The Detroit neighborhood Black Bottom’s physical contours were lost to so-called “urban renewal” and the construction of the Interstate 375 freeway spur into downtown, but an exhibit of oral histories and a reconstructed street view seeks to preserve the neighborhood’s past.
The exhibit by Black Bottom Archives will open at the beginning of January at the Michigan History Center in Lansing, and is planned to stay through next November. Black Bottom Archives is a nonprofit that serves as a repository for the Detroit neighborhood’s history.
Lex Draper Garcia, the nonprofit’s program manager, said a historical reconstruction of Black Bottom’s blocks has been stitched together from about 2,000 photos from the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection. The archives have also collected photos from former residents and descendants of the neighborhood. The exhibit has previously made stops at Bert’s Warehouse in Eastern Market and the Detroit Public Library.
“As people are sharing their oral histories, we’re able to fill in the blanks,” Garcia said. “When the exhibit is up, it’s as if you’re able to walk down those streets during 1949 and 1950, when the photos were taken.”
Black Bottom got its name not from the area’s residents but from rich, dark soil farmed by 18th-century French settlers, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The nearby neighborhood of Paradise Valley was the area’s commercial section for the Black community, said Detroit city historian Jamon Jordan. It was a bustling district of restaurants, salons, grocers and drugstores, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Hastings Street ran through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley as the main spine of both areas, and the construction of I-375 and I-75 destroyed the boulevard.
“Urban renewal” and the construction of the freeways, from 1949 through the mid-1960s, saw the neighborhood razed and thousands of residents displaced. I-375 opened in 1964. Jordan said much of Black Bottom had already been destroyed by the time construction of the freeways started, spurred by the 1956 signing of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.
“Most of Black Bottom was already being destroyed before they begin working on I-375 and I-75. That seals it, though. There’s really no coming back after you destroy Hastings Street,” Jordan said.
The freeway’s construction removed street connections between downtown and Black Bottom and adjacent communities.
Garcia said the photos and oral histories have been essential to Black Bottom Archives’ efforts to preserve Black Bottom’s past.
Many residents of the neighborhood were renters, leaving a shortage of accurate records of who owned properties and where residents lived. Jordan said renting also meant residents did not get any kind of compensation for being displaced.
Garcia believes that because the neighborhood was perceived as poor, government officials considered it disposable for demolition to make room for the freeway spur and new housing.
“It presented as a poorer area of the city. But that’s because the money circulated within the community; it wasn’t coming from outside of the Black Bottom neighborhood,” Garcia said. “They say during the time of Black Bottom, when it was at its height of people, a dollar circulated 80 times before it left the neighborhood.”
The Lafayette Park neighborhood now sits where part of Black Bottom was.
Jordan said photos and oral histories have helped tell the stories of Black Bottom in its last few decades, when it had become a predominantly Black neighborhood and destruction of the area had already begun. But he said that since oral histories can only go back so far, institutions that anchored the neighborhood, such as churches and businesses, have been key to preserving the history of Black Bottom’s earlier generations of French, British, German, Irish, Polish, Italian and Greek settlers.
“I’m going to say that Black Bottom, acre for acre, is the most historically rich, culturally significant area in the whole state of Michigan’s history,” Jordan said.
“We have the histories because the institutions that were in Black Bottom have history.”
The Michigan Department of Transportation has plans to reconstruct I-375 over the next several years, and project officials from the state and city say they plan to pay tribute to the neighborhood’s history.
MDOT plans to replace the mile-long sunken freeway with a street-level boulevard connecting Jefferson Avenue and I-75, lined with businesses, homes and open space. The state road agency’s goal is to begin the earliest stages of construction work late in 2025.
The Michigan History Center, at 702 W. Kalamazoo St. in Lansing, is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays.
jcardi@detroitnews.com
