A 110-year-old mansion designed by famed architect Albert Kahn for department-store scion Joseph Siegel has hit the Detroit market at $1.25 million, offering a rare shot at owning one of Boston-Edison's grandest early 20th-century estates. The 7,300-square-foot home at 610 W. Boston Blvd sits on a 1.29-acre lot and comes loaded with six bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, five fireplaces, and a detached six-car garage.
The listing was first reported by Crain's Detroit, whose real estate coverage detailed the property's size, price, and architectural pedigree. Detroit brokerage Nika & Co., led by agents Nika Jusufi and Erik Hill, formally put the estate on the market in late July, according to Homes.com. Inside, the home retains quarter-sawn oak woodwork alongside custom wrought-iron work by master artisan Samuel Yellin and original light fixtures crafted by Edward F. Caldwell & Co., per Signature Sotheby's International Realty.
A Retail Fortune Built the House
Joseph Siegel belonged to the family behind the B. Siegel Company, a Detroit retail empire that began in 1881 as a small ready-to-wear shop and grew into a premier Midwest department store chain, with a flagship at Woodward Avenue and State Street and eight regional locations before it filed for bankruptcy in 1981, according to Historic Detroit. The family's imprint on the surrounding blocks runs deep. Patriarch Jacob Siegel, founder of the American Lady Corset Company, lived directly across the street at 51 W. Boston Blvd in a mansion designed by architect Marcus R. Burrowes and built between 1917 and 1919, the same source notes.
Before it hit the market, the 610 W. Boston Blvd property went through a full-house estate sale in June, when Aaron's Estate Sales cleared out contents ranging from vintage vehicles and heavy machinery to taxidermy and Detroit memorabilia, according to the company's own estate sale listing. That liquidation effectively closed out one chapter of the home's century-long history before agents began showing it to prospective buyers.
A Neighbor's Sale Set a Recent Benchmark
The Joseph Siegel house isn't the only Kahn-linked property tied to this family to draw attention in recent years. In July 2024, the 11,103-square-foot Benjamin Siegel Mansion at 150 W. Boston Blvd sold for $1.95 million, marking the highest single-family home sale price in Detroit in nearly two years at the time, per reporting on the sale. That house was also the scene of a widely covered murder case involving neurosurgeon Dr. Devon Hoover, whose killing and the subsequent legal proceedings against Desmond Burks played out across the neighborhood's headlines in the past year.
Boston-Edison itself is one of the largest residential historic districts in the country, spanning 36 city blocks and containing roughly 900 single-family homes built mostly between 1905 and 1925, according to the City of Detroit. The neighborhood was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1973 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and it's home to the Historic Boston-Edison Association, founded in 1921 as Detroit's oldest continuous neighborhood group.
A Street That Drew Detroit's Elite
Over the decades, Boston-Edison attracted some of the city's most prominent residents, including automotive pioneer Henry Ford, Motown founder Berry Gordy, boxing champion Joe Louis, and retail magnate S.S. Kresge, per ClickOnDetroit. The Joseph Siegel house's listing adds another chapter to that legacy, giving a new owner the chance to take on a piece of Detroit's architectural and retail history at a price well below its neighbor's recent sale.
