Bringing Detroit's Black Bottom back to (virtual) life

I'm really looking forward to see how this turns out.

"Kutil, a 28-year-old Detroit architect, has a plan to make Black Bottom visible again for anyone who cares to look. She has embarked on a project to recreate the neighborhood out of about 800 rarely seen photos of individual homes and buildings that she found in the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection.

Kutil plans to build a virtual Black Bottom, an interactive website that maps the images and allows viewers to put themselves in the middle of those vanished streets, like Google Street View allows for contemporary cityscapes. Her site also will serve as a platform to collect former residents’ oral histories.
“Just to realize that that archive exists was amazing,” Kutil said.

“It needs to be made public. There is so much family history, and neighborhood history and community history that has been erased in Detroit. I want to give people some sort of infrastructure to share those histories.”
The photos, taken in 1949 and 1950, are black-and-white images from the Black Bottom eminent domain legal case, the process under which the city took the land from property owners and compensated them for their losses."

http://www.freep.com/story/news/loca...hood/98354122/

To support the project

https://www.gofundme.com/black-bottom-street-view

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Originally Posted by MSUguy

I'm really looking forward to see how this turns out.





http://www.freep.com/story/news/loca...hood/98354122/

To support the project

https://www.gofundme.com/black-bottom-street-view

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Fascinating photos, Thanx.

On the original city freeway planning maps, the Chrysler was designated the Hastings
Freeway.

Whether it's white liberalism or paternalism..it needs to stop. Let people progress at there own pace. Booker T Washington was correct...

Those photos are great. I really hope that they do all become publicly available as planned. I remember the area just to the east of there that was torn down to create Elmwood Park when I was a kid [[my great-grandparents had lived in a house on Monroe, aka Croghan, near Chene there) that had many old frame houses that looked like this. There are just a few still left in the area north of Vernor.

If anyone is interested in the history of Black Bottom during that period when it was home to Detroit’s Black community there’s several good books on the topic.


Ulysses Boykin, A Handbook on the Detroit Negro, 1948. This book has many charts and maps, but no pictures. Also, no index so it’s not easy to navigate. In spite of its shortcomings, it’s a weath of information.


John Dancy, Sand Against the Wind, The Memoirs of John Dancy, 1966. John Dancy was the long time director of Detroit’s Urban League.


David Katzman, Before the Ghetto, Black Detroit in the 19th Century, 1973. Charts, but no pictures, and a really good index.


Jeremy Williams, Detroit The Black Bottom Community, Arcadia Publishing Co., 2009. As is Arcadia's style, very readable and chocked full of good pictures. And, I assume, still readily available.

This looks like a great project. Really looking forward to it. My family's Detroit origins stem from nearby. And compliments to the freep for the feature. Well done.

PS. Thanks Neilr for the resources.