A whole town planned by one woman in the 1920s

In 1923, town-planning was almost entirely a man’s business. Louise Lathrup Kelley ignored that. She bought a thousand acres in Southfield Township and set out to build her own town from scratch. The city that carries her name today — Lathrup Village — is the result, a square mile and a half of streets that began as one woman’s plan.

Kelley had rules, and she enforced them. Houses had to be brick or stone, never cheap wood frame, and built to a set minimum cost so the area couldn’t slide downhill. She pushed attached garages early, when most people still parked the car in a barn out back, because she could see where the car was headed. Her husband, Charles Kelley, a former real-estate writer for the Detroit News, helped bring in architects to design custom homes. Many of them still line the streets.

The ideas didn’t stop at the buildings. Kelley ran a shuttle to carry residents to the shops. She even let buyers fold the cost of a car into the home loan — bundling the two big buys of suburban life decades before that was normal. By most accounts, she was one of only a handful of women building whole towns anywhere in the country at the time.

When Lathrup Village became a city in 1953, it was the first incorporated town in Southfield Township. Kelley stayed close to the place she’d dreamed up until she died in 1963. In 1998 most of the little city was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Lathrup Village Historic District — proof that the whole town, not one landmark, is the thing worth keeping.

Drive its streets now and the bones of her plan are still there in the brick: a small, leafy city that exists because one woman in the 1920s decided exactly how a neighborhood should look, and then went and built it.