A slice of Detroit history is being revived by Emily Kutil, a 28-year-old Detroit architect.
Kutil plans to make Detroit's former Black Bottom neighborhood visible again by recreating a virtual neighborhood with about 800 rarely seen photos of individual homes and buildings that she found in the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection, writes Bill McGraw of Bridge Magazine in a piece for the Detroit Free Press. Many local African Americans can trace their roots to Black Bottom.
Kutil is a designer, adjunct professor of architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy and a member of the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective.
A former club in Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood. (Photo via by Knight Foundation)
McGraw, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Detroit history, writes:
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.”
Of Black Bottom, McGraw writes:
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.
