Black Bottom Street View Exhibit (2019)

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The "Black Bottom Street View" exhibition at the Detroit Public Library. Emily Kutil

"Black Bottom Street View" is a photography show documenting entire streets and avenues in the African-American district that fell victim to urban "renewal" and the wrecking ball starting in the 1950s, leveled to make room for Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park and other developments on the city's near-east side. [1]

Black Bottom was home to a rich and vibrant community that became the center of African American life in the city. The exhibit allowed patrons to discover this former neighborhood of Detroit, connecting current efforts of revitalization and renewal with the past.[2] Black Bottom Street View, in Detroit Public Library’s Strohm Hall, is a “living archive” that allows viewers to walk through makeshift blocks of photographs that reconstruct Black Bottom, a razed neighborhood from Detroit’s past.[3]

Background

Architect and professior Emily Kutil created "Black Bottom Street View". Todd Mcinturf, The Detroit News

Kutil, a 28-year-old University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture professor, has a plan to make Black Bottom visible again for anyone who cares to look. She has embarked on a project to recreate the neighborhood out of about 800 rarely seen photos of individual homes and buildings that she found in the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection. Kutil plans to build a virtual Black Bottom, an interactive website that maps the images and allows viewers to put themselves in the middle of those vanished streets, like Google Street View allows for contemporary cityscapes.[4]

“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.”[4]

In 2019, Emily Kutil used a treasure trove of old photographs to recreate the long-gone Detroit residential area known as Black Bottom. Kutil’s display groups photos by location to simulate the experience of walking through the streets of 1940s Black Bottom.[5] “We feel that Black Bottom’s stories must be shared—especially at this critical moment in Detroit’s history,” says the written statement by project organizer Emily Kutil. “Black Bottom Street View is a project to visualize Detroit’s historic Black Bottom neighborhood.”[3]

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.[6]

The Exhibition

Emily Kutil, an adjunct professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, knitted the images together into panoramas before building a wooden framework to display them block-by-block. The result, on display at the Detroit Public Library main branch, allows visitors to walk a resurrected section of the neighborhood. Amy Crawford

The "Black Bottom Street View" exhibition is displaying at the Detroit Public Library’s Strohm Hall in January to March 2019. The exhibition finds its heart by visually evoking the look and feel of Black Bottom — a once-thriving African-American enclave just east of downtown.[4] By building custom displays designed to replicate elements of Black Bottom architecture, project organizer Emily Kutil has created an immersive world for her black-and-white photo re-creations of the neighborhood. The concept is simple but effective: By overlapping black-and-white archival images, she creates a panoramic effect of a Black Bottom streetscape. The photos resurrect a slice of life of black Detroiters.[4]

Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood resurrected in art exhibit

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.[6]

The photos show a remarkable variety of houses and buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the homes are in the working-class Victorian style of many homes in Corktown. Some of the Black Bottom streets would remind people of 120-year-old streets today on the north side of Chicago.[4]

The plywood frames, part of the Black Bottom Street View project occupy almost all of the library’s soaring Strohm Hall and are laid out to recall the street grid of the old neighborhood. For the exhibition, Emily Kutil wrapped the frames with layered photographic montages of the streets as they appeared in 1950, just before the neighborhood was dismantled. The result evokes the sensation of strolling through the community house by house, paying tribute to a place that has left few other traces on the landscape.[7]

References

  1. Hodges,Michael H. Detroit's Black Bottom resurrected at Detroit Public Library. Jan 9, 2019. detroitnews.com. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021.
  2. Black Bottom Street View Exhibit. 'urbanlibraries.com. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Trajkovski, Alex. Explore Detroit’s razed Black Bottom neighborhood through DPL exhibition. Dec 28, 2018. detroit.curbed.com. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021
  4. 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 McGraw, Bill. Bringing Detroit's Black Bottom back to (virtual) life. Feb 27, 2017. freep.com. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021.
  5. Staff, Stateside. How the razing of Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood shaped Michigan’s history. Feb 11, 2019. michiganradio.org. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021.
  6. 6.0 6.1 Crawford, Amy. Capturing Black Bottom, a Detroit Neighborhood Lost to Urban Renewal. Feb 15, 2019. bloomberg.com. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021.
  7. Hester, Jessica Leigh. Revisiting Detroit’s Black Bottom Neighborhood, Decades After Demolition. Jan 24, 2019. atlasobscura.com. Retrieved Jan 23, 2021.