In the late summer of 1949, three little boys sat on the curb outside 1231 Riopelle St., in Detroit’s now-vanished Black Bottom neighborhood, taking in what must have been an unusual sight: A city employee was heading slowly down the street, methodically photographing each address. As the shutter snapped on a single-story triplex, two of the children grinned, while a third looked perplexed. A fourth, just stepping into the frame, glanced suspiciously at the camera. The photographer moved on. Under a tree in front of Hall’s Coal Co. on Mullett Street, a woman fed a baby in a high chair—perhaps they were avoiding a hot kitchen at midday. At 1840 Macomb, little girls in light summer dresses watched with curiosity. At the corner of Lafayette and Russell, a man in shirtsleeves leaned on a stop sign and flashed a friendly smile. The photographer took a picture and moved on.
“You can see how people were reacting to this photographer moving through the neighborhood—it must have been this spectacle,” says Emily Kutil, an adjunct professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture whose installation, Black Bottom Street View—at the Detroit Public Library’s Main Branch through March 15—has put these 70-year-old images on view the first time.
Detroit Public Library Digital Collections
Captured hastily in black-and-white between 1949 and 1950, the photographs of Detroit’s oldest African American neighborhood (its name refers to the dark, fertile river bottom soil that early settlers found there) document homes, shops, churches, and clubs that the city of Detroit would soon seize via eminent domain. The action was part of a wave of urban renewal that would destroy neighborhoods—many of them African American—across the country during the mid-20th century. Made as a first step in the condemnation process, almost certainly before any residents were aware of their fate, the photos were never intended to be public. But when Kutil, who is part of a volunteer research collective called We the People of Detroit, came across some 2,000 of them in the library’s Burton Historical Collection in 2015, she recognized their value as a ghostly testament to a lost community.
“They were sequential—you could see the whole street,” Kutil says.
Fascinated, Kutil began to knit the images together into panoramas, along the way winning a $15,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant (matched by the Detroit Public Library Friends Foundation and crowd-sourced donations) to support the work of creating an exhibition. With some of her students, she designed and built a wooden framework to display the enlarged images block-by-block; the result, laid out in full in a cathedral-like space on the library’s third floor, allows visitors to walk a resurrected section of the neighborhood, where 1940s cars are parked along the streets, barber shops are open for business, ailanthus trees shoot up in alleyways, cops walk the beat, and residents stop by the corner store or poke their heads out their windows to see what’s going on.
