What Interstate Three Seventy-Five Replaced

The neighborhood where Interstate Three Seventy-Five now runs used to be called Black Bottom. Not a metaphor, not a slur, a geological description: the soil here is exceptionally dark and fertile, a soil type that runs along the Detroit River from the city's earliest settlement. The name predates the neighborhood's Black residents by a century.

From the nineteen tens through the nineteen fifties, Black Bottom and its entertainment district, Paradise Valley, were the commercial and cultural center of Black Detroit. Paradise Valley ran roughly between Gratiot Avenue and Monroe Street and supported at its peak more than three hundred Black-owned businesses. Jazz and blues clubs on Hastings Street hosted nationally prominent performers: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong played venues where they could perform but could not stay in the downtown hotels. The neighborhood produced doctors, lawyers, ministers, and entrepreneurs who had no access to the white professional economy.

Beginning in nineteen fifty-nine, the construction of Interstate Three Seventy-Five and the Chrysler Freeway tore through the heart of Black Bottom. Approximately ten thousand Black residents were displaced. The businesses did not reconstitute. The federal highway funding that paid for the freeways required no relocation assistance for displaced residents. The urban renewal language that justified the project described the neighborhood it destroyed as blighted.

The freeways that replaced Black Bottom do not serve the communities that lived there. They connect white suburban commuters to downtown. The neighborhood that had sustained itself through the Great Depression, through two world wars, through decades of systematic exclusion from the rest of the city, was finally destroyed not by neglect but by infrastructure.