It eventually got so big it moved to Hart Plaza. In the mid-1960s, a Greek Festival on Monroe became very popular. The Greektown Preservation Society, comprised of businesses on Monroe Street, recognizes the challenges (emphasis on “preservation”), and is trying to organize more Greek events, some of which vanished over the years. It's at a crossroads.Ĭan Greektown keep its Greekness? Can it live up its namesake? Or will it simply be Greektown in name only, much like the Meatpacking District in Manhattan, which is far better known for its restaurants and clubs than its dwindling number of meat-packing houses.

But unquestionably, like an assimilated second-generation immigrant, it has clearly lost some of its ethnic identity. Not all agree that Greektown, as we know it, is dead. You cannot call” a few restaurants a Greektown. “It’s no longer Greektown,” says Nafez Jadallah, owner of the Greektown Grocery store and former owner of the Laikon, a first-rate Greek restaurant that closed this year after the casino bought the building from his landlord for additional parking. Gone too are the coffee shops - except for one hidden above a bar - and the Greek grocery stores that carried foreign-language papers and the crunchy-crusted Greek breads. The Greek residents have vanished, having died or migrated to the suburbs. Today, there’s Five Guys, a hamburger chain out of Virginia Red Smoke Barbeque Cold Stone Creamery, a chain with outlets in 19 countries a steakhouse sports bars a sprawling casino and only three – yes, three - full-fledged Greek restaurants. It was almost as if you needed a passport at one time to come to Greektown in Detroit, the block teeming with Greek restaurants and Greek everything: coffee shops with card players and grocery stores with fresh feta, olives and lamb and Greek-speaking men on the sidewalk, cigarettes dangling from their mouths.

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