1940, the city of Detroit voted to consolidate the Department of Parks and Boulevards and the Department of Recreation into a new Department of Parks and Recreation. The consolidation was the outcome of overlapping goals and not enough discussion between the groups, which sometimes bottlenecked recreational activities. “It was a case of one hand letting the other know what it was doing,” remarked...
On July 22nd 1942, George Washington Carver, an African American scientist, visited his friend and fellow innovator, Henry Ford, at the Ford Nutritional Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan. Carver and Ford were old friends, having met 10 years prior and establishing a friendship based on Ford's interest in Carver's work at the Tuskegee Institute, where Carver experimented with agricultural raw material...
Evidence of lackluster city zoning is still evident in Delray. While there may have been a historical absence of zoning in the heavily industrial, immigrant community of Southeast Detroit, the residents of Delray were never adequately served by city zoning. Despite high-density residential settlement, Delray was never zoned residential, and through time this allowed for inadequate environmental and...
Twelve years after the Detroit Parks and Recreation Department entered into service, they proudly announced that they had become the “largest and most active [Department] in our City Government.” Originally created to prevent overlaps in event planning, the department expanded along with the booming city of Detroit. The total acreage of Detroit parks from 1940-52 jumped from 4163 to 5736 acres,...
Delray residents have been living with the roar of 18-wheeler trucks and congested morning commutes off the Interstate 75 since 1961. The interstate divided Historic Delray, with West Fort Street to the south and Lafayette Boulevard to the north, and created what the City of Detroit called a "natural boundary" between the industrial and residential quarters. At first glance at the land use map prepared...
Until the mid-twentieth century, the north-bordering area of Detroit's east side Black Bottom neighborhood was known as “Paradise Valley.” Its name referred to the high number of black-owned businesses that occupied Hastings Street and St. Antoine Street, the heart of the entrepreneurial neighborhood. At the time, it was the only place with businesses that would all serve blacks. In the 1940s,...
After World War II in 1943, the city of Detroit had trouble dealing with the huge influx of people moving to Detroit to find factory jobs and returning war veterans. White residents of Detroit were very reluctant to allow black people live in the same neighborhood so new and returning migrants were confined to live in certain areas away from white neighborhoods. Even though there were inadequate living...
The photograph taken by the agency created to document and appraise Detroit’s East Side neighborhoods in 1949 captured an important aspect of the history of urban agriculture in Detroit—African American’s contributions to urban agriculture. Seeing as the photograph was a piece of data used to assess the state of the neighborhood, it is clearly labeled. The date (7-26-49) is nicely written...
Betty DeRamus is seen as a Detroit legend to some. Her parents moved to Detroit in the 40s when Betty was a baby. She lived in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood as a child – her parents moved from the Black Bottom neighborhood when she was in high school. While growing up in Black Bottom Betty noticed the dilapidated housing; she said one house she lived in was desperately in need of a paint...
In January of 1942 in the brink of World War II(WWII), Federal Price Administrator Leon Henderson ordered that the city of Detroit to stop making automobiles for citizens and start military production for the United States. Factories stopped production and began to make weapons, planes, trucks, and tanks for the Allied forces. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered citizens to unite and help our factories...