In Detroit, there used to be a well-known underpass at Cass Avenue and Peterboro Street in Midtown. Two others in Highland Park include matching white concrete structures bracketing a onetime crossing at Second and Pilgrim and an unsightly rectangular metal grating on the east side of Woodward Boulevard at John R and Chandler streets. Others were built across the region, too, but only a few have left their once white-washed and somewhat elegant entrances behind as an ignominious historical marker of sorts. Instead, for the relative bargain of $5,000 ($78,000 in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation) the city dug this underpass walkway. ![]() Plus, they required an officer to manually operate them at a cost of $2,000 per year. Good question! Although the first electric traffic light was installed in 1914 in Cleveland, they weren’t cheap or ubiquitous, and many drivers didn’t understand what to do when they encountered them. Why didn’t they just put up a traffic light? Highland Park then boasted more than 50,000 people packed into 3 square miles - now there are just 10,000 - so there was a lot of traffic. This was an entrance to a pedestrian underpass that opened in 1925 in response to a high rate of pedestrian fatalities that included 96 children perishing in Detroit in 1924, the Detroit Free Press reported. Well, that right there was once a cutting edge method of promoting traffic safety before it occurred to people to put up traffic lights at busy intersections. ![]() But that is more than just some weird white bunker it tells an important story about how America adjusted to the onset of automobile age. ![]() The old-fashioned stop sign and that concrete structure are almost the only things that look even vaguely the same, time having been cruel to an area once bustling with middle-class housing and life. This is the corner of Cortland and Second Boulevard (now Second Avenue) in Highland Park photographed in color in September 2021 and in black and white at an unspecified date some 80 years ago. The pedestrian underpass at Cortland and Second Avenue is now sealed.
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