Saturday Extra: Why a good economy feels so bad

A photo of the interior of the 1908 Henry Ford home in Detroit’s Boston-Edison. Photo by Nic Antaya for Crain’s. 

This week, let our residential real estate reporter Arielle Kass (and photographer Nic Antaya) delight you and pull your heartstrings with the story of Henry Ford’s first house in Detroit. (We did just mark the June 16 anniversary of the founding of Ford Motor Co. in 1903.) 

Jerald and Marilyn Mitchell have owned the home at 140 Edison St. in the Boston-Edison neighborhood for nearly 40 years and have fastidiously kept it up with loyalty to its original features: “Being a steward of such a property, it gave me a meaning and a focus in life,” Jerald Mitchell told Crain’s. “I have never doubted for a moment it was an important thing to do.”

My favorite historical detail in the story is about the owners between the Fords and the Mitchells. Arielle reports:  

“The house was owned by the Temple of Light, a group that Mitchell said combined Christianity and astrology. The Canadian magazine Maclean’s reported a decade ago that Rev. Florence B. Crews and her husband, O. James Crews, who was known on local radio broadcasts as the ‘Voice of the Planets,’ read horoscopes for pay and ‘walled in the fireplace, hung heavy curtains in the windows and filled Ford’s parlor with enough folding chairs to accommodate the dozens of worshipers who gathered there on Thursday and Sunday nights.’ They lived there from 1941 until the Mitchells bought it in 1985.” 

On the cutting room floor: The Crews were actually sued by the Boston-Edison neighborhood association for running a church out of their home, in a case that went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court in 1944. The court sided with the neighborhood association, ruling that religious services were not allowed and that the home was only to be used as a residence.

Read more about the house’s history and uncertain future here.