The Golden Dream by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

feel as though one were a part of the city and what the city was building and creating and contributing. That feeling is all gone now.”
    Then came Henry Ford, Sr., bringing with him the dawn of the Automobile Age. Quickly, in his wake, came the great automobile fortunes, and Grosse Pointe was in for a huge spate of castle-building—French châteaux, Norman keeps, Tudor castles, ducal palaces designed to outdo Blenheim. Gothic arches, gargoyles, crenelated rooftops, and flying buttresses abounded. During the first decade of the twentieth century it was estimated that the servantpopulation of Grosse Pointe was thirty times that of the new gentry. Automobile money was big money, and it required a big show.
    Today, most of the castles have fallen to the wrecker’s ball. The few that remained along Lake Shore Road gave it the nickname “Widows’ Row,” since nearly all were owned by elderly widows who refused to bow to the winds of change. One of the last holdouts was the late Mrs. Joseph Schlotman (a salt Ford), whose house, a copy of a Tudor manor house, was complete with indoor fountains, greenhouses, and a ballroom with a private elevator. Mrs. Schlotman used to like to reminisce about the old days when she and her husband kept a huge yacht parked at the foot of the extensive lawn. “We used to have five miles of private fishing grounds on the Cascapedia River,” she once said. Did she actually own five miles of fishing grounds? a visitor asked. “No, darn it, we didn’t. You can’t buy a river. You have to rent it,” was her reply.
    One of the last big places on Lake Shore Road which has managed to stand, undivided, in much the same state as it was originally conceived is the red brick Georgian mansion built by Roy Chapin, who was the head of Hudson Motors. It owes its life to the fact that it was bought several years ago by Henry Ford II.
    â€œThe automobile money took over, and then the automobile business brought more people,” sighs one old-line resident. “They all wanted to live in Grosse Pointe because it was the place to live. They crowded in until now Grosse Pointe is simply bursting at the seams.” A few Grosse Pointers have defected and moved northwest to the suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills—where there is more space and air and, actually, hills. But Bloomfield Hills today means automobile money too—General Motors money, in large part. In the suburbs of Detroit, automobile money cannot be escaped. Only Detroit can be escaped. And the automobile-rich families enjoy pointing out that even first-cabin families such as the Joys have succumbed to automobile money. In the early 1900s, Mrs. Joy’s husband, her brother, Truman Newberry, and a number of other local businessmen quietly bought controlling interest in the Packard Automobile Company and moved it from Warren, Ohio, to Detroit. “So much for your ‘pre-gasoline’ snobs,” says one Grosse Pointer.
    But Mrs. Joy held on to her electric.
    * Mr. Joy was an early ham radio enthusiast whose specialty was picking up disasters from airwaves. From Treasure Hill, the Watch Hill estate, he was the first American to learn of the sinking of the Titanic .
    * At a population density of one person per 300 square feet.

SOUTH

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    The Country Club Set
    â€œJews and blacks are accepted everywhere here,” says a Main Line woman, adding, with almost a touch of pride, “except, of course, the clubs.”
    The local clubs are five in number—the Philadelphia Country Club, the Merion Cricket Club, the Merion Golf Club, the Gulph Mills Golf Club, and the Radnor Hunt Club—and are strung out along the length of the Main Line. As they march westward from the Philadelphia Country Club (the least fashionable of the five), they are rated as increasingly exclusive and choosy, until one reaches the Gulph Mills Golf Club, where, they say, “someone has to die”