This Boston-Edison mansion was designed by Albert Kahn in 1910 for James Couzens, an early stockholder in Ford Motor Co. who would go on to become Detroit mayor and a U.S. senator.
Constructed of brick and stone, the house features a gabled roof, rectangular windows divided by stone mullions, and prominent bay windows along the south (front) façade. Mature, well-developed gardens occupy the west side of the property. The interior is distinguished by elaborate carved wood paneling, used extensively on the ground floor in large, high-ceilinged rooms.
While the second-floor rooms are equally spacious and well lit, they are noticeably plainer in detail. The third floor contains a full-length ballroom, three servants’ bedrooms, a trunk room and a cedar closet. The basement is notable for housing one of the earliest semi-automatic bowling alleys in the country, an unusual and luxurious feature for a private residence of its era.
From coal clerk to millionaire
Couzens was working as a clerk for the Malcolmson Coal Co. in 1903, when he met Henry Ford. His life would soon change forever.
Ford hired him as the first secretary of the brand-spankin'-new Ford Motor Co., and Couzens became one of the automaker's original stockholders. He invested $2,500 (about $91,000 in 2025, when adjusted for inflation) in the fledgling automaker. He quickly rose through the ranks until 1915, when, as a vice president and general manager at Ford, he quit over a dispute with the big boss man himself over Ford's political opinions and company policy.
Now worth millions thanks to his early investment in the automaker, he could have led a life of leisure, but instead, Couzens went into public service. He served as commissioner of the street railways from 1913 to 1915, and was appointed a year later to the city's police commissioner. He held that position for two years until being elected mayor in 1918 and taking office the following January. And it was that year, in 1919, that he sold that early $2,500 investment to Henry and Edsel Ford for a tidy $30 million.
And all those millions he made? He was a generous giver to charities, especially for children. He established the Children's Fund of Michigan with a $12-million grant; within its first 10 years, the fund helped some 2.5 million kids in the state. In 1919, as mayor, he cut a $1.1-million check to the Michigan Hospital for Crippled Children as a Christmas present to his wife. The couple also would send orphans and underprivileged youths to camps or sending them cakes and ice cream on Couzens' birthday, a tradition his widow, Margaret, would continue. In 1931, he helped Detroit weather the Depression by buying $1 million in less-than-desirable Detroit Street Railway municipal bonds and gave another million to help out with emergency relief.
One of Detroit's greatest mayors
Couzens was just generous, he was a savvy political statesman. For starters, he would oversee a period of tremendous growth in the city, and saw Detroit annex surrounding townships to grow to its present 139 square miles. Fighting unemployment was one of his top priorities; he warned against slashing wages and employees, and believed that increasing the income of working people would lead to a better economy.
"Is it not silly that we should spend our time discussing taking off 5 percent of somebody's salary or laying off some poor devil who is getting a couple of thousand dollars a year, and at the same time appropriating and proposing to appropriate billions of dollars to feed them in the bread lines?" Couzens said in 1933. The Republican also supported higher taxes, especially on large inheritances and estates, keeping in mind that, as a millionaire many times over, he would be affected himself.
His biggest political success was finally ending three decades of controversy by bringing all of Detroit's streetcar lines under public ownership. Achieving municipal ownership had eluded seven other mayors and been a major political football for some 30 years. The Republican also waged this battle before the big push for fiscal and city-manager reforms swept the country.
He is also notable for being the first mayor under the new "strong mayor" charter of 1918 - and Couzens was sure to flex that newfound muscle. He directed the spending of some $240 million on schools, sewers and streets, ran the streetcar system that he put under city control, and created a slew of city jobs to put people to work and cut the city's unemployment rate. It is said that President Herbert Hoover modeled his strategy to combat unemployment after Couzens' battle plan.
He served as mayor until 1922, when he was appointed to the U.S. Senate. There, despite calling himself a staunch, lifelong Republican, he voted for a number of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal proposals because he believed they were the right decisions to help the nation. He voted his conscience, without any sense of party debt or duty. That's something that is hard to imagine in this day and age of politics.
He was re-elected to the Sente twice and serve until his death on Oct. 22, 1936, shortly after his 64th birthday, due to complications from uremic poisioning in his right kidney. He was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery.
Interestingly, he left no will, and his estate of $31 million – worth more than $500 million in 2025 – was split between his wife and four children, one of whom, Frank, was serving as mayor of Detroit himself at the time. Keep in mind, however, that there was a 69 percent inheritace tax on amounts above $20 million – something Couzens had championed during his political career – so Uncle Sam walked away with the equivalent of $320 million in 2025 money.
Following his death, parts of the Lodge Freeway Service Drive were named in Couzens' honor.
His home on Longfellow remained in the Couzens family for decades, passing from James Couzens to his son Frank, and later to Frank’s widow (like his mother, also named Margaret), who lived there until 1962. After she remarried and move to Grosse Pointe, the house was transferred to the Catholic Foreign Mission Society, which occupied the property as late as 1975.