The atrium was accented with brass and covered with an enormous glass roof. The five-story, exposed-brick structure contained five open levels filled with unique retail stores, psychics, souvenir shops and The Fudgery. Inspired by Faneuil Hall in Boston, the developers created a festival marketplace. The buildings were originally owned by old Traugott Schmidt, who used them as a fur processing center back in the day. In 1985, developers Cordish Embry & Associates transformed several historic buildings along Monroe Street in Greektown into an enclosed mall. This prompted the Greektown Merchants to band together to sponsor the first Greek Festival in 1965, a move that helped to further identify and brand the neighborhood at a time when much of the rest of the city was in decline. The Greektown neighborhood was reduced to one block in 1960 with the razing of the Greek Orthodox Church. The Greek businesses remained, however, leaving the area at least commercially Greek. This was true even as new sets of immigrants from Poland, Italy, and Lebanon gradually moved into the neighborhood and Greeks began moving to other areas of the city to live. Over the next few decades, the area continued to be known as the traditional center of the Greek community in Detroit. The 250 (or so) Greeks in the area also got together around this time to build the first Greek Orthodox Church of Detroit. This was evident in the coffee shops along Macomb and Macomb Streets filled with men aged 20 to 35 playing a backgammon-like game and/or smoking water pipes. Originally, the Greek immigrants lived above their shops or on nearby Macomb Street.īy 1910, most of the Germans had moved out, and the neighborhood was distinctly Greek. (The New Hellas Café finally closed in 2008).

Antoine and opened bakeries, coffeehouses, and restaurants, including Demetrios Antonopoulos’ Hellas Café in 1895. Once the Greeks started coming to Detroit, however, they settled in the area along Monroe Street between Beaubien and St. In fact, the first documented Greek immigrant didn’t settle in Detroit until 1890. It wasn’t until the 1880s that Greek immigrants began arriving in the Detroit area from the southern mainland of Greece. In fact, the area was originally known as Little Berlin. While the Detroit neighborhood dates back to the1830s, the original immigrants who lived in the neighborhood were German. As it turns out, the area now known as Greektown wasn’t always filled with Greeks.

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