Reckoning 375: The impact of I-375’s construction on two historic Black neighborhoods
“Reckoning 375,” a new miniseries from “Detroit Today,” will explore the history behind — and repercussions of — the freeway’s construction, and what the replacement project will entail.
A view of St. Antoine Street at Winder near Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood. In view are a number of residential buildings, as well as Abe's Market.
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were two majority-black neighborhoods on the lower east side of Detroit that were both destroyed, in part, to make way for the construction of Interstate 375 in the 1950s and ’60s.
This morning on Detroit Today, we continue our mini-series “Reckoning 375,” which takes a closer look at the history and culture of the two neighborhoods, amid plans to remove the 1-mile stretch of I-375 in downtown Detroit and replace it with a six-lane boulevard.
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Guests:
Jamon Jordan is the City of Detroit’s official historian, and founder of Black Scroll Network History and Tours. He says that when the federal government passed the National Housing Act of 1949 (aka the “Urban Renewal Act”), cities like Detroit used the money for what they considered “slum clearance.”
“We lost the businesses, many of the churches, some of the schools, the properties, the restaurants, the stores, the bakeries, the record stores, we lost the streets,” says Jordan. “But not only did we lose that, we lost the memory in many cases. We lost the history of these places.
“When we’re trying to piece these things together, we only getting part of the story because so much of it was wiped out. It’s going to take a generation of scholars to try to piece together much of what we lost.”
Emily Kutil is a Detroit-based designer, researcher and educator. She is the creator of Black Bottom Street View, an immersive representation of the historic Detroit neighborhood. She says that historical records of Black Bottom and Paradise valley are incomplete. Photos are available from the eminent domain process during property seizure by the City of Detroit and this is some of the only photographs available.
“I’m almost 100% sure that this is the largest area in any American city that was demolished for urban renewal. And we have just fragments,” says Kutil.
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