Black Bottom : Lessons from Detroit's Streetcar System

2019-2020

BLACK BOTTOM - PATTERN OF GROWTH LESSONS FROM DETROIT’S STREETCAR SYSTEM ANAS MOUTAOUAKIL SUPERVISOR : NADIA CASABELLA

FACULTÉ D’ARCHITECTURE LACAMBRE- HORTA

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my master thesis supervisor Nadia Casabella. I thank her for having supervised, guided, helped, and advised me.

I address my sincere thanks to all the teachers and all the people who, through their words, writings, advice, and criticism, have guided my reflections and have agreed to meet me and answer my questions during my research. I thank Matthew Kiefer, Francis Grunow, and Conrad Kickert for the time they devoted to me, helping me investigate new lines of research. Each, in a very distinct way, introduced me to new notions in research on Detroit and helped me crystallise the questions that led to this paper.

I thank my very dear parents who have always been there for me. I want to give a special thank you to my friend Romy St. Hilaire for her positivity and her enthusiasm for the subject.

To all of whom were of assistance, I offer my thanks, respect, and gratitude.

And last but not the least, I want to thank the Detroiters for the continuous bravery. Their determination was an inspiration and motivation to finish this project.

Abstract

Detroit- pattern of growth Lessons from Detroit’s streetcar system Anas Moutaouakil A thesis presented to LaCambre- Horta, Faculté d’Architecture.

Université Libre de Bruxelles Supervisor : Nadia Casabella 2019/2020 Abstract : After the launch of the Q-line in 2017 in Detroit and the disappointment of that experiment with streetcars (tramways), it is hard to imagine that this now-declining city was once home to one of the most developed and extensive streetcar networks of the early 20th century.

Indeed, it has been forgotten that most cities in the United States built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are illustrations of this type of transit-oriented development.

This thesis attempts to analyse the process of growth of the city of Detroit from the transit system point of view. Streetcars were a driving factor in the urban expansion of Detroit.

Leading to a city as big as Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston combined. With the highest ratio of detached single-family houses. Detroit represents a unique case to study the American urbanism and put in practise theoretical studies on the relationship between transportation, land use and urbanisation. Structured around decreasing scales of studies, the thesis opens with a global view on the urban development of the city since its creation and discusses several defining components to Detroit current shape. Scaling down, we explore the unpleasant facet of the city and the whole country regarding racial segregation exemplified by Black Bottom neighbourhood. Adding a layer of complexity in investigating the relationship between transportation and activities. Next, we analyse the effects of the transportation on the urban fabric through comparison of Black Bottom between two period times, demonstrating a switch from built forms to open spaces. And finally, we examine examples of housing units related to each transportation era. While observing whether the typology of each housing was a result of a motive for the transportation mode it is related to. These analyses help to generate insight into the influence of transportation on urban dynamics through different scales of the city.

Keywords: Detroit- Black Bottom- Transportation- Urbanisation- Racial Segregation

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

I II

Introduction

Theoretical Background 014

Transportation through urban scales

016

Typologies of urban transportation

016

Eras of urban development

019

Transportation between accessibility and mobility

Table of content

0 1

XL

Scale

L

Scale

026

Early Detroit

060

First stop

028

Back from the ashes

063

Promised land

032

The beginning of Public transit in Detroit

065

Redlining

069

The study

043

Ownership and decay 072

The structure

045

The price of progress 072

Black Bottom and the city

049

The Streetcar removal & Highway arrival impact on Train Stations

080

Black Bottom and the factories/ industry

085

Black Bottom to Rock Bottom

051

The determinants of the urban form of Detroit

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

M

2 3 Scale

S

Scale

090

It has all started with good intentions...

110

Victorian Houses, the beginning of an ideal

093

… Then was the erosion of a structure

114

Foursquare House, a streetcar production

095

From Hastings Street to Chrysler Freeway

121

Consequences of the Wars

100

From Black Bottom to Lafayette Park

129

The Brewster- Douglass Housing Projects

103

130 The aftermath

Dearborn; Ford’s White Suburbia

133

The colour of the house

Table of content

4 5 Conclusion

140

References

144

INTRODUCTION

i

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

Introducing a study project is usually motivated by a spread of theoretical background or historical interest on the main subject. Though, for my thesis, the interest in Detroit started with frustration. A frustration that would follow me through the whole process to answer simple questions, what happened there and mostly how?

To clarify, a year ago, as part of a workshop I finally realised my dream of visiting the United States of America. Only to find me in a city ravaged by poverty, racial exclusion, and urban decay. After attempting to understand the context (vaguely). Which had negatively impacted our architectural propositions. They lacked to convince juries, lacked attachment to the city. We were working on a city block like many others, half occupied with detached single-family houses. The whole city besides Downtown looked like suburbia but without the McMansion houses. Rather it was mysterious, yet a familiar typology of houses, which later I would be able to identify.

In a way, we missed important facts as the past presence of a streetcar system, it turned out that this transit system brought with it not only a way for the city to grow rapidly but also a new typology of houses, the Foursquare House.

From that point on, it became evident that the starting point should be the understanding of the dynamic that links transportation and urban development.

Today more than ever, transportation systems are and would shape the future of our cities. As time revealed, the dependence on a single mode of transportation could be destructive for the cities and the environment. Detroit is the most accurate and extreme exemplification of this process. Many scholars have investigated this subject. In his book Ladders, the American writer Albert Pope discusses the change of pre-war American Metropolis characterised by an open urban grid or what he calls the centrifugal cities to the post-war Megalopolis defined by a centripetal organisation with divided and closed spaces what he calls “ladder�. He also consolidates his work with the concepts, theories and policies that guided this change. The book is an efficient way to understand the

8

Introduction

nature of American cities. It follows the disintegration and implosion of the 19th century gridded and centralised city. While he brings many new terms, Pope used theories of Marcuse (1987) to make his case. This latest discusses the definition of the grid by confronting the open and the closed grid. To present afterwards how the grid to shape in what he defines to be three historical types, the precapitalist city ( with closed grid), the city of laissez-faire (with the open grid) and finally the city of mature capitalism (change of the pattern of development).

Detroit urban evolution would be studied through the periscope of Marcuse and Pope theories.

However, to study Detroit, I had to rely on more specific scholars the first one is Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City, it is an atlas of maps retracing the evolution of the city until its current condition, displaying on the way the historical causes that transformed the urban form. While to understand the racial segregation, I relied on two important books, The Color of Law by R. Rothstein, and Redevelopment and Race by J. M. Thomas, while the first exposes the governmental racial segregation nationwide the second is focused on the struggle of Detroit after the Second World War. Last but not the least, the book of Conrad Kickert, from whom I had guidance in choosing the bibliography, published a book Dream City, detailing focusing on Downtown where he delves into the dynamic of creation and destruction, the supremacy of parking and empty lots.

Inspired by these detailed works, to answer my main question on how transportation and to a large extent, transit transportation in Detroit contributed to the development and functioning of this urban fabric?

Cartographic research would be necessary to trace the morphological evolution of the city and the impact of this means of transport on the urban layout. Through a collection of photographs and testimonies relating the daily life of this district and urban life at through time. And the period chosen for my work starts with the first traces of the city around 1701 to end with the 1967 Riot.

9

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

These two very distant dates would reveal to be important, while the first would serve to understand the origin of the urban form and the last date mark a tipping point after years of urban struggles. Once the time frame narrowed, the question was how to organise all the information and put into perspective all the different elements studied. The answer came during my internship in Perspective. Brussels where one of my supervisors inspired by Rem Koolhaas’s famous publication “S, M, L, XL�. It was an answer put on the table by my supervisor as well, where we would divide the analyses subsequent the scale of the city from the Macro to Micro. This methodology allows a deep connection between the scales and unravels the complexity of the historical documents consulted.

Working on this thesis, grow on me an appreciation for historical documents for the valuable information they provide. While helping me to clarify the frustrating questions I wanted to answer.

Before the first scale, a theoretical chapter was necessary to define many of the terms and concepts that would be used throughout the thesis. From the distinguishing between notions like access and accessibility, the designation of the three main dimensions discussed in every chapter, transportation, urbanisation, and activities, required an investigation on the major notions surrounding the transportation and its link to urban scales, and the typologies of urban transportation. A specific character of American cities would bring us to focus on the great impact of transportation in defining urban eras.

Then, the XL scale, serves as an opening act, retracing the major markers of the urban history of Detroit. It would also demonstrate the importance of the streetcar network in the rapid urban growth of the city and shaping its urban form. At the end of the chapter, we would be able to distinguish what are the major determinants in the urban form of the city, and what were the elements that were the most disrupting to the urban grid.

Moving forward, the L scale is dedicated to the case of study, Black Bottom, serving at the same as an example of a transit urban-development by influencing

10

Introduction

the clustering of activities and land-uses, and as an example of spatial racial segregation by demonstrating how racial prejudice influences the faith of a whole neighbourhood and its community.

Zooming in, the scale M focuses on two elements inside the neighbourhood affected by transportation, streets, and blocs. It takes basis on elements described

by Albert Pope in his book Ladders. Notions like, urban implosion, grid erasure, ellipsis and centripetal reorganisation would serve as a grid of lecture at that scale. It is a confrontation of the urban concepts of Pope and the case of study.

The case of Hastings Street in Black Bottom is a major example of the process of urban implosion and grid erasure, indeed the insertion of the Chrysler Freeway created imploded spaces or as he calls them “ellipsis”. A comparison of the before and after structures would be necessary to put in practise Pope’s concepts.

Finally, the scale S consists of an ethnographic analysis. Its content develops around the experience of housing in different part and epoch. While the first part explores the development of the type of housing. The second one focuses on the daily life of Detroiters and the point of view of the users. Thus, giving a global view of how the city was experienced.

Throughout the reading of this thesis, there would be interludes. These small sections serve as a complement to the understanding of the different chapters.

They explore different topics and are formally distinct. The invitation to read these sections is a way for the reader to dive into the American history. So, by the end of the thesis, the reader would have hopefully gained a clearer grasp of the process linking the transportation to the process of urbanisation and activities in Detroit, and to a certain extent in other places.

11

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This chapter serves as an introduction to the theory that would comfort the comprehension of the urban history of Detroit. The city serves as a good ground to showcase the importance of transport in the process of urbanisation.

Detroit- pattern of growth

The study of any urban phenomenon requires an understanding of some basic notions in urban planning and transportation. This section represents an overview of the fundamentals of the growth of the city. The first step would be identifying the scales of the city and the elements constituting the urban fabric, therefore, highlighting the importance of the study of transportation, then its typologies and modes. Then, the relationship between transportation and urban development becomes evident, even marking some urban eras with their primary transportation mode. The understanding of the success of certain modes over others requires the study of related notions like access, accessibility, and mobility.

Once these notions clarified, the relationship between the development of activities and decisions related to land use becomes handy to seize.

Transportation through urban scales Many elements shape the city. It is the accumulated physical translation of the economic, political, social, and cultural considerations in a defined time frame.

Transportation remains a structural component affecting the city over its different scales by linking them to one another. At the level of small and medium scale, the residential or commercial clusters follow the street pattern, while at the level of large scale, the district or the neighbourhood are structured around main roads and service-oriented activities. Finally, at the extra-large scale level, the general city structure is influenced by the transit system like rails, light rail, highways, and transport terminals such as train stations, ports, and airports (Rodrigue, 2013).

This relationship between transportation and each scale of the city can be read in the dynamic of growth created by the arrival of each new transportation mode. The constant battle for speed and efficiency drives an endless circle of flourishing and declining of the transport modes and their networks as new transport systems are introduced. This circle shapes the city structure, streets patterns, and the typologies of housing.

14

Theoretical Background

Figure 1.1: Scheme summarising the interaction between the city scales and the structural components ( inspired by the work of Bruno Barocca, in “ Critical Infrastructure and MI across urban scales�. And Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue in Scale and Urban Spatial Structure).

15

Detroit- pattern of growth

Typologies of urban transportation Movement is the direct result of the need for people to carry out their activities.

While activities occur in a defined space and time, transportation is the element linking them. Whether it consists of people, goods, or information, the technological advancements of transportation play an essential condition for the thrives of societies. Many scholars addressed the theme of urban mobility and its relationship with urban development.

For a better understanding of urban transportation, a first step is to categoris it. The first one is the collective transportation; it is focused on profitability and efficiency, reducing thus costs by transporting the more travellers possible between the origin the destination of the trip. The second one is the individual transportation, offering a free choice of movement and less predictable routes.

The third one is freight transportation; it is transportation dedicated to the commercial purpose of goods. Independently from their categories, of each one of the transportations knew enhancement through time. Leading to a longer trip in the same or even shorter travel time (Rodrigue, 2013, p. 206).

Eras of urban development While urban transportation grew faster, the urban form of the cities followed the trend by spreading exponentially. The USA is a pertinent example of the adoption of each mode of transport. The urban growth eras of the American cities can be identified by the back-then dominant mode of transport. Four main eras (Muller, 1995, pp. 62-75) can be identified: 1- Walking-Horsecar Era (1800-1890): cities were compacted and pedestrian. The activities were organised in conflictual proximity to the residential and commercial networks. Even though the horsecars allowed a first attempted to mass transportation, the size of cities stayed small.

16

Theoretical Background

Figure 1 .2: Typologies of transport according to Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue classification.

17

Detroit- pattern of growth

Figure 1 .3: Scheme adapted from Muller, P.O. (1995) “Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis�, in S. Hanson (ed.) The Geography of Urban Transportation, 2nd Edition, New York: Guilford, p. 29.

18

Theoretical Background

2- Streetcar Era (1890 – 1920): the integration of electric motors to the horsecars increased their speed and enabled the first wave of urban sprawling.

3- The recreational Automobile Era (1920-1945): the democratisation of the private car offered new extents to the city limits as well as freedom of movement.

4- Freeway Era (1945- Present): it is an era marked with the dominance of the car in the urban and the invasion of Freeways to the core of the city.

Transportation between accessibility and mobility Alternately, each period demonstrated the impact of the mode of transportation on the urban form. The degree of adoption of the mode depended mainly on the accessibility offered to the users. Thus, studying accessibility allow the understanding of the dynamics between land-use and transport systems.

Due to their strong relationship, the concepts of accessibility and mobility are easily confused. However, accessibility can be defined as the potential of opportunities for interaction (Hansen, 1959, p. ii) or “the extent to which landuse and transport systems enable (groups of) individuals to reach activities or destinations employing a (combination of) transport mode(s)� (Geurs & van Wee, 2004, p. 128).

While mobility can be defined by the potential for movement (Bergmann, Hoff, & Sager, 2014, p. 130), in other words, the mobility is created when transportation maintains the movement. When you create access between two locations you create mobility. However, having access is not a guaranty of accessibility. Accessibility depends on the location and the time needed to reach a destination. (Rodrigue, 2013, p. 5) The transport system represents the aspect of mobility planning, which explains the role of strong and reliable transport infrastructures in the increase the accessibility. Additionally, accessibility plays a major role in the distribution of land-use planning and development process.

19

Detroit- pattern of growth

Figure 1 .4: Scheme of the “Transport land-use feedback cycle” (Wegener & Fürst, 1999; adapted by Bertolini, 2012).

20

Theoretical Background

The accessibility to the activities for city dwellers is dependent on how mobility is configured inside its urban context.

The scheme of feedback cycle (Giuliano, 2004; Meyer & Miller, 2001; Wegener & FĂźrst, 1999) illustrates the symbiotic between transport and land-use, and how the distribution of land-use can affect, in addition to the accessibility provided, where the activities occur. At their turns, the locations of activities generate a necessity for better accessibility provided by a better transport system. And so on, better accessibility encourages the attractiveness of the locations guiding a spatial division of activities leading to the beginning of a new cycle.

The importance of the transport land-use feedback cycle lies in its simplicity to explain the relationship and interdependencies between the two urban components. This cycle would later be applied in the next chapters to explain the dynamic between the streetcar lines and the urban expansion as well as the democratisation of private automobile and the suburban sprawl.

To enhance the understanding of the dynamic inside the cycle, it is necessary to dwell on some parameters of a trip-making. Spotting the purpose of the trip can give a glimpse of the activities, in other words, why would an individual move from point A to point B, for instance, work, shop, social, etc. Which leads to the location of the origin and the destination of the trip, which helps point the distribution of land-use. The time of day of the trip revealing use and attendance pick. The mode(s) of travel used to make the trip is important to the predominant typology of transport system present in the city, like the automobile, bus, street rails or bicycle. The frequency reveals the efficiency mobility which can be read through the number of trips per unit time, with which such trips are made. These parameters help us to identify the human activities taken place simultaneously in space and time (Grubler, 1990, p. 1).

It is not the aim of this study to develop a new integrative theory about the transport, but to compose with different works, historical data about transportation and apply them in the case of Detroit. Thus, this study is a narration

21

Detroit- pattern of growth

of travel behaviour on the transport mode by identifying the factors influencing the choices of the travellers. Improving the knowledge, at a larger scale, of the interaction between the transport system and land-use. This work would involve taking steps back and forth between the different scales of the city ( discussed earlier in this chapter: XL, L, M, S ), by raising to the surface the interactions between the users and the usages, as well as the origins and the destinations.

The first scale addressed is XL. This first step helps to have an overview of the historical urban pattern(s) of Detroit. Thus, settling a better understanding of the urban growth dynamic through time and space.

22

TIMELINE OF DETROIT

Relevant events 1825 1837 1869

The first mile of a paved concrete road along Woodward Avenue.

Railroad & Horse-car suburbs

Introduction of the Model-T by Henry Ford.

Pre-capitalistism city

Beginning of the electrification of the streetcar system

1862

Olds, America’s largest mass-market automaker, moves to Detroit.

1840 1848

Ordinance for the construction and commissioning of the horse-drawn streetcar system.

General Plan Road Act

1805

Michigan gains the statehood

Muller’s Urban Period

Construction of the Erie Canal

1701

A fire tears down the Fort

Marcuse’s Urban Period

Establishment of French Fort Pontchartrain

City urban expansion

Transit expansion

“Laissez-faire” city Streetcar suburbs

Population 277 000 hab

9 000 hab

1892 1900 1908 1909

1925 1942 1944

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (G.I. Bill)

1956 1963 1967

Completion of the Fisher/I-75 motorway between Gratiot and Rosa Parks, linking I-375, M-10 and I-96.

1950

Opening of the first 2.7 miles of the Walter P. Chrysler/I-75 freeway, destroying Detroit’s “Black Bottom” neighbourhood.

Recreational car suburbs

Final stop of the streetcar traffic.

Futurama, New York World’s Fair

1934 1939

The Davison/M-8 freeway was the first urban freeway to be opened in the United States.

1930 1933

The National Housing Act

Great Depression

1920

Circulation of the first buses .

Mayor James Couzens vetoes the subway project.

City of “Mature capitailism”

Freeway suburbs

1 850 000 hab

1 283 000 hab 673 104 hab

XL

XL Introduction

The XL scale provides a global understanding of the urban evolution of the city.

In this chapter, the focus would be hold on learning about the infrastructures like water access and railway connections, as well as, the historical and political decisions that shaped Detroit. The urban distribution of the key components like housing, industry, and leisure activities are easier to seize at this scale.

25

25

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

This first scale chapter would cover the major markers of the urban history of Detroit. By the tracing the urban odyssey of Detroit from its beginnings to its latest major urban project. Based on notions of Peter Marcuse and Albert Pope, we would try to read the how the city opened its grid when it moved from a small fort with a “centripetal grid” to a growing city with a “centrifugal organisation”.

Afterwards, a mapping study would help demonstrate the importance of the streetcar network in this rapid urban growth and in shaping its urban form.

At the end of the chapter, we would be able to distinguish what are the major determinants in the urban form of the city, and what were the elements that were the most disrupting to the urban grid.

Early Detroit The history of Detroit starts with the French. In 1701, they established a settlement to protect the French fur-trading interests. The choice of the location to build the French Fort Pontchartrain was guided by Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac.

He saw in the location of the actual Detroit a strategic point in the region of the Great Lakes and decided to build it on the crossing of Indian trails. Woodward, Michigan, and Jefferson Avenues take their origins from these old Indian trails.

(Thomas, 2015). Soon enough, the agriculture developed and took a greater place in the economy of the town. The French colons were offered free farmland.

They established adjacently to the fort, between the Detroit River and the backexisting woods.

The urban organisation of the fort was common of a centripetal grid, “being cut off from its context”( Pope, 2014, p 23). It is a grid that corresponds to what Marcuse describes as the “pre-capitalist grid” and mostly to the limited size towns of a defensive or military purpose such as the Fort Pontchartrain. As it was common to use the grid for its rapid deployment in conquered territories and colonies (Marcuse, 1987, p 293). These structuring elements lived on from a

26

XL - Scale

CANADA

0

1

2

5

KM

Legend :

Woodward Aven ue

Water Built Farm land Trails Wood

Jefferson Aven

ue

SCALE : 0

250

500

750

1000

M

1752

Figure 2.1 : Maps of the Fort Detroit and French agricultural strip farms , created after the reproduction of Carte de La Riviere du Detroit depuis le Lac Erie jus’ques au Lac Ste. Claire by Chaussegros de Lery, Gaspard-Joseph, 1682-1756, Source: Burton Historical Collection.

27

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

political power to another: when the French grip ended in 1770 to leave the place to the British, and finally under the control of the United States in 1793.

Back from the ashes In 1805, the history of Detroit took a decisive turn. It burned to the ground. At the same time, August Brevoort Woodward was joining the city to take his chair as judge of the new territory. He suggested rebuilding the city following the same radial design in Washington, D.C. This plan contrasted with the old narrow grids of the French farms. The geometrical plan was influenced by only the Detroit River and the cardinal systems since the topography of the land were flat. The triangle dominated the shape of the plan creating a hexagonal motif while the roads had different widths according to their importance. However, the plan was considered oversized and was not met with enthusiasm from the citizens in a hurry to rebuild. Leading Woodward to approve the settlements in a regular grid between the waterfront and Detroit’s east-west main street, today’s Jefferson Avenue. Many troubles would face Woodward vision plan for Detroit. Facing legal battles, reticent settlers and defiance of landowners lead to the containment of his vision to the only publicly owned lands (Kickert, 2019, p. 11).

In the 1810s, the federal government donated public lands to the Michigan Territory to fund a courthouse and a prison in Detroit. The thirty-six square kilometres of land donated was located about five kilometres north-west of Detroit centre and it is mostly known as the Ten-Thousand Acres Tract. The rectangle-shaped land was subdivided into 60 rectangular sections of farms and pastures. They were then divided into smaller plots over the years. (Sewick, 2017).

The Ten Thousand Acres Grid took the orientation from the French agricultural strips, thus breaking the Jefferson Grid. This grid created in 1785 by Thomas Jefferson, was implemented in the Western Territories in squares of one mile.

28

XL - Scale

CANADA

SCALE : 0

1

2

5

KM

Legend :

Water Built Farm land Trails Wood

SCALE : 0

250

500

750

1000

M

1807

Figure 2.2 : Outlines of Woodward plan for Detroit overlaid on the Fort and farm strip lines. Map drawn by the author based on a map retrieved from the state department archives.

29

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

Legend: Water

Canals

LAKE SUPERIOR

Detroit

Mining site LAKE HURON LAKE ONTARIO

LAKE MICHIGAN LAKE ERIE

Figure 2.3 : Map of the Great Lakes Region locating the major mining sites and the canals. Detroit is at central point in the region. Map drawn by the author based on the map found in “ Detroit : Mapping a new narrative, p 22)

This standardised grid can be seen nowadays in many other parts of Michigan.

While in the 1820s, the opening of the Erie Canal and Welland Canal boosted the growth of the city, by linking it with major ports on the East Coast and Canada.

The city became a maritime trade city attracting new immigrants. Irish, Germans, and African American established each on a different side of the city.

Detroit found itself in a pivotal position within the Great Lakes region, it would benefit directly from the natural resources found in the region. The discovery of various metals like copper, iron and coal made Detroit a strategic point for the establishment of foundries (Woodford, 2001). The proximity to these mining sites and its partial isolation during the winter times would establish Detroit as an industrial city with various factories to mostly ensure a self-dependence during shortage times.

30

XL - Scale

CANADA

SCALE : 0

1

2

5

KM

Legend :

Water Built Farm land Parcels Wood

SCALE : 0

250

500

750

1000

M

1853

Figure 2.3 : Upper map; Lay out of the structuring grids: from the up to down: The Jefferson Grid,the Ten-Thousand Acre Tract Grid and the French Ribbon Grid. Bottom Map: Overlay of the blocks, buildings, parcels in 1853, in addition to Black Bottom perimeter. Map drawn by author, based on 1853 map of Detroit by Henry Hart.

31

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

Progressively, Detroit started to expand by annexing the French farm strips forming new neighbourhoods, thus sounding the end of the Woodward plan visions. Meanwhile, the cityscape was changing rapidly as the constructions were made to be effortlessly moved or removed (Farmer, 1889, p. 374).

Due to its remoteness from the core of Detroit, the Ten-Thousand Acre Tract was not represented in the 1853’s map drawn by Henry Hart. It was the first map of Detroit after the fire, it unveils a city housing 26,000 dwellers living in around 4,700 buildings, twelve per cent of which were made of brick while the rest were made of wood (Farmer, 1889, p. 374). This population boom was the direct result of the economical shift from a trading base to a flourishing agricultural economy.

The physical distribution of the population was reflecting the limitation of that era. The residents were constricted to live near the riverfront close to their work.

Detroit was a victim of its location when it came to railroad connection. Unlike Chicago or Saint Louis, Detroit was isolated from the east to serve as a connection to the west, i.e. there was no direct rail connection to New York.

The beginning of Public transit in Detroit If the Woodward plan was abandoned in profit of a simpler grid, it was only to confirm the start of what Marcuse calls the city of “ laissez-faire” grid. A city he describes under the thumb of real estate speculation. The reduced power of the state in profit of the private market to decide the land use. A phenomenon that would be witnessed also in the absence of urban codes. Leaving freedom to the establishment of industries according to the convenience of those in economical power. Which would destructing consequences on many neighbourhood ( See chapter L ) The major industries in Detroit were related to mining. They took place on the fringes of the city, either on the waterfront or near the rail, leaving many empty parcels inland. Meanwhile, the downtown was grown fast and vertically.

32

XL - Scale

Legend: Water Parcels Green

Woodward

Industrial sites Train Streetcar lines Black Bottom Area

Michigan Gatriot

Jefferson

SCALE : 0

0.5

1

KM

1863

Figure 2.4 : Map of Detroit showing the first horse-drawn car lines. Map drawn by the author based on a map of the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune newspapers in 1874.

33

Black Bottom - pattern of growth

Legend: Water

Cass

Parcels Green Industrial sites

Woodward

Grand River

Train Streetcar lines Black Bottom Area

Michigan Gatriot Congress

Fort

Jefferson

SCALE : 0

0.5

1

KM

1874

Figure 2.5 : Map of Detroit showing the added horse-drawn car lines. Map drawn by the author based on a map of the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune newspapers in 1874.

34

XL - Scale

Detroit attracted more people and had to find a solution to accommodate them and ensure their circulation inside the city. Detroit opted for trendy urban transit solution deployed in 1832 in New York and later in many other American cities.

The horse-drawn streetcars were innovative for the era.

In 1863, construction of a horse-drawn street railway system was launched.

Detroit was a city with a land area of 32.8 km² (12.7 square miles). The line was built in the middle of Jefferson Avenue. It was using the same trackage as on steam railroads. The line Jefferson Avenue started from the old Michigan Central Train Depot at Third Street (currently the location of Joe Louis Arena) eastward to the city limits at Mt. Elliott Avenue. This line would become the most used line due to the concentration of the population near the river. The track rested on a 5 centimetres bed of cinders, brought flush with the top of the rails to provide footing for the horses. The track gauge used was 140 centimetres.

The Detroit City Railway Company took care of the construction and the operation of the line. Many other lines and line extensions followed afterwards, like the Woodward Avenue that went from Jefferson to Adams Avenue then to north Alexandrine. The Gratiot Avenue starting its route at Woodward downtown passing by Monroe, Randolph and Gratiot to Russell. The Michigan Avenue beginning at Woodward downtown via Michigan Avenue to Michigan Avenue.

The length of the cars was around 5 meters with low steps leading up to an open platform located at both ends. Entrance into the interior was through sliding doors leading to an interior finished in maple. Perimeter bench seating ran the car’s entire length, with interior lighting being provided by oil lanterns. Since these cars provided no heat, straw had to be placed on the floor during the winter to help keep the passengers’ feet warm. (Schramm K., 2006, p. 7) With increasing streetcar traffic along the streets of Detroit, the Common Council passed a resolution in August of 1864, which required each car to be equipped with a bell to warn pedestrians, after a man had been run down and bruised by an on-rushing streetcar. Although these horsecars were considered

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slow, even by that day’s standards, the iron-rail right-of-way they rode upon provided a smoother ride than the rough cobblestone or dirt roads used by the horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses of that day. By then, the company was operating eleven streetcars from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily over twelve kilometres of the track using ninety-two horses with five-cent fares (Lehto, 2017, p. 28).

Although these horsecars were considered slow, even by that day’s standards, the iron-rail right-of-way they rode upon provided a smoother ride than the rough cobblestone or dirt roads used by the horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses of that day. Back then the only ways of personal transport were like coaches or buggies were costly and reserved for an elite group.

In 1865, a second company followed, it was the Fort Street and Elmwood Avenue Railway Company, which sought to build a new line along West Fort Street.

Figure 2.6 : Detroit City Railway driving toward Michigan Avenue . Modified by the author (Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.)

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The line Fort Wayne and Elmwood went from the city’s western limits, just west of Porter Road (the present-day 24th Street), eastward along West Fort Street, through Michigan Grand Avenue (present-day Cadillac Square) to Randolph, then east along Croghan Street (present-day Monroe) to the Elmwood Cemetery at Elmwood Avenue.

Soon, other routes would follow as other companies jumped on board, namely; Grand River (Grand River Street Railway,1868), Cass and Third (Central Market, Cass Avenue and Third Street Railway, 1873), Congress and Baker (Detroit and Grand Trunk Junction Street Railway, 1873), and Russell (Russell Street, St. Aubin and Detroit and Milwaukee Junction Street Railway, 1874). By 1874, six streetcar companies were operating nine carlines within the city of Detroit.

From 1880 through 1890, several new horsecar lines were built. One of the last horsecar lines to be constructed was the Chene Street line, built by the Detroit City Railway in 1889. (H.B.Craig, 2014) The network continued to develop as the population continued to expand

Figure 2.7 : Horse-drawn streetcars along the Woodward Avenue, while the coaches are parked on the sides waiting for clients during the 1880s. Photo modified by the author (Schramm Collection.)

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Figure 2.8: Graphic showing the constituent companies forming the DUR (Lehto, 2017, pp. 172-173)

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outward to the city limits. It was becoming clearer that the system needed to switch to a more efficient mode of powered transportation than the horse. The only viable and efficient one was the electrically powered streetcar. It avoided many of the disadvantages of the horse-drawn street railway like diseases like the 1972’s epizootic across much of the United States, short-life expectancy of the animal, horse droppings and the most obvious one the slowness.

In 1880, Detroit was considered a medium-sized city, with a population of 116,340, it ranked only eighteenth among American cities, but its potential was great (Zunz, Olivier., 1982, p. 16). A potential that led many of the companies operating back then had to consolidate to face the new investments for the conversion to electrical era. Several new electric-powered streetcar lines began operations, like Detroit Citizens Street Railway in 1892, followed by the Fort Wayne and Belle Isle Railway in 1893, and the Detroit Railway in 1895. (Schramm K., 2006, p. 7).

By the arrival of the 1890s, the city of Detroit was emerging as an important and diverse industrial and manufacturing centre. A wide spectrum of goods — seldom remembered today as products made in Detroit — would help play a role in placing Detroit on the industrial map, decades before the arrival of the automobile industry. As a professor of history at Columbia University, Kenneth T. Jackson (1987) explains how the locations of factories were linked closely to the steamships and railroads. Thus, the meeting points were the initiating component to the development of industries and thriving shipment. As seen in Detroit, the industrial sites were not in the commercial core however, they kept a close distance to the downtowns. Jackson argues that the street railways were a major catalyser for the thrive of cities and their central business districts. These districts usually coincided with the downtowns. They represented the cities’ focal point or business and commercial centre (Misachi, 2019). Along with other technological inventions such as the telephone, the electric light bulb, and the elevator, that allowed the settlement in tall buildings, the street railways made

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Industrial sites Train Streetcar lines Black Bottom Area

SCALE : 0

0.5

1

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1915

Figure 2.9 : Map of Detroit 1914-1915 showing the extent of the streetcar network formed by thirty-two lines. In Red the industrial zones as found in 1918 industrial and transportation terminal map Detroit. Every circle represents a mile with a stating point at Martius Campus . Map drawn by the author based on the map drawn and published by Wouldiam Sauer in Commercial Pocket Map of Detroit.

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it more convenient for the middle class to leave the downtown to live outward.

However, the dependence on the central district was kept solid. Jackson goes on to explain the major difference between the railroads and the streetcars. He explains that the newer system “penetrated to the very heart of the city. The tracks radiated out from the center like spokes invariably led downtown, with only an occasional crosstown or lateral line, the practical effect was to force almost anyone using public transit to rely on the central business district” (p. 113).

In the meantime, many other Detroiters had difficulty finding housing.

Neither they could not afford commuting costs nor the suburban spacious housing. These underprivileged segments of society had to turn to the central areas like Black Bottom and Corktown, (this topic would be discussed deeply in the next chapter) just left by the middle class and higher class.

As the demand on streetcar grew, the city’s largest and oldest company, Detroit City Railway absorbed several of the smaller companies. The city started the new decade with only three city-based street railway companies left: the Detroit City Railway, the Fort Wayne and Elmwood Railway, and the Grand River Street Railway. On December 31, all the company were incorporated into one, the Detroit United Railway, aka DUR. The DUR network stretched on both the city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. Simultaneity to the electrification of the streetcar system, the development of another form of mass transportation started, known as the Interurban Electric Railway system. The interurban cars were larger and more luxuriant than the streetcars running inside the city. The interurbans could travel at speeds of 40 to 50 miles per hour through rural areas over routes ranging in length from 20 to 75 miles long. While the steam-powered railroads of that day did not bother with short-haul passenger runs – which transported passengers between villages, towns, and cities -- the interurban routes would help to fill that gap. (H.B.Craig, 2014). In total, the Detroit United Railway operated more than 400 miles (640 km) of interurban lines and 187 miles (301 km) of the street

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Figure 2.10: Map showing the extent of the DUR from 1904 (Perry-CastaĂąeda Library Map Collection)

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city street railway lines. (Hilton & Due, 2000, p. 287) Detroit at that time owned the “largest street-railroad” system in the world. (Base, 1970, p. 93)

Ownership and decay The period studied so far represents a period where Detroit was part of a new “manufacturing belt” formed by Buffalo and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Though, heavy industrial work was still limited at that time. Until the turn of the new century, Detroit changed into an automobile manufacturing centre of the United States.

At the same period, the DUR was having a lot of troubles keeping up with the constant population growth and the city spreading boundaries. This struggle was also worsened by the constant battles with city hall that pressured to take control of the rail lines. By the year 1910, the city’s population had reached 465,766 and continued to double every ten years. The streetcars were crowded and started to have a negative public opinion.

After years of battle, James J. Couzens (a former Ford Motor Company general manager) was elected in 1919 as mayor of Detroit. In 1922, the city then bought out the DUR for about $ 20 million. The new company would be called the Detroit Street Railway, or DSR. (Leary, 2007, p. 23) In the meanwhile, the DUR continued to operate its extensive interurban operation outside Detroit limits through the early 1930s.

The 1920s were marked by the democratisation of the private automobile thanks to the assembly line and the T-model. This induced a growing dubiety in the way people viewed transit services and the advantages of expanding them.

Confirming this tendency, the usage of streetcars and buses falling by seventeen per cent between 1916 and 1925, (from 349 rides /person/ year to 289). (Hyde, 2006, p. 69) When the city of Detroit had to set the first Regional Transportation Plan 43

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Figure 2.11: The hybrid solution chosen by the Rapid Transit Commission , the drawing illustrates the subway’s transition to surface trains in suburban areas. Detroit Rapid Transit Commission, The Relation of Individual to Collective Transportation (Detroit: Heitman-Garand Co., 1928)

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(RTP), two were the options discussed around the table: one based on private car use paired to heavy investments for the construction of a highway system, and a comprehensive rapid transit system, relying on underground and on-surface railway lines. The solution finally recommended was a hybrid between the two and a multi-modal system. However, the plan was not completely carried out according to the chief planner vision. The fixed rail rapid-transit system proposal was discarded leaving only the highway solution on the table. In 1925, the first buses start operating in the city. By the end of the 1920s, all hopes for rapid-rail transit solutions were over. Thanks to the freedom and wealth brought by the automobile industry, more and more white middle-class were able to move to newly constructed private transportation-focused neighbourhoods.

The price of progress The inclination towards the suburbs would increase exponentially only to be braked by the two Great Wars. The ownership of a car was part of the metaphor of the new American values held by the capitalist thinking. Private ownership of land and freedom of movement were key elements in the success of the capitalistic state. It was a symbol of success as well as social and economic upgrade. The adoration of cars was more marked in Detroit since it was the driver of the economy and thrive of the city. Leading the city to adopt earlier than other cities car-focused solution to the urban area of Detroit. (look into shaping the city document ).

While many proposals for enhancing the public transit like in 1933 when the subway plan, was rejected, and any future extension of the streetcar network seemed dim, the rise of the automobile was bright and urged. Even when the ridership during the 1940s peaked to reach 490 million users split between buses, streetcars and commuter rail, these latest would not be able to withstand the pressure of private automobiles. Since already in 1942, the first below-grade

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(depressed), limited access freeway would take place in Detroit. The Davison Expressway was part of a bigger plan where many expressways would traverse every section of the city (Bessert, 2018). The comprehensive design announced by the city plan commission in 1947. The downtown revitalisation through the increase of transportation and removal of “blight” in and around the urban core (Biles, 2014, p. 846).

Right after the end of the Second World War, the building of new freeway started even before the support of the federal through the 1956 Interstate Highway Act. However, the building of this new freeway came at the detriment of Blacks. The tracks of the freeway were targeting non-white and less wealthy neighbourhoods, and despite the multiple protests, the bulldozers had their final word on the question. By the beginning of the 1960s, Detroit witnessed the erase of two prosperous black neighbourhoods Paradise Valley and the West Side. The quest for speed and racial politics led the city officials to flout all human consideration, notably when the city identified replacement housing that was more decaying and unsafe than the structures demolished to build the highways (Biles, 2014, pp. 850-851).

Eventually, unlike what the promises of Mayor Cobo, who underestimated the impacts of the clearances of the African American neighbourhoods: “Sure there have been some inconveniences in building our expressways and in our slum clearance programs, but in the long run more people benefit. That’s the price of progress.”

The freeways did not provide the intended benefit for the city as it encouraged the whitefly and the destruction of a local urban economical system.

These simple ideas on a map shaped damaging effects on Black neighbourhoods.

In the next chapter, one of these neighbourhoods would serve as a case of study to showcase the dynamic between transportation and the urban growth blended with racial segregation.

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Figure 2.12 : The Network of Expressways for Detroit 1943 as planned in the Mayor’s Street Improvement

Committee.

The document recommended to lay the expressways on the existing street pattern and the future needs for the city in term of traffic management.

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Figure 2.13: Map of Detroit’s Planned Expressway Construction issued by the City Plan Commission in January 1950.

Cf. R. Biles. 2014. “Expressways before the Interstates: The Case of Detroit, 1945-1956”, Journal of Urban History, vol.

40, n°5 (p. 849).

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The Streetcar removal & Highway arrival impact on Train Stations Detroit was home to two historical passenger train station. The oldest being Brush Street Station (1852) (named afterward Franklin Street Station in 1974), Michigan Central Station (opened in 1913, replacing the Michigan Central Railroad Depot (1884)). Unlike many other cities, the main train station did not end in downtown.

Built by the New York Central System, the Michigan Central Station was situated in Corktown west Downtown. The reason for this unusual location is the intention to recover the flow of traffic from the newly opened tunnel linking Detroit to the Canadian Windsor. The design of the building was transit focused.

Connection to the station was made through streetcars system. And access by foot was limited due to the remoteness from the centre. So, when the shift to buses started, the accessibility of the train station degraded. Faraway from the effervescence of its early days, described as “a beehive of activity� by Sugrue (2014, p. 22). The author describes the preference of some passengers for taxis, which we could speculate, is an indicator of the inconvenience some might see in the usage of the streetcars. The train station served as an arrival point for many

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Housing Projects Auto-Industry Industrial sites Train Streetcar lines Black Bottom Area

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1

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1941

Figure 2.14: The extent of the streetcar lines and the symbiotic relationship between the railroads lines and the industries. We notice the first relocation of industries outside Detroit borders.Parallely the first low cost housing projects. Map drawn by the author based on 1941 Annual Report of Detroit Housing Commission and the Sanborn FIre Insurance Map Vol.4.

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migrants during the two Wars, thus keeping steady traffic. However, with the end of the war, and the shift to an all-car society negatively impacted the usage of the Michigan Central Station. The decline of usage reached a low point when the New York Central System tried to sell it for five million dollars with no takers.

After many unsuccessful attempts, the Michigan Central Station was closed in 1988. The Detroit Amtrak Station located in the junction of Woodward Avenue and West Baltimore Avenue recovered the traffic in 1994.

On the other side, the Brush Street Station located along the River Front.

The station served as an arrival and departure point for many passengers. It was an effective multimodal station. Connected to both the ferry traffic and the streetcar system. The station was rebuilt after a fire in 1867. Later in the 1910s, the station suffered from the competition of the Michigan Central Station. With reduced ferry traffic and abandonment of the streetcar system, the station witnessed the same fate as its bigger sister in 1983. (Berry, n.d.)

Both stations were an example of the integration of diverse mode of public transportation. The evolution of the city toward the car and the malfunctioning of the stations resulted in their termination. If the Michigan Central Station suffered from its remoteness from the centre, the Brush Street Station was in a central location, however, it did not benefit from the strategic connection to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.

The determinants of the urban form of Detroit The historical analysis of the urban development of Detroit at the XL scale showcases the importance of eight factors that shaped the morphological arrangement of Detroit.

Listed chronologically these factors are: 1- Water Access: The city took its name from its natural position as a

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1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Figure 2.15 : Schemes drawn by the author representing the eight selected determinants shaping the urban form of Detroit based on the scheme of Bekkering and Liu.

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strait (“détroit” in French) in the Detroit River. The city represented a strategic point to water access for trade. The importance of water access could be seen also by the multiple dock constructions and industries installed on the waterfront.

2- Detroit Fort and Indian Trails: The settlement of the “Le fort Pontchartrain du Détroit” took his origins from the crossing of the old Indian trails. The radial avenues like Woodward, Jefferson and Michigan avenues take emanate from these trails.

3- French Farms Strips: the perpendicular farm layout made by the French. These ribbons had a major impact on the city structure, many streets still hold the names of the landlords of the farms where they established.

4- Woodward Plan and Radial Avenues: Even the Woodward ambitions for Detroit were not implemented in their whole. The Radial Avenues Grand River and Gratiot Avenues were the direct results of the implementation of part of the equilateral triangle plan grid of Woodward. Their radial layout breaks the consistency of the city urban grid.

5- The Jefferson Grid: The North-South and East-West structured grid is set as a standard for the spread of the rest of the city. It’s East-west lines coincide with the Miles Roads and provides an idea of the size of the city.

6- The Ten Thousand Acres Grid: This grid is considered an irregularity in the Jefferson grid. First by the size of its grid and second by the orientation perpendicular to the French farms.

7- Railways: their establishment was before the urban spread. A given that influenced the establishment of many industries as well as the adaptation of the urban grid to the existent rail tracks.

8- City block layout: Little discussed in this chapter (the L and M scales are more appropriated), however, they hold an important role as they dictated the width of the street. They followed generally the orientation of their respective territorial plots. Generally rectangular, they measured in most cases 80*200m.

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1875

1891

1917

1926 Figure 2.15 : Schemes drawn by the author representing the relationship between the streetcar system and the urbanisation. The year 1926 marks the end of the annexation.

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In a timeline, the eight elements presented heretofore come to materialise what Peter Marcuse (1987) presents as the transition of Detroit from a “precapitalist” city to a “ laissez-faire capitalism”. Indeed, the Fort of Detroit represented the stage of the pre-capitalist city with a closed grid. While the “laissez-faire capitalism took form in the deployment of the open grids like the Jefferson Grid with a speculative insensitive. A final phase is discussed by Marcuse is the city of “ mature capitalism”, it is a part that would be better explained in the following chapters, as it mixes between policies, real estate speculation and in the case of Detroit racial tensions as well.

Two remaining factors were not mentioned in this listing. The first one was the streetcar system. Unlike the railways, the streetcars were influenced by the existing urban fabric patterns and even took advantage of the radial street to enhance the speed on long distances. Thus, making the city spreading horizontally, the promoters generally targeted sites where the streetcars passed by. This choice to develop horizontally, in addition to the long battle with the city would worsen the streetcar service and limit its development. Which would lead to a loss of speed concerning the continuing urbanisation. When the streetcars system was dismantled in 1956, the impact of this event had not had any repercussion on the urban grid formally. At the opposite side, the arrival of the highway system between the 50 and 60s would have a destructive impact. By demolishing many unfavoured districts as the one studied in the next chapter.

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1951

1970 Figure 2.16 : Schemes drawn by the author representing a parallel comparison between the streetcars and the Urban Freeway.

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Legend: Water 1857 1890 1950 1995

Figure 2.17 : Schemes drawn by the author representing the urban sprawl from the map found in (Limoges, 2001, p.9)

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Jefforsonian Ideals Since its foundation, the United States of America knew diverse political movements. One of the most influential ones was Jeffersonian Democracy. It succeeded to Federalist Ideals. It was opposed to the corruption and the aristocratic system as found in the British system. Instead, it prioritised “the decisions of the majority.” (NHPRC, 1821) Oppositely to the Federalist, Jeffersonians advocated for strong state and local governments and the weak federal government. Jefferson saw in elections a demonstration of “the would of the people”.

For him, the federal government shall strengthen its endeavours on national and international projects and leave the other matters in the hands of local governments. While most of the population back then worked in the agricultural field, Jefferson grew an admiration the agrarian life. He based his democratic principles for governance to prosper in an agrarian society. He argued that the contact with the earth kept the population independent from the corruption brought by urban life. For him, cities were perverted by financiers, bankers, and industrialists. These latest were holders of two threats to Jefferson’s ideals. The financial speculation through debt and urban industry would be leading farmers out of their independence. (ushistory.org, 2020) As the development of trade and industry was growing, Jefferson feared the reliance of the new working class on the industrials wages, as their votes would be strangled in the hands of their employers. And to counter that, Jefferson elaborated a system of taxation to avoid the accumulation of wealth as he explains in a letter written in 1811 to one of his friends: “These revenues would be levied entirely on the rich. ... The Rich alone use imported article, and on these alone, the whole taxes of the General Government are levied.

The poor man ... pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt.” (Jefferson, 1903, p.

42) This should not be read as an anti-modern vision, rather Jefferson preferred the usage of technology and trade to benefit the agricultural world and enhance productivity. Jeffersonians ideals required a continuing expansion of farmland, such as the purchase of Louisiana from the French in 1803. However, this expansion to the west ignited an American Imperialism. Through violence and policies enacted by Jefferson, the land was taken from Native Americans. (Jenckinson, 2017) Even if the Jeffersonian Ideals were met with success, there were many limits to them. The high cost of integration of technology deprived many farmers. Whom saw in the industry and urban life a way to escape poverty. As egalitarian Jefferson ideals were, they still did not include the Blacks in them. Jefferson argued that their “racial inferiority” was a burden to full citizenship and access to equal rights. Eventually, Jeffersonian Ideals set a trend for the next generation for a desire to expand and a closure to nature while keeping an economical racial segregation.

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Interlude

I

Official Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson (by Rembrandt Peale, 1800)

L

L The L scale serves as an introduction to the case study, Black Bottom. At this scale, we could sense with more ease the humane dimension of the city. We would also materialise the pattern of establishment of the resident and how (racial) policies impacted people’s land use.

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The United States of America has a well-known history of racial segregation.

Different laws and policies helped exclude the Black population from the wealth created even after the abolition of slavery in 1865. In this chapter, we would browse the different policies that enforced implicit segregation on black communities, by devaluating their land and restricted their social mobility. In order to materialize these words, Black Bottom would be the example studied. The evolution of this neighbourhood would show the importance of transportation in dynamizing the growth and thrive of the city as well as how it facilitated connecting different activities. The intent is to capture the many generations of newcomers this neighbourhood had crossed until its prosperity as a black neighbourhood and then its disappearance.

First stop Detroit, like many other eastside cities, was an arrival point for diverse migrants.

However, the waves of migration started later than the other cities. In the 1880s, most of the inhabitant of the growing city of Detroit were Yankees (nickname for native inhabitants of New England) and members of older immigrant groups like Canadians, English, while black represented only 2.42 per cent. Most often, these newcomers were Europeans and would settle near the centre of the city or their arrival point (like ports or train stations). Given the proximity of Black bottom to downtown, it had always worked as an arrival neighbour for migrants: cheap, affordable housing combined with proximity to the industrial activities near the river shore and, good accessibility explain its appeal for these often less fortunate population.

In Black Bottom, many ethnic groups succeeded to one another. For example, Germans came in the 1830s to flee political troubles, and the Irish in 1840s to escape the potato famine, opening the lead for a larger influx of waves of Italian, Romanian and Russian Jews migration. (Bedard, 2009, p. 27) But as these ethnic

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Figure 3.1 : Photograph of children posing in Hastings Street taken in the 1920s.( Wayne State University)

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Population 8000000

Philadelphia

7000000

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6000000 5000000

Chicago

4000000

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3000000 2000000 1000000 0

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Figure 3.2 : Evolution over a century of the four largest American cities in 1940. Graphic by the author based on the Census Data.

groups managed to move up the social scale, they moved away leaving the way for more Black people to move in. Meanwhile the population of Detroit was doubling every decade between 1900 and 1930 to become the fourth largest city in the United States in 1925.

Unlike what one might think, the Black Bottom did not borrow its name from the black population but rather it was the French farmers who named it in reference to its low elevation and rich black soil. Though the discrimination that people suffered into getting jobs in the factories, some of them (like Ford Motor Company) employed both black and white residents of Black Bottom. However, fear of losing their jobs to southern migrants lead the white population into racial segregation acts after the first great migration began. These persecutions increased even more after the post-war recession when in 1920 the economy was plumbing and the entire automotive industry was facing a depression. (Bates, 2012, p. 61) 62

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Population 2000000

Other or mixed

Black 1500000

White

Global Population

1000000

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0 I820

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Figure 3.3 : Evolution of Detroit population over two centuries showing the demographic evolution of Black and White population. Graphic by the author based on personal revision of Decennial Census Data.

Promised land In 1928, a black singer named Blind Blake released a song called “Detroit Bound Blues”. He sings about his intentions to go to Detroit to find a job, more specifically at Ford’s Company. The singer holds in his song the hope of thousands of other black Americans leaving the hostile South to settle in the city of Detroit attracted

by Ford’s Five-Dollar-a-Day promise as they were favoured partly due to the immigration policies during WWI that restricted foreign-born immigration and the void left by white men called for war duty. Even prior to that, Detroit was well appreciated by black southerners as a gate to Canada, where they escaped slavery and discrimination (Bates, 2012, p. 19). The discrimination that would be found still in factories, indeed, while Ford Motor Company was more inclined to hire black people in all departments of the assembly, competitors like General 63

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Motors and Chrysler limited the access for black to only low-paid jobs such as Janitor, porter, elevator operator, domestic, hotel waiter etc (Van Dusen, 2019, p. 72).

As said in the previous chapter, the automobile industry offered new opportunities mostly for white Detroiters. Unfortunately, it was not the same case for black Detroiters, who did not get the same chances to access the wealth created by the automobile industry. In his book Detroit Birwood’s Wall, Van Dusen (2019) exposes the struggle of black newcomers through the narration of real characters. He narrates the fighting journey of these women and men who left the racist South and intolerant cities in quest of a brighter future in Detroit.

Only to find disillusions after disillusions, if obtaining a job (often physical and unwanted ones in the industries related to war) was easy, managing to find housing. One of the protagonists, a New Yorker called Cornelia Davis settled in the back-then less known Eight Miles Road in late 1910s. It was in a remote and thinly populated area with few services. In parallel, John Crews who was from the south, went for the most known community for working-class black families in Black Bottom (Van Dusen, 2019, pp. 17-19).

By 1930, they represented 8 per cent of the total population of Detroit and their access to housing was often limited to substandard houses inside racially segregated communities, like Black Bottom or Paradise Valley, but this domicile could be used against them while applying for a job, instituting a form of discrimination. The high influx of populations into Detroit led the population in competition to find housing, but for Black Detroiters, the struggle was double since they faced a brake on their search. This was due to a federal policy that weakened the desirability of Black neighbourhoods and limited the physical and economic mobility of the Black population.

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Scale

Redlining Before talking about redlining, it is important to have an overview of how the creation of wealth operates in The United States. One of the major ways of creation of wealth can be through homeownership. To purchase a house, one would need a loan from a bank. The bank then would investigate the individual creditworthiness which was based on one’s location and conditions of prosperity.

(Mitchell & Franco, 2016, p. 5) The 1930s was also marked by the great depression following the 1929 crash.

To bring relief to the suffocating economy, President Franklin Roosevelt unveils the New Deal containing a collection of innovative programs and projects. The major ones were The National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934 that gave birth to The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Act that lead to the creation of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). The NHA eased for low- and middle-income families the way to get a loan to buy a house. By restructuring the federal banking system, the mortgages were spread on a thirty-year period instead of three to five years, and interest rates were lowered to 5 per cent. However, there was a need to ensure the solvency of the borrowers with the banks, it is at this point the HOLC came into play.

They produced the infamous Residential Security Maps. These maps contained a classification of neighbourhoods according to their perceived level of lending risk. There were four colour-based categories: Green meant Best Area; Businessmen, Blue was for Good Area; White-Collar, Yellow meant a declining Area; Working Class Families, and finally Red meant Detriment Area or Hazardous; Foreign-born people, low-class whites and most considerably “Negroes”. This where the term of Redlining comes from. Areas with considerable presence of black and foreign-born citizens. Redlining made it hard for them to buy or refinance. In other words, these maps put prejudice on the inhabitants of Red Areas by trapping them in a vicious cycle of poverty. For instance, land values

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Figure 3.4: The infamous HOLC Redlining Map 1939.( Hearne Brothers)

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Location of Black Population Before 1910 Between 1910-1920 Between 1920-1950

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Density of the Black population 75% -100% 50% -75% 25% -50%

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1925 3.5: Upper map: Location of Black population from 1910 to 1950. Drawn by the author based on the map of Bradley Davis, Figure Department of Geography and Urban Affairs Michigan State University.

Figure 3.6: Bottom map : Density of Black Population in 1925, Drawn by the author based on the 1925 Detroit City Census map, Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research,

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Figure 3.7: The Birwood Wall built in the 1940s to separate communities near the Eight Miles Road. (United States Library of Congress).

were devaluated, and black families had (and still) encounter higher rates of interests on mortgages. While white families even with lower incomes than black families, managed to get low-interest mortgages allowing them to move to the newly established whites-only suburbs. If the New Roosevelt’s New Deal is proof that a rising tide does not raise all boats. Mainly when racial segregation is on the equation, and even further when it is institutionalised on the highest level of federal authority.

Detroit manages again to be the extreme example of this segregation acts. Not only a line was drawn on a map, but a wall was erected to divide the 68

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communities. On Eight Mile Road, the Birwood Wall was built during the 1940s, when a developer planned to build a whites-only community near a majority-black neighbourhood to get the approval from the FHA (Kozlowski, 2019). This event came only a decade after the widening of the Eight Mile Road who destroyed the thriving black-owned business established there. The same pattern that would be applied decades later in another thriving black community, the Black Bottom.

The study As early as 1935, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt backed up by the New Deal federal package, decided to fund the first public housing development for Afro Americans, the Brewster Homes (see chapter S), located north Black Bottom. This must be read against the progressive empowerment of the Afro American population in Detroit: even though they might have been pushed to specific places, the rate of business owned by this group increased, and with it the access to education.

According to statistics data (1920), the African American ownership started to increase reaching over 350 businesses in Detroit, including a movie theatre, the only African American–owned pawnshop in the United States, a co-op grocery, and a bank while the community included seventeen physicians, twenty-two lawyers, twenty-two barbershops, thirteen dentists, twelve cartage agencies, eleven tailours, ten restaurants, ten real estate dealers, eight grocers, six drugstores, five undertakers, four employment offices, a few service-stations, and a candy maker (Wouldiams, 2009, p. 28).

While the Detroit Urban League reported in 1942, the establishment of five black artists; twenty-five barbershops; seventy-one beauty shops; two bondsmen; seven-building contractors; twenty-five dressmakers and shops; ten electricians, four employment agencies, two dairy distributors; twelve coal dealers; thirty-six dentists; thirty drug stores; fifteen fish and poultry markets; five flowers shops; three furriers; fourteen garages; twelve hat shops; ten

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Train Streetcar lines Black Bottom Area

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Figure 3.8 : The perimeter of Black Bottom. Map drawn by the author based from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map..

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hospitals; twenty hotels; nine insurance companies; fifty-five restaurants to go along with eighty-five lawyers; one-hundred and fifty-one physicians; and one hundred and forty social workers. (Koleman, 2014, p 13). There is no doubt that Black Bottom represents a well-documented neighbourhood, through its historical importance and cultural impact on the Afro-American community in the United-States. The question that might arise is why this district was amongst the one to attract interest economically? What distinguished it from the other neighbourhood?

According to the Detroit Historical Society (Black Bottom Neighborhood, 2020), the borders of Black Bottom limits can be defined by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, Vernor Highway, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks. The Black Bottom neighbourhood belongs to the first generation of suburbs that evolved around horse-drawn streetcars then electric streetcars. The streetcar suburbs were built in the late 19th century, early 20th century around streetcar lines.

These lines connected these suburbs and downtown. If trips have always an origin and a destination. The trips would originate from residents’ homes. And the destinations would be where the city dwellers went where they had points of interests, be it working, shopping or any other attractive activity. Stores and small factories, for example, were located next to streetcar lines with housing a bit further out. The main streets (like Hastings and St. Antoine) show a very efficient design. With an orthogonal grid, the blocks are elongated rectangles rather than squares. However, the diagonal Gratiot Avenue comes to break this grid. The streetcar suburbs can be considered as neighbourhood oriented commercial facilities. They are characterised by stratification of mixed-use places.

The elongated rectangles blocs’ longer sides containing the housing units are perpendicular to the main streets. (Streetcar suburbs: how they were designed and what we can learn from them, 2014)

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The structure To understand this typology of urban layout, it is necessary to trace the category of relationship to their contemporary dominant transit system. Although Black Bottom first marks dates to the early 19th century, it represents a good example of what the typical “streetcar suburb” could look like. As the city renews itself constantly, the neighbourhood has adapted its land-use hierarchy around a continuous corridor whom nerves were the streetcar lines, attracting along with its stores and local commercial facilities, from which gridded residential streets distributed on both sides of the lines (Muller, 1995). This can be read more clearly once we look at the neighbourhood before 1941, Black Bottom used to see pass many streetcar lines which some of them were replaced by bus under the DSR “steel wheels to rubber tires” campaign. The DSR used small-size Ford Transit Coaches.

The campaign started in 1937, however, it was interrupted by World War II.

By December 1941, only four lines were still passing through the neighbourhood, Gratiot, Jefferson, Fort Kercheval and Mt Elliot. The Myrtle line was substituted on October 11, 1937, while E. Lafayette line was changed to buses on March 1, 1939. The concentration of these lines offered numerous opportunities for business to grow and put Black Bottom in a central position next to downtown.

Black Bottom and the city The urban fabric of Black Bottom was denser compared to the rest of the city, besides downtown and New Center Areas. The compactness and well connected to the transit system helped the neighbourhood to thrive. Destinations and transit access were within safe walk range. This structure was particularly important considering the economic benefit it had by bringing different economic activities in proximity. The Black Bottom inhabitants had access to numerous

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services (hospitals, shops, churches, public services) and opportunities (schools, factories, offices). The direct access from the inner street of the neighbourhood to the commercial avenues was beneficial for pedestrians. Most preeminent spot related to the neighbourhood dwellers was Downtown. In actuality, it was necessary for a traveller to live near a streetcar to be able to reach their destination in less than one hour, since the vehicles were quite slow driving in average 15 KM per hour (Rodrigue, 2020).

The usage of streetcar and buses was complemented with foot traffic and cycling to carry out activities. Either in Black Bottom or the rest of the city, foot traffic was fuelling, as stated by Duffus (1927, as cited in Kickert, 2019) in the New York Times, the city witnessed a semblance of anarchy due to the traffic: “The city has been, one might say, assembled rather than manufactured. ‌ When Detroit goes to work in the morning the effect is as if some one had poked

Figure 3.11 : The store across the street says Goldberg and is in the St. Antoine and Hastings Streets section of Black Bottom. We can note in the background a streetcar arriving. This photograph is from around 1930. (Detroit Public Library).

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Legend:

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Madison Avenue Mullet Street Clinton Street Macomb Street Monroe Street E. Lafayette Street

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E. Fort Street E. Congress St.

Jefferson Avenue Woodbridge St.

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Madison Avenue Mullet Street Clinton Street Macomb Street Monroe Street E. Lafayette Street

E. Congress St. Larned Street

St Aubin Street

Russell Street

Rivard Street

Hastings Street

St Antoine Street

Brush Street

Beaubien Street

E. Fort Street

Jefferson Avenue Woodbridge St.

Figure 3.9 : The evolution of the streetcar lines and the progressive replacement by buses lines in Black Bottom. Map drawn by the author based from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, W. Sauer , Department of Street Railways.

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Russell Street

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Hastings Street

St Antoine Street

Beaubien Street

Train Station

Brush Street

Transit lines

E. Lafayette Street

Jefferson Avenue Woodbridge St.

Figure 3.10: The distribution of the land use in Black Bottom. There is a clear overlay between the commercial corridors and the transit lines.

We note the effect of the widening of Gratiot in suppressing the lowest part of its commercial corridor. The industrial area is closely attached to the railway. Before the monopoly of Michigan Central Station, the Brush Street Station used to be a gate to many newcomers and was linked to the streetcar system. Map drawn by the author based from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, W. Sauer , Department of Street Railways.

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a stick into an ant hill and had temporarily lost their sense of direction. There is no general stampede toward a centralized workshop district. The traffic flows all ways at once.” (p.78) Seemingly, there was no real coherence of movement in the city. It might have to do with the shape the city took. The diagonal arteries like Gratiot that connected the city outskirt to the centre, made downtown the beating heart of Detroit. Thus, many streetcar lines had their connections around Grand Circus and Campus Martius. Which benefited grandly to Black Bottom. On one hand, only two lines (Clairmount and Oakman) bypassed the downtown, while all the remaining lines converged toward it. On the other hand, the bus lines network provided parallel connections between the lines.

During the World War II, Detroit moved from being the “Motor City” to become known as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” when automobile plants under the impetus of the government started to produce supplies for the military. Between 1940 and 1947, manufacturing employment in Detroit increased by 40 per cent, a rate surpassed only by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago (Sugrue, 2014).

This economic vitality boosted the influx of yet another southern migration, unsurprisingly the city was unable to provide decent accommodations for these categories of citizens unwelcome in white neighbourhoods.

Once established, workers had to reach their workplace. Generally, they would use the streetcars as it was the quickest and most affordable option available for them. Before praising an all-car society, some big industrialists like Henry Ford encouraged the usage of mass transit. He even took part in the construction of suburban streetcar lines. He saw in them an efficient way to connect his factories to his workers’ residencies (Kickert, 2019,). Detroit’s lower east side was a labour pool where hundreds of workers headed to work in the factories. As predicted

by Ford, most of them used streetcar lines as primary transportation mean. This usage increased during the wartime. White Americans were obliged to change their transportation habits, at a time when the common freedom provided by

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the car ownership was valued as the ultimate success of the American society.

The officials’ message was clear, the situation would be temporary and only done out of necessity. While the streetcar system was already struggling, this new added pressure came as a bad image to the ridership in mass transit. In her dissertation, Frohardt-Lane (2011) lists three factors that made: Detroit’s public transit crowded during the war: One, the implementation of rubber and gasoline rationing for a private vehicle. Second, shortages of equipment and employees because of wartime priorities. Third an influx of migrants to perform “war work” in Detroit’s factories. (p. 27)

Figure 3.12 : Picture of passengers boarding in the Grand River trolley in December 1942. (Wayne State University)

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In his autobiography, Charles Denby recounts his experience of the streetcars and his fellow workers at the Ford Plants. He justified identifying Ford as a “mankilling” by the tiredness state of the workers who were sleeping in their way back to their home (Charles, 1989, p. 35). Faraway from this acute image of napping workers on their seats, the situation during World War II was utterly anarchic.

The overcrowding of the transit system was turning travellers against each other.

Many anecdotes of these tensions retrieved by Frohardt-Lane can be read in the letters addressed to Mayor Jeffries, one, for example, was demanding to limit the access of the vehicles in the advantage of those who went to work, “keeping out a horde of silly high school girls who bum around the stores after school and fill

Figure 3.13 : Long line to ride the streetcar in front of Ford Highland Park Plant, Woodward Avenue circa 1916. (The Henry Ford Museum).

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seats needed by tired workers. We could also weed out the greedy housewife that shops any time she pleases…” or another one complaining about the reduced price tickets for schoolchildren, the rider protested about the streetcar being crowded of children!, “It takes just a little more [patience] than the average laborer has to have to stand all the way to Cass Tech, while all the seats are occupied by a six cent rider.” (Frohardt-Lane, 2011, p. 37). These fragments are a signal of a growing frustration from White male Detroiters who were “forced” into the overcrowded and unpleasant travel. These travels that included a close physical proximity with black people lead to raising racial tensions. Many conflicts would occur during the trips, either amid passengers or between passengers and conductors.

Figure 3.14 : A shift change at the Ford Rouge Plant, Dearborn, Michigan.Circa 1940 (Wayne State University)

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The DSR tried unsuccessfully to counter these issues by coordinating a varied hours program for factories and schools to ease the pressure in its traffic during the beginning and end of the workday (Frohardt-Lane, 2011). The transport company was doubly impacted by the war; indeed, first, it was facing a sustained scarcity of staffs who were called to serve in the war, and second, it was competing desperately with the war industries to attract potential employees. In another try to solve this problem, the DSR turned to male Black Detroiter to work as drivers and fare collectors until 1943 when they decided to hire women for the same jobs. Even with all these efforts, it appeared that DSR network could not manage to run at full capacity leaving many of the streetcars and buses in idle state.

In those circumstances, many racial altercations occurred inside the transit system. These travels that included unusual physical proximity with black people lead to raising racial tensions. Many conflicts would occur during the trips, either amid passengers or between passengers and conductors on racial factors. Since Whites and Black did not live in the same neighbourhood, the transit system was the only space linking their both habitations to their workplace.

Black Bottom and the factories/ industry Black Bottom enjoyed a strategic location.

Analysing in the map, the neighbourhood was in deep connection with industrial plants via the transit lines.

Industries and transportation modes were always associated creating waves* of economic opportunities for manufacturing and expenditure (Rodrigue J.-P., 2013). If Detroit is famously known for its automobile industry, it is nonetheless important to note that it was not the only industry present there. In his article, Hyde (2001) goes around the issue of the manufacturing history of the city, demonstrating the diversity of industries like cigars, breweries, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding was overshadowed by the automobile industry (p. 57). But it is in the map published in 1941 by the Detroit Housing Commission that we can easily

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Train Station Auto-Industry Industrial site “Slum” Area Train Black Bottom Area

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Figure 3.15 : The connection of Black Bottom to the industrial sites. Noting the location of “slum” areas was often related to closeness to industrial sites. Map drawn by the author based on Detroit Housing Commission 1941.

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Train Station Housing Projects Auto-Industry Industrial site Train Streetcar lines Bus lines Black Bottom Area

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Figure 3.16 : The connection of Black Bottom to the industrial sites. Noting the location of “slum� areas was often related to closeness to industrial sites. Map drawn by the author based on Detroit Housing Commission 1941 and DSR map.

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read the location of the major industrial areas. Interestingly, this map highlights the location of the areas considered “slums”, as mentioned before the Detroit black population was forced to live in discriminated areas that were afterwards judged by the FHA as slums or undesirable areas. On a side note, this map would be used later in the 1950s as base a reference to produce the “Urban Renewal” program. A program that would force thousands of Black Detroiters to relocate.

Figure 3.17 : Picture taken in 1949 showing a side view of two-story brick building hosting a factory as the sign on building : “Eureka Plating Co. Located at 979 Monroe. (Detroit Public Library)

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The presence of these two elements in the same maps is not unusual. Both areas were having a pejorative image in the eyes of the American citizen. Industrial plants represented the vices of urban life like pollution and noise. This is another reason why the neighbourhood located in proximity to industrial sites ( Black Bottom counted even light industries and factories in its core) were less desirable (Mitchell & Franco, 2016, p. 5). An image that reassured the ideal in many minds.

Seeking the proximity to nature was a reaction to the overcrowded and polluted city (Warner Jr, 1978, p. 5). People were moving as soon as they could financially

Figure 3.17 : Picture taken 1949 of a three-story brick factory building “Federal Plating Co.�located at 1034 St. Aubin. ( Detroit Public Library)

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to settle in the suburbs. As more and more people left the city for bigger houses far away from the expensive city core. The industrial started to follow the trend, first as a prospect to build bigger factories like Ford’s decision to move his factory to Highland Park ( an enclave city in Detroit) then to escape Detroit’s taxes when new factories were built in River Rouge, west the border of Detroit (Bates, 2012).

To encounter the housing shortage his employees were facing, Ford founded in 1919 The Dearborn Realty & Construction Company. In a way, this venture was an attempt to apply mass production to produce affordable housing for the workers as well as demonstrating the efficiency of the industrial concepts inherited from automobile manufacturing (Loeb, 2001). However, the attempt in the real estate construction would be cut short due to the 1921 economic stagnation. With limited sells, the company had to diminish their activities (Bryan, 1997).

Black Bottom to Rock Bottom Black Bottom emerged as an immigration pole for black newcomers, providing quick access to manufacturing sites and services like transit system, shops, and schools…However, racial segregation had its way to disadvantage this neighbourhood once it became predominantly black. By “stacking” more people more than the neighbourhood could absorb, creating a higher density compared to the rest of the city where the conditions of living were hardly humane. Above all the struggles, the Black community proved to be resilient. Neighbourhoods like Black Bottom, Paradise Valley became thriving thanks to their well-known streets notably Hastings and St. Antoine streets. These streets at the level of the city were part of a bigger network of commercial corridors. Many of which were affected by the arrival of the car. In the next chapter dedicated to the Medium Scale, the importance and functioning of these streets would be analysed.

Extending the knowledge on the symbiotic relationship streetcars and these commercial streets toiled.

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Jim Crow laws The term “Jim Crow” derives from the character stereotyping black men in minstrel shows. In these vaudeville and burlesque shows, White actors used make-up to paint a black face and wore wigs and white gloves exacerbating an image of Blacks as being lazy, superstitious, and irresponsible. It was this figure that was used to represent the discrimination laws applied in the United States of America after the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. (Tompkins, 2011) For more than a hundred year, Blacks endured laws that denied them the right to vote, get an education or even access to certain places. From 1865, the Black citizens were controlled in southern States by local and state laws established by the Black Codes. In 1896, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, these codes evolved, when the Supreme Court declared the “separate but equal” facilities to be constitutional. (National Geographic Society, 2020) This phenomenon was translated into separate waiting rooms in bus and train stations, dedicated water fountains, restrooms, bars, and even cemeteries. These laws created separation in spatial distribution. Blacks were not allowed in White neighbourhoods, both Blacks and Whites had dedicated facilities, public pools, phone booths, bars, hospitals, prison. While interracial marriages or relationships were rigorously prohibited. When these rules were defied, their victims often faced arrest, imprisonment, violent threats, and death.

The main purpose of these laws was to ensure white supremacy and economic superiority. With every amendment ratified, new local laws appeared to counter indirectly the new rights voted for Black citizens.

The right to vote was the most attacked one. Indeed, many stratagems were used to marginalize Black men.

For example, by allowing only those whom grandfathers were voter before 1867, most of the Black citizens were disqualified to vote. The laws were enforced by the all-white police and state armed forces, stranded Blacks in a political system that muted them.

Northern cities and some progressive Southern cities were perceived as an asylum for these racism refugees.

The next century would witness an increase in violence towards Blacks. The rise of Ku Klux Klan, a private organization formed in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by Confederate veterans. The Black citizens were pushed into segregated neighbourhood inside cities where they also found safety from the terrorism of the KKK. As a reaction, many riots and protests would animate the quest for equal rights. With the rise of the civil right movement, many advancements would be reached. After the end of the Second World War, the Jim Crow Laws would be removed in 1954 after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that educational segregation was unconstitutional. After the death of Martin Luther King in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Right Act that banned discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin. followed by the Voting Right Act in 1965 to dismantle the laws that prevented Blacks from voting and finally the Fair Housing Act in 1968 to guarantee equity in access to housing and rent.

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Illustration of the character of Jim Crow

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M Introduction

The M scale is predominantly related to the component of Land use and Activities as seen in Wegener & FĂźrst cycle. The impact of transit lines in shaping the land use inside the streetcar neighbourhoods is demonstrated in the distribution of commercial activities. The importance of these transit lines would be more apparent, once the impact of the arrival of the automobile and the disastrous consequences of road widening is studied.

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It has all started with good intentions...

Hitherto, we have seen how the automobile industry influenced the city economic status. Making Detroit an Eldorado for immigrating Black people. It became a place to make money and escape the hostile South. We have also observed how streetcars supported the stretching of the city even though it struggled to maintain a good quality service due to the thirty-year battle with local municipality limiting its expansion before the 1929 Crash and Second World War. In this chapter, the emphasis would be put on how automobile had affected the city on a deeper level. The commercial arteries were the first affected by the arrival of the car. A big part of this study would be based on Kickert’s (2019) research

Figure 4.1 : Picture advertising Lafayette redevelopment project. It was later merged with Gratiot redevelopment project to create Lafayette Park. ( Retrieved from City-Data)

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on the downtown of Detroit. The researcher produced a great collection of maps describing in detail the phenomenon of destruction and reconstruction of parcels in that area. He also indicates the consequences of several policies and political choices on the retails and stores of Downtown. Another element that would be easier to capture at this scale, is the understanding of the implementation of zoning plans/codes in the USA. It is necessary to comprehend how functions and land use were (not) controlled.

The first achievement of the Regional Transportation Plan (see chapter XL) was the Vernor Highway. In 1921, the project envisioned the widening of the existing street linking Michigan Central Station to Eastern Market. The road would be about 24 meters wide and 19 kilometres long. The promise held by the Detroit Automobile Club, the Detroit Real Estate Board and the City Council was that more automobile traffic would bring more clients and increase the value of adjacent lands. As the tendency would continue, the arterial avenues such as Woodward, Gratiot and Michigan, leading to the downtown were approved to be enlarged. However, the first contradiction to the promoted promises emerged.

The footfall which is very primordial to the prosperity of businesses decreased in many sections of the recently constructed highway. As described by the business owners, customers were not inclined to cross the risky highway. This can be explained by the fact that the travel pace for a car is not the same as walking.

The road created served as a place of passage rather than a stopping spot.

Ironically, the widening of the street not only undermined the central businesses but facilitated the increase of suburban shops. Part of the impacted areas was Black Bottom. Indeed, the lower side of Gratiot Avenue was torn down to widen the road and rebuild on the remaining of the plots with the aim for economic expansion. Unfortunate, the 1929 Great Depression put a brake to the ambitions of developers who were supposed to invest in the empty plot that damaged the urban fabric. Many vacant plots would serve afterwards as parking to address the business decline in revenue. (Kickert, 2019, pp. 94-101)

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Legend: Water Parcels Green Train Station Commercial Corridors Train Streetcar lines Bus lines Black Bottom Area

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Figure 4.2 : The connection of Black Bottom to the Commercial strips. Noting the location of commercial strip depended on the passing of transit lines to ensure their viability. Map drawn by the author based on Detroit Housing Commission 1951 and DSR map.

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… Then was the erosion of a structure After this first hit on the commercial strip on Gratiot, Black Bottom became a segregated neighbourhood (as seen in chapter M). The neighbourhood continued to develop economically thanks to the adjustment of its commercial streets. For example, Jefferson Avenue before being an important industrial avenue was a retail centre. Indeed, by 1920s Jefferson Avenue witnessed the withdrawal of mix of high-income apartments and large single-family homes at the establishment of industrial facilities and rail lines (Ryan, 2012). However, Gratiot Avenue, Hastings and St. Antoine streets became a cluster for retails, shops, entertainment and even for industrial activities.

As said previously, the streetcar suburbs pattern is defined by how the streetcar outlines the core of commercial strips from which then the housing clusters. In the case of Black Bottom and many segregated districts, another pattern started to emerge. It was the consequence of a void in the American legislation. Following the Jeffersonians principles, the land governing was placed upon local levels. This is one of the characteristics of the city of “laissezfaire capitalism” described by Marcuse (1987, p 295). Land-use laws were nonexisting before the mid-20s when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Euclid v. Ambler * (Hirt, 2015, pp. 62-63). It helped to strengthen zoning regulations in cities. Indeed, before this policy, the only juridical entity used was the Building Code specific to each city (AWWA (American Water Works Association), 1998, p. 53). The concept of zoning did not exist, it was even seen as an invasion into private property right for a government to dictate the usage of one’s property.

Even after the Euclidian zoning was legislated, and many cities started to adopt zoning codes. Detroit was under pressure from the Property Holders’ Protective Association and United Community Associations not to apply a zoning code. The

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lobbying group was afraid of the impact of the restriction of the zoning ordinance would have on the high-rise development. This battle at the City Hall would last until 1940 when Detroit would adopt its first zoning code (Davis, 1980, p. 479).

At that time, Black Bottom was long been viewed as a neighbourhood infested with polluting industries and less desirable place to live in. In reaction to the similar circumstances other American cities were facing, the Federal Housing Act passed in 1949 by the Congress would serve as a key to solve the spread of “slums” by providing public housing as an alternative. The same year the American Road Builders Association put on the table the proposition to bring the interstates into cities, promoting the benefits it would bring to “eliminate the slum and deteriorated areas” (Rothstein, 2017, p. 137). These ideas would be later adopted in the 1956 Highway Act. Both Acts were serving each completing each other but would not reveal to serving the black population interests in the

Figure 4.2 : Aerial view of Black Bottom, the line drawn marks Lafayette redevelopment project. Picture retrieved from http://www.detroits-great-rebellion.com/Urban-Renewal.html

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long term.

Nevertheless, Detroit was precursor with its Mayor Edward J. Jeffries exposing in 1946, his urban development project called “The Detroit Plan” (Coleman, 2013). Under the slogan of “Blight Elimination”, the main purpose of Jeffries’ plan was to thwart the white flight and attract well-to-do residents to secure the prosperity of Downtown with no big incentive in rehousing the Black Bottom residents (Kickert, 2019, p. 133). Before this forecasted fate, Black Bottom was becoming a landmark for the African American musical outreach.

When faced rejection from the entertainment businesses of Downtown, black artists decided to create their own in Black Bottom. This neighbourhood saw the rise of famous musical figures like Blues singers, Jazz artists -Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie-, where they performed for varied crowds. On the upper side of Gratiot Avenue, Paradise Valley was one of the rare entertainment places where white and black mixed (Black Bottom Neighborhood, 2020). Unfortunately, the self-dependent black community was starting to lose population by the late 1940s when a growing percentage of the population was able to purchase elsewhere like in Twelfth Street was a former Jewish neighbourhood. It served as a refuge for black residents attracted by the free racial bonds. Although the home prices cost was higher than the city average, these new residents were driven to escape the poor conditions of living in the low east side of the city. Moving to Twelfth Street translated their physical climb of the social ladder. Leaving behind residents, landowners and retailers who were unable to sell their property due to the announcement of the Detroit Plan. Their land capital had evaporated, and no government support may well be expected. The typology of the houses did not allow them, as in white areas, to physically relocate their houses (Sugrue, 2014, p. 152).

From Hastings Street to Chrysler Freeway

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Figure 4.3: Axonometric view of Black Bottom before the arrival of the Freeway, drawn by the author

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Figure 4.4 :Axonometric view of Black Bottom after the arrival of the Freeway, drawn by the author

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In his Boogie Chillen’, the blues singer, John Lee Hooker narrates his experience in the music clubs along Hastings Street. He describes a vibrant and animated neighbourhood and a crowded street of people during the night. A scenery is different from the one witnessed in the current Hastings street replaced by Chrysler Freeway.

Before the construction of The Chrysler Freeway started on January 30, 1959, (Barnett, 2004, p. 233) many residents of Black Bottom along with many other displaced Detroiters were struggling in the post-war housing market, and few options for public housing were available ( see chapter S). Ultimately, the below-ground-levelled highway construction not only wiped the Hastings Street (Chrysler highway) but also fractured the physical connection between neighbourhoods and the downtown. Following the same pattern of the 1920 Regional Transportation Plan (see chapter XL), the Detroit Plan abandoned the public transit section of the masterplan. With the removal of the last streetcar line on April 8, 1956 (add a source 30-year war), there was a crucial need for the promised subway and express lines to those who were not able to afford a car. The four lines projected would be emanating from the underground in the downtown area along each of the main expressways. The transit system was essential to Detroiters daily life activities. In Frohardt-Lane work, we can retrieve some of users’ habits or profiles, like housewives on shopping expeditions, schools’ girls, churchgoers alongside the workers in factories.

The following maps show how the transit lines coincide with the commercial corridor and the impact the physical the freeway left. Indeed, the transit lines (streetcars and buses) made way for a clustering of shops, which according to Kickert and Vom Hofe (2017) statistical studies, is a great factor to the thrive of retailers allowing comparison of goods. They also put in place three parameters for the risk of closure like the typology, the size and the mode of access. Knowing that commercial strips like Hastings and Gratiot drove a lot of traffic compared to inner housing streets. It becomes understandable why the congestion created

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by the arrival of the car on the radial axes where streetcars passed, was perceived critical.

Ironically, the same commercial arteries that drove the car traffic and thus the congestion, lead to a car-focused solution, where the destruction of commercial arteries and the streetcar system was favoured. Indeed, the streetcars lines did not have dedicated lanes, which meant that cars would often obstruct the circulation of the streetcars as well as being risky for passengers to board. Giving an overall bad impression of the usage of the streetcar.

Meanwhile, the city had a hard time to adapt to new urban demographic

Figure 4.5 : These Works Progress Administration workers dig up old street rails in Detroit for the Second World War ( Britannica).

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changes. Oppositely to the Black Bottom commercial strips, the stores and businesses present in downtown were less accommodating to the black population. With their higher price tag and segregation internal policies. It was a lose-lose situation, demonstrated by the counterexample of businesses in Downtown that adapted to the new audience, such as Fox Theatre, and the musical entertainment emerging around Motown in Midtown, both of which managed to survive the suburbanisation of activities and the vacancy crisis (Kickert, 2019, p.

177).

Notably, transportation could impact either positively or negatively the productivity, business activity, property values and employment. Which explain why when the Chrysler highway was built, it has improved car driver accessibility and represented an economic interest for those living in the suburbs. However, the highway represented a barrier to pedestrian travel living nearby. The effects took the form of an isolated and isolating land use development patterns and reduced access by other modes.

From Black Bottom to Lafayette Park Lafayette Park represents a miniaturised but tangible example of what Albert Pope calls a “ladder”. He defines the ladder as the result of the fragmentation of the grid. Creating a closed system where discontinuity reign. The ladder is an instrument of “mechanical unity: division, classification, and prescribed response”.

A response that would take the form of a project of an area of 78 acres bounded by Rivard Street, Lafayette Avenue, Orleans Street and Antietam Street.

While the site counted more than fifty intersections with its “open grid”, the project erased most of them leaving less than fifteen intersections. The process of transformation from a built environment to a predominantly “open spatial field”. (Pope, 2014)

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Legend: Road Pedestrian path

Figure 4.6: Illustration drawn by the author representing the eroding grid. In the upper illustration, Black Bottom’s gridiron, based on the map of Detroit Housing Commission. The bottom illustration, the west part of Lafayette Park’s superblock, based on Stamen Design Maps.

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Once the site designed was cleared, construction started in 1956 with a shift in targeted residents. The towers and townhouses built would serve the wellto-do and middle-class families (Lafayette, Nicolet, Joliet, & LaSalle Townhouse Cooperatives, n.d.).

The masterplan was constituted of two section functioning as an isolated giant block:

Figure 4.7 : Scheme of Lafayette Park drawn by the author.

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• Townhouses and Court Buildings were built in 1958-60, the majority of the

twenty-one buildings was 2-story. With a large variety in capacity from two to four bedrooms apartments, • Pavilion and Lafayette Towers were three 22-two stories buildings.

While the Pavilion was built between 1956-58, the two other twin towers were erected in 1963. Each building contained three hundred to three hundred forty apartments.

Lafayette Park is famously known to be the biggest collection of residential buildings designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The construction took three years finishing to what is considered a significant example of the Bauhaus vision of residential living. The new residential complex was devoid of car traffic, and pedestrian-focused design where streets left the place to a park and walkable pathway to diverse amenities and of course to parking structures (Historic Designation Advisory Board, 2002). On a side note, the supremacy of space can be read in the attention to preserve the landscape was so advanced that an underground system to circulate the garbage was created!

The compacted plans, the all-glass façades and introduction of new material like aluminium created a novelty in the residential architectural scene in Detroit.

The project per se was a response to the suburban ideal success. However, this answer came at the cost of the suppression of an entire community. The men in power decided on copying the suburban ideal revolving around the car adoption instead of improving the transit system already existing in the city and revitalising the already exciting neighbourhoods.

The aftermath Amid the struggle to find better housing, black workers suffered the postwar economic slow-down. The industries and factories that were the economic heart of the city started to tumble. Leading to a series of layoffs and even closings.

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Unsurprisingly, there were more redundancies among the black workers under the policy of “Last hired, first fired�. (Walter P. Reuther Library Wayne State University, n.d.). The 1950s were marked by a loss of more than a hundred thousand jobs in the factories from which seventy per cent affected residents of the east side of Detroit (Uprising of 1967, n.d.). Many were the reasons to this fiasco, the switch to automation technology which improved the efficiency of work requiring less unskilled workers, the search for bigger and more accommodating factories; first in the city outskirts and then to Sunbelt states where the cost of labour was cheaper, less regulated and with undeveloped worker unions. With unemployment rising among Black Detroiters and decreasing living environments. Crime related activities rose continuously for the rest of the decade, smearing the image of central Detroit. Added to that, the underfunded schools and development of suburban shopping centres featuring parking lots, terminated any reasons for the affluent residents to live or to shop in Detroit (Kickert, 2019, pp. 168-169).

The 1960s would be marked by a series of displacements and attacks on Black Detroiters. The great benefits promised by the Urban Renewal revealed to be disappointing, failing to attract people to establish inside the city. Besides Lafayette Park (See S-scale chapter), which engendered more taxes than the entire emptied area of Black Bottom (Kickert, 2019, p. 174).But left many black people in the frustration of finding new housing and activities to sustain their lives. Continuous tensions reached a tipping point in the summer of 1967, the 12th Street Riot (where many old residents of Black Bottom were living) sparked after an umpteenth police raid against the black gathering. Violence escalated, along with the 50 million dollars property damage, 508 victims were recorded, 43 of which were fatal. The riot would last two months but its consequences accelerated a steady white flight toward the suburbs.

In conclusion, the passing of the freeway had numerous consequences after and even before its construction. The loss-in-value of properties, the displacement and the urban fracture mixed with the insufficient intervention of the state to

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help the displaced residents revealed to be harmful to the vitality of Detroit. On the other hand, a shopping mall located near the highway interchanges were bursting, the American society was shifting its culture and ideals around the highways and lanes and its vehicles need. To satirise, the free-ways brought the suburbs with predominantly white ghettos (or gated communities) at the expense of Black neighbourhoods.

Undoubtedly, the conditions of living were one of the main causes of distress in the Black community. Many options were created, even though they were demonstrated to be insufficient. The next chapter would study the microscale of the city, the core of the life of any person, the house. Identifying the typologies of housing that existed in Detroit and the many factors leading to their creation. The extent impact of transportation on housing would be revealed

Figure 4.8 : Picture taken in 1963, showing members and supporters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People picket outside of the Open Occupancy Hearing at Cobo Hall, Detroit, (Detroit News Photograph Collection)

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Futurama Between 1939 and 1940, the Flushing Meadows Corona Park hosted a world’s fair dedicated to the future.

A vision of the future of cities in 1960, through the eyes of General Motors. Futurama, as they named it, was an exhibition of the world centred around the car. (Patton, 2014) The exhibition was innovative for that time with moving chairs equipped with sound, they were turning around a model representing five hundred thousand buildings, and one million trees and fifty thousand automobiles. (Snyder, 2010) The fair contained miniaturised models of what cities shall look like in the future. With geometric sculptures, extensive use of glass and chromium. The presence of the International Style was influential next to the Streamlined Moderne style of Art Deco. Holding a vision for a city up to date with the developments in technology and continuous renew with integrations of towers and skyscrapers that were defined by highways penetrating the city. The same highways that would be link city-dwellers to suburbia and other cities. A model where life is divided between a machine and productive influenced city and countryside-like residential suburbia.

The ideas defended in this fair inspired tremendously the shaping of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944.

As Franklin Roosevelt requested the advice of Norman Bel Geddes, who was the visionary behind the fair.

Geddes’ vision of the transportation future for the country was undoubtfully absorbed by automobile seen as efficient and powerful. With more than five million visitors, Futurama was a successful advertisement for the automobile industry. Shaping an ideal world focused on cars.

In 1964, a second fair would be organised and many of the vision of 1939 was already realised. Automobiles ownership at that time exceeded the initially projected numbers. In a period of thrive and power peak.

The giant of the automobile showed a more conquering vision of the world. While General Motors showed a colony on the moon. Chrysler brought real moon rockets. The second edition of Futurama presented machinery capable of dominating inaccessible territories like oceans, deserts. And as for rain forests, their destiny would be cut by an atomic-powered machine that would with a laser cutter, free the way for agricultural lands and freeways (Patton, 2014).

Luckily, many of the envisioned engines never saw the light. As apprehensions about safety and fuel economy increased after the OPEC fuel crises and rising environmental concerns. If the two editions of Futurama were not realised completely. Many of the ideas were translated into reality with an influence felt until today on American architecture and industrial design.

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Interlude III Introduction

Futurama International Exposition in New York 1939 - 1940.

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S Detroit- pattern of growth

Housing represents an important aspect of the living of any city dweller. In this last scale, we would discuss the various housing typologies witnessed in Detroit.

As well as an ethnographic analysis of the city.

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The S scale outlines the impact of every mode of transportation on housing and land use. It would reveal the specificity of Detroit compared to other cities, demonstrating the consequences of a preference for a specific typology of housing on the global urbanisation of the city. From Black Bottom Neighbourhood to the Brewster Project passing by Dearborn suburbs, and through pieces of testimonies, we would capture how people lived and experienced the city.

Victorian Houses, the beginning of an ideal The previous chapters demonstrated how the city prospered timidly compared to other eastern American cities. However, the prosperity brought by the development of the railways and fluvial transport helped the industrial revolution which led to the rise of a new and well-to-do social class in Detroit and the United States in general. This period is known as the Victorian Era, the period of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901. Thus, Victorian architecture is not a single style but rather a collection of designs that includes Second Empire, Queen Anne, Stick, Shingle, and Richardsonian Romanesque (Copley Internet Systems, n.d.). With the advances of the time, designers adopted new materials and technologies to create homes with decorative architectural details and affordable metal parts.

In addition to the extensive use of decoration from different eras was applied to the exteriors (Craven, 2018). These houses were characterised by asymmetrical facades with steeply pitched, irregularly shaped roofs, usually with a dominant forward-facing gable, textured shingles to avoid the appearance of smooth walls.

Full or partial width asymmetrical porch, usually one storey high and extended along one or both sidewalls.

Ornamentation and overabundance are constant in Victorian homes.

Decoration supersedes the simple function of architecture. Innovation focused mainly on the design of new, more modern, and sophisticated ways of adding decoration and ornamentation to the houses of the period. These houses almost

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Figure 5.1 : Plans of the Ransom Gillis House, enhanced by the author.

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always had at least two floors, often three. If there was a third floor, the house would have dormer windows and turrets in the attic. The interior of the house tended to be unique and often disjointed in its complexity. Multiple bedrooms, second-floor balconies, double doors, ornate staircases, and detailed interior finishing are just some of the typical features of Victorian homes and floor plans.

High ceilings, deep arcades, carved woodwork, and ornate chandeliers create the scene for the opulent interior of a Victorian home. Living rooms were usually

Figure 5.2 : Photograph of The Ransom Gillis House in 1876 (Burton Historical Collection)

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ostentatiously decorated with chequered drapes, heavy tapestries, dark woods, fireplaces with fancy mantels and gilded panelling. Many of these rooms were not used (HomeAdvisor, n.d.). Nevertheless, these rooms would not stay unused for long, when the streetcars arrived and enabled more of the elite and middle-class to leave their old neighbourhood and their big houses. Brush Park and Jefferson Avenue counted many of these houses. When judged to be too close to industry nuisances their owners moved further and rented their houses to newcomers.

To relieve the growing demand the houses would be subdivided to boardinghouses for a daily rent the immigrants (Kickert, 2019, pp. 27-28). It did not take long before the houses became overcrowded and inadequate to host more new residents.

Few Victorian houses survived the twentieth century, The Ransom Gillis House represents one of them and shall give an idea of the houses that existed.

The final brick of the house was set in 1878 after two years of construction. The house was built for Ransom Gillis, a general dry goods supplier. The house was within Brush Park district, a neighbourhood hosting the elite of Detroit. It was one of the first to adopt the Venetian Gothic style,( a very fashionable style this time thanks to John Ruskin’s book “ The Stones of Venice” (Historic Designation Advisory Board)). Shortly after completion, the house was sold starting a cycle of sell-buy between well-to-do families that would end in 1919. In line with the trends of that time, the house was transformed into a lodging house. While the coach house (a structure housing the horse-drawn carriages and the related tack (Berg, 2005)) was converted to a workshop for pottery then to an auto repair shop, a battery service shop and eventually to a filling station before being reconstructed to host a restaurant in 1935. After years of usage, the house and structure were left to natural decay until 2016 when the house was restored to become the emblem of a newly developed residential neighbourhood. (Kossik, n.d.)

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Foursquare House, a streetcar production After discussing the Victorian architecture that marked for a moment the architectural production of the city. It is important to acknowledge the impact of the constrained urban growth of Detroit during its first two hundred years.

Since the city remained with a small population there were not any incentives to produce a variety of denser housing, like apartment blocks or row houses (Grunow, 2015). Another trait, that distinguishes Detroit is its preference for stretching out instead of growing up. Generally, in the other cities, homebuilders tended to purchase and demolish the buildings the central areas and replaced them by high-rise buildings. However, in Detroit, homebuilders opted for a simpler solution. By building on unlimited topographically outskirts lands, they could make more earnings and build faster. They constructed on newly annexed communities, streetcar lines and parks to raise land values. (Kickert, 2019, p. 55) Finally, the fact that the booming of Detroit coincided with the improvement of the efficiency of the streetcar system might explain the rapid extension and adoption of this type of land use. Indeed, if the economic boom of Detroit happened earlier when the streetcar was still depending on the inefficient horsecar-drawn streetcars, there would have been a pressing need for a denser and higher residential housing.

Eventually, Detroiters embraced the idea of ownership of a single-detached home as an ultimate symbol of success mimicking the Victorian houses. Promoted by the impulse of local banks and financial institutions to build single-family houses, as explains Grunow in his article (A brief history of housing in Detroit, 2015) “banks routinely loaned 100 per cent to developers to build and sell tracts of homes in what was then a very “New Detroit.” ” (2015) The financial power implemented the beginning of a new ideal, a new standard. The American singlefamily, it became the target for many Detroiters.

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Figure 5.3 : An example of a brochure published in the 1908 : Model No. 115 Sears Catalog Home (Sears Roebuck Catalog).

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Figure 5.4 : Upper collage made by the author, of the houses in East Lafayette Avenue in 1949 from pictures retrieved from the Burton Historic Collection.

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Figure 5.5 : Bottom collage made by the author, of the houses in Monroe Street in 1949 from pictures retrieved from the Burton Historic Collection.

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Figure 5.6 : Axonometric view, drawn by the author, of the houses in East Lafayette Avenue in 1949 from picture retrieved from the Burton Historic Collection.

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Figure 5.7 : Axonometric view drawn by the author of one of the houses in East Lafayette Avenue in 1949 from picture retrieved from the Burton Historic Collection.

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Figure 5.8 : A prototype of floor plan that could be speculated to resemble the interior of houses in the houses in Black Bottom. Retrieved from https://searshomes.org/index.php/2012/11/08/the-glendale-a-good-substantial-house-of-nice-appearance/

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architectural style but the detachedness from other houses. It is the start of the American Dream. The arrival of the streetcars would mark the arrival of the Foursquare House. This type of building came as a reaction against the Victorian over-ornamented style. Indeed, the Foursquare House represented more a new typology rather than a new style. It appeared in a variety of architectural styles, the most popular being the Colonial Revival. It provided many advantages, thanks to its efficient and simple form, the floor plan was easy to standardise.

It was also economical to build and extend. It had very often, two- and one-half stories with a pyramidal rood and dormers, and a raised basement. One of the most common plans was a formal entry with the stairs to the second floor, and a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the main floor. On the second floor was divided into four equal squares with the bathroom in one quarter and three bedrooms, though four-bedroom variants were common. (Antique Home Style, 2015) (Ames, 2002).

Consequences of the Wars Black Bottom was characterised by a wide range of architectural styles and a rich set of housing options from single-family, duplex, and one-story houses. The houses in these typologies of neighbourhoods were narrow and little spaced between each other.

During the First World War, the houses witnessed the first pressures to house more people. On the other side, Paradise Valley encompassed some of the oldest residences in the city. Built between the 1860s and 1870s, their landlords were absentee, lacking any effort to maintain the houses. When the Great Migration started, old hotels and row houses were converted into small apartments and boarding houses. Twenty-five per cent of them were without modern amenities like plumbing and full kitchen facilities (Sugrue, 2014). The choice of subdivisions of old dwellings instead of building new ones can be attributed to the First World 121

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War. Indeed, The War effort monopolised the resources which left no openings for private house building. House occupied previously by Jewish families were subdivided and rented for a higher rent to Black newcomers. (Bates, 2012, p.

155) In fact, in 1916, Black migrants rented homes without baths and frequently without electricity or gas for four times the average rent in the city. While it represented often from forty to fifty per cent of their paycheck, the average in the city was sixteen per cent (Wouldiams, 2009).

The same scheme would recur during and after the Second World War. Each floor was arranged into a short-term apartment. This situation increased the already high dense and overloaded dwellings in the segregated neighbourhood (Sugrue, 2014, p. 127). The condition of living was critical since the lack of garbage collection and deficient sewer system favoured disproportionally the spread of epidemics like tuberculosis and influenza in the community (Van Dusen, 2019). And due to the extensive usage of wood, the maintenance of these houses required to be more recurrent than the brick or stone houses. As a result, black residents who represented often the third generation in these houses were living in bleak conditions. Sugrue (2014) brings to light through a short letter addressed to Michigan Governor G. Mennen Wouldiams in 1949, from Ethel Johnson, a black Detroiters describing her living conditions and her struggle to find an adequate renting. “My husband, baby and I sleep in the living room. When it rain or snow it leap through the roof. Because of the dampnes of the house my baby have a bad cold. We have try very hard to fine a place, and every where we go we have been turn down because of my baby.” (130) Another testimony found in Conot’s work, American Odyssey (1974), where he describes the journey of Irma and her husband Donald Stallings. After being unable to pay rent in their apartment in Black Bottom, they rented a basement apartment in the Gratiot Redevelopment Area. In reality, the “apartment” was a portioned basement service room. The Building’s furnace served as a partition wall between the kitchen and bathroom. Creating inconvenience when the coal

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was loaded, it would fill the room with smoke. Ironically, in winter, the floor would be flooded with water from leaking plumbing, creating a frozen and slippery floor (407-408). The description of Donald Stallings pictures quite an unpleasant residence which can be extended to define the general situation of Black Bottom residents. They had little to no accommodations and conveniences that other Detroiters enjoyed, like electricity and running water for examples.

The installations of toilets would be only added under the pressure of health official or in the intention to raise the price of rent. (Wouldiams, 2009, p. 79).

Some living situations were even deadly, as the death of Miss Beatrice Corley can prove it. She was 34 living at 2476 Hastings. She was living in an extremely

Figure 5.9 : Photograph of one of the houses ( Burton Historical Collection)

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Figure 5.10 : Upper picture : Photograph of a woman doing laundry in kitchen. Washtub and stove in foreground; china cabinet, chair and chest in background. Handwritten on back 1906.( Burton Historical Collection) Figure 5.11 : Bottom picture : photograph of a bedroom containing two beds, two dressers, and three large mirrors. Handwritten on back: “Beaubien Street House.�( Burton Historical Collection)

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Figure 5.12 : Upper picture: Photograph of a home located at 2614 Beaubien Street taken in 1930s, showing a kitchen and dining room with two chairs, a table, rocking chair, flattop stove, and storage cabinet.( Burton Historical Collection) Figure 5.13 : Bottom picture : Photograph taken in 1938, three women and one man standing in yard; laundry hangs from clothesline. Washtub in foreground.( Burton Historical Collection)

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“deplorable and squalid” house. She shared an improvised room between two pillars of the building foundation with her husband. After suffering for many weeks and being denied entrance to the Receiving Hospital the day previous to her death (Coleman, 2014, p 19).

Even if the situation were harsh, for many Black newcomers it would still be better than living in the south as described by the famous boxer Joe Louis, the settlement his family had “in Macomb Street. It was kind of crowded there, but the house had toilets indoors and electric lights. Down in Alabama, we had outhouses and kerosene lamps. (Barrow, 2018, p. 214)

Figure 5.14 : Brewster Projects (Burton Historical Collection)

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Figure 5.15 : Axonometric drawing of the Douglass Projects.

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Figure 5.16 :Axonometric drawing zoom on one of the towers of Douglass Projects.

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Unluckily, there were no interior pictures taken of the housing. However, the following pictures could serve as an overview of the evolution of Black Bottom situation. And give a glimpse of the interior and living conditions of Black families.

Additionally, the old wood-frame houses were at risk of catching fire. The overcrowding conjugated with an outdated electrical and heating systems leads to a disproportionately high percentage of residential fires occurring inside Black neighbourhoods (Sugrue, 2014). As seen in the preceding chapters, there were many attempts (with limited success) to resolve the situation. Chronologically we would cover the most notable housing projects linked to Black Bottom.

The Brewster- Douglass Housing Projects In almost every big American city, you can find high-rise housing buildings. They are usually referred to as The Projects. These developments were publicly funded by the allocations of the New Deal Policy and later the 1937 Housing Act. The first model introduced in Detroit was the Brewster Housing Project and Parkside Projects. While the latter was built on vacant lands in a white community. The Brewster Project was instead dedicated to black families and required the destruction of another dense Black neighbourhood. It was a result of White communities refusing to incorporate housing amenities nearby them.

The work began in 1935, when 701 units of 2-story row houses and 3-story apartments buildings were constructed (The University of Richmond, n.d.)

(Wouldiams, 2009). The project was following the recommendations (except for racial inclusion) of Elizabeth Wood who was a public housing pioneer. She pleaded for the integration of shops, churches and parks to create a sense of neighbourhood and community belonging (Lamber, 1993). These garden apartments projects were completed in 1938 and were quite an upgrade for many of the black middle-class who left Black Bottom. Three years later, the Frederick Douglass Apartments erected with 1 300 units. They contained a collection of 129

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two 6-story and six 14-story high-rise buildings. The residential complex was named the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects and housed between 8 000 to 10 000 residents (Wouldiams, 2009).

The towers contained a repetitive and modern plan. Each floor included eight apartments regrouped around the circulation system, thus forming a crossshaped plan. The total floor surface of the two-bedroom apartment was smaller than a typical suburban house. It is important to note that the management committee was selective, targeting employed middle-class residents. However, for many of the residents, the projects were a temporary choice. After the rise of tension and 1967 Riots, many moved to more well-heeled neighbourhoods. With less constraining selection rules, many poor families managed to move into the Brewster projects, being unable to maintain a good estate the buildings fell into a spiral of decay.

If the Brewster-Douglass Housing Project was a relief for the Black Bottom residents who were struggling to find decent housing. They reveal institutional discrimination separating blacks and whites. Leading a route to a new pattern of displacement of Black residents. A pattern that would mark the end of Black Bottom to give way to Lafayette Park in the name of “slum clearance�.

Dearborn; Ford’s White Suburbia Dearborn is a small city located sixteen kilometres west of Detroit. It was a major step in the route connecting Detroit to Chicago. This strategic position made it a rational choice for Ford to establish its factory complex. The Dearborn Complex was finalised in 1928, becoming the largest integrated factory in the world at that time. This economic expansion brought attraction to the city. The thousands of workers needed to be housed. While many workers were buying a two hundred dollars-lot, where they built a five hundred small house. It was a temporary solution until they manage to save enough money to build a bigger home on the 130

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same lot (Bryan, 1997).

After many attempts, only the Molony Subdivision would be accomplished.

The first group of houses started in 1919. The project was realised by the Dearborn Realty and Construction Company under the indirect supervision of Ford and its company. The subdivision was close by the Henry Ford & Son tractor plant.

Hosting a workforce of more than four hundred men, who often did not have access to the car and were unfavourable to the long commute (usually more than half an hour) (Oldenburg, 2015). More than a simple answer to an evident housing problem. The project was driven by three main directives, a sense of singularity to the houses avoiding the cookie-cutter effect. Larger housing adapted to the typical-size family. Attention to the quality of materials used in the construction (Walker, 2019)

Figure 5.17 : Photo of Molony subdivision District taken in 1919 (Collections of The Henry Ford)

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To comply with these demands, Albert Wood, the architect in charge of the project created six different designs placed intermittently any sensation of repetition. Though the construction was fast and efficient, the houses were sold for a higher price than the average. While the first ninety-four houses were sold quickly, the following year the sells staggered due to the move of the Tractor Plant operations to Rouge Plant.

The houses were reputed to be durable. Their floor plans were configured differently from one another. However, the distribution was similar in all of them.

On the first floor, there were the day uses, the living room, dining room, and the kitchen. While the second floor had the night uses, with the bathroom for a minimum of three bedrooms (Oldenburg, 2015).

Even if the project was not making profits. It established a precedent, an ideal.

Dearborn was becoming an example of suburban life with a better environment for families and their children. It established Dearborn as a place where the workingclass people were able to own a house. The city was economically and racially discriminating. By excluding the less-skilled workers and the Black population.

Indeed, almost seventy per cent of the resident in Dearborn were Whites, and fifty-seven per cent of them were owners. If Ford was encouraging mixing in the workplace, his views on racial spatial distribution were segregationist. In his words, he argues that “Race lines are fixed. Nature punishes transgression with destruction”, an idea that takes roots in his theory that “ the Negro does not want to crowd in among the whites; what he does want is the air, sunlight, space and sanitation which are to be had in white residential sections. He should have all of these things in his quarter” (Barrow, 2018, p. 213) According to historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, the saying “The sun never set on a Negro in Dearborn,” was common between the residents of Dearborn. Racism promoted by the city mayor Orville Hubard, who declared that “as far as he was concerned, it was against the law for Negroes to live in his suburb.” (Lowen, 2018, p. 202)

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In the meantime, White residents of Dearborn as many other suburbanites enjoyed better conditions. During the1930s, the families took advantage of their gardens to grow vegetables to counter the rise of prices, while in Detroit the thrift garden program of the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee supplied food for more than twenty thousand people. Many families spent time indoors, due to lack of money to spend on leisure time hobbies such as cinemas (Konkel, 2018) In the 1950s the daily life was described in a documentary found in King Rose Archives. It displayed a typical day in the fifties (at a time Blacks were still struggling to find adequate housing). Between dedicated roles and spaces for men and women. The head of the family was an automobile worker. As a union worker, his work at the factory enabled him to obtain a mortgage to build his house in the 40s. And the role of the wife to take care of the house and the children. The video represented an idyllic living environment, as to promote life in the suburbs. Enjoying conveniences, like radios, refrigerator, remarkably many of the services were in a walking distance like “neighbourhood shopping markets”.

While Dearborn is taken here as an example, this model of segregation can be applied to many other suburbs of Detroit. Indeed, out of fifty-nine suburbs of Detroit, only eleven could be considered as racially mixed. (Lowen, 2018) And many of them hosted neighbourhoods applying racial covenants that restricted the selling or rent to Blacks. It would even become a marketing tool for real estate agencies (Bates, 2012). Advertisement like “This tract is exclusive and restricted” or in the case of Dearborn “Keep Dearborn Clean” were very common to promote a racial homogeneity excluding Blacks and other minorities.

The colour of the house When studied apart, the situation of living of both Blacks and White seemed antagonistic. Through the accessibility and conditions of housing, there was a clear gap in quality of life and on how both experienced the city and its amenities.

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Figure 5.18 :The Supremes walking from Brewster-Douglass( Burton Historical Collection)

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S - Scale

The deprive that many Blacks faced as a low working-class force was visible in the workplace, the housing and even in the public space. The situation of living put prejudice on segregated communities. Creating fear in the mind of Whites from the presence of Blacks in their neighbourhood. As they saw it as a risk of devaluating their property. Suburbanisation was seen as a solution for whites to escape many problems of the city, pollution, traffic, and “Black presence�.

While the middle-class families were able to enjoy the post-war progress of the country. Black Detroiters saw themselves impacted economically, spatially, and physically. With limited resources and access to health and education, there were not able to climb the social ladder. However, either in the suburbs or in Detroit city, there was a constant of preference towards detached single-family houses.

A consequence of a long indoctrination toward the ideal of a single property.

The concluding chapter shall discuss the grounds of this tendency.

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Black pattern of of growth growth Black Bottom Bottom -- pattern

Levittown The Levittown was a project of construction led by Abraham Levitt and his two sons in 1947. After the success of their first project in Nassau County, Long Island, the building planned communities set the codes of building American suburbs. While they did not create the concept of suburbs, they managed to democratise the American dream. The instability of the early decades of the twentieth century, and the Cold War atmosphere, pushed the American families to look for stability and security in the suburban life (Galyean, 2015).

In the same spirit of Jefferson agrarian ideals, the building of the new communities was made to be antagonist to everything that could remind the city and urban life. However, this time the enemy was not the aristocratic system but socialism. For instance, the suppression of urban grid-like sense in favour of curvilinear design to give an impression of on-hill village. The aim of the curves was to reduce the traffic speed and noise inside the community.

Levitt described his operations to fit more manufacturing rather than building. Creating a cookie-cutter concept aiming to respond to the high demand for cheap housing. The demand was driven by the 1948 Housing Bill, allowing millions of Americans (5 per cent down payment) and veterans (0 per cent) to access to cheap mortgages. Owning a house revealed to be cheaper than renting an apartment in the city. The uniformity of these new residential projects did not only stop at the houses but to race and economical status. Indeed, at the purchase of a property in Levitt, the lease was signed contained a provision preventing the tenant from allowing non-Caucasian race to live or access the community. White residents justified their racist segregation as an act of patriotism and referenced their “Americanism” to counter criticism. They libelled their detractors as communist.

As Kenneth T. Jackson (1985) asserts in Crabgrass Frontier, The Levittown and suburbia in general are the formal completion of American separatism, he describes suburbia as a representation of “a conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the private automobile, upward mobility, the separation of the family nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and the tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness.”

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Interlude S - Scale

Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania

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IV

CONCLUSION

Conclusion

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Through this journey of spatial scales, many questions found their answers, while many answers led to other questions. The way to look at Detroit evolved as the study of its urban transformation progressed. Analysing the city at the XLscale provided insights on the factors impacting on the city’s morphology, like the networks sustaining its development. Among them, transportation networks seemed particularly structuring, in that they contributed to define land use, therefore fixing the spatial distribution of population and activities. The design of such networks was not left to hazard but orchestrated politically and governed by the capital-holders’ interests. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, those interests were focused on the construction of the streetcar network, a transit system irrigating the old Detroit and sticking the city together. At that moment, as explored in the L-scale, Black Bottom as a housing pole was well connected to most of the major employing industries and next to downtown. It was a racially diverse, and an economically thriving neighbourhood that attracted many liberal professionals and retailers into its old wooden, semi-detached structures.

The massive introduction of the motorised private vehicle allowed new investments to happen outside the old city and into the nearby suburbs. The local expansion of the car and housing industry attracted new workers, Blacks coming mostly from the South. The progressive degradation of its housing stock and the ruling racial segregation transformed Black Bottom into a dominantly “black” neighbourhood, whose inhabitants lacked any perspective of growth and social inclusion. To add insult to injury, the construction of the freeway inside the city and across Black Bottom, as explained in the M-scale, destroyed its central nerve, the commercial strip of Hastings Street, and transformed the once vibrant neighbourhood into a slum.

The interdependencies between transport and urban form are somehow revealed in this short story. If the streetcar marked an era of an open grid city, where activities settled around strips and avenues, the arrival of private cars forced the erosion of the grid into superblock containing monofunctional activities.

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Conclusion

But the streetcar also marked the beginning of distancing between residential and working places, of functional segregation, since it made it possible to travel longer distances at still an affordable price. Above all, it made enabled a longcherished dream, owning a detached single-family house and being surrounded by people you considered your equals. A dream that preceded the arrival of the private automobile, as we could investigate at the S-scale.

All this brings us back to the cycle explained at the beginning of the master thesis: the feedback cycle between transportation and urbanisation. It turns out to be a feedback cycle between capital and urbanisation too, where transportation appears to be a major instrument for capital accumulation.

Indeed, the realisation and expansion of a new transportation system demand big investments, but it equally constitutes a quick way of increasing the land value along with the infrastructure it provides. It is only understandable that this mechanism was known to many speculative landowners who sought to increase the value of their land by stretching lines of streetcar rails. The following major industry, the automobile industry, brought with it a new round of investments, this time in the form of superhighways connecting the city to its suburbs, whose urbanisation process was part of a strategy of capital accumulation too. The destructive consequences of relatively un-mediated capital mobility should be part and parcel of such conversation even though it is a subject that was not explicitly discussed in the previous pages.

However, the importance of discussing this matter could have an answer to many big questions pending around the process of urbanisation of Detroit. The answer could be found in the analysis of David Harvey (2008) of the capitalismdriven urbanisation. He founded his work on Marx materialist thinking. He argues that cities are (the result of) geographic and social concentrations of capital surpluses. Those surpluses were amassed by the upper class, a happy few detaining the capital. Harvey’s image of this phenomenon is described as “surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody� (2008, p.2). The words of Harvey resonate in the investigation of Detroit contained in 141

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the previous pages, while simultaneously casting light on the broader process of sudden growth and subsequent rapid decadence characterising this city.

The wealth accumulated by the automobile and related industries was quickly invested in building skyscrapers and suburban housing tracts, encouraging the newly formed white middle-class to own a single-family house beyond the city limits. No other city in the United States spread as quickly as Detroit did, which can help to explain the characterless neighbourhoods, leaving Downtown as the only strong marker of the city space. When building with wood, the intention was directed toward speed and profits, not towards resilience, which impacted later the obduracy of those same structures and neighbourhoods once they were left behind induced by capital surpluses. Capital flew to the suburbs, as the white middle-class did, knew no physical or natural barriers and was largely facilitated by transportation investments driven by the state (Ryan, 2012). The price of this relentless capital accumulation process was paid by the racial minorities and the working class. Black workforce contributed to the generation of that surplus with its work but was excluded from the wealth it created.

The city itself suffered from this excavation of wealth and population for the benefit of the suburbs. Indeed, the suburbanisation that started in the twenties and expanded in the fifties emptied the tax-base of the city. It made it difficult to continue a normal provision of public services, like schools or care, hence stabilising the social and racial injustices as well since only the poor had remained. The usual response by city agencies was to lure new taxpayers into the city, both residents and companies. The LaFayette Park is exemplary on that respect: demolish dis-invested parts of the city, like Black Bottom had become, to erect new developments that might bring back some tax revenues both from the real estate operation and the new residents. A decade later, General Motors announced to the city its plans to build a new assembly plant. The city cleared another neighbourhood, Poletown, to make a place for it, to discover shortly after that the egregious effort only generated a few jobs and the entire plant went bankrupt a few years later. Capital always flows to areas where land is cheaper, 142

Conclusion

and development is easier and more profitable. Governments absorb risk and spend their money on the non-profitable part of the development. This is the way urban growth goes, we see it again and again, in many other projects that followed (such as GM Center, Ford Field and most recently the Qline Streetcar), a genuine expression of an early “urban mega-project”. Those projects, as Harvey explains, are projects that took place in the city to serve the interests of the big capital. It is an urban development driven by the sole intention to make profit directed to only a limited upper class.

The case of Detroit is no historical accident. What happened in Detroit could be easily extrapolated to many other American cities and today to many metropolitan cities. Cities like Casablanca, my hometown, where the capital surplus is invested in mega-projects (the Grand Mosque of Hassan II, malls, marinas, etc.) in total disconnection with the local environment. And where the same pattern of social injustice is reproduced: land speculators push urban renewal and people are displaced in the name of slum removal. The spaces are becoming more and more privatised either physically or economically. And the slums removed would be replaced by multi-storey slums elsewhere.

It goes without saying that the noticeable impact this consumption of land had had on the environment. The first source of wealth! From financial crises to urban crises, Detroit as a case of capitalist urbanisation brings to light the limits of this model. It quickly showed the vices of this system and the repercussion it has on its victims. If one thing Detroit could teach us, it would be the urgency of acting for urban and social justice, by acknowledging the impact of urban decisions on the fate of the city and its citizens.

To conclude, as Oscar Wilde (1910) said in his book The Soul of Man Under Socialism : “The recognition of private property has harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It made gain, not growth its aim.” (p. 7)

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