The death knell, it seems, was struck by urban renewal which transformed Black Bottom into Lafayette Park. As early as 1941 “the first concrete plan aiming at ultimate rehabilitation of the area within the Grand Boulevard circle was under consideration by Jeffries’ blight committee…The plan, embracing 20 square blocks bounded by Hastings, Dequindre and Larned streets and Monroe avenue” had sealed the fate of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. The 1943 riots would only provide reason and logic for what was to come. The Chrysler Freeway took Hastings. Stroh’s took over St. Antoine. Hudson’s took Brush and Beaubien. It seemed like the Berlin Conference. Some say it was a White man’s conspiracy to break the power and solidity of the Black man’s community. Some residents jokingly called urban renewal “Negro removal.” And when one considers these claims, from an historical perspective, it is plausible. Many believe that possibly all of the above factored into the inevitable end of Black Bottom.
In reality, Mayor Edward Jeffries and the Detroit City Plan Commission in 1946 had destroyed a community. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were devastated by highway construction. The Oakland-Hastings (later Chrysler) Freeway barreled through these former Black enclaves. The Hastings Street commercial district in Paradise Valley felled many of Detroit’s most prominent Black institutions, from jazz clubs to the St. Antoine branch of the YMCA. The John C. Lodge Freeway ripped through the increasingly Black area around Twelfth Street, and Highland Park. It seemed as though a crime had been committed.
The aftermath was not much more than a “‘no man’s land’ of deterioration and abandonment.” Actual construction had been delayed and for 10 years after Jeffries Detroit Plan, Black Bottom lay dormant and the city did nothing to help business owners or Black residents to relocate. Shopkeepers had no real reason to invest in improvements, as condemned buildings were buried under asphalt and cement. While statistics show that, by 1950, 423 residences, 109 businesses, 22 manufacturing plants, and 93 vacant lots had been condemned for the first three-mile stretch of the Lodge Freeway from Jefferson to Pallister, the Michigan Chronicle’s 1951 front page story, “Progress Has Been Rapid for Negroes in Motor City,” seemed propagandist, at best. By 1958, the Lodge Freeway displaced 2,222 buildings. Destruction continued to make way for the Edsel Ford Expressway with the demolition of approximately more 2,800 buildings. While some of the displaced residents were White homeowners, Black renters suffered the brunt of such, since, unlike the majority of the White homeowners whom were successfully relocated, they were left out in the cold.
Eventually, homes and businesses were replaced with apartments and townhouses such as those in Lafayette Park, which many of the former residents couldn’t afford. Hastings Street became Chrysler Freeway. The rise of new office buildings, the development of a large network of expressways whimsically cut through what was once a testament of Black socio-economic success. B. J. Widick thought this fleecing of the Black community to be “an aura of prosperity,” while those folk whom were suffering the sting of displacement and obstruction saw it differently: “I [did] not have money to rent a $75.00 house [with] no heat,” exclaimed Maud W. Cain, a widow forced to move out of her one-room apartment on in Black Bottom. Harvey Royal shared Cain’s pain and frustration at the senselessness of moving residents from their homes, for the purpose of highway construction: “I think it would have been so much nicer to have built places for people to live in than a highway and just put people in the street.” Paradise Valley was obliterated, but the Black ghetto simply moved to the Twelfth Street area, forgotten until it became the center of the 1967 riot. Twelfth Street had been the Jewish area; the Jews were now living in Huntington Woods, Southfield, and other suburbs. Middle-class Blacks moved to the more prominent neighborhoods of La Salle Boulevard, Chicago Boulevard, Boston-Edison, and Arden Park. Black Bottom was gone. Paradise Valley was gone.
Excerpted from Detroit: The Black Bottom Community, on sale at all major bookstores,
barnesandnble.com, amazon.com, borders.com, etc.
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One Response to “From Detroit: The Black Bottom Community, Urban Renewal”
Comments (1)
You have sold that book to me!
angelia