The Night Train - Curiosities from early Detroit by Amy Elliott Bragg

Source.
Edith Munger wanted a do-over.
She had just finished up a huge project: a poll, open to all Michiganders — and in particular its school-aged children — to select the state’s official bird. A ballot listed some 20 options for Michigan’s avian avatar: the black-capped chickadee, the...

Graves on the hillside at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California.
When Clarence Sanger set out to create White Chapel Memorial Cemetery in the suburbs of Detroit in the 1920s, he was working from a model pioneered in California by a visionary cemetery entrepreneur named Hubert Eaton. Eaton’s creed was “the happy cemetery...

I had such a “YES, THIS!” moment when I first saw John Faier’s photographs of Chicago’s Queen of Heaven mausoleum, and read about his obsession with the place, and places like it.
“Bright colors, matching upholstery, matching lamp shades — the architecture reminds us more of a cocktail lounge or hotel, not of a mausoleum,” Faier said in an interview with Wired. His photographs captured something essential about what it’s like...

This post is from a spring issue of the Little Detroit History Letter, an email newsletter I occasionally send about Detroit history, news, tours and events. I thought it was seasonally appropriate to revisit it here! You can subscribe to the Little...