16832 Hamilton Avenue
Kepler Printing, Barber Shop, Colonial Art Funiture Shop, Palmer Park Paint Company, Good Housekeeping Siding & Roofing Company, Oddments Unlimited, Thing’s Antiques, Christian Brothers Furniture & Things, Christian Brothers Home Repair, Sam’s Job Service
This structure has seen better days. However, the bones appear to still be in pretty solid shape.
Hamilton Avenue was, at one time, a bustling commercial strip with shopping, manufacturing, apartments, and other amenities. Today, almost all of that is gone.
16826-16834 Hamilton was built around 1927. It featured numerous storefronts and was a part of the bustling commercial corridor that was blossoming here at the time due to the large number of manufacturing jobs available in the area. Highland Park’s population peaked in 1930, shortly after this structure was completed, with just over 50,000 people.
Early in its history, the building featured a printing shop, a barber and beauty shop, and a furniture store. Kepler Printing focused on factory forms, long runs, and soliciting paperwork. The barbershop was there by at least 1931 and was for sale in 1945/46 and again in 1954. Colonial Art Funiture Shop was there through the late 1940s and was later taken over by the Palmer Park Paint Company and later the Good Housekeeping Siding & Roofing Company in the 1960s.
Although this structure is located in Highland Park, it’s located less than a quarter mile from Palmer Park, which still had an affluent population in the 1960s and had become metro Detroit’s gay mecca by the 1970s.
16832 Hamilton, and a few neighboring structures, made up a section of Highland Park known as ‘Antique Row.’ This building had at least two shops, Oddments Unlimited and Thing’s Antiques. The former was run by Lewis Faieta, a “youthful proprietor” that focused on art deco antiques and clothing from the movie star era.
I’m not certain when ‘Antique Row’ came to its demise, but I’d imagine it was around the same time as the surrounding area began to decline, which was the 1980s. The younger generations that had moved into the surrounding neighborhoods and the gay population that was the heartbeat of Palmer Park moved further up Woodward to communities like Royal Oak and Ferndale, and most of the trendy businesses nearby went with them. After Oddments Unlimited on Hamilton closed, Faieta co-owned Tempo Studio in Royal Oak.
After ‘Antique Row’ was gone, I’m unsure what happened to the property. Its most recent occupants were the Christian Brothers businesses, encompassing sewer and drain services alongside a general handyman and home repair business. There was also Sam’s Job Service, which appears to have been a temp agency of sorts. It appears that there were apartments in use upstairs.
The structure is currently owned by an LLC that shares its name; however, there’s a chance it’ll be lost to foreclosure soon.
Today, Highland Park has under 9,000 residents. There hasn’t been much investment in the city in general and even less on this stretch of the road in recent years.
A mile down Hamilton, a brand new industrial facility bound by the Davison and Lodge Freeways, Labelle Street, and Hamilton Avenue was recently completed by Oliver/Hatcher Construction for Eric Means and Ashley Capital. It’s a Class A industrial facility with over 444,000 square feet of space, costing millions of dollars to complete.
Up and down Hamilton Avenue, there are dozens of crumbling industrial, commercial, and residential structures that haven’t seen investment in decades. I’m not saying that new investment is a bad thing—it’s just an interesting juxtaposition riding down Hamilton and seeing historic structures screaming for liberation from their dates with the wrecking ball and seeing a multi-million dollar complex with no leasee secured rising across the street.
Hopefully, this one will be saved, but I’m not holding my breath.
