Lafayette Park is located on the city's lower east side directly south of the Eastern Market Historic District.

Although Lafayette Park is most commonly identified with van der Rohe, Gunnar Birkerts and John Macsai played significant roles in the south half of the neighborhood.

Firstly, FHA policies following World War II promoted aggressive "slum clearance," under the Housing Act of 1949, providing up to half of demolition costs on projects that often impacted African-American neighborhoods.

The success of the project in increasing tax revenue was such that the city engaged a similar program in Corktown, leveling much of a neighborhood of frame houses in favor of industrial property.

Following World War II, the FHA favored mixed site plans including both high-rises and garden-style apartments or townhouses.

[7] Initially, Minoru Yamasaki, Victor Gruen, and Oscar Stonorov were commissioned to create a site plan and design the residential buildings.

Their initial design, in the Gratiot Redevelopment (the north half) involved 20 high-rise towers, some of square proportion and some rectangular, along with several dozen townhouses.

The first phase of the project proceeded substantially according to the final plan, with the construction of the Pavilion Apartment, originally conceived as part of a predecessor development that included the Wayne State School of Pharmacy.

The low-rise housing was set several feet above grade to minimize views of automobiles and generally featured central parking lots serving multiple buildings, but the courtyard homes had driveways that led to the front door.

The general construction of the low-rise houses was a lightweight steel space frame from which 3-inch concrete slabs were hung for floors and glass panels for front and rear walls.

Because HUD had mandated for new developments to include a shopping center, Greenwald's partners built the present-day shopping center (originally called "Towers Plaza"), which originally featured a two-story concrete bank building with windows that called back to the Lafayette Tower Penthouse and an L-shaped pedestrian mall.

[6] Roughly contemporaneously with Lafayette Towers, four additional parcels in the Gratiot Redevelopment were developed: In 1960, Morton Scholnick, who had developed Ann Arbor's Huron Towers, engaged Gunnar Birkerts, a Latvian-born modern architect, and Frank Straub to design an ultra-luxury apartment building on a site originally projected for a Mies highrise.

[8] 1300 Lafayette East, the first part of the development, was the tallest concrete building in Detroit and featured two slabs, offset along a central corridor, giving the illusion of thinness.

[9] Unlike the Mies structures, 1300 Lafayette East was designed in the New Formal style of modern architecture and so features a subtle gable detail and places the building on a podium, which contains a two-story underground garage, on top of which are trees and a garden space.

A simplified version of the original Birkerts development, Navarre Place features both projections and recesses from a basic oblong shape: the rear doors, accessible from the street, are inset, and the dining rooms are set out.

[10] The civil disturbances of 1967 caused Downtown Detroit development to collapse and arrested the construction of Navarre Place after the north side of the first street had been built.

Today, a stub road reflects the unrealized additional parallel streets, and the twin tower to 1300 Lafayette East, to be sited at Larned and Rivard, was never started.

The Central Park Plaza Apartments, to the south of the Rochdale Court site, were designed as A-frame walk-ups of one-and two bedrooms, with several buildings clustered around a swimming pool.

[11] It was the setting for a pivotal scene in Elmore Leonard's City Primeval,[12] and in 2014, Jewish Ensemble Theater produced an eponymous play.