As plans to rebuild Interstate 375 in Detroit move forward, historians and residents are seeking to preserve the history of neighborhoods known as Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, whose destruction was sealed by the freeway’s construction.
The Michigan Department of Transportation plans to replace the mile-long sunken freeway with a street-level boulevard connecting Jefferson Avenue and Interstate 75, lined with businesses, homes and open space. MDOT’s goal is to begin the early stages of construction in late 2025.
“Black Bottom, acre for acre, is the most historically rich, culturally significant area in the whole state of Michigan’s history,” said Detroit city historian Jamon Jordan. “Why? Because so many people’s history is tied to that place.”
Jordan was among speakers who gathered Tuesday night at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History for a panel to share stories about Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, residential and commercial areas that were demolished by the time I-375 opened in 1964. Researcher and urban planner Rod Arroyo; and Kimberly Cooley, a descendant of a Black Bottom business owner and founder of a Taste of Hastings Street, joined Jordan.
MDOT, the museum and Detroit Historical Society hosted the panel.
MDOT 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 Black Bottom’s history. Leslie Love, a regional director for MDOT, said the history of the neighborhoods is not taught in Detroit’s schools, and the state road agency plans to keep the stories of Black Bottom residents and descendants in their archives to preserve them.
“Urban renewal” and the construction of the freeways, from 1949 through the mid-1960s, razed the neighborhood and displaced thousands of residents.
Black Bottom’s name derives from the rich, dark soil farmed by 18th-century French settlers. Though the neighborhood had become populated predominantly by Black residents in its last few decades, earlier generations saw British, German, Irish, Polish, Italian and Greek settlers. Part of Black Bottom eventually became Greektown, Jordan said. Jordan previously told The News anyone with roots in Detroit dating back a few generations or more likely has some connection to Black Bottom.
The nearby neighborhood of Paradise Valley was the area’s mainly commercial section for the Black community, according to Jordan, with restaurants, salons, grocers, drugstores, clubs and theaters. Jordan said the entertainment venues attracted people of all races to nighttime music performances, especially big band music of the 1920s and ’30s.
“Everybody wants to hear that music, not just Black people,” Jordan said. “If you wanted to hear that music, you were coming to Paradise Valley, to these clubs and these theaters.”
Gratiot was the main border road between the two neighborhoods, while Hastings Street was the major boulevard tying Black Bottom and Paradise Valley together. It ran from the Detroit riverfront to East Grand Boulevard, and was named after Eurotas Parmalee Hastings, a former Michigan State Auditor General and president of the state bank. The construction of I-375 and I-75 destroyed the boulevard.
Though much of Black Bottom had already been demolished by the time construction of the freeways started, spurred by the 1956 signing of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, Jordan said the demolition of Hastings Street was the final blow.
The majority of the neighborhood’s residents were renters, meaning they were not entitled to compensation or assistance relocating when they were forced to leave. Joshua LeMere, who was at the event, said he’d like to see concrete plans for reparations to the residents and business owners displaced from the area, rather than just discussion of the neighborhoods’ histories.
“This is cool, but let’s give people their 40 acres and a mule; it ain’t that hard,” he said. “There’s people in this room who got displaced from Black Bottom, and they won’t live to see this. So my question is, what do we do?”
Arroyo said Hastings Street had at least 167 Black-owned businesses in 1952, according to records from the Booker T. Washington Trade Association, which maintained a yearly directory of Black-owned businesses in Detroit. That year, around the time when the Motor City’s population had reached its height of 1.8 million people, the directory tallied 2,500 Black businesses.
Arroyo said notable businesses included the Lucy Thurman YWCA, located where Ford Field now sits, and the Fairbairn Hotel, which catered only to Black men.
“So by understanding what was lost, what people experienced and why it happened, we can gain some perspective,” Arroyo said.
jcardi@detroitnews.com
