Why Eastpointe used to be called 'East Detroit'

If you’ve heard the city of Eastpointe called by an older name, you’re not imagining it. For most of the 20th century this Macomb County suburb, right up against Detroit’s 8 Mile border, was named East Detroit. Before that it was “Halfway” — because the old Halfway Inn here was the midway stop for stagecoaches running between Detroit and the county seat at Mount Clemens. The village of Halfway incorporated in 1924, became the City of East Detroit in 1929, and then, on July 1, 1992, voters approved changing the name to Eastpointe. The city’s stated reason was that “East Detroit” kept getting confused with Detroit and left the community without its own identity; the new “-pointe” ending was chosen to tie it to the nearby, well-off Grosse Pointe communities along the lake. Historians have pointed to a harder layer in the story, too: in the early 1990s East Detroit was an almost entirely white suburb sitting right on Detroit’s border, and the rename has been read as partly an effort to distance the city from its struggling, majority-Black neighbor during an era of “white flight” — though the residents who campaigned for the new name never spoke about race directly. The old name lingered for years afterward — the local high school didn’t switch from “East Detroit” to “Eastpointe” until 2017 — and you’ll still hear the original around town, including in Kid Rock’s “It’s Still East Detroit to Me.”