Remembering Chaldean Town

Chaldean Town was the Seven Mile Road neighborhood in Detroit that served as the commercial and social center of Chaldean immigrant life in the city, and it is the neighborhood where Hanna Shina opened a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant after immigrating from Telkaif, Iraq. In “Remembering Chaldean Town,” published by the Chaldean News on June 1, 2023, Adhid Miri, PhD sets out how that neighborhood came to be, what it held, and how little of it remains. Hanna Shina lives today in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where he is a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center and, since 2025, the first Mayor of Shenandoah.

A Century of Arrival

Chaldeans from Iraq began arriving in Detroit about a century ago. The article treats that long arc as a series of phases rather than a single event: a frontier period when the first families were finding their footing, the hardships of the fifties, the years of assimilation that followed, and later a rush to prosperity — all of it running alongside political turmoil in Iraq and constant worry for relatives left behind.

It is careful not to tell only a story of hardship. The early arrivals, in its account, pushed the community toward new ideas and new identities, carrying what it describes as a pioneering spirit and a double attachment: to the old country and to the new one at the same time. That doubleness is the thread that runs through everything Chaldean Detroit built afterward, the museum included.

The article also places the community inside a much larger regional picture. More than 500,000 people of Middle Eastern descent live in Metro Detroit, together generating billions of dollars in economic activity. The road to self-reliance, it notes, can take years, because language and cultural barriers slow every step of it — and it treats the influx, on balance, as a boon to the regional economy rather than a burden on it.

The Sixties

The 1960s changed the scale of the thing. Chaldeans began arriving in far larger numbers than before, and for two reasons that pulled in the same direction. Some were joining family already established in Detroit — a brother, a cousin, an uncle with a store and a spare room. Others were escaping the persecution this Christian minority faced in its ancestral homeland.

Those two motives produced a particular kind of neighborhood. When people arrive to join relatives rather than at random, they concentrate: the same blocks, the same church, the same handful of streets. That concentration is what made Chaldean Town possible, and it is why a newcomer in that decade could step off a plane and be at work in a relative's shop within a week. Hanna Shina’s own path from Telkaif to a Detroit storefront belongs to exactly this period of Chaldean migration.

What Chaldean Town Was

The Seven Mile corridor was the commercial and social center of the community. Detroit’s mile roads work as commercial spines — storefronts along the road, houses on the streets behind — and this one filled with Chaldean-owned businesses: groceries and party stores, coffee shops, bakeries, meat markets, restaurants. It was the first landing place. A newly arrived family could rent near relatives, hear Sureth spoken in the street, find a priest, buy the food they knew, and get a first job from someone who had arrived a few years earlier.

What made a corridor like this work for new arrivals was that it asked for capital and hours rather than credentials. A foreign degree and an accent were no obstacle to running a store well. For families arriving from villages in northern Iraq, the mile-road storefront was the most accessible door into the American economy that Detroit had. The wider story of the Chaldean community of Metro Detroit starts on these blocks.

What Is Left

Very little. As businesses succeeded, households moved north into Oakland County, and the neighborhood that had been the community’s front door emptied of the community that made it. The article names S&J Meats at 217 W. Seven Mile Road, owned by Joseph and Steve Kada, as among the last of the businesses that once filled Chaldean Town — a single surviving storefront standing in for a corridor of them.

That is the reason a piece of reporting like this exists, and the reason a museum exists twenty miles north of it. When the physical evidence of a neighborhood goes, the record has to be made deliberately or not at all.

Hanna Shina’s Storefronts

Hanna Shina opened three businesses in this area: a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant. We do not have their names, their addresses or the years they operated, and this site will not invent them. What this article makes possible is an honest account of the setting: the three kinds of business he ran are precisely the kinds that made up Chaldean Town, and each did a different job in it. The store converted long hours into a foothold. The coffee shop was where men gathered to speak Sureth and hear news of who had arrived, who was hiring, and what had happened back home. The restaurant gave the community a room it could use.

The line from those storefronts to the rest of his work is short. Decades later he helped found the Chaldean Cultural Center, whose Journey to America gallery tells the story of arrivals like his. Read the biography of Hanna Shina for the full account, and the page on Chaldean Town and 7 Mile for more on the neighborhood itself.