Black Bottom Neighborhood
Black Bottom was a predominantly Black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the late 1950s to early 1960s and replaced with the Lafayette Park residential district and a freeway. It was located on Detroit's near east side, bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, the Detroit River, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks.
An adjacent area that extended north of Gratiot, known as Paradise Valley was considered a different, though overlapping neighborhood, where most businesses and entertainment venues were located. Historically, the area of Black Bottom was part of the riverbed of the River Savoyard, which was buried as a sewer in 1827. The rich marsh soils of its bottom are the source of the area’s name.
Hastings Street, which ran north-south through Black Bottom, had been a center of Eastern European Jewish settlement well before World War I, with housing that was built in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. As the population began changing from immigrant to migrant, the wooden frame houses built side by side, some without indoor plumbing, became packed with African Americans from the South, come to work in the auto factories. Restrictive housing covenants prohibited them from living in most other parts of the city.
Black Bottom suffered more than most areas during the Great Depression, since many of the wage earners worked in the hard-hit auto factories. During World War II, both the economic activity and the physical decay of Black Bottom rapidly increased as many more people poured into a city faced with a housing shortage, and racial discrimination restricted Blacks to the increasingly overcrowded Black Bottom area.
https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/black-bottom-neighborhood
Paradise Valley
Paradise Valley was the business district and entertainment center of a densely-populated African-American residential area in Detroit known as Black Bottom, from the 1920s through the 1950s.
During the 1920s, the Black population in Detroit swelled from 41,000 to 120,000 as migrants from the South arrived daily to seek employment in the automobile industry. The cramped, near east side neighborhood of Black Bottom was one of the very few areas Blacks were allowed to reside. The residents’ daily needs were amply met by more than 300 Black-owned businesses in Paradise Valley, ranging from drugstores, beauty salons and restaurants to places of leisure such as nightclubs, bowling alleys with bars, theaters and mini-golf courses.
The nightclubs and theaters in Paradise Valley were a primary source of income for the residents of the impoverished neighborhood. Black-owned nightclubs like the Flame Show Bar, the Horseshoe Bar and Club Harlem, booked popular Black artists and attracted mixed-race audiences to shows. Whites felt comfortable listening to jazz alongside Black audiences and ventured to the Valley to hear Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald and the Inkspots. The Paradise Theater, opened in 1941 in the former Orchestra Hall, was the place to hear jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie. After the race riots of 1943, Whites became reluctant to visit Paradise Valley and mixed audiences became rare.
Gambling was also big business in Paradise Valley, notably with the Great Lakes Mutual Numbers House and the Valley’s Frog Club. In 1939, a scandal involving gamblers from the Valley, Detroit police officers and the mayor’s office resulted in those involved being jailed on charges of gambling and accepting bribes. In 1963, the FBI raided the lavish Gotham Hotel, home to many jazz artists while in the Valley, on evidence of illegal gambling.
https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/paradise-valley
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