(No caption)
Beautiful Bridal (Facebook photo)
Keasha Rigsby opened her upscale bridal salon, Beautiful Bridal, in an 1889 mansion in Detroit's East Jefferson Avenue corridor earlier this year.
She's not alone when it comes to interest in the strip, notes Marti Benedetti reports in Crain's Detroit Business, who writes:
Beautiful Bridal, along with a new Caribbean restaurant, a Christian yoga center, women's clothing boutiques, a casual branded clothing store, a used record store, and a coffee shop and bakery, are a few of the more recent businesses that have planted roots along the eight miles between downtown Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park.
Josh Elling, executive director of Jefferson East Inc., which promotes neighborhood redevelopment, said more than 20 years of efforts to revitalize the East Jefferson Avenue corridor on the city's east side have been paying dividends in recent months. "Over the last two years, the amount of interest we've seen in Jefferson Avenue has been astounding," he said.
Since 2009, $1 billion has been invested in the five neighborhoods from Alter Road to downtown along East Jefferson, Elling said, adding that $540 million of that went to improvements to the giant FCA US plant. Within the last year, seven new businesses have opened in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood in the corridor. Since 2007, JEI's budget has climbed from $140,000 to more than $1 million.
