Drive the length of Big Beaver Road on a weekday and you pass glass office towers, the moving walkway that links the two halves of the Somerset Collection, and a string of restaurants where the menu reads in Arabic before it reads in English. The Lebanese in Troy are not a single street or a storefront row. They are doctors with offices off Rochester Road, engineers in the automotive supply firms, families who left the east side of Detroit two generations ago and kept the church, the saj bread, and the surname. This is the quieter half of Lebanese Detroit, the Christian half, settled north of the city in one of Michigan’s wealthiest suburbs.
The Place
Troy sits in southern Oakland County, in the northern reach of metropolitan Detroit, and it was built almost entirely after the Second World War. The city incorporated on 1 February 1955, stitched together from Troy Township largely to stop neighbours like Clawson and Birmingham from annexing the land.
What followed was deliberate. Troy never built a traditional downtown. Its 1965 master plan favoured corridor development along Big Beaver Road, and the result is a city of corporate headquarters, the Somerset Collection mall, and the technology cluster known as Automation Alley.
Today roughly 90,000 people live here. The median household income sits near 120,000 dollars, well above the Oakland County figure and more than 1.5 times the Michigan median, the kind of number that tells you who could afford to move in and who, over time, did.
How It Became Lebanese
To understand the Lebanese in Troy you have to start about twelve miles south, in a Detroit that no longer exists, and about seventy years before Troy was a city at all.
The east side, the peddler’s pack, and the five-dollar day
The earliest Arab migrants to the Detroit area were Syrian and Lebanese Christians, and they began arriving in numbers between roughly 1890 and 1912. Most came from the villages of Mount Lebanon, then a district of the Ottoman Empire.
A Detroit Free Press article from 6 February 1900 counted only 75 to 100 people in what it called the city’s colony, most of them Lebanese Maronites. They were a tiny presence, and they made their living the way new arrivals across the country did: with a peddler’s pack, selling goods door to door.
Then came the factories. When Henry Ford announced the five-dollar day in 1914, the calculus changed. Many of these families settled and worked on the east side, close to the Jefferson Avenue auto plant, trading the peddler’s route for a place on the line. The pack money and the factory wage, pooled across a household, became the down payment on a house.
Building the churches
A community that means to stay builds a church, and the Lebanese Christians of Detroit built several, each tracing a different ancient rite. The Maronites organised first. After a call to the Maronite Patriarchate in Lebanon, St. Maron parish was formed, and its church on East Congress Street was formally dedicated on 30 April 1916, the oldest Maronite parish in the greater Detroit area.
The Antiochian Orthodox were just as early. On 30 January 1916 the congregation officially organised the St. George Syrian Orthodox Society of Detroit. The Melkite Greek Catholics followed with Our Lady of Redemption, established in 1929.
These were Detroit parishes for Detroit families. The significance, decades later, is that when those families moved north, the churches moved with them, or rebuilt closer to where the congregation had gone.
The move north
The pattern that reshaped so much of postwar metro Detroit reshaped its Lebanese Christians too. As incomes rose and the children of the east side became professionals, families left the old neighbourhoods for the Oakland and Macomb County suburbs. Southfield, Oak Park, West Bloomfield, Sterling Heights, and Troy absorbed the largely professional, largely Christian Arab American middle class.
St. George made the move concrete. Under the pastorate of Father Joseph Antypas, beginning in 1985, the parish built a new church in Troy in 1994, on East Maple Road. The Syrian Orthodox Society of 1916 had become, in effect, a Troy congregation, following its people to where they now lived.
It is worth being precise about who these Lebanese are. Troy’s Lebanese are overwhelmingly Christian, Maronite, Melkite, and Antiochian Orthodox, professional families a generation or two removed from the factory floor. That distinguishes them from the largely Muslim Lebanese community anchored in Dearborn, whose later arrivals came mostly from the Shia villages of southern Lebanon, and from the Chaldeans, who are Iraqi Catholics, not Lebanese at all, and who built their own dense cluster to the north and east.
A suburb that fit
Troy was, in a sense, designed for them. A city with no factory smokestacks of its own, organised around office corridors and a luxury mall, with some of the best public schools in the state, it offered exactly what a doctor or an engineer with a Lebanese surname was looking for in the 1980s and 1990s. The community here did not announce itself with a single ethnic main street. It settled into the professional grain of the city instead.
The Landmarks
St. George of Troy Antiochian Orthodox Church, 2160 E. Maple Rd. The lineage runs back to the St. George Syrian Orthodox Society organised in Detroit in 1916. The present Troy church was built in 1994, the parish following its congregation north out of the old city. It anchors the Orthodox half of Troy’s Lebanese Christian life.
La Saj Lebanese Bistro, 2149 Crooks Rd. Opened in 2015 on Crooks between Maple and Big Beaver, La Saj is named for the domed griddle, the saj, used to make the paper-thin bread that gives the kitchen its identity. It is the kind of unpretentious, busy lunch spot that tells you a neighbourhood has the customers to support it.
The Somerset Collection, 2800 W. Big Beaver Rd. Not Lebanese, but central to the story of why Lebanese professionals chose Troy. The luxury mall, with its 700-foot enclosed skywalk and moving walkway crossing Big Beaver, is the symbol of the affluent corridor that drew the white-collar middle class to this city.
Our Lady of Redemption Melkite Catholic Church, 29293 Lorraine Ave, Warren. Established in 1929, this is the metro area’s principal Melkite parish, part of the Eparchy of Newton. Many Troy Melkite families keep their roots here, just across the Oakland and Macomb county line.
St. Sharbel Maronite Catholic Church. First built as a new church and banquet hall in Warren in 1993, later expanded and relocated to Clinton Township, it has served southeastern Michigan’s Maronites, including many who immigrated from Lebanon, for more than three decades. For Troy’s Maronite families it is one of the spiritual centres of the wider community.
Phoenicia, 588 S. Old Woodward Ave, Birmingham. A short drive from Troy in neighbouring Birmingham, Phoenicia is the institution of upscale Lebanese dining in metro Detroit. Lebanese native Sameer Eid bought a modest Birmingham restaurant in 1971 and moved it to its present white-tablecloth home in 1982. It has defined the region’s idea of fine Lebanese food for two generations of Oakland County families.
St. Maron Maronite Cathedral, Detroit. The mother parish, dedicated in 1916 and later elevated to the first Maronite cathedral in the United States. Troy’s Maronite families descend, spiritually and often literally, from the congregation that worshipped here when the community still lived on the east side.
Where They Came From
The first families came from Mount Lebanon, the Christian heartland of the Ottoman-era Levant, the same mountain villages that sent Maronites and Melkites across the globe in the great emigration of 1900 to 1914, when roughly a quarter of Lebanon’s population left.
They were pushed by the hardship and political pressure of late Ottoman Mount Lebanon and pulled by the promise of American wages. The largest numbers settled in the United States and Brazil. Detroit, with its factories, drew its share, and chain migration did the rest: one family wrote home, sponsored a cousin, and the village reassembled itself, street by street, in a new city.
The Lebanese who reached Troy are the descendants of that first Christian wave, not the later southern Lebanese migration that built Muslim Dearborn. Their journey was internal as much as transatlantic: from Mount Lebanon to the east side of Detroit, and from the east side to the suburbs of Oakland County.
Troy Today
There is no Lebanese quarter in Troy, and there never will be. That is the point. The community here is woven into the professional life of an affluent suburb rather than concentrated in a single visible district. You read it in the names on medical-office doors and engineering firms, in the parish directory at St. George, in the lunch crowd at La Saj.
For a sense of the wider Lebanese map of Oakland County, Troy belongs to a band of suburbs that also includes the Lebanese of Birmingham just to the west, the established families of Bloomfield Hills, and the large community in West Bloomfield. Across town, the older Lebanese presence in Grosse Pointe tells a parallel east-side-to-suburb story. None of this should be confused with the very different, largely Muslim community in Dearborn.
The same northward migration that brought the Lebanese also brought others. Troy is now more than a quarter Asian American, and the city’s South Asian community, profiled in our piece on the Indians of Troy, shares the same schools and the same corporate corridor. The Lebanese were simply earlier, a reminder that the affluent suburb absorbing today’s newcomers was itself built, in part, by an earlier diaspora that arrived with a peddler’s pack and a saint’s name.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the Lebanese in Troy, Michigan mostly Christian or Muslim?
The Lebanese in Troy are overwhelmingly Christian, mostly Maronite, Melkite Greek Catholic, and Antiochian Orthodox. This distinguishes them from the largely Muslim Lebanese community centred in Dearborn, whose roots lie in the later migration from southern Lebanon.
How did the Lebanese end up in Troy specifically?
They came north in stages. Christian families from Mount Lebanon first settled on Detroit’s east side around 1890 to 1914, working as peddlers and then in the auto plants. As they prospered into professionals, they moved to Oakland County suburbs like Troy, and parishes such as St. George followed them.
Is there a Lebanese church in Troy?
Yes. St. George of Troy Antiochian Orthodox Church, at 2160 E. Maple Rd, descends from the St. George Syrian Orthodox Society organised in Detroit in 1916 and built its Troy church in 1994. Maronite and Melkite families in Troy also worship at parishes in neighbouring Warren and Clinton Township.
Where can you find Lebanese food in Troy?
La Saj Lebanese Bistro on Crooks Road, opened in 2015, specialises in saj bread cooked on a heated dome. For upscale Lebanese dining, many Troy families go a short distance to Phoenicia in neighbouring Birmingham, a metro Detroit institution since the early 1970s.
How are the Lebanese in Troy different from the Chaldean community?
They are different peoples. The Lebanese in Troy are Arab Christians from Lebanon, while Chaldeans are Iraqi Catholics from a different country and church tradition. Both have a strong presence in metro Detroit’s northern suburbs, but they are distinct communities.
Why is Troy considered an affluent place for the Lebanese community?
Troy is one of Michigan’s wealthiest suburbs, with a median household income near 120,000 dollars and strong public schools. Built around corporate corridors rather than factories, it attracted the professional class, including the Lebanese doctors, engineers, and business owners who had risen from the old east-side neighbourhoods.
If your family’s story passed through Troy, or any of the places Lebanese Christians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Mount Lebanon to the auto plants of Detroit’s east side, to a house off Big Beaver Road, to wherever you are now.