Now this is interesting. A friend found this on the r/Detroit Reddit, a graphic imagining the city’s 1918 subway plan, which came oh-so close to being approved, as a modern day subway map. It’s a flashback to a time when Detroit itself was still a powerful, up-and-coming economic engine and the city limits were basically a gateway to unincorporated farmland.
This was actually the second plan developed in its era. Daily Detroit describes the earlier plan, in 1915, as catering to Detroit’s working class: “Page after page mentions factory and industrial workers — this subway wasn’t designed for the east coast ‘Wall Street’ types, but as a functional and important tool for the working people of Detroit.”
The map shows routes utilizing the expected spoke roads — Woodward, Gratiot, Jefferson/Fort Street and Grand River — but also spurs that would have provided service to Hamtramck and Detroit’s East English Village and westside neighborhoods.
Here’s the back story, according to the Detroit Transit History website: In late 1917, a second engineering study prepared by a consulting firm hired by the Detroit Street Railways Commission outlined its recommendations: “a total of 65 miles of combined underground downtown subways with surface or elevated rail lines further out in the city, should be built to relieve downtown congestion.” It should be financed and built by the city, but operated by the privately owned Detroit United Railway, with the money generated evenly split between DUR and the city, to pay down its debt and eventually, to acquire DUR if it wanted.
The plan made it to the Detroit Common Council in 1919, which passed a resolution to begin negotiations with the DUR to put the plan in motion. But Mayor James Couzens, elected into office just the year before, had campaigned on eliminating the DUR, and he vetoed it. The Council’s attempts to override Couzens’ veto failed by a single vote.
Today, it’d be wildly unfeasible to build anything approximating this subway system, given the city’s dramatic depopulation and other factors. But it’s fascinating to imagine how such a rail system might have influenced the city’s own development.
Would it have acted as a bulwark against the abandonment Detroit saw starting the 1950s, as the federal government went on a freeway-building spree and began subsidizing mortgages in the suburbs? Would it have had any effect whatsoever on the racism that at least partly fueled white flight? And what about the migration patterns that saw so many suburbs spring up northwest and north of the city? This subway network provides far more comprehensive service to the city’s now largely impoverished east side. How might that area’s fortunes be different today had this plan taken shape nearly a century ago?
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