Capturing Black Bottom, a Detroit Neighborhood Lost to Urban … · 2019-03-01 · Neighborhood...

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Thank you for printing content from www.citylab.com. If you enjoy this piece, then please check back soon for our latest in urban-centric journalism. House at 2217 Macomb, taken on May 3, 1950. // Detroit Public Library Digital Collections Capturing Black Bottom, a Detroit Neighborhood Lost to Urban Renewal AMY CRAWFORD FEB 15, 2019 “Black Bottom Street View,” now exhibiting at the Detroit Public Library, thoughtfully displays old images of the historic African American neighborhood in its final days. In the late summer of 1949, three little boys sat on the curb outside 1231 Riopelle St., in Detroit’s now- vanished Black Bottom neighborhood, taking in what must have been an unusual sight: A city employee was heading slowly down the street, methodically photographing each address. As the shutter snapped on a single-story triplex, two of the children grinned, while a third looked perplexed. A fourth, just stepping into the frame, glanced suspiciously at the camera. The photographer moved on. Under a tree in front of Hall’s Coal Co. on Mullett Street, a woman fed a baby in a high chair— perhaps they were avoiding a hot kitchen at midday. At 1840 Macomb, little girls in light summer dresses watched with curiosity. At the corner of Lafayette and Russell, a man in shirtsleeves leaned on a stop sign and flashed a friendly smile. The photographer took a picture and moved on. www.citylab.com

Transcript of Capturing Black Bottom, a Detroit Neighborhood Lost to Urban … · 2019-03-01 · Neighborhood...

Page 1: Capturing Black Bottom, a Detroit Neighborhood Lost to Urban … · 2019-03-01 · Neighborhood Lost to Urban Renewal AMY CRAWFORD FEB 15, 2019 “Black Bottom Street View,” now

Thank you for printing content from www.citylab.com. If you enjoy this piece, then please check back soonfor our latest in urban-centric journalism.

House at 2217 Macomb, taken on May 3, 1950. // Detroit Public Library Digital Collections

Capturing Black Bottom, a DetroitNeighborhood Lost to Urban RenewalAMY CRAWFORD FEB 15, 2019

“Black Bottom Street View,” now exhibiting at the Detroit Public Library, thoughtfully displays oldimages of the historic African American neighborhood in its final days.

In the late summer of 1949, three little boys sat on the curb outside 1231 Riopelle St., in Detroit’s now-vanished Black Bottom neighborhood, taking in what must have been an unusual sight: A cityemployee was heading slowly down the street, methodically photographing each address. As theshutter snapped on a single-story triplex, two of the children grinned, while a third looked perplexed.A fourth, just stepping into the frame, glanced suspiciously at the camera. The photographer movedon. Under a tree in front of Hall’s Coal Co. on Mullett Street, a woman fed a baby in a high chair—perhaps they were avoiding a hot kitchen at midday. At 1840 Macomb, little girls in light summerdresses watched with curiosity. At the corner of Lafayette and Russell, a man in shirtsleeves leanedon a stop sign and flashed a friendly smile. The photographer took a picture and moved on.

www.citylab.com

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“You can see how people were reacting to this photographer moving through the neighborhood—itmust have been this spectacle,” says Emily Kutil, an adjunct professor at the University of DetroitMercy School of Architecture whose installation, Black Bottom Street View—at the Detroit PublicLibrary’s Main Branch through March 15—has put these 70-year-old images on view the first time.

Houses at 1824-1826 Mullett, taken on August 26, 1949. (Detroit Public Library Digital Collections)

Captured hastily in black-and-white between 1949 and 1950, the photographs of Detroit’s oldestAfrican American neighborhood (its name refers to the dark, fertile river bottom soil that earlysettlers found there) document homes, shops, churches, and clubs that the city of Detroit would soonseize via eminent domain. The action was part of a wave of urban renewal that would destroyneighborhoods—many of them African American—across the country during the mid-20th century.Made as a first step in the condemnation process, almost certainly before any residents were aware oftheir fate, the photos were never intended to be public. But when Kutil, who is part of a volunteerresearch collective called We the People of Detroit, came across some 2,000 of them in the library’sBurton Historical Collection in 2015, she recognized their value as a ghostly testament to a lostcommunity.

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“They were sequential—you could see the whole street,” Kutil says.

Fascinated, Kutil began to knit the images together into panoramas, along the way winning a $15,000Knight Arts Challenge grant (matched by the Detroit Public Library Friends Foundation and crowd-sourced donations) to support the work of creating an exhibition. With some of her students, shedesigned and built a wooden framework to display the enlarged images block-by-block; the result,laid out in full in a cathedral-like space on the library’s third floor, allows visitors to walk aresurrected section of the neighborhood, where 1940s cars are parked along the streets, barber shopsare open for business, ailanthus trees shoot up in alleyways, cops walk the beat, and residents stop bythe corner store or poke their heads out their windows to see what’s going on.

Emily Kutil, an adjunct professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, knitted the images together into

panoramas before building a wooden framework to display them block-by-block. The result, on display at the Detroit Public

Library main branch, allows visitors to walk a resurrected section of the neighborhood. (Amy Crawford)

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Home to black families whose roots here dated to the Civil War, as well as many who traveled northas part of the 20th century Great Migration, Black Bottom and adjacent Paradise Valley were knownfor their music scene, with nightclubs that brought in talent like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, andCount Basie. Aretha Franklin’s father preached at the New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street.Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, grew up here. But by the late 1940s the housing stockwas deteriorating, and the homes were crowded with families who were shut out of otherneighborhoods.

“People were living precariously there,” Rutil says. “There was a population boom and a hugehousing shortage then, but there were restrictive covenants all over the city.”

1231-1235-1239 Riopelle, taken on September 1, 1949 (Detroit Public Library Digital Collections)

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The Housing Act of 1949 provided cities with funding to clear neighborhoods deemed to be blighted,and Detroit was one of the first cities to take advantage of what would by 1985 amount to $13.5billion for “slum” clearance and redevelopment projects. Beginning soon after the photos were taken,the city started to tear down Black Bottom, a 20-year process that would scatter its residents, most ofthem working class renters, but many with deep, multi-generational ties to the area. Today, thesection of Detroit depicted in Kutil’s installation lies beneath the Chrysler Freeway (Interstate 375*)and Lafayette Park, a collection of superblock high-rise and low-rise apartments, many designed byLudwig Mies van der Rohe. (Most of the initial residents were white.)

Over the next few decades, the redevelopment of Black Bottom would be mirrored in AfricanAmerican, working class, and immigrant neighborhoods across the country, from Boston’s West Endto San Francisco’s Fillmore. Kutil notes that displacement of black and poor urban residents continuestoday, whether through tax foreclosures or gentrification. “It’s just happening really slowly, inpiecemeal ways, because we never addressed the root causes.”

Hall Coal Co. at 1836 Mullett (Detroit Public Library Digital Collections)

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Kutil is now working with Black Bottom Archives, a project focused on Detroit’s black culture, tocompile the images from Black Bottom Street View, along with the era's city directory, on a searchablewebsite. She has also connected with local historians, activists, and people with family ties to BlackBottom to gather oral histories and provide context for the project. Eventually, she hopes the websitewill serve as a repository for memories of Black Bottom’s heyday as well as its loss.

“The destruction of Black Bottom wasn’t Detroit’s original sin—there was violence around housingbefore and after that,” she says. “But it’s a mystical place for a lot of people. There was this greatmoment [in the early 20th century] when there were so many significant institutions being formedthere, and important people who went on to do influential things in the city. There was a density ofreally positive things going on, coming from the black community and supporting the blackcommunity. That was a golden age.”

*Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the Chrysler Freeway as the 395. It is the 375.

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Amy Crawford has written for Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, Slate, andSmithsonian. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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