The East Jefferson Avenue Residential District in Detroit, Michigan, includes the Thematic Resource (TR) in the multiple property submission to the National Register of Historic Places which was approved on October 9, 1985.

Additionally, many prominent Detroit residents of the time lived along Jefferson, including Charles Christopher Trowbridge,[3] William Hull, Solomon Sibley, John R. Williams, Antoine Dequindre, Joseph Campau, Oliver Newberry, and Oliver Miller.

[2] After the Civil War, many newly prosperous Detroit citizens built prestigious homes along Jefferson in a variety of popular architectural styles, including Gothic Revival, Richardsonian Romanesque, Queen Anne, and Italianate.

Wealthy residents, spurred by the availability of streetcar lines (and later, the automobiles), moved farther from the city center, leaving Jefferson Avenue behind.

These structures are distinguished by their relatively modest appearance, although at the time of their construction they were fashionable homes housing prominent Detroit citizens.

The larger apartment buildings continued to be constructed along Jefferson, with the much larger Garden Court Apartments (1915), the Whittier Hotel (1922–1926), and the Alden Park Towers (1922) built over the next two decades, and The Kean (1931) built just as the Great Depression halted construction for years.

The fourth group includes the more modest (but still well-appointed) smaller scale apartment buildings constructed in the 1910s and 1920s to cater to more upper-middle-class tenants such as automobile company workers and professionals.