Black Bottom, Paradise Valley, and the Highway That Erased Them

The name Black Bottom referred originally to the dark, rich soil along the river bottom where the neighborhood sat. By the nineteen twenties and thirties it had become Detroit's primary Black residential district, the place the Great Migration brought tens of thousands of people from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee when the auto plants were hiring. The housing was overcrowded. The properties were older than what white workers occupied on the west side and in the suburbs. The overcrowding was not accidental. Detroit's real estate industry maintained written agreements, called restrictive covenants, specifying that properties could not be sold or rented to Black buyers. Black Detroiters were confined to Black Bottom by policy as well as by economics.

Paradise Valley was the commercial and cultural district along Hastings Street that grew inside that confinement. By the nineteen forties it had a specific character: Black-owned businesses running blocks in every direction. The Forest Club, the Flame Show Bar, the Club Three Sixes, the Garfield Lounge. Bars and theaters that booked Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie. Black-owned banks and newspapers and insurance companies. A self-contained economy that had developed because it had to. Paradise Valley was not simply a neighborhood. It was the institutional infrastructure of Black Detroit.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the city of Detroit and the federal government demolished virtually all of it. Urban renewal projects, announced as slum clearance, condemned and cleared thousands of structures. The construction of Interstate Three Seventy-Five cut directly through Black Bottom, removing the physical substrate on which Paradise Valley had existed. An estimated ten thousand households were displaced. The city's relocation assistance was inadequate, and many displaced families moved into public housing or into neighborhoods that immediately began to experience white flight and disinvestment.

The Flame Show Bar's address no longer exists as a street address. The blocks that held the economy of Black Detroit are now parking structures, highway ramps, and vacant parcels. A small historical marker near the Lafayette Park development acknowledges what was there. It is easy to drive past without noticing.