The Detroit Foundation is a D/B/A for Newapostles.net a Michigan non-profit corporation dedicated to the rebuilding and rehabilitation of the east side of Detroit since  every Church needs a cause.  I grew up on the east side of Detroit.  I lived there before the neighborhoods changed.    In 1974 when Coleman A. Young became mayor of the city of Detroit, he euphamistically told any white person in the city that did not like the fact that he had become mayor, to hit 8 Mile Road.  But that was thirty-five years ago and a generation past our time; it is now time to look beyond the travails of history and build a new community for the city of Detroit.  Yes, her houses are old, her neighborhoods in need of repair, her churches sit vacant, her stores boarded up; it is time Detroit rise from her slumber and take her rightful place as the center of American manufacturing once again.  Detroit Michigan has been at the forefront of America's history since Henry Ford began to build cars on an assembly line.  Detroit has to unique distinction of creating the first traffic lights; creating the first painted road lanes; creating the first mall in America, built by the J.L. Hudson company which now exists in its later life as the Target Corporation; Detroit created the first limited access road, a "freeway" where automobile traffic could move quickly from east to west, called the Davidson.  Indeed here is a list of some of the "firsts" Michigan has lead the nation in:  

1849 - The Michigan State Fair was the first state fair in the United States.

1855 - Michigan State University was founded as the nation's first land-grant university and served as the prototype for 69 land-grant institutions later established under the Morrill Act of 1862. It was the first institution of higher learning in the nation to teach scientific agriculture.

1866 - Vernors ginger ale became the first soda pop made in the United States by James Vernor and Company, Detroit. Mr. Vernor concocted and sold his ginger ale at his drug store.

1872 - Elijah J. McCoy, a black inventor raised in Ypsilanti, patented the first automatic lubrication system for locomotives and other machinery. The device was so effective it was difficult to sell imitations that were not "the real McCoy"; McCoy's name became synonymous with anything genuine or authentic.

1879 - Detroit telephone customers were first in the nation to be assigned phone numbers to facilitate handling calls.

1891 - The world's first international submarine railway tunnel was opened between Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario.

1896 - The nation's first carpet sweeper was invented and patented by Melville R. Bissell of Grand Rapids.

1909 - First rural mile of concrete pavement in the U.S. opened in Wayne County. It was constructed on Woodward Avenue between McNichols Road (Six Mile) and Seven Mile Road at a cost of $13,534.59.

1910 - U.S. Census placed Michigan first in the nation in the manufacture of automobiles.

1913 - The Ford Motor Company introduced the first moving automobile assembly line at Highland Park.

1917 - Michigan was credited with painting the first center line on a state highway-the Marquette to Negaunee Road.

1919 - The legislature granted the Michigan Secretary of State power to discipline careless drivers, leading to today's point system for driving infractions.

1920 - The first four-way traffic signal with red, green and amber lights appeared in Detroit. Designed by William L. Potts of the Detroit Police Department, the light was placed at the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Fort Street.

1920 - GMC became the first company to develop research laboratories under the direction of Charles Kettering.

1920 - WWJ began commercial broadcasting of regular programs. It was the first such radio station in the nation.

1922 - The first practical highway snowplow developed in the United States was designed and built by Edward C. Levy, Munising's public works superintendent. It was mounted on runners and consisted of two wooden wings, each 10 feet high and 20 feet long. The wings were retractable, permitting the plowing of all city streets, county roads or alleyways, but they were obsolete in a few years with the advent of rotary, angle and V-plows mounted on the front of trucks.

1923 - The nation's first intercity superhighway, "an eight-lane divided marvel," was built on an 18-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue between Detroit and Pontiac. It had a 40-foot median for public transit service.

1924 - J. L. Hudson's in Detroit became the first air-conditioned department store.

1925 - The first use of aerial surveys for highway design occurred when the Abrams Aerial Survey Company of Lansing took photos of a planned route between Benzonia and Beulah.

1926 - The nations first regularly scheduled air passenger service began operation between Grand Rapids and Detroit.

1927 - First commercially-prepared baby food was invented by Daniel F. Gerber of Fremont.

1928 - The Ford Motor Company was the first auto manufacturer to use safety glass as standard equipment.

1929 - The Michigan State Police established the first state police radio system in the world.

1930 - The one mile-long Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was the first automobile tunnel built between two nations and cost $23 million to build.

1937 - What Every Driver Must Know: A Summary of the More Important Rules of the Road was published by authority of Secretary of State Leon D. Case. In 1938, a million copies of What Every Driver Must Know were distributed. Michigan was nationally recognized as the first state to place traffic law instructions into driver's hands.

1939 - The Packard Motor Car Company in Detroit manufactured the first air-conditioned car.

1968 - Fisher Body introduced a specially designed child safety seat to protect one- through four-year-olds from interior collision.

1969 - Ford Motor Company introduced rear-wheel antilock brakes.

1971 - Michigan was the first to complete a border-to-border interstate highway, I-94, that runs 205 miles from Detroit to New Buffalo.

1972 - General Motors became the first automaker to establish a biomedical science department to perform and report research addressing the mechanisms of toxic and traumatic injury.

1973 - The State Safety Commission convened the Cycle Safety Conference - the first such symposium held anywhere in the world. The conference was designed to study how bicycles and motorcycles could safely coexist with cars and trucks in Michigan.

1974 - The first mass produced air bags were provided as a $225 option on some Cadillac and Buick models.

1975 - Michigan became the first state in the nation to combine driver licensing and voter registration as part of the same service, later known nationally as "Motor Voter."

1976 - The Jaycettes formed the "Buckle Up Babes" program, which became a national model for child safety seat loan and rental programs. 

Source: (http://michigan.gov/hal/0,1607,7-160-17447_18630_22469-11896--,00.html)

At the time the city was pretty much built to its boarders, but the suburbs were young and had room to grow.  I think most of the east side moved to Macomb County and most of the west side (at least those Catholics who were in the Monaghan Council of the Knights of Columbus, it seemed) went to Livonia and Farmington, many to Oakland County.  My family moved to Sterling Heights.  I do remember the old neighborhood, however, fondly.   

I lived in an area stretching from Woodward to the West and from the Grosse Pointes to the east.  We lived on the east side of Detroit which at one time meant something more than mere geography.  We were east-siders in an era when being such denoted your upward mobility.  There was a time when people moved to the suburbs, because they could not afford to live in the city.  That was when the city of East Detroit did not fear its name and the thought of changing the city's appellation to Eastpointe, was in the hazy distant future.  Being Catholic in Detroit placed my family in one of the numerous parishes of the Archdiocese of Detroit, as it did for all Catholics who lived in the city.   Our parish was Assumption Grotto.  St. Jude's and Guardian Angels were our neighboring parishes.  I lived behind the Grotto in the first house next to the cemetery.  While the house is still standing, it is worse for the wear, as is the rest of the city.  It seemed as if my entire family lived within a four block radius of my house.  My Uncle Herb lived just off the corner of Seymour and Peoria.  My Aunt Bertha lived on Troester.  My Gram lived on Hazelridge, right across the street from Robinson Grade School.  Next to my grandmother lived her brother-in-law, my Uncle Des.  In the Grosse Pointes lived my grandmother's sister Aunt Sally, whose real name was Blanch.  Her husband, ,my Mother's Uncle Clyde, was quite successful in the auto supply business and they were considered by most to be rich.  I believe many of that generation received assistance from him as the Ryan's were generous to their family.  Indeed, when my sister was dying from leukemia in 1960, Clyde offered to pay for a trip to the Mayo Clinic or to Lourdes.  As Children's Hospital in Detroit had one of the best researchers of the day, Dr. Wolf Zeltzer, my parents stayed in Detroit.  My sister died from a disease that may not have killed her if she were alive today; but science had not created the treatment yet.  I can look at many family members who may have lived longer lives if they had the treatment of illness active today.

The city of Detroit was laid out by Augustus Brevoort Woodward, a friend of Thomas Jefferson and Pierre-Charles L'Enfant.  While living in , Georgetown practicing law, he befriended L'Enfant who discussed with him the new layout for Washington D.C.  Woodward made a copy of the layout and when Jefferson became President, Woodward was appointed Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory and moved to Detroit, arriving on June 30, 1805.  The city had burned to the ground on June 11th.  also   Woodward's interpretation of L'Enfant's plan for the District of Columbia became the design chosen for rebuilding the city of Detroit.  While L'Enfant's design included full wheels and spokes, Woodward's design accommodated the Detroit River so he chose a half wheel with spokes design.  Proud boulevards leading to grand parks with fountains and war memorials are found in both cities to this day. 

In 1884 Silas Farmer published his History of Detroit and Michigan and meticulously detailed the city of Detroit in the fading years of the nineteenth century.  You may read the book should you have the mind to by going to Google Books and typing Silas Farmer's name.  The book is an indispensable history if you want to get a glimpse of old Detroit.  Like any city, Detroit has had its generational change.  At first a trading post and fort, then a wilderness town, then a frontier town, then a city with boulevards, filled with Victorian mansions proclaiming the wealth of Michigan's lumber barons.  A city of trees, Detroit was once called by some the Paris of the midwest. 

We were Detroiters; my father was a westsider and my mother was an eastsider. The division of the city was the mighty, mighty Woodward Avenue.  If your neighborhood fell on the eastside of the road, you were forever an eastsider and likewise for all those westsiders as well.  My Father went to St. Gregory the Great School from first grade to high school, while my mother went to Assumption Grotto through the eighth grade and Dominican High School after that.  My brothers and I went from first to eight grade to Assumption Grotto school.  The old school was eventually torn down, an environmental time bomb filled with asbestos and old construction standards.  In recent years the parish has seen a revitalization that it surely deserves.  It is my intent that the Detroit Foundation should use it's resources to rebuild the neighborhoods of the city.  Low interest loans to support small business owners, grants and loans for people to fix up their homes, get an education, just help them through a time of need.  Its all about restoring the vitality of the neighborhoods, so anything that gives assistance to the revitalization of the neighborhoods will be considered.   To that end we pledge to use any resources derived from the sale of our books to "Green" the city of Detroit.  Urban Farming is the key to resurrection of a people; if you lift up the people, the city will follow.  I do not believe that Detroit needs new housing; what Detroit needs is to use the vacant land it has for the good of the people in the neighborhoods.  If the vacant lots of the city of Detroit were farmed, not only would people have food to eat that is not subject to the next national e-coli scare, but the food will not have to be transported across the nation to sell; it may be taken to Eastern Market for sale.  This is "Green" technology at its best.  Why just give a loaf of bread when helping people farm would generate both jobs skills and a source of income.  It would not hurt to plant new trees in the city as well; I remember our parish at Grotto had a lot of trees when I was growing up.

Silas Farmer describes the Grotto:  "One of the most attractive and for this country peculiar structure connected with church life is the grotto erected "in memory of the apparition at Lourdes".  It is near the Church of the Assumption, in the township of Hamtramck, about seven miles from Detroit on the Gratiot road.  It was built through the exertions of Rev. Father Amandus Vanderndriessche who has been in charge of the parish since 1851.  The grotto is located at the end of an avenue of trees nearly 1,000 feet long, planted through the same zeal that caused the grotto to be reared.  The entire cost of the construction is estimated at $6,000 though much of the work has been gratuitously performed.  It was begun by the blessing of the ground, on the last Sunday of May, 1881, and just a year from that time mass was said for the first time."   The parish was in Connor's Creek village which was annex by the city of Detroit on April 23, 1917.

We lived behind the cemetery on Spring Garden.  When I was young I thought that our yard might be the location of the start of Connor's Creek which supposedly ran from the parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary eastwards towards the river culminating at the Connor's Creek drain.  The 9th Precinct station of the Detroit Police Department was located at Connor and Gratiot.  My maternal grandfather was a Seargent on the Detroit Police force, having emigrated from Canada, with training as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  He died young (51) of a stroke, just short of achieving his pension.  My grandmother never got the pension or social security, as she did not work but stayed at home and raised her children. 

Although my Father grew up on the west side of the city and went to St. Gregory the Great, he married an east side girl.  They first lived in apartment above my Grandmother's's home; a private residence with two separate apartments upstairs, known as an "income."  They lived there until my father moved his new family to a newly build suburban home in Royal Oak, where he purchased a home with a VA loan.  The family would stay but for a few years, until my parents discovered my sister had leukemia, so they moved back to the old neighborhood, so Mom could be near her mother and sister.  Dad sold the Royal Oak home to his sister who provided a place for my paternal Grandmother to live.  So my father became an eastsider and in the end died an eastsider; as he was buried out of Grotto the day after Christmas, 2006.  It was a beautiful funeral with a Latin Mass and bagpipes.  With the alter still decorated from Christmas, the funeral was ethereal.  I spent many a weekend as an alter boy on that alter.  This is what the interior of Grotto looks like. 

We shopped at 7 Mile where there was a Federal's and a Montgomery Wards.  My Uncle Herb and Aunt Pat would pick up the Sunday Detroit News (before the fiction of two separate papers) and not the Detroit Free Press (as the family preferred the editorial position of the News) which was sold Saturday night at the Ramona Theater under the marquee.

Every Sunday we would load into our father's car, for in those days people only owned one car mostly, and drove out to visit my father's mother in Royal Oak.  Royal Oak won its fame as the city where Father Coughlin built his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower, in memory of St. Therese of Liseaux

Father Coughlin himself

Thérèse is known for her "Little Way." In her quest for sanctity, she realized that it was not necessary to accomplish heroic acts, or "great deeds", in order to attain holiness and to express her love of God. She wrote,"Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love."  This "Little Way" also appeared in her approach to doctrine:  "Sometimes, when I read spiritual treatises, in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles in the way and a host of illusions round about it, my poor little mind soon grows weary, I close the learned book, which leaves my head splitting and my heart parched, and I take the Holy Scriptures.  Then all seems luminous, a single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul, perfection seems easy; I see that it is enough to realize one's nothingness, and give oneself wholly, like a child, into the arms of the good God. Leaving to great souls, great minds, the fine books I cannot understand, I rejoice to be little because 'only children, and those who are like them, will be admitted to the heavenly banquet'."  Passages like this have also left Therese open to the charge that hers is an overly sentimental and even childish spirituality. Her proponents counter that she sought to develop an approach to the spiritual life that was understandable and imitable by all who chose to do so, regardless of their level of sophistication or education.  This is evident in her approach to prayer:  "For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward Heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy; in a word, something noble, supernatural, which enlarges my soul and unites it to God.... I have not the courage to look through books for beautiful prayers.... I do as a child who has not learned to read, I just tell our Lord all that I want and He understands."   Wikipedia.org

Three of my grandparents were Canadian.  I guess I look to the Great Lakes Region as my world center.  Since coming from Ireland, my family has found work in farming, as store owners, as young men who wanted more and came to Detroit to earn five dollars a day in the auto plants.  There were others who stayed on their farms in their home towns, but others, well they took to the sea.   My uncle worked on the Great Lakes in shipping as did my paternal grandmother's people, who came from St. Thomas in Ontario.  My grandmother's half brother was Louis Murphy, who was a protege of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers Movement; he was also the father of a Detroit City Councilperson, as the family lore goes.  The Murphy's at one time had four of the youngest captains on the Great Lakes.  That is a fact that I am proud of, even if the full story has been lost in time, or soon will be when that generation finally passes from this earth.  If you ever want to take a look at what it is like to watch a Great Lakes vessel passing Detroit you should go to the Dossin Maritime Museum, on Belle Isle or look it up on the web as they have a link to the Detroit Historical Society's live camera called the Detroit River Watch:  www.glmi.org/webcam.htm.   

Southern Ontario was founded by Thomas Talbot, the fourth son of the Baron of Malahide, who accepted a grant from the crown and emigrated from Ireland settling in Port Talbot Ontario with the goal of populating the area.  My people came from Ireland to New York in the 1820's and settled in St. Thomas and Lasalette areas of Ontario.

Here is a picture of Belle Isle from an airplane in the 1920's, with so much hope ahead of her and so much past behind her.  The Dossin Museum is located on the Canadian side of the island, which would be south of the city of Detroit, where lives the Canadian city of Windsor, sisters on the river of the straits.  If you ever visit the city of Detroit, you should stop by Belle Isle and see it.  The history of maritime trade in the Great Lakes is a rich and wonderful tradition of this area, the city of Detroit also being the home of Old Mariner's Church.   Here is a link to the Dossin Museum which is tendered through the Detroit Historical Society. http://www.detroithistorical.org/exhibits/index.asp.  Once there, click on the left hand icon for the Detroit River Watch Cam.  Its impressive to watch the freighters going by on a slow bell.    

I grew up in Detroit and believe that Detroit is worth saving.  That is the goal of the Detroit Foundation: to rebuild the city of Detroit, lot by lot, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood.  Proceeds from the sale of our books will be contributed to the non-profit corporation, NewApostles.net.  Part of our goal is not only to spark neighborhood development, but to provide assistance for people who no longer have jobs.  The key to a successful city is an investment in property.  One noted Detroiter once said:  Many are pining and dying from monotony and depression, who might bury their cares by planting a few seeds...” wrote D. M. Ferry in the 1876 Seed Annual.  The vegetable section began with a quote from Plutarch advising exercise through gardening. 

“Out-door work...must tend to develop that attachment of the citizen to his home, which is one of the strongest safeguard of society against lawlessness and immorality.”  Chromolithographs illustrated this catalog as well, and lithographs of the seed farm show different activities, hoeing, weeding cabbage, dinner, and harvesting.  The field workers are almost all women with men supervising.   Ferry invented the “commission box,” a seed rack for retail display, and was the first to have brightly colored seed packets.  Indeed Dexter Ferry is an example of the Amercian Dream.  He started with nothing and grew his company to be the largest seed producer in the world for his time.  We firmly believe that people who have a stake in land, who have an interest in making sure their home is well cared for, just as a garden needs to be cared for, will create a milieu where neighborhoods are safe and free of crime and if nothing else, people who have no jobs, will have a way to feed themselves. 

If you have any thoughts or suggestions for the Detroit Foundation, please feel free to comment.  Thank you for your view or our work.  Nothing contained herein is or should be construed as a solicitation for a charitable donation.