by
Joe Lapointe, a regular contributor to Deadline Detroit, is a former reporter for the New York Times and Detroit Free Press.
The black-and-white photograph shows a slender fellow wearing a well-cut zoot suit. The dapper man is crossing Hastings Street with a slim package under his left arm.
Taken on a sunny autumn day in 1949, the picture also shows behind him the striped awning of a small, corner grocery store, the kind once plentiful in Detroit neighborhoods. One sign on the side of the store advertises a nearby “Sweet Shop” and another promotes snuff.
The face of the man crossing the street is partially obscured by the wide brim of his fancy hat. On the sidewalk in front of the store, a woman wearing a white, sleeveless housedress gazes into the distance, up the street, as if waiting on a friend. A man striding by her wears an official-looking hat and jacket and looks like a cop on a beat.
This single slice of city life is among dozens of evocative images in a compelling exhibit called “Black Bottom Street Views” which officially opened Saturday afternoon at the Detroit Public Library Main Branch on Woodward Avenue in the Cultural Center.
The display celebrates Detroit’s core African-American neighborhood on the near East Side – effectively a ghetto in the classic sense – which was gradually torn down over more than two decades, beginning in the early 1950s, to make room for the Chrysler freeway and mid-century condominiums.
The exhibition will overlap all of Black History Month and close on March 15. Saturday’s opening ceremony drew an enthusiastic, overflow crowd of several hundred people to the ornate Strohm Hall on the third floor.
"Negro removal"
One of Saturday’s speakers – author Ken Coleman -- noted how the destruction of Black Bottom was described in such euphemisms of the time as “slum clearance” and “urban renewal,” before such things were called “gentrification.”
And, Coleman asked the audience, what other term was used?
“Negro removal!” shouted many in the crowd that was about two-thirds black.
The Black Bottom display is the work of Emily Kutil, who teaches architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy. The pictures were taken by the city government’s Corporation Counsel Bureau of Real Estate and discovered in storage in the Burton Historical Collection.
Although intended merely to assess property value, the best of the photographs inadvertently show not only the buildings, but the human beings who lived inside them, played on sidewalks in front of them and sat to chat on their porches. Part of Kutil’s exhibition in the high-ceilinged hall includes two bare wooden replicas of the sort of porches found in Black Bottom.
The photos are arranged on spare wooden frames and lined up in rows of streets and intersections that approximate roughly 10 percent of Black Bottom’s district, a geographical triangle which extended to Elmwood Cemetery on the east and on the diagonal below Gratiot running from southwest to northeast.
Hastings Street – the commercial strip – ran south to north on the west end. The black entertainment district of Paradise Valley was north of Gratiot and extended up to Forest. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley are often conflated in the collective consciousness of Motor City memory and boundaries are imprecise.
Where it got its name
Another ambiguity is that it often said that Black Bottom got its name not for its racial makeup in the 20th century but for its rich soil near the bottomland of the Detroit River, where French settlers displaced native tribes in the early 1700s.
Some of Saturday’s speakers linked more recent historical events to the very soil and streets just east of Downtown and north of the river. One was Marsha Music, whose father ran a record store at Mack and Hastings.
She said Detroit’s violent civic uprising of 1967 was a direct result of the destruction of Black Bottom; people were frustrated by a lack of housing choices in a segregated city after their homes in the pictures were razed.
“The bitterness was deep in the DNA,” she said. “These aren’t shacks. These aren’t hovels.”
Indeed, the photos show many wooden houses of 19th-century construction that look weather-beaten and worn but also neat and tidy.
They serve as a long-ago version of today’s Google Street View.
The exhibit includes telephone receivers that allow visitors to hear recorded interviews with elderly people recalling what life was like then and there. Perhaps, someday, someone will find a large cache of motion picture film.
Completing the mood for Saturday’s ceremony, a disc jockey played records made in the era, including “Paradise Valley Walk” and “Hastings Street Bounce” by Paul (Hucklebuck) Williams. Some visitors milled about a large and detailed map of Black Bottom constructed recently from old real estate maps produced for fire insurance.
Elated exclamations came from guests who discovered and pointed to their old houses or schools or churches on the map.
Others merely strolled down and gazed at the “streets” made of photo images, some over-lapping in a way that seemed almost mystical, as if visiting a dream-like ghost town, unexpectedly and delightfully resurrected.
