Lincoln Park is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan. It lies in an area of cities and communities known as Downriver. The population was 38,144 at the 2010 census. The settlement was organized 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. It 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.
Long before Lincoln Park was incorporated as a city, an area along the 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 the British 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.
Neighborhoods were first laid in the area of Ecorse Township that would become Lincoln Park in 1906. It was incorporated as a village in 1921, and as a city in 1925.
Preston Tucker, famous for his controversial financing and development of the revolutionary 1948 Tucker Sedan, grew up in Lincoln Park in the early 1900s. Tucker joined the Lincoln Park Police Department in his early years to gain access to the high performance cars the department used.
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. Two major shopping hubs were constructed in the 1950s: Lincoln Park Plaza in 1955 on the southeast side and the Lincoln Park Shopping Center the following year on the northwest side.
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. Gary Grimshaw, a noted rock concert poster artist, grew up in Lincoln Park at the same time.
As of the census of 2010, there were 38,144 people, 14,924 households, and 9,685 families residing in the city.