Brush Park

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Brush Park takes its name from Elijah Brush, an early Detroit lawyer and militia colonel who owned a large farm just northeast of the old city before his death in 1813. Decades later, his son Edmund Askin Brush began platting the family land into an upscale residential neighborhood, and starting in the 1850s Detroit's wealthiest families built ornate Victorian mansions along its streets, some of them named for the Brush family, including Alfred, Adelaide and Edmund. By the mid-twentieth century, most of that wealth had moved to the suburbs, and Brush Park fell into decades of decline, with grand houses abandoned, burned or demolished until only a fraction of the original mansions survived. Restoration efforts picked up in the 2000s and accelerated in the 2010s, and today Brush Park mixes surviving Victorian landmarks like the Ransom Gillis House with new apartment and condo construction, once again one of Detroit's more desirable near-downtown addresses.

1. Named for early Detroit landowner Elijah Brush, who died in 1813
2. Platted as an upscale neighborhood by his son Edmund starting in the 1850s
3. Fell into severe decline in the mid-to-late twentieth century
4. Surviving Victorian mansions include the Ransom Gillis House
5. Under active restoration and new development since the 2010s