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. Then Black migrants from the South, many of them drawn by the auto plants and shut out of most of the city by restrictive housing covenants, filled its crowded wooden houses. By the 1950s Hastings and St. Antoine were the heart of Black-owned Detroit: drugstores, doctors, restaurants, nightclubs and churches. The Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father, found New Bethel Baptist Church in a former bowling alley on Hastings, and the freeway took its later building on the street as well. Paradise Valley, the entertainment district just north of Gratiot, shared the same streets. Condemnation began in 1946, and federal money from the housing act of 1949 and the highway act of 1956 finished it. Many residents got thirty days' notice and little help moving. Lafayette Park, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, took the east side of the neighbourhood, and the Chrysler Freeway took Hastings itself. In 2022 the federal government awarded about $105 million toward replacing I-375 with a street-level boulevard, a plan paused and revised in 2025.
Getting there
42.3376, -83.0391
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