David Coates / The Detroit News Elmhurst resident Curtis Lewis, left, helps fix Renie Chow’s storm door. “I was the first one that had bars and locks,” Chow said.

Derelict buildings become common sight

    Some landlords simply grew frustrated with tenants, or the lack thereof.

    Naomi Dallen, who co-owned and managed the rows of shops and flats at 12001 12th Street, at the northwest corner of Elmhurst, simply got fed up. She couldn’t rent the retail space on 12th, which was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1975.

    Part of the problem was that the storefront church, Bible Community Baptist Church, had started to take over the building. The church painted huge scripture passages on placards outside the yellow brick building. Revival meetings for alcoholics and drug addicts would be held in the storerooms. The Rev. George Gooden Jr. and his followers would preach at the corners on weekends. “He had his bullhorn, talking to the people coming out of the bar, especially on Saturday nights,” said Paris Freeman, who lived down the block.

    Gooden’s zeal for battling sin, laudable as it was to many on the block, wasn’t attractive to tenants. He also stopped paying rent. Dallen said she took him to court periodically, but he simply didn’t have the money to pay, so she gave up. On July 19, 1976, she deeded the land to Gooden for a pittance and took the tax loss.

    “We went down to the county offices to make sure the deal was done,” she said. “It’s ironic that I ended up giving the building to the person who drove me out.”

    Gooden died in 1998. Members of the church wouldn’t comment.

    By 1984, halfway through Coleman Young’s tenure as mayor and a year after the Devil’s Night arson craze had begun, only three apartment buildings remained on the block: Jordan’s Elm Tree Apartments, the Hazelfern Apartments at 1929 Elmhurst and the 20-unit building at 1977 Elmhurst. Only Jordan’s was stable.

    A 1984 directory lists the 20-unit Hazelfern as having only five occupants. Within a year, it would be demolished. The building at 1977 Elmhurst had only six residents, including the superintendent.

    That year, empty, derelict buildings were a common sight on Elmhurst. It was a vista that even today stirs a passionate response from Choice Cooper, now 83, the normally mild-mannered man who was mugged in the alley in 1974.

    “You don’t get used to it,” Cooper said with a trace of anger as he sat on the stoop of his home at 1926 Elmhurst. “You just look at it, and try to keep on going on.”

    Sometime in the late 1970s, city work crews came through and cut down all of the street’s namesake trees, wiping out the leafy arch that gave the street much of its charm. Since the 1950s, Dutch Elm disease had been sweeping through a city once known for its tree-lined streets. According to the nonprofit group Greening of Detroit, the city lost 500,000 trees between 1950 and 1980.

    Paris Freeman, the Rev. Johnson’s granddaughter, who lived with her on Elmhurst at the time, remembers coming home from school one day and noticing all the stumps.

    “That made me really sad,” she said. “I didn’t understand.”

    The city didn’t replace the trees on Elmhurst; it couldn’t afford to. The Dutch Elm plague was spreading, and crews had more trees to cut down. If they destroyed enough trees, city experts thought, they might contain the scourge.

You can reach Cameron McWhirter at (313) 222-2072 or cmcwhirter@detnews.com .