Essay & Slideshow: Placement & Corine Vermeulen Living with
Mies: The Towers at Lafayette Park Lafayette Towers, Lafayette
Park, Detroit, Michigan. [Photo by Corine Vermeulen] In the late
1950s and early 1960s, a major urban redevelopment project on
Detroit’s east side created Lafayette Park , a planned community
that is today one of the city’s most racially integrated and
economically stable neighborhoods. Lafayette Park was built on
land that was once a densely populated working-class African-
American neighborhood called Black Bottom, after the marshy
bottoms at the source of the River Savoyard, which was buried
when Detroit was settled. Classified as a “slum” in the 1940s,
the neighborhood were razed and left vacant until the mid-1950s,
when Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald made a successful
proposal to develop the land with architect Mies van der Rohe ,
urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape designer Alfred
Caldwell . Three high-rises, 186 ground-level townhouses and a
large park were complete