Video transcript
For 80 years, the first federal public housing projects for African Americans stood here. The Brewster-Douglass homes were built between 1935 and 1955. At their peak occupancy during the 50s and 60s, the Brewsters housed 10,000 residents. Before the Brewsters, this used to be the western edge of the Paradise Valley neighborhood. The Brewsters and Paradise Valley are now gone, but they continue to be remembered as significant places in African American history and culture.
By the 1940s the nucleus of African American culture in Detroit shifted from the overcrowded Paradise Valley – just across the freeway – to the Brewsters. The shift was part of city officials’ plan to slowly move residents to the new housing complex and then replace Paradise Valley with a freeway.
For some, the loss of Paradise Valley was tragic. But many were excited about new opportunities in the updated, safer Brewster-Douglass complex. By the mid-50s, rows of townhomes stood to the west of the 6 14-story towers that were arranged in a circle around a fresh lawn. One former resident recalls being the envy of her neighbors because she lived in the “elite” complex. Others remember the homes fondly as a vibrant community of musical talent that produced stars like the Supremes and Smokey Robinson.
The construction of the Brewster-Douglass homes marks a turning point in Detroit’s settlement history. The freeway that eventually replaced Paradise Valley also made it easier for middle and upper-class Detroiters to commute in and out of the suburbs. By the late-60s, residents from the Brewsters also started to move into other parts of Detroit, leaving vacancies in the projects that crime and blight soon filled. The quality of life in the Brewsters declined into the 80s and 90s when management stopped maintaining the buildings and their security.
The Brewster-Douglass homes were closed in 2008 and demolished in 2014. If you look around, you may see a few traces of foundations or other building materials. This area will soon be transformed by new developments, making the history of these rich communities visible only through the photographs and stories that survive.
Narrative
The Brewster-Douglass homes were located at St. Antoine and Alfred Streets in between Detroit’s Midtown and Downtown neighborhoods. The history is complex because of the frequent demolition and rebuilding that has taken place over the last century. Most recently, the neighborhood was predominantly African-American, but it is no longer strongly associated with any one ethnicity.
In the 1800s, the neighborhood was populated by European immigrants, many of them Jewish. By the 1910s as African Americans migrated from the south to the city, this neighborhood was one of the few they were allowed to live in. African Americans redefined the area as Paradise Valley, a hot spot for music and entertainment hosting such artists as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. By the 1950s, Paradise Valley was still vibrant but also suffering from overcrowding, crime, and decrepit housing. The city’s solution was to move the residents into public housing projects just a few blocks over. Once Hastings Street, the most populated and bustling area, was clear, the city demolished the neighborhood to build the Chrysler Freeway and six high-rise apartment buildings for the rest of the Paradise Valley residents.
The loss of Paradise Valley was a blow to this cultural center and the music scene, but many of the residents that moved into the Brewster-Douglass homes nostalgically look back on the towers with joy. Those lucky enough to live in the brand new projects were sometimes described as “elite” by their neighbors. Previous residents describe the projects as the bearer of their roots and history, a kind of heaven, and a city in and of itself. It was not just a community, but almost a self-contained city with room for everyone, and banks, churches, and stores. The strong sense of community was a positive outcome, but its self-contained nature eventually became a problem.
In the late 50s and early 60s, some residents attained economic stability and wanted to move out and up into single-family homes. Even though home sellers were not allowed to discriminate by race, they discriminated in other ways that mostly affected African Americans. An African American person or family looking to buy a home in the 60s would often be refused by the seller because they were other buyers in a higher economic class, even if the African American couple was in the right tax bracket to afford the house. This unofficial segregation caused the Brewster-Douglass homes to be at their capacity of about 10,000 throughout the 50s and early 60s.
This changed when middle and upper-class White Americans discovered they could move to the suburbs and commute easily to downtown for work because of new highways like the Chrysler that was paved over Paradise Valley. As they left the city, African Americans from the Brewster-Douglass homes became valued buyers throughout Detroit, leaving high vacancies in the projects. This was the turning point for the complex. The race riots of 1967 sped up the process of economically stable residents leaving the projects and the city.
By the 80s, management stopped taking care of the property while raising the rents during a recession that especially affected the African Americans living in the projects. Many couldn’t afford rents and left the city, leaving even higher vacancies and openings for squatters and scrappers in their stead, increasing crime in the projects. Management closed and demolished two of the towers in 2003 to try to consolidate the residents, but the damage had been done, and the Douglass high-rises closed for good in 2008. Demolition of the remaining towers began in late 2013.
As of now, there are no concrete plans for the neighborhood after demolition is complete, but city officials have talked about mixed-use development. The project’s later days have marked it to outsiders as a dangerous center of a slum, but the previous residents remember an alternative history of a strong and exciting community where those living in the projects were elite. The neighborhood passed from European Jewish immigrants to African Americans escaping the harsh south, to upwardly mobile African Americans, to residents seemingly forgotten by the city as they struggled to make ends meet. The projects were demolished in 2014, but the stories of those that lived there live on in the oral histories of African American families throughout the United States.
