Antonique Johnson hugs Karen Knox, president of the Eden Gardens Block Club.
(Bridge magazine photo by Bill McGraw)
The east-side area around Glenfield and Roseberry looks like many Detroit neighborhoods ‒ flower pots hanging from tidy porches, empty houses rotting in wild grass, residents asking why they have to live like they do.
Yet, as Bill McGraw reports in Bridge magazine, Glenfield and Roseberry stands out in important ways from the vast panorama of abandonment that stretches for miles in this section near the old City Airport: It’s got a nucleus of activists who have refused to sit back and watch their neighborhood decline. In post-bankruptcy Detroit, anonymous neighborhoods like this can’t afford to await a city rescue if they hope to survive.
Marker shows Glenfield and Roseberry on the east side.
With money remaining tight, the administration of Mayor Mike Duggan has been forced to perform triage, favoring some areas with intense demolition over other communities. The neighborhoods getting immediate relief tend to have well-established names like Grandmont Rosedale, Brightmoor and Marygrove, yet they comprise only a fraction of a city that sprawls over 140 square miles.
More typical are scores of nameless, obscure neighborhoods like the area near Glenfield and Roseberry, places torn between pleading for help and finding a means to rebuild what they can on their own, while their fate remains in doubt. Planning officials have suggested letting some declining areas — including the blocks around Glenfield and Roseberry — continue to lose population and targeting the land for alternative uses, writes McGraw, a Deadline Detroit co-founder.
To meet its biggest challenge – blight – Glenfield and Roseberry will receive no significant assistance from the city any time soon. Some residents realize that. And while they don’t like it, they are not waiting around.
They’ve branded the area with a name – Eden Gardens – started an actual vegetable garden, formed alliances with the outside world – including a Jewish congregation downtown — and never stopped dreaming of creating a sustainable neighborhood with stores, services and security.
“We don’t rely on the city. We rely on the community,” said Karen Chava Knox, president of the Eden Gardens Block Club and a prime mover behind the changes.
Glenfield and Roseberry avenues on Detroit's east side intersect near the center of this Google Earth image.
