Bringing Detroit's Black Bottom back to (virtual) life

St. Aubin and Jay. Monroe and Orleans. Hastings and Fort.

Those Detroit intersections sound familiar, but they no longer exist. You can still drive on the individual streets, but the corners have been gone for more than 50 years, along with the adjacent homes, schools, churches, stores, bars, nightclubs, pool halls, barber shops and apartments, not to mention music, street life and preaching.

Those corners were part of the street grid of Black Bottom, where many of metro Detroit's African Americans can trace their  roots in Michigan. From World War I through the 1940s, the neighborhood rested on the eastern flank of the central business district.

Related:

Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood: See it then and now

Then, in the early 1950s, in one of the most controversial episodes of mass gentrification in Detroit history, the virtually all-white city government bulldozed Black Bottom in the name of “slum clearance,” eventually to replace it with the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park, an upscale residential community that initially was occupied by mostly white residents..

Black Bottom is so long gone that you have to be at least Social Security age to have walked its streets, and its memory fades a little each day.

Emily Kutil is hoping to change that.

Kutil, a 28-year-old Detroit architect, has a plan to make Black Bottom visible again for anyone who cares to look. She has embarked on a project to recreate the neighborhood out of about 800 rarely seen photos of individual homes and buildings that she found in the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection.

Kutil plans to build a virtual Black Bottom, an interactive website that maps the images and allows viewers to put themselves in the middle of those vanished streets, like Google Street View allows for contemporary cityscapes. Her site also will serve as a platform to collect former residents’ oral histories.

“Just to realize that that archive exists was amazing,” Kutil said.

“It needs to be made public. There is so much family history, and neighborhood history and community history that has been erased in Detroit. I want to give people some sort of infrastructure to share those histories.”

The photos, taken in 1949 and 1950, are black-and-white images from the Black Bottom eminent domain legal case, the process under which the city took the land from property owners and compensated them for their losses.

Mark Bowden, the library’s coordinator of special collections, says the photos — plus dozens of boxes of legal documents —  sat in a Detroit Public Library warehouse for many years before being moved to the Burton Collection. In about 2008, when Bowden and colleague Romie Minor opened the boxes that contained the photos, “We knew we had gold,” Bowden said.

A few people have used some of the photos for small-scale personal projects, Bowden said, but the pictures have not circulated widely.

“Most of them have never been seen. It’s like bringing to life the Lost City of Atlantis,” said the Detroit writer who goes by the name of Marsha Music.

Music's father, Joe Von Battle, ran a famous record store on Hastings Street, Black Bottom’s main commercial thoroughfare, and recorded sermons by the Rev. C.L. Franklin — Aretha’s father, whose New Bethel Baptist Church was nearby. One of Von Battle’s friends was blues legend John Lee Hooker.

Hastings and neighboring Paradise Valley to the north, another celebrated African-American district that included a number of restaurants, bars and night clubs, are gone from downtown maps, swallowed by the construction of I-375 and I-75, which traced its north-south route.

'A thrilling convergence of people'

Black Bottom’s boundaries were informal, never set down in any legal document, and people differ about the specifics. But the borders were generally described as Gratiot, Brush, St. Aubin or the Grand Trunk rail tracks (now the Dequindre Cut recreation path) and Congress.

Ford Field sits on part of the area that was Paradise Valley.

“People often see Paradise Valley and Black Bottom as interchangeable,” said Ken Coleman, a Detroit writer and author of “Million Dollars Worth of Nerve,” a 2015 book about the leading figures in those neighborhoods.

Once the home of numerous immigrant groups, especially Jewish people, the area that became known as Black Bottom became an African-American neighborhood as black migration exploded throughout the first half of the 20th Century and white Detroiters made it difficult for black residents to move into many areas of the city. In 1910, the city’s black population of fewer than 6,000 was only 1.2% of the city's population, but by 1950, there were 300,000 black residents, 16% of the 1.8 million Detroiters.

As late as the 1920s, Black Bottom was home to both black Detroiters and other newcomers. Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African-American mayor, moved there from Alabama with his family in 1923, when Young was 5. He often recalled that his neighbors were Italian and Syrian immigrants, with German and Jewish stores nearby.

But as black people poured into booming Detroit to find jobs and escape the Jim Crow South, the color line hardened, and Black Bottom became one of the few districts in the city where African Americans could live.

In his autobiography, Young wrote that he did not recall much racial tension when Black Bottom was integrated, but noted “the adversarial attitude was gathering ominously around the city as the new immigrant groups staked their competing claims for social status, housing and jobs.”

Given Detroit’s segregation in that era, Black Bottom was isolated economically and socially, but it became a city within a city, with black merchants, doctors and lawyers living and working in the neighborhood. Its sidewalks were crowded and its blocks were a mixing bowl of classes: An accountant might live on the same block as blue-collar workers, musicians and hustlers, partly because the accountant had few other other choices. Poverty and prosperity co-existed in Black Bottom.

Many residents of Black Bottom lived in their own house with their own yard, but most were renters. The legal documents in the Burton Collection indicate a lot of the landlords had addresses in what were then white sections of Detroit.

Like many members of his generation, Young, who died in 1997, spoke of Black Bottom with fondness.

“I loved that neighborhood,” Young wrote, calling the community “a thrilling convergence of people, a wonderfully versatile and self-contained society.”

City officials began setting their sights on Black Bottom after World War II. They called their plan urban renewal. Critics slammed it as “negro removal” and noted the city provided no housing for the several thousand people who would be evicted.

The mayor at the time, Albert Cobo, largely ignored Detroit’s black community and drew his support from neighborhood associations that wanted to keep their areas white. When Cobo announced his plans for Black Bottom, the black-owned Michigan Chronicle slammed them as a “Jim Crow project.”

The neighborhood’s demise came as part of a sweeping blueprint for the city’s postwar future called the Detroit Plan, which included freeways, hospitals, housing, the Cultural Center, the expansion of Wayne State University and a renovated riverfront.

In a 2004 study of the city’s "urban renewal" efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Goodspeed, a professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, concluded that perhaps in no other U.S. city were the ideas of planners so fully realized as in Detroit.

But Goodspeed, like other experts who have studied the era, said the process of condemning Black Bottom was brutal.

While the taxable value of the land increased about eight-fold when Lafayette Park replaced Black Bottom, Goodspeed contends the financial, social and moral costs of the project were extreme.

“Tens of thousands of poor and mostly black citizens dislocated in the name of civic progress saw their homes, businesses and communities appraised, bought and destroyed without their input or permission,” he wrote.

Furthermore, Detroit experienced a citywide housing crisis after the war, and black people were limited in where they could move. Attempts to enter many white neighborhoods in the city were met with white mob violence, and black renters had to pay higher rents in neighborhoods where they were able to live, such as 12th Street north of West Grand Boulevard.

In addition to the Chrysler Freeway, the glass, steel and trees of the Lafayette Park residential development replaced Black Bottom. Designed by the pioneering architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lafayette Park has been considered a success story, receiving international acclaim for its design and architecture and remaining a stable and integrated neighborhood for decades.

There was such bitterness over the demolition of the African-American neighborhood that 30 years later, when Mayor Young announced his controversial plan to condemn the Poletown district for the General Motors’ assembly plant, there was never-proven speculation Young was seeking revenge for what the city had done to Black Bottom. Poletown included blacks and Arab Americans, but many of its residents were white.

Digging into history

Kutil describes herself as a “history nerd” who spends considerable time digging into local history. She says she would like to “to figure out why Detroit is like it is.”

She adds: “It’s the most mind-bending city I’ve ever lived in.”

Kutil grew up in Waterford and graduated from the University of Cincinnati before earning a master’s degree in architecture from U-M. She moved to Los Angeles before returning to Detroit in 2014.

She was looking for photos of Hastings Street once day in online archives when she stumbled upon the Black Bottom cache.

“I was like, ‘What is this?’ ” Kutil recalled.

The photos show a remarkable variety of houses and buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the homes are in the working-class Victorian style of many homes in Corktown. Some of the Black Bottom streets remind you of 120-year-old streets today on the north side of Chicago.

In shooting the properties, the photographer also captured a number of everyday scenes that show residents going about their lives, including children and teenagers mugging for the camera. Most photos carry data such as an address, date and legal parcel number of the house.

Kutil’s “Black Bottom Street View” project won a $15,000 matching grant late last year through the Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge. She has to raise $15,000 on her own this year to receive the grant, and plans to launch a fund-raiser in the coming weeks. Her website — www.blackbottomstreetview.com  — shows some of her work.

Music, who grew up in Highland Park but spent time in her father’s store in Black Bottom when she was a child, is offering Kutil advice on the project. She sees the photos as a correction to history.

“Those photos belie the narrative that Black Bottom was merely a slum, worthy of destruction,” she said.

Kutil is eager to get going. She’s well aware that anyone who lived in — or visited — Black Bottom is growing old, and memories are disappearing. At some point in the coming years, there will be no one left who walked by the corner of Monroe and Orleans, or knew what it was like to be inside New Bethel Baptist on Hastings when Franklin was preaching or who bought a record at Joe Von Battle’s store.

“That’s why I think we should do it now,” Kutil said.

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Black Bottom facts

The Name: Most references to Black Bottom say its name refers to the rich black soil of the area going back to Detroit’s French period. But some observers, including Detroit writer Desiree Cooper, have raised questions about the possible racial origins of the name. Neighborhoods known as Black Bottom during the segregation era were home to African Americans in other cities, such as Philadelphia and Nashville, and the Black Bottom dance — widely considered to be invented in black areas of the South — became popular among white people across the country in the 1920s, just when many black migrants were coming to Detroit.

The borders: While never defined in a legal sense, the boundaries are generally given as Gratiot on the north, Brush on the west, Congress on the south and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks or St. Aubin on the east.

Some famous residents: Mayor Coleman Young, singer/actress Della Reese, star athlete Charlie Primus, former Detroit Police Chief Ike McKinnon.

For further reading:

Detroit's Black Bottom and Paradise Valley Neighborhoods, a website operated by Wayne State University’s Reuther Library: http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/8609

“Million Dollars Worth of Nerve,” by Ken Coleman, Portraits of residents of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley 

"Urban Renewal in Postwar Detroit: The Gratiot Area Redevelopment Project: A Case Study," by Robert C. Goodspeed, available at his website http://goodspeedupdate.com/RobGoodspeed-HonorsThesis.pdf

“Detroit: The Black Bottom Community,” by Jeremy Williams. An Arcadia photo book on the neighborhood.