What happened to Brush Park in 50s/60s?

[EastsideAl]

The riots didn't really touch Brush Park [[well, the 1943 riot did, but that's before the period you're talking about).

What happened in Brush Park is a mixture of things.

The main thing that happened, as DetroitPlanner says above, is just that those buildings became no longer profitable. A big cause of that was a social change that resulted in a change in population dynamics. Brush Park, then known primarily as Paradise Valley, was once the most densely populated part of the city. Beginning around the 1920s it was increasingly filled with African-Americans who lived in small cut-up apartments in the otherwise unwanted old houses there. They were effectively restricted from living anywhere else other than the neighborhoods immediately east of Woodward and downtown.

But by the 1960s blacks could live in any number of neighborhoods around the city - including the nearby 'modern' public housing projects. As their economic conditions improved, and they faced less discrimination in housing, there was no reason for African-American families to remain in the cramped, congested, and deteriorating conditions of Brush Park/Paradise Valley.

As the old houses became valueless as structures and too expensive to maintain, many were torn down to make way for parking lots for the other old houses and buildings in the area [[look at the later photo closely and you'll see a lot of cars parked on those lots), which were being used as businesses, hospitals, union offices, and offices for civic organizations. During that period, due to the growth in car usage for commuting, there was increased demand for parking everyplace in the central city. Lots of downtown and central city buildings that were no longer very profitable, particularly on the periphery, were torn down between the '50s and '70s to make way for more profitable surface parking lots.

Anyway, by the '60s it was clear that Brush Park was going to be gone soon. Like the rest of the black neighborhoods and "outmoded housing" east and northeast of downtown, it would be torn down for urban renewal. The eastern portion of Brush Park had already been replaced by public housing in the '50s, the heart of Paradise Valley - the Hastings St. business strip - was being torn down to build the Chrysler Fwy, and the northern part of the neighborhood was scheduled to disappear soon for the Detroit Medical Center.

So, the embarrassingly ugly and old Victorian houses of Brush Park were a goner, and everybody but a few "crazy" people called preservationists knew it. Because planners and developers were certain that 'everyone' wanted clean-lined, undecorated new houses, apartments, office buildings, and street-free "super-blocks" in that era of 'progress'. In the '50s and '60s Detroit was leading the country in tearing down the old and ugly and replacing it with the new and shiny. Detroit was a city on the move!

Only they didn't move fast enough on Brush Park. After the urban renewal craze of the '50s and '60s had passed, the federal money dried up, and the urban economic realities of the '70s had begun to set in, there Brush Park still sat, unmodern, unloved, marooned, and increasingly empty. Then began the sad saga of the Woodward East project debacle, and the road towards the desolation we see today.