7 Mile Road and the Chaldean Businesses of Detroit

After immigrating from Telkaif, Hanna Shina opened a store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant in the 7 Mile area of Detroit — the corridor that was the commercial and social heart of Chaldean life in the city. He 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.

The 7 Mile Corridor

Detroit’s mile roads run east to west across the city and its suburbs, and each one functions as a commercial spine: storefronts along the road, houses on the streets behind it. Seven Mile Road is one of those spines, and the stretch of it near Woodward Avenue became, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, the place where Chaldean immigrant business life in Detroit concentrated.

What made a corridor like this work for new arrivals was that it required capital rather than credentials. A storefront could be leased, stocked, and opened by a family willing to work every hour it was open, and a foreign degree or an accent was no obstacle to selling groceries. For a community arriving from villages in northern Iraq, the mile-road storefront was the most accessible door into the American economy that Detroit had.

A Century of Arrival

Chaldeans from Iraq began coming to Detroit about a century ago, and in the 1960s they began arriving in far larger numbers — some joining family already established here, some escaping the persecution this Christian minority faced in its ancestral homeland. Because so many came to join relatives rather than at random, they settled in the same blocks, attended the same church, and worked in one another’s shops. That concentration is what produced Chaldean Town. Hanna Shina’s own move from Telkaif to a Detroit storefront belongs to this period.

The community sits 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, according to the Chaldean News. The same reporting notes that the road to self-reliance can take years, because language and cultural barriers slow every step, and treats the arrivals as a boon to the regional economy. It also declines to tell only a story of hardship: the early arrivals pushed the community toward new ideas and identities, with a pioneering spirit and a double attachment to the old country and the new.

What Chaldean Town Was

The neighborhood along 7 Mile near Woodward came to be known as Chaldean Town. It was the first landing place for Chaldean immigrants in Detroit: the blocks where a newly arrived family could rent an apartment near relatives, hear Sureth spoken in the street, find a priest, buy the food they knew, and get a job from someone who had arrived a few years earlier. Places like it exist in every immigrant city, and they do the same work everywhere — they shorten the distance between getting off a plane and having a life.

Chaldean Town was also, by design and by circumstance, temporary for most families. It was where people started, not where they intended to finish; as businesses succeeded, households moved north into Oakland County. What remained were the habits formed there, and the network of people who had known each other in that first neighborhood. The wider story of the Chaldean community of Metro Detroit begins on blocks like these.

What Is Left of It

Very little of the corridor remains in Chaldean hands. As businesses succeeded, families moved north into Oakland County, and the neighborhood that had been the community’s front door emptied of the community that made it. The Chaldean News 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 — one surviving storefront standing in for a street of them. That disappearance is a large part of why the community built a museum: when the physical evidence of a neighborhood goes, the record has to be made deliberately or not at all. Read our summary of “Remembering Chaldean Town” from the Chaldean News for the fuller account.

A Store, a Coffee Shop, and a Restaurant

Hanna Shina opened three businesses in the 7 Mile 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 can be said honestly is what each kind of business meant in that neighborhood.

The store — the grocery or party store — was the family’s foothold. It was open long hours, staffed by whoever was in the household, and it converted labor directly into a foothold in a new country: a lease, a bank relationship, a credit history, eventually a house. More Chaldean families in Detroit began with a store than with anything else.

The coffee shop was something different. It was where men gathered to speak Sureth, to drink tea and play cards, and above all to hear news — who had arrived, who was hiring, whose relative in Iraq needed papers, what had happened back home. In a community without a newspaper of its own in its first decades, the coffee shop was the newspaper.

The restaurant fed people the food they had grown up on and gave the community somewhere to eat together: baptisms, funerals, ordinary Sundays. A restaurant is the point at which a business stops being only a livelihood and becomes a piece of communal infrastructure — a room the community can use.

From Storefront to Institution

The line from those three businesses to the rest of Hanna Shina’s work is not a long one. A store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant are all versions of the same act: making a place where a community can gather and be served. Decades later he was doing the same thing on a larger scale, helping to found the Chaldean Cultural Center, the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, and giving more than 40 years of service to the Chaldean foundations and the Chaldean church.

The museum’s Journey to America gallery tells the story of arrivals like his, and its Chaldean Village Life gallery tells the story of what they left. Read the full biography of Hanna Shina for how the two connect.