In this historical photo, a woman walks along Lafayette St. on July 22, 1949 in Black Bottom before it was torn down in the 1950s. Black Bottom was home to many of Detroit’s African Americans. (Burton Collection)
From World War I through the 1940s, the Black Bottom neighborhood was the heart and soul of Detroit’s African-American community. Then, in the early 1950s, the area was bulldozed in the name of “slum clearance” and eventually replaced with the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park. Emily Kutil, a Detroit architect with a master’s degree in architecture from U-M, hopes to help preserve the memory of this once vibrant center of African-American commerce and culture. Her discovery of about 800 rarely seen photos in the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection inspired her to build a website that will recreate a virtual, interactive Black Bottom. 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.”
