Hazel Park Bottle House Relic — Sunsweet Green Glass Globe Bottle with Message, Limited Edition (1 of 75) (Vintage & Found)

Vintage & Found · The Foundry · Limited Edition — 1 of 30

The Hazel Park Bottle House. 39 W. Elza Avenue. The wall is gone. The bottle is here.

Between 1941 and 1944, a man named Emil Schelenski built a house at 39 W. Elza Avenue in Hazel Park, Michigan — and he built it from bottles. Tens of thousands of them, pressed into mortar, arranged in patterns, embedded in walls and fences and garden structures across the property. Milk bottles, soda bottles, medicine bottles, juice bottles. Whatever he could find. The result was one of the most quietly extraordinary pieces of folk architecture in southeast Michigan — a house that caught the light differently depending on the hour, the season, the angle of the sun through the glass.

The house stood for decades. Neighbors knew it. Collectors knew it. History Loves Company documented it. Then it was gone.

These bottles came from that house. This one held Sunsweet prune juice — one quart, juice of dried prunes with water added, no preservatives, packed and distributed by Sunsweet Growers, New York, N.Y. Round green glass, heavy, hand-finished, the kind of glass that holds light the way modern glass doesn’t. It was pressed into a wall in Hazel Park and held there for the better part of a century.

This is a Limited Edition Artifact — one of 30 bottles recovered from the Hazel Park Bottle House and offered through The Foundry. Each bottle is numbered. Each came from the same walls. No two are identical.

This is not a reproduction. This is not a prop. This is a bottle that has a place it came from, a man who put it there, and a story that History Loves Company has documented on video. Watch it on YouTube. Then hold the bottle.

Item Details

• Sunsweet prune juice — round green glass, one quart
• Provenance: 39 W. Elza Ave, Hazel Park, Michigan — the Schelenski Bottle House, built 1941–1944
• Limited Edition — 1 of 30 bottles offered through The Foundry
• Each bottle individually numbered
• Some with original label intact — noted at time of purchase
• Heavy vintage green glass — surface wear consistent with age and wall installation
• Documented by History Loves Company — watch on YouTube

Pickup & Shipping

• Available for local pickup at The Foundry, 35 W Huron Street, Suite 101, Pontiac, Michigan
• Shipping available — packed carefully for transit

Returns

All vintage sales final. Contact us at 248-568-6030.

Shop online or visit The Foundry at 35 W Huron Street in downtown Pontiac.