Detroit's Most Beautiful Street Is Blocked Off to Cars

Detroit — Brick-paved Pallister Street runs between stately houses. It’s closed off to cars and covered by a canopy of green leaves from mottled trees.

In nearby Pallister Park, a homeless person sleeps on the wooden playground. The nicest street in Detroit is still in Detroit.

Pallister Street got its name from a family who owned farmland around the area in the early days of the city.

The houses here were built in Detroit’s gilded age, when the automotive industry was taking off and they still made houses by hand with intricate details in unique styles like Neo-Georgian, Craftsman, and Neo-Tudor.

I don’t really know what these mean, but they sound old and expensive and look fantastic next to each when the landscaping has been faithfully maintained.

These are good houses in a good neighborhood—you know them when you see them. And you don’t really see other ones like this near downtown Detroit.

These houses were saved in part by General Motors.

The story goes that by the 1960s, the artisanal houses were crumbling into modernity and GM wanted to incentivize executives to stay close to its downtown headquarters in New Center.

So the company spearheaded an effort to block off the street to cars, rehab the houses, and develop the area to make it a nice place to live.

It didn’t pay off for GM. Executives reportedly didn’t want to stay there. But it did ameliorate the neighborhood and protect the houses from ruin and urban decay.

Today, it’s a beautiful destination in a city not synonymous with beauty. You want to take photos of it, to walk it, to maybe even live on the street.

If blue plastic tricycles in the yard are a valid indicator, there are families raising young kids on the street.

After some frank conversations about when you shouldn’t play on the playground when there are strangers sleeping on it, Pallister Street could be an idyllic spot to grow up.

Maybe it shows how we as a society actually still value beautiful houses and put a premium on preserving them even when it comes at a high cost.

Or maybe Pallister is a lesson for city planners that people care more about houses when we cordon them off from the mundane traffic of a city.

Perhaps that’s the beauty of Pallister—that it’s separated from the rest of our lives, outside of time but forever inside Detroit.