Featured Apartment:
Detroit-Black Bottom - Fully furnished large
upper 1 bedroom condo for lease. Close to Schools and downtown. Separate dining
room. Balcony overlooks gardens and lovely courtyard. Includes everything a
renter could need other than personal items.
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About Black Bottom
Black Bottom (also known as Paradise Valley) was a predominantly
African-American neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment
1960's. It was located on Detroit's East Side, was approximately 0.5 mile (1.3
km) 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.
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 Homes and Jeffries Homes.