The COVID-19 pandemic has closed the Hamtramck city clerk’s office, after City Clerk August Gitschlag and two employees tested positive for the disease. The office closed on Monday. Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski told the Detroit Free Press that for the time being, all clerk-related business will be handled through the city manager’s office. Hamtramck city hall remains open. Gitschlag said it’s unclear whether he and the other employees contracted the virus from election-related activities last week, but Election Day polling sites and city employees have all been notified about the outbreak.
Surrounded on all sides by the City of Detroit, Hamtramck, Michigan, a city in Wayne County, was named after a French Revolutionary War hero, Colonel Jean Francois Hamtramck, and originally settled by French émigrés from Quebec. By the early 1900s, it was a German-American farming village of about 500 people. Then, with the opening of the Dodge Brothers automobile plant in 1914, Hamtramck attracted large numbers of Polish laborers and its population swelled from about 3,600 in 1910 to over 46,000 by 1920. Hamtramck became a city in 1922, to protect itself from being annexed by Detroit.
