Iesha Morgan didn't set out to open a cigar lounge. She built her name in tax preparation, running a company called Tax Stars, then added a medical supply business and a wholesale operation called FAM Global Supply. When she walked into a deteriorating building at 13124 Mack Avenue, most people saw a property that had been empty for years. She saw a jewel worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore. That building is now I Place Cigar Lounge, reported by Fox 2 Detroit in February as the first female-owned cigar lounge in the city.
The lounge sits on Mack Avenue, the commercial spine that forms the southern edge of Conner Creek. It's a fitting spot for a comeback story, because this stretch of Mack has spent close to a decade under a magnifying glass, and the creek this neighborhood is named for hasn't run above ground in generations. Both facts explain each other.
A Corridor With Paperwork Behind It
New storefronts on Mack Avenue don't happen by accident. The Eastside Community Network, working with the Mack Avenue Strategy Committee, completed Phase I of the Mack Avenue Improvement Plan in 2018 with funding from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. That phase studied the stretch from Conner Avenue to Neff Road, laying out recommendations for streetscaping, building renovations, and how to activate vacant storefronts. Phase II picked up in late 2019 and pushed the planning east, from Cadieux Road to Moross Road, pulling in the neighboring cities of Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe, and Grosse Pointe Farms as partners.
That's four municipalities coordinating on one commercial strip, which is unusual for a street this size. The Mack Avenue Business Association, which grew out of that same planning work, now maintains a directory covering more than 180 businesses along the corridor between Conner Street and Moross Road. Over 25 of them are Black-owned and more than 35 are women-owned, according to the association's own count when it launched the directory online in 2021.
I Place Cigar Lounge is the newest name added to that list. But it's not an outlier. It's what years of corridor planning were designed to produce: someone taking a hard look at a vacant building on Mack and deciding the paperwork had finally caught up to the opportunity.
The Creek That Isn't There Anymore
The neighborhood's name predates all of this planning by more than a century, and it refers to something you cannot see from Mack Avenue or anywhere else. Conner Creek once ran from what is now the city of Warren down to the Detroit River, a real waterway used by Native American communities and early French settlers, who named it Riviere du Grand Marais. Mills went up along its banks in the 1870s after Colonel Philetus W. Norris, the frontiersman who later became Yellowstone's second superintendent, platted the Village of Norris between its forks.
The creek didn't survive industrialization. The Detroit Terminal Railroad ran parallel to it and pulled in manufacturers like Detroit Edison, Chrysler, Hudson Motor Car, and Fruehauf. The Daimler Chrysler Jefferson Avenue plant and other facilities were eventually built directly over its former channel. Today the water runs underground, routed to the Jefferson Avenue Conner Creek Pumping Station operated by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. There's no creek to point to. There's a pump station.
What replaced it, at least in terms of a visible route through the neighborhood, is the Conner Creek Greenway. The Detroit Eastside Community Collaborative, a coalition founded in 1992, built the trail as its signature project, tracing the old creek's path along Conner Avenue for most of its length. The first constructed segment, a mile and a half starting at Conner Playfield near Harper and Conner, cost roughly $1.7 million, with the Michigan Department of Transportation covering most of it. More miles have been added since, connecting neighborhoods, parks, and business districts that used to be linked only by water and are now linked by pavement.
That's the through-line worth noticing. This neighborhood took its name from a creek that no longer exists above ground, and the thing doing the work that creek used to do, connecting one part of the east side to another, is now a bike path and a business corridor instead of a stream.
What's Actually Underfoot This Fall
None of this is theoretical for anyone who already lives here. The greenway is a paved shared-use path with marked bike lanes along parts of Conner Avenue, open to walkers, runners, and cyclists. Dogs are welcome on leash. There's no admission and no season pass required, just a path that follows a street most residents already drive on.
Fall is a reasonable time to actually use it. The path doesn't have much tree cover in places, which means less mud and fewer bugs than a wooded trail, but also means the open sky gets you the color change on the blocks where street trees do line the route. If a walk along Conner Avenue is part of your week already, the fact that you're retracing the exact line of a creek that hasn't seen daylight in decades is the kind of detail that makes a familiar walk feel less routine.
The southern end of that same route feeds directly into the Mack Avenue corridor, which means a walk that starts at a greenway trailhead can end at a storefront the Mack Avenue Business Association added to its directory this year. Iesha Morgan's building at 13124 Mack sits inside that same stretch the corridor planning targeted back in 2018. The infrastructure and the investment are running along the same line, one buried under storm sewers and blacktop, the other counted in a business directory update.
That's the part of this neighborhood's story that doesn't show up on a map. The creek is gone. The route it carved is still doing exactly what it always did, just for people and small businesses instead of water.
If you're curious about what else is changing along Mack Avenue or want the block-by-block read on how Conner Creek is shifting, that's the kind of detail Liz in Detroit tracks as a matter of course. Reach out any time you want the local read before it shows up anywhere else.
