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By Izzy Donnelly
If you have driven by Joy Bells Park on Moross
and Grosse Pointe Boulevard you may have
noticed that that the bells are missing. Being
curious I called the Grosse Pointe Farms office
and spoke to City Manager Shane Reeside. He
assured me that the bells were doing just fine.
“We are in the process of repairing the structure,”
he said. “We will replace the cedar shake roof,
repair the mechanism that plays the bells, paint
the structure and clean and re-polish the bells.
We hope to be finished by the end of the year and
this project has been funded by the Grosse Pointe
Farms Foundation.”
The 15 bells of this carillon were commissioned
in 1929 by Henry B. Joy from the Paccard Foundry in the French Alps for his
estate, Fair Acres.The structure was moved to its present location on Friday, July
3, 1992. Every bell contains the inscription of Henry B. Joy, the date 1929, and
the seal and name of the bell-founder: George Paccard et Fils. “Unfortunately,”
writes William De Turk, Assistant Carillonneur/Librarian in Florida’s Bok Tower
Gardens in 1997, “the bells are horribly out of tune because they were not tuned at
the foundry: a practice they discontinued when they
realized the English foundries were tuning bells and getting the world market.
Why Mr. Joy went to this foundry is a mystery”, continues De Turk, “because, as
a member of Grosse Pointe Memorial Church, he would have been exposed to
the 1926 English bells in its tower.”None-the-less, Grosse Pointers have become
accustomed to the out-of-tune bells and will welcome their return. Soon the Joy
Bells will be ringing again.
By Greg Jakub, Chairman, GPHS Preservation Committee.
The historic survey of approximately 2,300 structures in the City of Grosse
Pointe is the final stage. A team of historic preservationists has been diligently
photographing and documenting architectural data related to the homes and
commercial buildings in Grosse Pointe since early spring.The information that
they collected is now being entered into a data base according to the guidelines
from Michigan’s State Office of Historic Preservation.The end result of the survey
will be a report available to the community on the history and trends that led
to the development of the City’s current built environment.The final report is
planned to be complete in the fall.
The project’s goal is to create a valuable database that will be a fundamental
resource supporting current and future efforts such as the development of The
Village and potential identification of historic areas.The latter is a strategy
attracting the attention of homeowners, real estate agents and city leaders as a
way to leverage the value of Michigan’s older communities in our very competitive
real estate market.
We are very grateful to the Wilkinson Foundation for its continued support
of our historic survey project. Our plan is to complete the survey of Grosse
Pointe City as the first step in surveying all the Pointes. Ultimately we foresee
creating a rich database of our history and making it accessible to everyone in
our community.
City Survey Update
Welcome New
BoardMembers
Susan Lewandowski
and DaveTarrant
5
Susan Lewandowski
grew up in Dearborn, but
has lived in the Grosse
Pointes since 1982. She
graduated from the
University of Michigan with
a degree in Political Science.
After college, she earned a
Juris Doctor degree from
the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and
began a career with the federal government.
She retired in September 2010, from
the U.S. Army Tank -Automotive and
Armaments Life Cycle Management
Command (TACOM) in Warren, Michigan,
after almost 33 years of federal service.
During the last ten years, she was the Chief
of the Business Law Division, supervising
25 attorneys with responsibility for the
legal sufficiency of the billions of dollars of
contracts awarded by TACOM.
Lewandowski joined the Grosse Pointe
Historical Society in the mid 1980s. She is
a member of Soroptimists International of
Grosse Pointe and an active member of both
the Fine Arts Society of Detroit and the
Theatre Arts Club. Also, she has recently
joined Grosse Pointe Friends and Neighbors
and is enjoying widening her circle of friends
in the Grosse Pointe communities.
Dave Tarrant
was
educated in history – both
undergraduate and graduate
studies. After obtaining a
B.A. in History, he joined a
Ph.D. program in History
of Technology. His on-go-
ing hobby project is original
research into the use and
fate of all B-17 aircraft (over 1000) that
continued to be used by U.S. forces in the
post-World War II period. He also maintains
a considerable collection of archival material
in automotive history, and enjoys making a
study of it.
Since 1993 Dave spent time serving the
Detroit Historical Museum in a variety of
Where are the Joy Bells?
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