Islandview
Islandview
Like many neighborhoods around the outer edges of Detroit, Islandview has the feel of a small Midwestern town or city: houses of varying styles spaced out along tree-lined streets on lots with cropped lawns. The occasional playground or empty lot or community garden provides recreation space. Detroit's urban blight creeps in at the edges, making itself known--street surfaces are cracked, curbs overgrown, and in many places the trees have completely overgrown the power lines. There are a few vacant houses, their boarded-up windows like vacant dead eyes where once there was life and health.
Just east of Islandview, West Village, Indian Village and East Village occupy slices of land along the north-by-northwest axis of Detroit's linear street plan. Like Islandview, these neighborhoods end at Mack Street to the north. To the south, on the river side of Jefferson Avenue, Erma Henderson Park offers views of the river and Belle Isle. The prestigious Joseph Berry neighborhood has several riverfront properties with this view, as well as a private park and playground. The Indian Village neighborhoods end at the now-defunct Conner Creek Industrial complex.
Chandler Park, a small community north of Conner Creek and beyond East Village, is now the easternmost outpost of civilization in the new city limits of Detroit. Beyond that boundary is the urban prairie: a land of buckling pavement, overgrown empty lots and falling-down structures. There, nature slowly reclaims the abandoned streets excised by Measure 2.
- Marina
