The Hill Historic District
Curving Lanes and English-Revival Estates
On the gentle rise at Huntington Woods’ east edge, The Hill carries some of southeastern Michigan’s most architecturally significant pre-war homes along quiet, tree-canopied curves.
About The Hill Historic District
The Hill occupies the east side of Huntington Woods, a compact rise platted in 1916–1917 as the original Huntington Woods Subdivision and locally designated as a historic district by the City Commission on October 19, 2004. Its streets — Borgman, Concord, Dundee, Hendrie, Huntington, Nadine, Salem, and York — were laid out as curving avenues rather than the surveyor’s grid that defines most of inter-war suburban Detroit, producing irregular lots, deep setbacks, and the meandering, English-village feel that the developers patterned on Huntingdon, England.
The housing stock is the district’s defining asset. The majority of homes were built before 1940, and the heaviest concentration went up in the 1920s and 1930s as Detroit’s upper-tier executives commissioned substantial brick Tudors, Colonial Revivals, and period-revival residences. The district counts work by some of the most prominent Detroit-based architects of the twentieth century — Albert Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki among them — placing The Hill alongside Indian Village and Palmer Woods as one of the region’s deepest concentrations of pre-war architectural pedigree.
Daily life centers on a small, civic-active city of roughly one square mile. Huntington Woods is served by Berkley Schools — Burton and Pattengill elementaries date to the same pre-war build-out as the district itself — and shares the Royal Oak 48070 mailing address that sometimes surprises out-of-area buyers. Rackham Golf Course, designed by Donald Ross and opened in 1925 on land donated by Horace and Mary Rackham, sits immediately east of The Hill and remains a public course; the Detroit Zoo borders the district at its northeast corner, a legacy of the same Rackham land gift.
Buyers on The Hill are typically trading scale and architectural character for a walkable, low-traffic setting with strong municipal services and very low reported crime. The Gillham Recreation Center and the city’s outdoor pool are a short walk from most addresses, the Burton branch of the Royal Oak Public Library and Berkley’s Twelve Mile commercial strip are minutes away, and Woodward Avenue places downtown Birmingham, Royal Oak, and Detroit within easy reach. Inventory is thin and turnover is slow — homes here tend to be held for decades rather than traded.
Where is The Hill Historic District
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