Local Stories in Michigan
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Music History·Wayne County
Martha Reeves At The Fox
Martha Reeves was headlining a run of hometown shows at the Fox Theatre on Woodward Avenue on Sunday 23 July 1967, the top of a package called the Swingin' Time Revue. Before dawn that day a police raid on a 12th Street blind pig had set off what became the deadliest disorder in the city's history, and by the afternoon show police had reached the theatre with word that it was spreading.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Bagley Avenue Shed
The first automobile Henry Ford ever built was put together in a brick shed behind the rented half of a double house at 58 Bagley Avenue, on the block now occupied by the Michigan Building. Ford was working as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company, and he spent his evenings in the shed on a light, tiller-steered machine with bicycle wheels that he called the Quadricycle. In the early hours of 4 June 1896 it was finished, and it was too wide for the door.
History·Wayne County
The Blind Pig On 12th Street
The 1967 Detroit uprising began at 9125 12th Street, now Rosa Parks Boulevard, in a second-floor room above a printing shop. By day it was the office of the United Community League for Civic Action. After hours it was a blind pig, an unlicensed bar, and before four on the morning of Sunday 23 July the police vice squad raided it. They expected a few customers and found more than eighty people at a party for servicemen back from Vietnam. Arresting everyone took time.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Dodge Brothers' Shop
John and Horace Dodge ran their machine shop at Hastings Street and Monroe Avenue, where a casino parking garage now stands, and the first Fords on the road began there. The brothers had made bicycles in Windsor, opened a shop in the Boydell Building on Beaubien in 1900, and supplied engines and transmissions to Ransom Olds before moving to a larger plant on the corner by 1903.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Dodge Main Wildcat
Dodge Main, the plant John and Horace Dodge moved into in Hamtramck in 1910, grew into a Chrysler complex of dozens of buildings that employed tens of thousands at its peak. By 1968 its workforce was by one estimate seventy percent Black, under a management, a union local and a city hall that one observer described as essentially Polish.
Music History·Wayne County
The Donovan Building
The Donovan Building stood at 2457 Woodward Avenue, and it was the last Detroit headquarters of Motown Records. Albert Kahn designed the ten-storey office block, which opened in December 1923 and took the name of Timothy R. Donovan, who had it built. Motown's first home was Hitsville USA at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, a house bought in 1959, where a photographer's studio at the back became the recording room. As the company grew it spread along the boulevard until it held eight properties.
Architecture·Wayne County
The Durant Building
Cadillac Place on West Grand Boulevard was meant to be called the Durant Building, after William C. Durant, the salesman who had built General Motors out of Buick in 1908. Pressed by his board for a permanent headquarters, Durant agreed in 1919 to buy the block between Cass and Second, and Albert Kahn designed a limestone complex of four fifteen-storey wings on a two-storey base. Ground was broken on 2 June 1919. Durant did not last until the building was finished.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Eagle Boat Building
The Ford Rouge complex, later the largest factory in the world, began as a shipyard for a war Henry Ford had publicly opposed. In January 1918 the Navy, its yards full, asked Ford to mass-produce a steel anti-submarine patrol ship, the 200-foot Eagle boat. Highland Park was landlocked, but Ford owned land near the mouth of the Rouge River, bought in 1915, and dredging gave it a way to the Detroit River.
Transport·Wayne County
The First Concrete Mile
Wayne County claims the first mile of concrete highway in the world, laid on Woodward Avenue in 1909 between Six Mile Road and Seven Mile Road, in what was then Greenfield Township and is now northwest Detroit. Work began on 20 April and the stretch opened on 4 July. Roads at the time were brick, cobblestone or macadam, which did not last long. The Wayne County Road Commission, organized a few years earlier, ran the experiment.
History·Wayne County
The First Pulitzer Photograph
The first Pulitzer Prize ever given for a photograph went to a picture taken outside the Ford Rouge plant on 3 April 1941. Milton Brooks of the Detroit News was waiting with other photographers near the gates, two days into the strike that finally forced Ford to the table. When a strikebreaker crossed the picket line, eight men with fists and clubs closed around him as he pulled his coat over his head. Brooks got the picture, hid his camera under his coat and ducked into the crowd.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Five Dollar Day Crowd
On 5 January 1914 Henry Ford and James Couzens announced that the Ford Motor Company would pay five dollars a day, more than double the going rate for factory labour, and within days the news had brought thousands of men to Highland Park from across the Midwest. They gathered on Manchester Street outside the plant in the January cold. On 12 January, in temperatures reported at 9 degrees, a crowd put at about twelve thousand rioted at the gates, and fire hoses were turned on the men.
Music History·Wayne County
The Flame Show Bar
The Flame Show Bar stood at 4264 John R Street, on the corner of East Canfield, where a Detroit Medical Center parking garage now stands. Morris Wasserman, the son of a Detroit developer, opened it on 24 June 1949 with Nellie Lutcher on the bill, and it ran for fourteen years at the edge of the Paradise Valley club district. Billie Holiday played a fourteen-night run in its first month. Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Jackie Wilson and B.B.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Flywheel Magneto Line
The moving assembly line began as an experiment on one small part. On about 1 April 1913, at Ford's Highland Park plant, workers who had each been building a whole flywheel magneto, the component that supplied the Model T's ignition current, were lined up along a waist-high platform. Each man now added one piece and slid the work to the next. A magneto had taken one worker about twenty minutes.
History·Wayne County
The Gotham Hotel
The Gotham Hotel stood at 111 Orchestra Place, at John R about a block north of Mack, on a stretch of street that no longer exists. It opened in 1924 as the Hotel Martinique, serving white guests. In 1943, about four months after the Detroit race riot, John White, Walter Norwood and Irving Roane bought the nine-storey, 200-room building for $250,000 and turned it into a hotel for Black travellers at a time when Black guests were barred from the downtown hotels.
History·Wayne County
The Hunger March Graves
Four of the men killed in the Ford Hunger March lie side by side in the north end of Woodmere Cemetery in southwest Detroit. On 7 March 1932, with hundreds of thousands out of work across Michigan, at least 3,000 unemployed autoworkers marched from Detroit toward the Rouge plant in Dearborn with a list of demands. The march was organized by the Communist-backed Unemployed Councils.
Industry & Science·Wayne County
The Mack Avenue Plant
The Ford Motor Company's first factory stood at what is now 6520 Mack Avenue, in a former wagon shop beside a rail line. The building belonged to the contractor Albert Strelow, who also put $5,000 into the company alongside the coal dealer Alexander Malcomson, Henry Ford's main backer. It was enlarged and given a second storey soon after Ford moved in. The company was incorporated in June 1903 with twelve investors and $28,000 in cash. Almost nothing was made there.
Music History·Wayne County
The Motown Mansion
The Motown Mansion at 918 West Boston Boulevard was the home of Berry Gordy Jr., who owned it from the late 1960s until 2002. Nels Michelson, a Danish immigrant who made his money in lumber, built the house in 1917 on about 2.2 acres in what is now the Boston-Edison Historic District. A later owner, Leonard Young, added a separate athletic building with a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a gymnasium and a billiard room.
History·Wayne County
The Packard Hate Strike
On 3 June 1943, about 25,000 white workers walked out of the Packard Motor Car plant on East Grand Boulevard because the company had promoted three Black men to the aircraft assembly line. Packard was then building Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engines and marine engines for PT boats, and the walkout halted war production. Until then Black workers at Packard had been kept largely in the foundry and in sanitation jobs.
History·Wayne County
The Poletown Clearing
General Motors' Factory Zero stands on what was the northern end of Poletown, a Polish and Kashubian neighbourhood settled from the 1870s. In 1980, with Detroit losing auto jobs, GM offered to build a new assembly plant in the city if a suitable site could be found. Mayor Coleman Young and the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck used eminent domain to assemble one.
Music History·Wayne County
The Primettes Of Brewster
The Supremes began as the Primettes, teenagers from the Brewster-Douglass housing projects on Detroit's near east side. In 1958 Florence Ballard, then a junior high student at Brewster, met Paul Williams and Eddie Kendricks of a vocal group called the Primes. Their manager, Milton Jenkins, wanted a sister act. Betty McGlown, Williams's girlfriend, was already singing, Ballard brought in her best friend Mary Wilson, and Williams brought in Diana Ross, who had moved to Brewster at fourteen.
History·Wayne County
The Street Under I-375
Interstate 375, barely a mile of sunken freeway, runs over what was Hastings Street, the commercial spine of Detroit's Black Bottom. The neighbourhood took its name from the rich marsh soil of the old River Savoyard, which was buried as a sewer in 1827. Before the First World War, Hastings was a centre of Eastern European Jewish settlement.
History·Wayne County
The Woolworth Sit-Down
On the morning of Saturday 27 February 1937, at the big Woolworth's on Woodward Avenue, a union organizer named Floyd Loew blew a whistle, and 108 young women stopped working. Most were paid about 25 cents an hour. The Flint sit-down had ended with General Motors' surrender only two weeks earlier, and the saleswomen and lunch counter staff took the idea and applied it to a five-and-dime. They stayed in the building and slept on mattresses in the store.
History·Wayne County
Vincent Chin
Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman, was celebrating his coming wedding at the Fancy Pants club at 13843 Woodward Avenue in Highland Park on the night of 19 June 1982 when a fight broke out with two white men. Ronald Ebens was a Chrysler plant supervisor and Michael Nitz, his stepson, a laid-off autoworker.