Detroit’s Black Bottom was named by French settlers for the dark, fertile soil left by the flooding River Savoyard, which the city buried as a sewer in 1827. On the Lower East Side, bounded by Brush Street, the Grand Trunk tracks and the Detroit River, it lay south of Gratiot Avenue, with Paradise Valley to the north. Before World War I it held Eastern European Jewish families, and Coleman Young, whose family arrived in 1923, remembered Italian, Syrian, German, Jewish and Black neighbors. During the Great Migration, restrictive covenants and redlining funneled Black newcomers there until one third of Black Detroiters lived in the area, and Hastings Street grew hotels, groceries, bowling alleys, policy offices and 17 nightclubs.
Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and Sam Cooke played downtown but could not sleep or eat there, so they came to Paradise Valley and played late sets at clubs like the Flame Show Bar. The city later classified two thirds of the buildings as substandard, used the 1949 Housing Act to condemn the area, and the 1956 Highway Act to dig the sunken Chrysler Freeway, I-375, over Hastings Street. Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park rose on the cleared land, and the last three Paradise Valley structures fell in 2000. In September 2022 Detroit won a $104 million federal grant to fill in the 1.062-mile trench and build a street-level boulevard.
- Orchestra Hall was renamed the Paradise Theater in 1941 to tap the neighborhood’s prestige.
- Reverend C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father, founded New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street.
- City photographers documented buildings just before demolition, and the images sit in the Burton Historical Collection.
- The only physical marker today is a Michigan historical sign near Ford Field at Adams Avenue and St. Antoine Street.
- A Black Bottom Street View project rebuilds the streets virtually from those archival photos.
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