by
This stretch of Broadway in the 1960s had House of Marks Furs, William E. Hintz Shoes, Epps Sporting Goods, Capitol Bar and the Wurlitzer Bulding.
They give us those nice bright colors . . .
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
-- Paul Simon, 1973
Detroit wasn't sunny for everyone a half-century ago, but there certainly were nice bright colors during a different era of retailing downtown and on Hastings Street.
Scenes from that era in the 1960s and a few years earlier are archived on photo slides at Wayne State's Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs. Many of its holdings have been digitized in recent years and are posted online.
The 11 collections of historic images in its Urban Affairs section include 89 slides classified as Streetscapes and Storefronts: City Life in 1960s Detroit -- a gallery of architecture, street fashions, hand-lettered signs and bygone retailers great and small.
We dove in for more than a few minutes recently and can't resist sharing these selected finds from a different time in Detroit, where the population was 1.67 million in 1960.
None of the photographers are identified in the collection, curated by audiovisual archivist Elizabeth Clemens.
These seven throwbacks make us stare and decide to share:
Ross Records, shown in 1966, sold vinyl 45-RPM singles and 78s at Griswold Street and Grand River Avenue.
Hastings Street in the 1950s had the Morris Loan Office, Chase's Supermarket, a restaurant, hardware store and druggist.
In 1966, decades before search engine optimization, this is how a crafty downtown merchant snared a top listing in the alphabetized Yellow Pages -- the Google of that era.
Another downtown marketplace shot from 1966, when street commerce was bold and brash.
Crowley's Department Store in 1958 straddled Farmer Street at Monroe Avenue with an arched walkway for shoppers walking between its buildings.
A Hastings Street barber shop's window sign during the 1960s.
