Hastings Street Before I75

[hastings paradise]

The very first picture is Jefferson and hastings with that curve into the freeway. I used google map to see the church which is still there and other stuff.

[Honky Tonk]

Like these pictures:
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OH! Zoot Suits. I know those. I might even still have one.

[Cincinnati_Kid]

The public housing dedicated by Mrs. Roosevelt was not at the same time as the dramatic slum clearance policies that created Lafayette Park and I-75 and I-375.

And you can thank the "honorable" Albert Cobo for that.

[aoife]

The public housing dedicated by Mrs. Roosevelt was not at the same time as the dramatic slum clearance policies that created Lafayette Park and I-75 and I-375.

To add on that, the slum clearance that Mrs. Roosevelt "kicked off" was a New Deal project that became the Brewster Townhouses. It targeted one of the most downtrodden parts of town and created safe, modern housing [[at the time many people in the area were still using coal stoves and outhouses) specifically for the residents of that area. It is nothing like the clearances of the late 1950s. Lafayette Park was a land grab pure and simple. It displaced the residents in struggling neighborhoods and created something purely for the Middle Class. It was a beautiful experiment on an architectural level, but morally deplorable.

[Honky Tonk]

Lafayette Park was a land grab pure and simple. It displaced the residents in struggling neighborhoods and created something purely for the Middle Class. It was a beautiful experiment on an architectural level, but morally deplorable.

Kind of like what's going on in Midtown today.

[Huggybear]

Whenever Hastings Street and Black Bottom comes up, it always seems to provoke the observation that "hey, look what the government swung through and destroyed in some misguided social [[or redevelopment) effort." It is absolutely true that the business owners of Hastings took the hit - and that had this been today, wiping out a street and a neighborhood would seem completely excessive. But realistically, was there an alternative future in which Black Bottom and Hastings Street survived?

Downtown was not experiencing organic growth, the city was bleeding out both financially and in population, and middle-class people were not pouring into or redeveloping any part of the city. The Feds, for their part, were subsidizing suburbia and not supporting urban redevelopment unless it fit their model, which included co-ops [[to help promote, ahem, "the right people"?) and shopping centers. The neighborhood that supported Hastings Street was, to put it mildly, in poor shape and not exactly thriving [[it was also 90%+ renters from absentee landlords). What is not captured well in aerials is what is apparent looking at the historic pictures that pop up occasionally on Ebay: the housing stock was poor, and the general look east of Hastings was rural poverty. I'm having trouble thinking of any Detroit neighborhood in that condition that spontaneously [[or even with help) regenerated between WWII and the present. People stayed in the good neighborhoods and walked from the not-so-good ones. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the residents of Black Bottom would have moved on to better neighborhoods in the city as those neighborhoods got cheaper over the decades following WWII.

Although I think there were tremendously disruptive and unfair things going on in redeveloping Lafayette Park and Elmwood, you don't have to look further than any area in Detroit that was in the lower quartile of housing values in the 1950s to see what probably would have happened if someone hadn't tried to do something. Probably the only thing that saved Corktown was that the West Side Industrial District cut the neighborhood down to a size that matched demand.

HB