Highland Park, MI, is an enclave of about 2.9 square miles in southeast Michigan, surrounded completely by the City of Detroit. Its history is closely linked to the history of Ford Motor Company.

Highland Park started as a rural farming village in 1889 and was incorporated as a city in 1918, coinciding with the boom brought about by the burgeoning automobile industry. Ford’s Highland Park Plant, where the Model-T was manufactured, opened in 1910. Designed by renowned architect Albert Kahn, it was the largest automobile manufacturing facility in the world and the first to use the moving assembly line. In 1914, Ford offered the famous $5 a day wages, and Highland Park’s population exploded.

In approximately ten years, from 1910 - 1920, the population of Highland Park grew from about 4,000 to around 46,000, and housing had to keep up. Most of the houses in the City were built from 1914-1920, during the height of the popularity of Craftsman architecture in the U.S. We here in Southeast Michigan are fortunate that the professionals and executives who built homes in Highland Park appreciated the style, for there are many fine Arts and Crafts homes there. In fact, the two historic districts: Highland Heights-Stevens Subdivision and Medbury’s-Grove Lawn Subdivision boast many fine examples of the style. Of the two, Medbury’s is larger and contains more bungalows.

Although the City of Highland Park faces challenges (its financial management has been supervised by the State of Michigan since 2001), and some of these homes have sadly deteriorated, many beautiful homes still remain.  It’s definitely worth a trip.   "Highland Park is one of the richest troves of Arts and Crafts houses in America", says architectural historian William Porter, retired head of design at General Motors.  "If those houses were in southern California, people would kill for them."¹ Do you know of other Michigan neighborhoods rich in Arts and Crafts architecture? Please send us your submissions.