Drive north on Woodward out of Detroit and the city loosens its grip. The blocks give way to ravines, then to gated drives and stone gateposts half-hidden in oak. By the time you reach Bloomfield Hills, twenty miles from the river, the only sign of the industry that built all this is the quiet. The Lebanese in Bloomfield Hills did not arrive here. They arrived in Detroit, a century ago, near the Ford plants on the east side, and then, generation by generation, they moved up Woodward until they reached the top of it.
The Place
Bloomfield Hills is one of the wealthiest small cities in the United States. With a population of roughly 4,400 spread across five square miles of Oakland County, it has for decades sat near the top of national income rankings, and the highest median household income in Michigan.
It was incorporated as a village in 1927 and as a city in 1932, growing up around country clubs, hunt clubs, and the Cranbrook estate that the newspaper magnate George Booth carved out of farmland. It is a place of long driveways, of houses you cannot see from the road, of schools whose names carry weight.
It is also, quietly, a place where a particular kind of Lebanese family has gathered. Not the working-class Shia community of Dearborn down on the other side of town, but Christian professionals: doctors, lawyers, developers, auto-supply executives. The story of how they got here runs straight down Woodward Avenue.
How It Became Lebanese
The east side, and the Ford line
The first Lebanese in metro Detroit were not suburbanites. They were villagers, most of them Maronite and Antiochian Orthodox Christians from Mount Lebanon, who came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the way millions of others did: by ship, by rumour of work, by the pull of relatives already gone ahead.
They settled first along Jefferson Avenue on Detroit’s east side, within walking distance of the riverfront factories. When Henry Ford began offering five dollars a day in 1914, the trickle became a current. Detroit became one of the largest Maronite communities in the United States, and in 1915 the first Maronite parish in the city, St. Maron, was founded to serve it.
These were peddlers and grocers and line workers at the start. They opened markets, then restaurants, then small manufacturing shops feeding the auto trade. The second and third generations went to school, and the children of grocers became the doctors and lawyers and engineers their parents had hoped for.
The war, and the second wave
A second Lebanese wave arrived later, from the late 1960s onward and heavily during the Lebanese Civil War that began in 1975. This group was different. Many were already educated, already professional, fleeing Beirut and the mountain towns not for a factory job but for safety and a future for their children.
They landed in a metro Detroit that already had Lebanese churches, Lebanese grocers, Lebanese cousins. That existing scaffolding mattered. A surgeon arriving from Beirut in 1978 could find a parish, a banquet hall, a community that spoke Arabic and understood the cooking. The new arrivals slotted into the professional class quickly, and the professional class, in metro Detroit, lived north.
The drive up Woodward
The geography of Lebanese Christian success in Detroit is a literal northward line. From the east side to the inner suburbs, then out along Woodward to Royal Oak, Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, and finally Bloomfield Hills, the addresses climbed with the incomes.
By the time analysts were writing about Arab settlement in the region, the pattern was clear: while much of the Lebanese and Arab working class concentrated in Dearborn and east Dearborn, the established Christian families had moved to Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Farmington Hills, and West Bloomfield. The split was as much about class and generation as about religion.
Bloomfield Hills sits at the far end of that line. It was never going to hold a large Lebanese population in raw numbers. The whole city holds only a few thousand people. But for the families who made it there, the address meant something specific: arrival, in every sense.
This is the quieter cousin of the larger Lebanese story in Michigan. The dense, visible community lives in Dearborn, where Lebanese life shapes the streetscape itself. The professional-class migration found its centre of gravity a little to the north and west, in West Bloomfield’s Lebanese community, with Bloomfield Hills as its most exclusive outpost.
What the families built
The institutions followed the people, though they tended to land just outside Bloomfield Hills itself, in the surrounding townships and counties where land was cheaper and parking was easier. The churches anchored the community across the metro: St. Maron in Detroit, St. Sharbel out in Macomb County, Antiochian Orthodox parishes scattered through the suburbs.
What Bloomfield Hills offered was not a commercial strip but a residential summit, and a set of schools. The presence of Cranbrook and the consistently top-ranked Bloomfield Hills public schools was, for ambitious immigrant families, much of the point. You did not move to Bloomfield Hills for a Lebanese bakery on the corner. You moved there so your children could walk into Cranbrook, and then into medicine or law, and the bakery you drove to.
The Landmarks
St. Maron Maronite Catholic Church, 11466 Kercheval Street, Detroit. Founded in 1915, this is the mother church of metro Detroit’s Maronites and once the first Maronite cathedral in the United States. Long after the families moved north, many still trace their American story back to its altar, and to the east-side blocks around it where their grandparents first lived.
St. Sharbel Maronite Catholic Church, 31601 Schoenherr Road, Warren. Built up from the early 1990s as one of the largest Maronite communities in the country, St. Sharbel became the gathering place that downtown Detroit no longer could be. Its hall hosts the weddings, the funerals, the festival nights where Bloomfield Hills families reconnect with the broader Lebanese metro.
Phoenicia, 588 South Old Woodward Avenue, Birmingham. Opened by Lebanese-born Sameer Eid and moved to well-heeled Birmingham in 1982, Phoenicia has spent more than fifty years as metro Detroit’s white-linen standard for Lebanese cooking. For the Bloomfield Hills crowd it is the neighbourhood restaurant, the place a Cranbrook graduation dinner or a doctor’s anniversary actually happens.
La Marsa, 43259 Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Township. Sitting on Woodward near Square Lake Road, just south of Bloomfield Hills, La Marsa is the everyday Lebanese kitchen of the area: shawarma, fattoush, garlic toum, ordered as easily for a Tuesday as for a feast. It is the kind of place that proves Lebanese food here is simply local food.
Shatila Bakery, 5741 West Maple Road, West Bloomfield. The West Bloomfield branch of the bakery Riad Shatila founded in Dearborn in 1979, this is where Bloomfield Hills families drive for baklava, knafeh, and trays of pastry for a christening. The Dearborn original made the name. The West Bloomfield shop brought it within a short drive of the wealthier suburbs.
Cranbrook Schools, 39221 Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Hills. The private college-preparatory campus at the heart of the Cranbrook Educational Community is, for many Lebanese families, the reason the address was worth the price. Generations of immigrant doctors and developers have sent their children through its gates, treating it as the surest bridge from a Beirut childhood to an American future.
Oakland Hills Country Club, Bloomfield Township. The championship golf club just beyond the city line stands for the social world the established families bought into as they climbed. Club membership, like the Cranbrook diploma and the Woodward address, was part of how a Lebanese name moved from the factory floor to the top of Oakland County in three generations.
Where They Came From
The roots run, overwhelmingly, to Mount Lebanon and the Christian towns of the Lebanese highlands. The early migrants were Maronite and Antiochian Orthodox villagers from places like Bsharri, Zahle, and the towns of the Bekaa and the mountain, the same heartland that fed Lebanese settlement across America from Toledo to Boston.
The later, professional wave came more often from Beirut and the larger towns, carrying degrees and clinical training rather than peddlers’ packs. War pushed them out. The civil war that tore Lebanon apart from 1975 sent a steady flow of educated families toward the relatives and parishes already established in Michigan.
What both waves shared was Christianity, and that shaped where they landed. The Maronite and Orthodox identity drew them toward the suburban parishes of Oakland and Macomb counties rather than the Shia institutions of Dearborn. It is one of the reasons the Bloomfield Hills story reads so differently from the working-class Lebanese story in Dearborn, and why metro Detroit’s Lebanese world has always had more than one centre. The Christian migration also overlapped, in its suburban geography, with the region’s Chaldean Catholic community, another Middle Eastern Christian group that climbed the same Oakland County ladder.
Bloomfield Hills Today
Bloomfield Hills today is not a Lebanese neighbourhood in any visible way. There is no commercial district, no banner, no strip of Arabic signage. It is a residential city of a few thousand people, and the Lebanese families in it are woven into the broader professional elite rather than set apart from it.
That invisibility is, in a way, the point. The Lebanese presence here is measured not in storefronts but in surnames: on hospital staff directories, on law-firm letterheads, on the donor walls of cultural institutions, on the rosters at Cranbrook. The community’s commercial life happens just over the borders, in Birmingham and Bloomfield Township and West Bloomfield, a few minutes’ drive in any direction.
For the children of the second wave, now grown, the city represents a kind of completion. Their grandparents arrived near the Ford line. Their parents fled a war. They themselves grew up with Cranbrook blazers and Phoenicia dinners and trips back to a Lebanon they know mostly through August visits. The address at the top of Woodward is the family’s whole American century, compressed into five square miles of Oakland County. To trace the rest of that arc across the region, the older Lebanese community in Toledo shows where the very first Michigan-adjacent Lebanese settlement began.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there really Lebanese families in Bloomfield Hills, given how small it is?
Yes. The Lebanese in Bloomfield Hills are few in raw numbers, since the entire city holds only about 4,400 people, but they are present as part of the professional elite: doctors, lawyers, developers, and auto-industry executives. The community is residential and integrated rather than concentrated in a commercial district.
How is the Lebanese community in Bloomfield Hills different from Dearborn’s?
The Lebanese in Bloomfield Hills are overwhelmingly Christian, Maronite and Antiochian Orthodox, and largely professional class. Dearborn’s much larger Lebanese community is heavily Shia Muslim and working class. The two represent different migration waves, different faiths, and different points on the economic ladder within the same metro area.
Why did Lebanese families move to Bloomfield Hills specifically?
Schools and status. Bloomfield Hills offers Cranbrook and top-ranked public schools, prized by immigrant families investing in their children’s futures, along with the prestige of one of America’s wealthiest addresses. The northward move up Woodward, from Detroit’s east side to Oakland County, tracked rising incomes across generations.
Where do Bloomfield Hills Lebanese families worship?
At Maronite and Antiochian Orthodox parishes across the metro rather than within the small city itself. St. Maron in Detroit is the historic mother church, and St. Sharbel in Macomb County is one of the largest Maronite communities in the country. Families drive to these parishes for Mass, weddings, and funerals.
Where do they go for Lebanese food?
Just outside the city. Phoenicia in Birmingham is the long-running white-linen standard, La Marsa on Woodward in Bloomfield Township handles everyday meals, and Shatila Bakery in West Bloomfield supplies the baklava and knafeh. All sit within a short drive of Bloomfield Hills.
When did Lebanese people first come to metro Detroit?
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Maronite and Orthodox Christian villagers from Mount Lebanon settled along Detroit’s east side and took factory work, especially after Ford’s five-dollar day in 1914. A second, more professional wave arrived from the late 1960s onward, many fleeing the Lebanese Civil War.
If your family’s story passed through Bloomfield Hills, or any of the places Lebanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Mount Lebanon to the Ford line on Detroit’s east side, to a stone driveway at the top of Woodward, to wherever you are now.