Famous people's places / Detroit – Palmer Woods
Bishop Gallagher Residence
Closed – archive entry · 1989
Detroit's largest private home, a nearly 70-room Tudor mansion in Palmer Woods built for Bishop Michael Gallagher in the 1920s and later home to two cardinals before it passed into private hands.
01 / The story of this place
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The Fisher brothers, the auto-body magnates, paid for this sprawling Tudor Revival mansion in the Palmer Woods neighborhood, designed by the Boston firm Maginnis and Walsh and built between 1925 and 1928, then gave it to Michael Gallagher, the bishop of Detroit, as his official residence. At nearly 40,000 square feet with close to seventy rooms, it remains the largest private home ever built in Detroit. After Gallagher's death, two more leaders of the Detroit archdiocese lived there: Cardinal Edward Mooney and then Cardinal John Dearden, who died in 1988. With no more cardinals to house, the archdiocese sold the mansion in 1989 to Detroit Pistons forward John Salley for five hundred thousand dollars. It later passed to televangelist Bishop Wayne T. Jackson in 1995, and then to a California investment firm in 2017 for two and a half million dollars, which has worked on restoring the long-neglected building. A historical marker on the property still calls it the Bishop's Residence.
- Nearly 40,000 square feet with close to seventy rooms, the largest home in Detroit
- Built 1925 to 1928 by the Fisher brothers for Bishop Michael Gallagher
- Later home to Cardinals Edward Mooney and John Dearden
- Sold out of church hands in 1989, later owned by Pistons player John Salley
- Carries a historical marker as the Bishop's Residence
Famous Detroiters
Famous people tied to this place 1
Lexicon entries for the people who lived, worked, performed or liked to spend time here.
- Michael Gallagher 1866–1937 · Catholic Bishop of Detroit (1918–1937)
Lived here
The 39,000-square-foot Tudor mansion in Palmer Woods, paid for by the Fisher brothers and later home to Cardinals Mooney and Dearden; the largest house in Detroit.
Sources & fact check · Checked: 2026-09-25
An independently written bilingual guide. This collection is not an attendance-based ranking.
03 / Events
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