Lincoln Park is a city in Wayne County in the state of Michigan.


Lincoln Park is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 44,008 at the 2000 census. The area was founded as a village in 1921 and reorganized as a city in 1925. The area was originally home to the Potawatomi Indians who ceded the land to a French settler, Pierre St. Cosme in 1776. The area developed as a bedroom community providing homes to workers in the nearby steel mills and automobile plants of the Detroit area while having no industry within its bounds.

Geography

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According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 15.2 km² (5.8 mi²), all land. The north and south branches of the Ecorse River run through Lincoln Park and join just before leaving the city.

Lincoln Park borders the cities of Detroit, Allen Park, Melvindale, Ecorse, Wyandotte and Southgate.

History

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Long before Lincoln Park was incorporated as a city, an area adjacent to Ecorse River was the site of a pivotal meeting during Pontiac's Rebellion. On April 27 1763, a council of several American Indian tribes from the Detroit region listened to a speech from the Ottawa leader Pontiac. Pontiac urged the listeners to join him in a surprise attack on Fort Detroit, which they attempted on May 9. Today, the area is known as Council Point Park, and a small engraved boulder marks the site of the historic meeting.

During the 20th century, Lincoln Park grew as a bedroom community for the numerous workers at Henry Ford's River Rouge Plant and other mills and factories of the auto industry.

Among Lincoln Park's minor claims to fame is that it was the home of the members of the seminal punk rock group MC5 in the 1960s. The band was rumored to have evolved out of the group's habit of listening to music from a car radio in the parking lot of the local White Castle restaurant in the small downtown area.

The auto magnate Preston Tucker joined the Lincoln Park Police Department in his early years to gain access to the high performance cars the department used.

Lincoln Park gained brief notoriety in 1999 when the high school's principal enacted a new dress code intended to keep out gang symbology and colors. However, included among the prohibited paraphernalia were any items related to the "pagan" or "goth" lifestyle/fashion sense, including most notably, representations of the pentagram. The decision sparked animosity between the administration and the students and teachers, who generally saw it as an excessive measure given gang activity in the school had been largely eliminated in the late 1980s. This animosity culminated in legal action against the school initiated by the ACLU, on behalf of a student who self-identified as a practicing pagan. Under mounting pressure from the courts and media, the administration formally made an exception in the policy for practicing witches, though informally it dropped the matter. As of September 2006, the same...