Black Bottom, Detroit
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Black Bottom was an African-American enclave in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the 1960's. It was located on Detroit's Near East Side, and was approximately 0.5 mile² (1.3 km²) in area, and was bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, Vernor Highway, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks. Its main commercial strips were on Hastings and St. Antoine streets. An adjacent neighborhood was known as Paradise Valley. The two were not, however, the same neighborhood.
Hastings Street, which ran north-south through Black Bottom, had been a center of Eastern European Jewish settlement before World War I, but by the 1950's, migration transformed the strip into one of the city's major African-American communities of black-owned business, social institutions and night clubs. It became nationally famous for its music scene: major blues singers, big bands, and jazz artists—such as Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie—regularly performed in the bars and clubs of Paradise Valley entertainment district.
Black Bottom suffered more than most areas during the Great Depression since so many of the wage earners worked in the hard-hit auto factories of Detroit. During World War II, both the economic activity and the physical decay of Black Bottom rapidly increased. In the 1960s, the City of Detroit conducted an urban renewal program to combat what it called "urban blight" that bulldozed Black Bottom. The area was replaced by the Chrysler Freeway (Interstate 75) and Lafayette Park, a mixed-income development designed by Mies van der Rohe as a model neighborhood combining residential townhouses, apartments and high-rises with commercial areas. Many of the residents relocated to large public housing projects such as the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects Homes and Jeffries Homes.
Other historical Detroit black neighborhoods include Conant Gardens, Russell Woods, and Elmwood Park.
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