Paradise Valley & Black Bottom
1920’s -1940’s
Detroit’s “Black Bottom” and “Paradise Valley” neighborhoods provided both housing and entertainment for the city’s African-American community from the 1920s through the 1940s.The two were not, however, considered to be the same neighborhood. the Black Bottom area where rent was higher and the housing poorer. Paradise Valley, meanwhile, consisted primarily of black-owned businesses where African-Americans could shop, eat and relax.
The district reached its social, cultural and political peak in 1920. Blacks owned 350 businesses in Detroit, most within Black Bottom. The community additionally boasted 17 physicians, 22 lawyers, 22 barbershops, 13 dentists, 12 cartage agencies, 11 tailors, 10 restaurants, 10 real estate dealers, 8 grocers, 6 drugstores, 5 undertakers, 4 employment agencies, and 1 candy maker.
The area’s main commercial avenues were Hastings and St. Antoine streets. An adjacent north-bordering area known as Paradise Valley contained night clubs where famous Blues, Big Band, and Jazz artists such as Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Pearl Bailey, and Count Basie regularly performed. In 1941, the city’s Orchestra Hall was named Paradise Theatre. Aretha Franklin’s father, the late ReverendC. L. Franklin, first opened his New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street. Hastings Street, which ran north-south through Black Bottom, had been an area populated by immigrants before World War I.
With ethnic succession, by the 1940s it had become an African-American community of black-owned business, social institutions, and night clubs.] Detroit’s Broadway Avenue Historic District contains a sub-district sometimes called the Harmonie Park District which has taken on the renowned legacy of Detroit’s music from the 1930s through the 1950s and into the present.
The number of blacks moving into the district continued to increase with the promise of available industrial jobs. Increased demand for housing in Black Bottom allowed landlords to charge exorbitant rents for units in extreme disrepair. This prompted many tenants to take in boarders, further increasing crowding and the degradation of living conditions in the district.
Towards the end of the decade, black employment in Detroit dropped by almost 30% (Williams). The stock market crash in 1929 only exacerbated the dire circumstances of Black Bottom’s working-class families.
Sources (http://roguehaa.com/a-brief-history-of-detroits-black-bottom-neighborhood/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bottom,_Detroit , http://roguehaa.com/a-brief-history-of-detroits-black-bottom-neighborhood/ , http://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/black-bottom-neighborhood , http://wdet.org/posts/2015/10/19/81771-curiosid-how-a-1900s-black-detroit-community-was-razed-for-a-freeway/, https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/8609)
