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Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Dwight Stackhouse
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Dwight Stackhouse was born in November 1947 in Richmond, Virginia. When he was only a few months old, his family moved to North Corktown, Detroit. He remained there until he finished high school and has since returned with a passion for improving the city.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Sally Schmitt
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, Michigan
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
10/4/2018
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
[Start of Track 1]
[Initials of Interviewee: DS]
[Initials of Interviewer: SS]
SS: So it is October 4, my name is Sally Schmitt and I am interviewing Dwight Stackhouse in Detroit about the neighborhood North Corktown. So first, let’s start with where and when were you born?
DS: I was actually born in Richmond, Virginia.
SS: Oh wow!
DS: I wasn’t born in Michigan at all, but I was only there for three months. I was born in November 1947, by February 1948, my family moved here [to Detroit, MI]
SS: Okay, did you have family here previously?
DS: No.
SS: Like relatives?
DS: No.
SS: No? Just moved here out of the blue?
DS: Well it wasn’t so much out of the blue, Detroit was a destination spot, everybody wanted to come here, you know the automobile industry, the opportunities, and of course fleeing the racist South. You know… my parents… chose to flee the insanity, the racism.
SS: Obviously, you were very young when you moved here, but had you, like, heard anything about Detroit before coming here, or do you know, like, what your parents thought about it?
DS: No, the only thing they knew is that it was boom town, it was a destination spot, one of the fastest growing cities in the world at the time and you have to imagine being a black person in the oppressive South, you looking for ways to give something better to your children and Detroit, Chicago, the northern cities, were places where it was believed you could achieve that. You would be freer, opportunities would be grander if you lived North. So, in some ways it was a continuation of the Underground Railroad, just now it’s above ground. Exiting from the South to any major city where we thought… well my parents thought opportunities [presented themselves]
SS: So, when you moved to Detroit, did your family move to North Corktown? Or was that later in life?
DS: No, that was… insofar as I know… they moved from… well… it was the process… they didn’t know anybody here… but they came with several. My father and his two very best friends who they were like uncles to us. My mother and her two best friends all moved up here at about the same time and for the first year, six months to be sure, they co-habitated, they all lived in… wherever they could live. They all had to find jobs and so… then when they did that, each person found their own space and my parents found a very modest little house in a lovely little neighborhood, that I fell in love with, on Michigan [Avenue] and 23rd Street. The house is gone, but it is, that little spot, Sally, is the epicenter of my nostalgia… you know and I’m… I can get weepy about that little spot, I see it as it was, not as it is and I mean… I see it, I see it all, every tree, every shrub, all the neighbors, all the kids, I can hear them, dogs, and see them. The little corner store, manicured lawns and trees bowing over the streets. So that was where we landed, 23rd and Michigan [Avenue].
SS: Cool, so what neighborhood would you define that as?
DS: Well that’s interesting, I don’t know. It is not Corktown, it’s not exactly Core City.
SS: It’s North of [Interstate] 75, right?
DS: No.
SS: No?
DS: No, oh wait a minute… Yes!
SS: Yes?
DS: Yes, it is North of [Interstate] 75. I don’t know if it has a name, if it ever… look, when we were there, it didn’t have a name at all. And if it did, we… it was unbeknownst to us, but I think people just called it the South End… I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s called. It’s not exactly Corktown, but I spent a lot of time in Corktown. It was part of my… play area, if you will.
SS: Yeah? [Laughs]
DS: Yeah
SS: And what was it like there? Like, how would you describe it?
DS: Uh, man, it was, I mean, it’s such an interesting question because my siblings would answer differently, we were all there at the same time, but for me… it was heaven and I would be hard-pressed… I would have to talk for a long time for me to recall some unpleasantness. It was wonderful, I was one of those kids though, you know I’m, tree-climbing, marble shooting kinda kid. I just, you know that kid running up and down the street, I knew everybody, and everybody knew me, “Well there goes Skipper,” you know. So, it was kinda, it was a slice of heaven for me. It was a place where all the lawns were manicured, and we had these little picket fences, and everyone was poor, so if you had a picket fence you had to build it yourself. It’s where I began to hone my carpentry skills with my uncle and so on. We were so poor that we would gather nails and straighten them so that we could reuse them, and now repurposing is a big thing. And we repurposed everything… everything you know, back then, everybody had a garden, everybody, you go in the garden for the beets, you go in the garden for the beans, for the cabbage, for pumpkins, you know, cucumbers, peppers, etc. So, this movement to urban farming it seems silly to us because we, it was simply understood, it’s what we did. That makes sense because everybody’s up south, they just came North from the South, they were used to having a garden, but it was there, plant, every spring you plant some.
SS: Was it an integrated neighborhood, or was there some separation?
DS: No, I tell ya this, I did not know this until… and … I’m a poet, I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it or not, and I write poems about this period because it is so precious to me. You know? I’ve got hundreds of stories, probably endless stories about this little enclave and I had no idea that the eclectic, ethnically, eclectic environment that I was in was unusual.
SS: Oh, so it was like a little pocket?
DS: Yeah, of Hispanics, Asians… Europeans, primarily Slavic, and then poor whites up from the South, and the poor Blacks up from the South and we all simply played together. You know… we just played together, now not so much the adults, because the adults were limited by their language barriers, you know, first generation. And their culture, you know, Soul food is very different food from Mexican food’s very different from Polish food and so on. Um, but imagine growing up with all those aromas wafting in the air. I did, as I said to Cassidy [the student who interviewed him before this interview], I literally remember the pies sitting on the window sill to cool, now that’s and image that’s Rockwellian, you know… Nobody does that anymore, nobody even makes their own pies, but that’s how I grew up, I knew all the families and all the kids in all the families, I knew all the pets. The dogs and the cats, knew them all, yeah we was… My childhood was the stuff of which movies are made and it was wonderful, my sister would say something very different.
SS: Why is that?
DS: I don’t know, I don’t know, we were both there… I am the only member in my family that loves the city of Detroit.
SS: Really?
DS: I’ll never leave, well I mean, I have left, but I’ll never leave. My brother lives here but he lives here because it’s cheap, but uh, the rest of us have fled.
SS: So what kinds of things did your neighborhood kids do for fun?
DS: All the old games, I mean, we were the generation that saw the birth of the hula-hoop. You know, the first time the hula-hoop showed up, it was a big, big thing. But we were, so wonderfully poor, that playing with tires and sticks and, climbing trees, and shooting marbles, hopscotch, jumping rope, what time is it Mr. Fox. All the games we played, and it was simply beautiful and then of course the street lights would come on and that meant everybody had to go home… looked like a bunch of ole rodents fleeing into our own little cubby holes, but yeah, we all had to be home by the streetlights, but no, I can’t imagine a happier childhood than the one I had. I can’t even imagine. Money wouldn’t do it. I don’t care where you would take me, you know, Hawaii could not have been more beautiful. I believe the Fords and the Rockefellers, and the Carnegies did not have as wonderful a childhood as I did. I loved being a kid. It’s what my book is about in some ways.
SS: So, you are writing a book, or have written a book?
DS: I have written a book.
SS: Okay.
DS: The neighborhood is in some way’s incidental in the book. The book is called Mother’s Milk and it is about what happened to me when my mother died, I being a momma’s boy, and when she died I died, and stayed dead for a long time. And I wrote the book in such a way that it’s reflective, it’s a reflective device all the way through it. So, I describe this neighborhood that I am trying to describe to you now and so it’s in the book. You know, if you read the first chapter, you’d see this neighborhood that you’re asking me about. And throughout the book I reflect back to those happier days, because I was clinically depressed for 20 years.
SS: And so, speaking of your parents, did both your parents work? Just your father?
DS: No, they both worked. They were both chefs, award-winning.
SS: Oh, wow!
DS: Award-winning chefs. But, I wrote it this way in one of my poems, “No blue ribbons for the Blacks.” My mom would make the pie but the mistress would win the award. My dad would bake the Wellington, but the mister would get the reward. So, they felt the need to get away from that and they came here and, you know, they’re moving on up. They’re moving into paradise and reality sets in that these are just white folks that didn’t have slaves [chuckles]. You know, you are still considered less then. So, my mother, this beautiful, elegant woman was a domestic. [She] cleaned houses for other people and washing their clothes and my father could no longer even be a chef. He simply became a cook, working for the County of Wayne. So, there was poverty all around, but no sense of it. [I] never ever felt poor. But then they were both [unintelligible]. When you would make 30 bucks a week, you can only afford… well there’s not much that you can afford. You make 30 dollars a week and you’ve got 5 kids to feed… but I remember that set of Brittanicas and I mean worn from A to Z. That set of encyclopedias was worn. All the classics were in the house, you know, from Joseph Conrad to Faulkner, to Dostoyevsky [I believe this is the author he was referring to], everything all in the house. My father would conduct these readings. You get the assignment, you gotta read the Iliad, let’s say, and he’d give you a day or a week at the most. And then he’d quiz you on it, and you’d have to tell him what you learned. And I hated him for it, you know, just loathed my father. [I] hated to see him coming, he was going to ask you something about what you learned and “Did you do what I asked” and so, but if he lived now, I would worship him.
SS: Yeah.
DS: I get it. So, they were both chefs and my mother, interestingly, [when] she was probably in her 40’s, mid 40’s, she did begin selling insurance and became one of the most successful agents in the city. So, she would make, every moth what she made all year [before]. So, that’s more money than she knew what to do with. When you think about it, you could buy a Cadillac for four-thousand dollars. So, she traveled the world and bought… I remember my mother, when we left that enclave and moved to Linwood and Henry [streets], and again a modest house by every way of reckoning, except for poor Blacks up from the South. This was a grand house and she remodeled the whole thing, added on to the kitchen. And I remember her standing there with a cup of coffee in her hand, “I have nothing else to buy. I don’t know what to do with my money,” and so she started just traveling the world. Everywhere, Europe, Mexico, Hawaii, started traveling and that presented some problems because she was making that money, not Daddy. Daddy was still making 30 bucks a week. It’s hard [tearing up]. But yeah, it was a two-family income all my life.
SS: And so, where did you guys do your shopping? Did you just shop mostly in that area, or was it more in Corktown?
DS: We had, Sally, then what every metropolitan area now wants. I could walk from my house to Michigan Avenue, which is roughly where that woman is sitting [points to a woman roughly 10 yards away] over at the desk, up the steps there. Roughly that far and on that strip, on Michigan Avenue, a butcher, grocery store, sporting goods, furniture, jewelry, we used to go to five-and-dime, drugstore, bank, restaurants, shoe repair. It was nothing that you would want that you couldn’t walk 2 blocks to get to. So, we shopped there and then there was something called the Western Market everyone knows of the Eastern Market, but the Western Market was its kid brother, if you will, and it was at Michigan and I want to say 18th or 15th or somewhere up there. It died young. I mean, I was around when it died, but that's where we would go. It was a farmer’s market and then I as I say, we grew vegetables and flowers in the yard, you know. [phone buzzes] Oh-oh is it time for me to do the thing? Can I try it right now? [talking about paying for his parking meter] Shopping was… the other visual I have of my mother before she became monied. My family is, how do I put this, they’re very well-made. My mother was splendidly built and most of her children of that way. My brother was just, I mean, if you have met my brother when he was young you would have thought that he been lifting weights all his life. [He] never touched any in his life, he was simply sculpted. My brother weighed 230lb and his waist was the same as mine and I weigh 167 [gesturing to his waist] this is how well-made he was. But I have this image of my mother walking home from the Western Market, with these bags two in each hand and my brother would have three in each hand but it's just an image of her coming down what were very clean alleys. You could walk the alleys. It is a very pleasant image, a very pleasant memory. And then sitting around the table when we would chop the vegetables and clean them. Back then, canning was popular for people, poor folks up from the South couldn't afford to go to the store to buy peaches or pears but you can buy them at the farmers market and then can them. Of course, I thought everyone did that. I thought that was the way people lived and I remember participating, but I would participate by handing her things and… I mean because I'm not moved by the culinary. I'm not a food guy. Food is almost no consequence to me. If I'm not hungry I'm not eating. I don't care how beautiful it is, I'm one of those persons that I simply must be hungry to eat a peanut. I can eat one potato chip that's who I am. But yeah, it was very easy going to the market and every now and again we would get into the car as a family and go to a large Market an A&P or a King Cole. I remember that, but that was rare. Mainly, we would just walk up the street.
SS: Well that seems like a nice way to live, instead of having to drive to the supermarket every time.
DS: No, it was. I'm telling you we must get back to that. We must become an ambulatory pedestrian community, that's what we need to be. This business of malls and such as just… of course I'm not fond of the internet either [chuckles]. I guess I'm just an old school obstructionist.
SS: So, where'd you go to school at?
DS: Well, my formal education begin at a place called Kraft Elementary and that was roughly at Vinewood and West Grand Boulevard. That school was gone, and for whatever reason there was a zip code change or whatever, so, I had to leave Kraft and go to a school called Cheney. That building still stands, no longer a public school, but the building, still beautiful, at Lawton and I forget the cross street, but somewhere between Myrtle and Buchanan on Lawton. Still a beautiful building, elementary school, but and for a little while I went to a, again still in elementary school, why can't I think of the name of that school? It won't come to me, but I was only there for 1 year. Then I went to Comden [?], junior high school, which was at the corner of West Grand Boulevard and Buchanan. Now gone, just a big, vast lot, you know, gone. And from there I went to Western High School on Scotten and Vernor. That's school still open, and that's the extent of my formal education. That's when you could get educated in in Detroit Public Schools.
SS: What was the high school like for you, like, what was your experience in high school?
DS: You know you and Cassidy are asking, obviously, the same questions. I'm not much of a student, but I've always been smart. You know, my mom used to get this comment all throughout elementary, junior high, and so on, “you know you can't keep his brain in the room.” I'm staring out the window. Just staring out the window, watching the birds, the butterflies and so on and having thoughts of my own. But I was, how do I put it? I was a good kid. I was a c student and I would only get to be a c student when it was time. Hell, if I don't get all A's I'm going to fail, so I had to hunker down and get the A's just to pass. I was not… I've always been a learner and always loved learning but, I've never liked compulsory learning. You know, you must learn this, and you must memorize it and spit it out on the test. I thought there must be a better way to do this. No one was going to listen to me, I'm a kid. So, I was not what you would call a great student high school. And I don't know that I was particularly popular, you know, I just came and went. I was in the middle of the pack.
SS: Was it integrated schools as well?
DS: Very integrated, again, equal parts like my neighborhood. I didn't know how special that was. You know again, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, and Blacks, now and a smattering of Middle Easterners and Asians. I don't remember conflict. Now, understand I graduated in 65, that’s just two years before the big riot. I don't remember racial tension in high school, which isn't to say it wasn't there. I mean, I was always somewhat oblivious to conflict because I was always so happy go lucky. I’m that kid if you gave me… I'm sure you've heard of this joke. You give a kid, a let's say a box of horse manure for Christmas and it's only question, “where's my pony?” You know, and that's who I was. The horse manure… “where's the pony?” The manure would not have depressed me. And so, I had this thing about just enjoying being alive. Just about every moment. When I when I say I'd be hard-pressed to remember unpleasant moments, that's the truth. But my siblings would say it differently, because they're not me. They remember what they remember. I'm always stunned with [unintelligible] we were in the same house. I remember this and you remember that.
SS: Which number of the siblings are you?
DS: I'm the fourth of five.
SS: Okay.
DS: But there were always others, you know, poor folks who share a space. So, there was at least one cousin always in the house. He was raised like a brother, and another one who was there almost every summer. And then, my aunts, my mother's sisters, would come and stay in a tiny little house. But we pulled it off somehow. I mean, really, it was a two-bedroom house that we somehow managed to make it a three-bedroom out of it. But that bedroom was like the dining room, between the living room and the kitchen but we turned it into a bedroom. 1 bathroom and sometimes 9 people. It's amazing isn't it. It's inconceivable. I live alone, and my house is too crowded [chuckles]. In a house that is twice that size. I live alone.
SS: So, are there any special stories from your childhood that involve your neighborhood as a background that you'd like to share?
DS: I should have had you read the book!
SS: I'll for sure read it in my research because I'm very interested!
DS: Yes, the book is called Mother's Milk and it's about my… I don't want to use the word perverse but clinical attachment to my mother, which is very different from Oedipus it’s not like that at all. It’s physiological and it’s biological and I try to describe it in the book. So, that when she died, I could not stand life without her. Just, “that cannot be” and I lost my mind, but the book is written with a consistent reflective device. It opens with her death and my collapse and then I go into the memories of this neighborhood that were talking about, what it was like. Much of what I've just said is written in this book, and throughout the book, I reflect on those happier days. So, that neighborhood is, I don't know how prominent it is in terms of the 500 pages, but it certainly opens with that. If you read the first chapter, you would see this neighborhood being described.
[29:40]
[Recording continues to 1:31:00]
[End of Track 1]
Search Terms
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Detroit, Michigan, North Corktown, Neighborhoods, Michigan Avenue, Detroit Public Schools
Video
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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Dwight Stackhouse
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Dwight discusses growing up in the North Corktown/Briggs neighborhood. He discusses what life was like for him growing up in a poor neighborhood as a young African-American boy. He describes the neighborhood and the people who live there.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/4/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Rebecca Salminen Witt
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Rebecca Salminen Witt became executive director of the Greening of Detroit in 1996. For twenty years, Witt led the Greening as it advanced its mission of restoring Detroit’s green spaces.
Interviewer's Name
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William Wall- Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
11/27/2018
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
[INITIALS OF INTERVIEWEE:] RSW
[INITIALS OF INTERVIEWER:] WW
[REPEAT INITIALS EACH TIME EACH PERSON SPEAKS]
WW: Hello, today is November 27th, 2018. My name is William Wall-Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Urban Farming Oral History Project and I am sitting down with..
RSW: Rebecca Salminen Witt.
WW:Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
RSW: My pleasure.
WW: You started as the executive director of the Greening of Detroit in 1996, how did you come to that role?
RSW: Well, I was practicing law in the city and (so my daughter was born in January 1996) I was doing mergers and acquisitions - a pretty high intensity practice. I just really was looking for a way to do something that more of an avocation rather than just a mark and time with a job that I did find fulfilling, but (especially with a tiny baby at home) was taking really a lot of time and didn’t really speak to my passions as much. So I just started looking around for you know, testing the old adage, “with a law degree you can do anything. “ I thought I would test that and see if that were true. How I came to the Greening? I didn’t really know the organization beforehand. I found a little, like, three line advertisement in the Detroit Free Press and sent them my stuff. Basically through a fairly long interview process, kind of, talked them into giving me a chance to lead that organization.
It was pretty much still a fledgling organization at that time. It had been started in 1989 by Elizabeth Gordan Sachs and a pretty strong group of Detroit civic leaders and they had a pretty simple mission just to plant trees. I could really see the potential in that organization (Having grown up in most rural places around the state - daughter of a conservation officer). That environmental mission, especially bringing more of the environment to the downtown setting, really spoke to me personally. And so, I was hired in November 1996 and at the time the organization had a budget of about 235,000 dollars a year and that was me a little old lady that worked at the front desk and one forster that was right out of college at that time.
WW: After you started, was were some of the first projects that you worked on?
RSW: Our main project at the time was a neighborhood tree planting program, so community tree planting. We worked directly with block clubs, who self identified. They would to us and say, ‘We think our street needs trees.” We would work with them and plant (generally) between ten and thirty trees usailly along a block or two. We had an environmental education project at that time, too. So we would go into schools and work with the established environmental education curriculums (Project Learning Tree, Project WET, Project Wild) and bring those to city classrooms, as well. Those were the two main projects. I kind of learned the ropes of what it meant to run a non-profit endeavour using those projects as our tool pretty much.
We expanded both of those project first and the first major new thing that was, kind of like, something I thought up and implemented (that was brand new) was our youth employment program: The Green Core Program. Which started in, we raised funds for it in 1997 and kicked off our first cohort in, 1998.
WW: What was the reception of [to] that program?
RSW: Of the Green Core Program? We, as most tree planting organizations across the country, had a big problem with maintenance. People will give you money to plant trees. Once they’re in the ground nobody wants to give you money to maintain them. Trees require three years of fairly intensive maintenance before they can be just left on their own to grow and they require maintenance beyond that time for pruning and that kind of stuff to make sure that they grow correctly.
So we invented the Green Core Program really as a way to solve that maintenance issue. I saw that the city had an issue, it had lots of high school kids with nothing to do in the summer. Our high school employment rate was the lowest in the country at the time. We also had this maintenance issue. So I thought the two of those problems could meet in the middle with a little bit of money. We could get kids summer jobs - they would water and prune our trees for us. Almost immediately, that was a really popular project. We started in 1998 (it was our first cohort) and we had six kids (all from Northern High School). It was funded by the Kellogg Foundation. By the time, probably, twenty years later we have two hundred kids every season from every high school in the county [city] and two thousand kids apply for the job every year. That program, still even to this day, still has tons of potential. We could still hire many, many more kids.
WW: Throughout the 90s, did you do any work with the Gardening Angels?
RSW: We did. Gerald Hairston was, kind of, the leader of that group at the time. It was funny because when I first started in the late 90s (even early 2000s), there was this kind of growing drum beat around urban agriculture, At the time, the Greening’s mission was strictly tree planting and so people would come to us all the time for help with gardens, but it wasn’t really in our mission. We would work our way around that by saying, “Yup, we can help you with that garden, but you gotta find a place for a tree.” Or, “Let’s go an orchard in conjunction with your garden.”
The issue with tree planting and gardening is, they are to some extent, mutually exclusive because gardens require sunshine and trees create shade. That was for, probably the first four years that I worked at the Greening, that was a growing issue. On our board there was a camp of strict tree planting folks, they just wanted to only plant trees forever. The city was missing, probably still to this day you could probably prove this is true, about half of its available tree planting spots were vacant because of Dutch Elm Disease and a bunch of other things. So they were like, “We haven’t gotten our original mission done yet, so why would we expand into something else that is going to eat up capacity and not help our primary mission?” But we could really see that there was a growing need for the kind of things that urban agriculture could provide.
Gerald and the Gardening Angels were one of the first organized groups around urban agriculture. We did a bunch of projects with them. We had tools. We knew about soil science - we could grow things. The Gardening Angels, in particular, kind of, had this “guerrilla wherewithal” to go out and make a garden where nobody was doing anything on the property. Back in those days, and it’s almost funny for me to say this, but back in those days there was plenty of vacant property and it was growing.
Folks, like Gerald, could kind of see that this was something that could provide a long term solution for a whole bunch of issues. It could create cared about spaces from spaces that weren’t cared about and it could feed people who didn’t have enough food. They were some of the earliest folks really doing urban agriculture as an organized movement not just like the, kind of, farming in an urban space that had been happening in Detroit forever. Detroiters, particularly African Americans, who came to Detroit during the Great Migration came from the South and so they had a farming background. Not only African Americans, a whole lot of White folks came. My mom’s parents came from the South and had a farming background. They came with those skills.
When talking about urban agriculture, I like to remind people that these are not skills that we had to teach people. These are skills that had been baked in for generations. In some cases, they had been dormant for a while because during better times everybody was able to get a job in the shop (which is what my grandpa called it). But for the auto companies, you could get a job in the shop, you didn’t have to raise all of your food. Lots of folks still had a kitchen garden - my grandparents did. But for a while, it was skill that wasn’t as “hip” or as needed. Then, when the city fell on harder times (the 80s and 90s were tough times in the city), it became something that people turned back to as a solution to some pretty serious social issues and to bring people together around those issues, too.
WW: The Greening also put on the Garden tour.
RSW: Yes.
WW: Could you talk about that?
RSW: Sure. That really came later. It’s probably useful to talk about how the Greening fully embraced urban agriculture. That was a progression of changing of its mission itself. For any non-profit, when you talk about changing its mission, you know, it creates lots of angst in people. Sometimes it’s an easier process than others, but at the Greening, everytime the mission has changed it had been a very thoughtful, kind of, intense process. It never happened accidentally and it never happened without a lot of thought and planning and conversation. The first instance, we went from being a tree planting organization (the mission called out tree planting specifically) to just a planting organization. We just dropped tree.
So we were still a planting organization, but that opened the, sort of, opportunities for us to plant other things and that could be.. For a while were doing lots of butterfly gardens. We did prairies and lots of different kinds of planting, but it also opened the door for us to plant food - plant gardens. There was a guy that we worked with a lot, on both the tree planting projects and later on urban agriculture called Brother Rick Samyn. He was a Capuchin Monk. He was the person that began urban agriculture.. Their project at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. We had done tree planting with him for a long time. All those tree planted around the Capuchins were planted by the Greening and Brother Rick at one point.
He came to us in probably 2001, I wanna say, and said, “I have this idea to create an urban farm as destination so that people could learn what it could do” - for all of those social issues that I talked about earlier - “But they would come to it as almost a field trip or become an attraction on its own. At the time, the city had lots of issues with its parks. We had 236 parks in the city (I wanna say). They [the city] were actively deactivating them. The city proper didn’t have enough money to take care of them all properly so it was picking and choosing where it was going to spend its resources. We at the Greening had been working on that issue as well. The social issues of access to park lands and trying trying to influence where those funds would be spent… raising additional funds so the Greening actually took over some of the care and maintenance of the parks that would have been in places where there would be a large swath of the city’s more needy population would not have a park to go to. So we were doing a lot of that work. We decided that would throw down with Brother Rick; take his concept and use it to solve one of these park problems.
So there is a park in Southwest Detroit called Sergeant Romanowski Park, it’s just south of Michigan [Ave] on Lonyo. It’s a 29-acre park. When we started working there it had, we like to say, three painted sewer tubes and a swing set with no swings. It was in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city: there were African Americans, Native Americans, Arab Americans, Hispanics, and the remnants of the original population which was Polish American (thus Sergeant Romanowski). It was a famous park where tennis tournaments were held in the 40s and 50s (I wanna say) so it had some left over infrastructure from that, but it was not being used for anything. We basically took Rick’s idea and created an urban farm park there.
It was a five-year plan. We did lots of community organizing around there. There were about a 1,000 children who lived in that neighborhood. O. W. Holmes was an elementary school at that time. That was there… it has since been sold to a private school (I think Academy of the Americas is there now). We worked with that school, those children, the families in that neighborhood. We had several focus groups over the period of weeks that were drawing 300/350 people at a time. So people were really interested in this green space. We did the classic dot thing (where you put up ideas on the walls) and people voted for what they want with dots. We were expected… we had lots of stuff on there… classic playground stuff. Do you want us to bring back the tennis courts? How do you feel about basketball? Everything, including farm stuff. How do you feel about an apiary? Can we bring bees to your neighborhood? All these kinds of ideas and we were really expecting to have to do kind of a hard sell after the fact on the agriculture stuff. So we were like, “Let’s listen to what they really want, so we can make sure we include that stuff too,” but we were expecting to have to be like “agriculture is really okay. It’s going to be cool, honestly. You’re going to be able to grow what you want to grow. Culturally speaking, we could have this really diverse farm that grows stuff Hispanic people want to eat and stiff that Arab American people want to eat.”
And we were really excited to find that people were excited about every single thing that was up there. Some of that was probably a reaction to “we just want anything. We don’t want to not vote for something because even that would be okay.” But some of it was a genuine interest in this kind of new idea about creating a community garden in the midst of an underutilized city park in the midst of a pretty densely populated city neighborhood. This was not a neighborhood that people had moved away from yet. It was a neighborhood where people were coexisting. Although they were coexisting (and that was probably the best way to put it), they weren’t intermingling necessarily. They were just living next to each other. There were language barriers. There were cultural barriers. And the school folks would really talk to us about that.
The city saw this community engagement stuff going on (they were excited about it). They ended up allocating all of their park resources for that quadrant (or whatever it was of the city that they had divided up. They would divide up the city into these zones and there was x amount of park money per zone they could spend). They took all their park money for that zone and invested it in that project. At the same time, we were raising money from foundations and corporations around town. We ended up collapsing what was a five-year budget and timeline into two years. What was really fun about that is that the kids who said they wanted a slide (because they were five years old and didn’t have one in their neighborhood) were still little enough to enjoy it once the thing got built. That was really cool. The community groups who wanted to see cultural expression in their planting activities, got to do that with the people who, sort of. were able to [unintelligible] that. Collapsing that time frame, I think, was really important for the long term success of that project.
That really was the first operating urban farm in the city. We did it again with the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. The Greening raised all the money and brought the city to the table, but we had lots of neighborhood partners as well. American Indian Health and Family Services was a big partner at that time. Some of the other schools in the area, O. W. Holmes… Detroit Public Schools was a big partner in the project and we had corporate and foundation support, too. Everyone came out and wanted to have a hands on role in this big urban experiment.
We ended up farming.. The plan was such that we would, sort of, expand the farm gradually. I think we ended up farming just under five acres there out of the 29-acre park. We added all the other amenities, too. We did bring back the tennis courts. We moved and created new basketball courts. We created five soccer fields. All of the cultural groups in that area like to play soccer. I’m telling you, the played the grass off that park. 29-acres of soccer fields… We did out in a big playground. We put in a teaching garden and a pavilion (there was a pavilion there that was renovated).
We did all of this stuff, but it was built around this concept that “if you - and this is funny, because at the time we thought “all right, we’ll put a farm in the middle of a robust recreation area and people will soak up the agriculture just by being near it. So they'll come to play soccer or they’ll come to play on the playground, or walk on the walking path (we put a walking path around there too) but they’ll see this urban agriculture going on and get sucked in in spite of themselves.” Well, and it did work like that. What we found was that the garden, more than any of those other amenities, turned out to be the thing that drew people there and turned out to be the thing that they [residents] could get together over - and instead of just coexisting - build community around. Language barriers became less important because they could recognize the same vegetable that was valuable in two different cultures. We had an evening gardening club where you could just come and stop in. It always starts with the kids, so little kids would come first. So at first it was an evening kids gardening club, but slowly but surely their parents would join and pretty soon it was two nights a week. There would be fifty people in the garden.
That was kind of the first really big toe hold that urban agriculture had that began that movement. That really was in 2003 where we started seeing the momentum building. That’s where the garden resource program started (off of that project). Again the Garden Resource Program was another very… the urban agriculture community is really quite very intentionally partnership oriented. That doesn’t always come easily [Laughter], but there is a lot of intentionality about wanting to do it that way.
So all the urban agriculture stuff: the Garden Resource Program, Romanowski Park, the Capuchin’s project, Earthworks Farm (you’ve must have run across Earthworks farm)... Gerald was involved in the early days before he passed away, which was a huge loss for the whole community. All that stuff was built around.. 4H was involved in that [and] MSU Extension.. The 4H group on the east side was a big early working partner of that. But they all came together to build these bones intentionally and with some strength.
So first there was Sergeant Romanowski Park and then there was the Garden Resource Program which was a program designed to provide resources, support, and engagement around the ideas of urban agriculture. The more interaction, the more engagement you had (maybe you would come and take a class or maybe you would do some volunteering) the more resources you had access to.. Was kind of the way be built that project. Once that started happening, now you had little independant gardens and farms and community gardens kind of popping up around the city.
The Garden Resource Program was also designed on a tiered system so you had family gardens, community gardens, and school gardens. Depending on how many people were involved (whether it was one family group or larger community - like a neighborhood group) you would qualify for different things. Once those started popping up because they now had access to resources that they wouldn't have had before and that could be education like… One year we distributed ground cherries and nobody knew what to do with them, right? So we were like, “okay, we need to have some classes on ground cherries. Here’s we distributed them.” We also always did it with an eye towards being able to add to the local economy with local food. So ground cherries is a good example. The reason we distributed those in particular is because you could sell them for five bucks for half a pint at a farmers market. We tried to very intentionally pick some high value items so that people who did want to have a farm stand out front or take their stuff to Eastern Market or where ever could have some high value stuff to sell.
But once all of these gardens kind of started popping up and the thing grew exponentially. It went from like twenty gardens the first year to two hundred gardens to (there's probably) three thousand now. Once that started happening people wanted to see other people’s gardens and because these were private gardens, they would always come to the Greening and also to the Capuchins and say “oh, can you [like reporters] could give us a map of where all these gardens are because we want to see some of them?” Well you can’t really just send people out.. I can’t send you over to Billy’s house to [unintelligible] around and look at his garden. The other thing was, at the time, urban agriculture as a single use on a piece of property in the city was illegal. So most of these gardens (pretty much all of the community gardens)… not so much the family gardens and not so much the schools, but the gardens that people really wanted to see were all guerilla gardens, you know, in the style of Gerald and the Gardening Angels because urban agriculture was not allowed as a primary use on any piece of property in the city. You could have a garden behind your house, because that’s not a primary use. But you couldn't move that garden to the vacant lot next door to you cause then it was a primary use.
So all of these folks and their gardening activities - no matter how big or beautiful or well kept or whatever - were[n’t] really operating under the law. So that was another problem. Another reason we couldn’t really just send people around. So we created the garden tour as an opportunity, once a year (the first Wednesday, I think.. Or Thursday.. The first Wednesday in August)... and we created like three different bus routes and a bike route every year and that was your, sort of, one chance to get on the bus and see all the cool urban agriculture stuff happening around the city and it’s still going on, that tour.
WW: Did have any undercover police officers sneak on to get those permit violators?
RSW: [Laugher] You know, well we probably did. I know for sure we had some police officers on the bus a few times, but they were just interested in seeing what was going on. At the same time this chicken movement was coming up and the bee movement was coming up. Those actually people had more problems with than the gardens. The gardens, most, people didn't have any issue with except some of them got kind of wild. As always, there were some glommers onto the movement. There was one group that came in and they would do these huge gardens right, but they would drop in and do a huge garden (you know, sort of “gift it” to the community) and leave. It was just a huge problem every time. They became overgrown… We did a lot of garden saving [laughter] of those things too.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Every time I went to ask a question, you preempted it. So thank you!
RSW: [Laughter] I am a quote machine after twenty-five years of doing this
[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 30:27]
[End of Track 1]
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Capuchin Monks, US Army, Greening of Detroit, Detroit, Michigan, Southwest, Urban Agriculture
Video
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Rebecca Salminen Witt
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Witt talks about how she came to work at the Greening of Detroit. Witt chronicles the Greening’s evolution and growth during the first ten years of her leadership. The Greening’s relationship with the Capuchin Monks is covered. Additionally, Witt delves deep into the rehabilitation of Sergeant Romanowski Park.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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11/27/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Arietha Walker
Brief Biography
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Mrs. Arietha Walker was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1982 and moved to the Grand River and West Grand Blvd. in November of 1986. She continues to live in the same neighborhood and has seen how it has changed in the last 22 years. She currently works at the Detroit Historical Museum in the Human Resources department.
Interviewer's Name
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Jacob Russell
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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10/21/2018
Transcription
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Interviewer: Did your mother grow up in the neighborhood too?
Mrs. Walker: My mother grew up in the Ohio/Wisconsin area right off of grand river, so not far from where we live now but it may be one neighborhood over. It’s straight down Grand River it’s a straight shot.
Interviewer: Where and when were you born?
Mrs. Walker: I was born in [inaudible] Brooklyn New York in 1982.
Interviewer: When did you move to the Detroit neighborhood?
Mrs. Walker: So my mother was born here she had my brothers and I so mid 80’s maybe 85 or 86. We moved into that house the day after Thanks Giving 1987.
Interviewer: so you were about 5 years old?
Mrs. Walker: yes
Interviewer: what was the neighborhood like when you grew up there?
Mrs. Walker: It was a place of senior citizens and kids. You saw a lot of kids on my block and the surrounding blocks. I’m one block up from west grand Blvd. which was very family centered as well. So a lot of senior citizens and kids.
Interviewer: What were the demographics like of that neighborhood?
Mrs. Walker: It was definitely one race, African American.
Interviewer: and what is it like now?
Mrs. Walker: There is a growing Hispanic population among black. Most of the house were burned down/torn down or vacated. So of the people that still live there there are a lot of renters, not a lot of family’s that were there from 10-20 years ago. Just a couple of us.
Interviewer: when did the houses start being torn down?
Mrs. Walker: More recent this happen in the last 10-15 years that blight that happened. Kind of around the time of Kwame Kilpatrick.
Interviewer: What did you do for fun?
Mrs. Walker: I was a nerd I read books stayed around the home stead but my brothers would get on their bike go with their friends they would go everywhere. We are talking back in the day of ding-dong ditch, basketball. My family was really big into go-carts. My uncle would come and bring go-carts. There’s a school right behind us we would go in the lot or even in the streets and ride us around in go-carts. But really we had swings in our backyard so a lot of kids would come to our house and play on the swings and with the basketball hoop. Id stay by the homestead but my brothers would venture out and do ridiculous things.
Interviewer: What school was that? North Western?
Mrs. Walker: North western is across Grand River. The school right behind me was an alternative school for like if you injured your self, needed more time to finish, or even handicap accessibility that’s where kids went back than.
Interviewer: what were the stores like? Did you go shopping a lot?
Mrs. Walker: oh man all of them are all of the stores in that kind of one to two block radius are like gone now. There was a store on Grand River maybe three blocks down next to the fire station there and within the last five years it was robbed and the owner was shot so he sold it. No he didn’t sell it. They burned it down and probably took the insurance pay out on it. But I guess his family wanted him out of the neighborhood for a really long time now. It was a small liquor store where you could get snacks in it. There was a grocery store on the Blvd. that we shopped at for years because that was like our neighborhood store. And that went through ownership different owners and finally that burned down as well. Typically that seems to be the trend. We had a candy store that was right down my street maybe two blocks down and I think they tore it down within the last couple years. Its been vacant for about 10 years.
Interviewer: Do you think that closing of the stores caused a lot of the residents to move out?
Mrs. Walker: I think a lot of the residents moving out caused that. When family’s left the neighborhood. I don’t want to sound like my grandma but when the family’s left a lot of the rift raft came in. Living in a neighborhood where there are a lot of senior citizens. Those folks bought their homes. They owned them. When they left if their family’s or if they didn’t have kids or if the kids didn’t care about their property it became vacant so vacancy so folks are stealing, stealing property, taking pieces off the houses and reusing it. Than there’s broken windows there’s an infestation of rats. So there going to beg the city to come tear it down. So I think that’s what happen. People died and their family’s didn’t care about the houses or the houses went to the city. That ownership left with that generation.
Interviewer: Where did you go to school at? Was it in that neighborhood?
Mrs. Walker: Yes I did. On Tiremann there’s a school. James B Weber middle school was what it was called. Its called Weber Samson school of technology now and its still open there’s an elementary school right behind it but I think that’s been closed since I been in high school. But I went to weber from third grade to 8th grade and than I went Cass for high school.
Interviewer: Was North Western open?
Mrs. Walker: yes it was. It was different because now its called North Western prep or something I think it became a charter school. It was open. But it wasn’t a school my mother was going to send her kids too. It wasn’t the best school to go to.
Interviewer: did it close for a while?
Mrs. Walker: I think it might of have. From age 18 to 27 I was in the U.P. but I think they may closed down and than they put a lot of money into it and now it became a charter school I think. They have a football team and everything though. During the school year you know kids are attending the school cause you see them in the neighborhood. You see them everywhere.
Interviewer: Do you have any stories fro your childhood?
Mrs. Walker: It was a community so we could be walking home from school if we were fighting or just being loud and obnoxious when we got home my mother would know because folks called. We see your kid’s they’re doing whatever or just even you just got that sense of community. You could get a spanking from someone else’s mom. It definitely was a community. I remember one of the few times I went out with my brothers this is how I realized they played that lovely ding dong ditch. We ha d a Yorkhee dog. I was walking her I was with my brother and their friends. We were on a side street one of our side streets. We are walking and all of a sudden they are on this persons porch and I’m like what are you guys doing they are knocking and ringing the door bell and all of a sudden everyone takes off running and im a heft woman now and I was pudgy girl than and I had this dog and I was not going to go running what was I suppose to do so I just kept walking my dog and one of the people in the house got in their car and was driving around looking for the kids who did it which makes me think they did it often. He stopped by and said hello miss. He thought I was older I always looked older than I was so I probably was 10 or 12 and looked like I was in high school. So he was like miss have you seen any kids running this way and I was like nope just out walking my dog. We use to curse like sailors so I cussed my brothers out for that. Other than that it was just safety my brothers were normally. There was this huge house a lot of the house along west grand Blvd. are either really big two to four bed room flats. So there was a family right behind us next to the high school on the Blvd. there were siblings and there were cousins so it was a lot sides of the family in the house. We were all friends and I actually babysat a lot of there little kids when I was in high school. That’s where my brothers would always be or they would be in our back yard. It was a good environment to raise kids whether those kids were bad or not.
Interviewer: Was there a strong police presence in the neighborhood?
Mrs. Walker: No it was rare to see police and it was rare to see white people. If something happened my mom would throw block party’s where the old school way where they would cut off the ends of the blocks with trucks. And there would be games and just food and things people could play. Well it was nearing the end of the party and the trucks have been moved and someone came down driving really fast and hit a kid cause the kids were still playing in the street. So that was one of the few times I remember the police being in the neighborhood cause we just didn’t see them that often.
Interviewer: How has the neighborhood changed through the years? Has it slumped down and started to come back up?
Mrs. Walker: one of the areas I remember my mom driving around because it is very close to us is Dexter Blvd. and as a kid I remember thinking the houses are huge the grasses are green were just mowed. We were good with it but they were just great. I remember thinking kind of just how the grass was greener on the other side. That to were a lot of older not like the older people on my block but more people who were working and maintaining there home and you saw the kids and it was just a different world. Now you drive down there and it just different city its just like if its not ours they just don’t care for it. That’s what I see going around the city. Where before we owned it was ours and if it looked like crap we didn’t want it to look like that. Now they jus don’t care.
Interviewer: have you ever thought about moving away?
Mrs. Walker: I am prime location in the city. I wouldn’t mind being mid town adjacent I don’t want to be in midtown. I don’t feel like its welcoming to people I feel like I’m treated like I’m new here when actually I grew up here. I’m treated like I’m the visitor instead of a lot of the owners in their businesses now there the visitors so the (inaudible) is happening which doesn’t make me want to be in mid town but adjacent. But the house I grew up in and live in I’m close to all major freeways I’m centrally located its just great place. My friend’s come to visit and there just like this is awesome. Your not directly in the thick of it its just right off the city but you know its safe. The other side of the Blvd. we didn’t venture Toeben when we were kids. Its right across but not across the freeway its still on our side. Where they sold a lot for drugs they weren’t older they were younger on that side. Where you would be like in your mid 20’s with 6 or 7 kids. I’m not being generic I’m actually this is legit that was the setting it was kind of like mid town in the 70’s like you knew it was nothing but pimps and hookers they sold drugs over there. We weren’t allowed. We didn’t cross the Blvd.
Interviewer: what do you consider the perimeter of your neighborhood?
Mrs. Walker: so when you get to Tireman which is so I am two block up from Tirman. Two full blocks o our street so if you go up 5 blocks and than if you go up Tireman if you go up maybe three block that would be kind of like you knew the people living in those house you see them everyday. That sense of community if they saw you walking down the street and look like you have been beaten up they would pull you into their house and call the police. They knew you even if they didn’t always see you. So that sense of community as far as I am aware it might even be farther than that. The kids we associated with the senior citizens we knew id say that span.
Interviewer: How do you feel about the state of your neighborhood today versus when you grew up there? And what would you change?
Mrs. Walker: I feel that definitely with more community growing up that ownership was there. I feel like in the past couple years when I say about senior citizens I am like minded with them since coming back from college iv noticed that younger folks moving into the neighborhood because its affordable for them to rent, where something I never experienced before even as a kid some neighbors a few houses down at 4 a.m. their riding around in their car screaming and drinking I remember going what the hell what do we pay our taxes for I lived here for 20 years and never experienced this like its degraded its water down. Its not a neighborhood that family’s look at and want to move to and that’s what I wish would change. The American dream 20 years ago was to have a picket fence two kids and a dog and even though I feel like that might not have been the minority American dream it wasn’t a reality for them. I feel like that would be where I would like it to go back to. Where that owner ship goes back too.
Interviewer: So where would you go now to go grocery shopping? What is required of you to get groceries?
Interviewee: Actually its right straight off the boulevard more down by Rosa Parks area so right where the start of 67 happened there is a family foods is the closest that’s where I go. It’s a little market.
Interviewer: How far is that away from your house?
Interviewee: I think like a mile away. I’m not very good with that kind of a thing but I don’t believe its more than two miles. There is a true value hardware store on Grand River. I don’t frequent the gas station on grand river because they are ridiculously expensive. And they sell expire foods to you which is a big issue I notice in the city. I actually go off of warren that probably one of the safest places to go to.
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, West Grand, neighborhood
Video
A link to the video
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ElPdCVR2dhM?si=bV5fCDf8pWKlpKgJ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Arietha Walker
Description
An account of the resource
During this interview Mrs. Walker describes her childhood growing up in the West Grand and Grand River neighbor hood since she moved there in 1986. She discusses how the closing of local business and grocery stores has negatively impacted her neighborhood. She also discusses specific childhood memories that she experienced.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/21/2018
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Roberta Sanders
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Roberta Sanders worked for 35 years as the CEO of The New Center Community of Mental Health organization before retiring. Now retired Sanders devotes much of her free time to community organizations within the Virginia Park neighborhood. For about three years Sanders was an active member of the Virginia Park black club holding both the treasure and later vice president positions within the group. Later on Sanders decided to apply to become part of a larger organization and applied to join the CanCan board, being that she had been paying dues to the organization for 27 years and active member of the community she felt that she had something to offer the organization. Sanders is still resides within Virginia Park to this day and is an active member on the board.
Interviewer's Name
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Lily Roark
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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10/11/2018
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
LR: Where and when were you born?
RS: In port Huron Michigan in 1941, I Lived there until I was 19
LR: When did you come to Detroit?
RS: I came to Detroit in 1961.
LR: and why?
RS: For work.
LR: For work? Where did you work?
RS: Wayne County General Hospital
LR: Doing?
RS: I…I was a registered nurse.
LR: Oh Cool. What had you heard about Detroit before coming?
RS:…not a whole lot, because… I had relatives that lived in Detroit so I was often here in the summer to visit with them…so it was not…you know…nothing crazy [laughter]
LR: [laughter] nothing crazy?
RS: [laughter] eah nothing crazy. Yeah actually ah in 1961 the hospital that I worked didn't hire African American nurses, so I didn't have a whole lot of choice.
LR: Oh, wow. What was your first impression of Detroit?
RS: oh…actually, I just thought it was very large. Port Huron is a small town.
LR: Oh, Ok I've never been.
RS: Now, it's a small town, but then it was even smaller than when I was raised so I was not accustomed to the amount of traffic.
LR: Yeah, Oh yeah, and driving.
RS: Yeah driving and that sort of stuff.
LR: yeah it is overwhelming.
RS: Yeah and I was outside of the city I worked in Elaweese is Wayne county general is in now what its either Wayne or Wetland…or Inkster, I don't know what that, that. What they call it
LR: yeah people's definitions of stuff of things are always different too.
RS: Yes.
LR: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
RS: See that was not a Detroit neighborhood.
LR: Yeah.
RS: It was an area called South Park.
LR: And what was that like?
RS: Oh, it was semi-rule, a lot of people had small farms…and umm had chickens, big lots.
LR: Was is integrated?
RS: yeah because there wasn't enough room to have…
LR: segregated neighborhood
RS: yeah to have segregated neighborhoods,
LR: What did you do for fun?
RS: umm we played outside a lot, there was actually a playground across the street from our house, so [laughter] you probably don't even know the term playground.
LR: [laughter]I take the kid to the playground.
RS: So we could go, in the summer we could go to the playground from about 9 o'clock until about 6, because they always had things going on, things happening.
LR: where did your parents work?
RS: My mom was an elevator operator at the local back there …and my dad worked at the local foundry
LR: What did they make there?
RS: Some parts for the auto industry, some small parts.
LR: Where did you go shopping?
RS: At the time I was growing up the shopping was downtown in Port Huron, downtown, we didn't have malls at that time. So the shopping was downtown, Although, my mom did some shopping in Wisner at that time there was a fairy that went from Port Huron across to downtown Wisner and she shopped and she shopped over there, she thought she got better deals, she thought that the meant was better.
LR: Where did you go to school?
RS: St. Joes Catholic. Our family is Catholic. St Joseph. Catholic school.
LR: Did you like it there.
RS: Yeah it was nice. It was… you know… you hear all of these terrible stories about the nuns, and the Dominican nuns where theoretically the worst in the group, But I didn't see that part of it, the kids who maybe misbehaved maybe saw that part of it. But I didn't, Sister Agnus Claire was our principle and I always thought she was nice. I mean but I didn't cut up in school I was not one of those kids, I always liked school.
LR: Are there any stories from Virginia Park that you would like to share?
RS: Yeah, there is a couple. I don't know if you remember the big blackout? When the lights went out? I think you were maybe not born. Anyway, I don't even know what year it was but all the lights went out all over the city well. from here to New York. You've probably heard about it. Yeah so, I knew the neighbors and everything, because I had been living there probably maybe five or six years at that time and so they were calling me up and saying "do you want to come over and stay at our house?" I said you don't have any lights either. [laughter]. You have no lights, I have no light, I don't know, I'll be over there in the dark, you know. But I lived alone, so I thought it was nice that they were thinking about me. They said well if you change your mind, you know feel free. And then, of course, the next day when it was pretty clear that these lights were not going to come back on in a few minutes we, everybody took stuff out of their freezers and we just had like this big barbeque, we put everything
LR: Well you would have to.
RS: because I mean it wasn't going to keep. Yeah, but that was fun. And then I had another incident, again, one of my neighbors. I was having my driveway paved…and umm I walked, I always walked with the neighbor across the street from me. I don't know if you know Virginia Park, It's a historic area. And the homes are large, and a lot of them have two car garages and, but what I didn't know was this one neighbor, which I had been knowing Tony for a while he lived next door to a neighbor that I walked with and I was telling Dick, you know I hate parking my car on the side of the street I said but I got to have my driveway done. And you know, and I can get to my back to get to my garage because if it was behind, like behind my house. And he said "well tony has got a three car garage, and he only has one car maybe he'll let you park at his house." So like I said I knew Tony, not quite as well as I knew Richard but I knew him I said "Okay, Okay I'll ask him"….and he was kind of a very quiet guy he was you know, kind of reserved, so I ask him he said "yeah no problem" he said "when do you want to bring the car?" I said "umm I get home from work around 5:30." So I don't know he must have been looking out because he was a social worker. He said "you know I have a better idea." I said "what", he said "where do you have to go this evening?" I said "I'm not going anywhere until tomorrow morning I'm going to work" and he said "what time do you go to work?" I said "around 830" he said "well I'll come and get your car, and put it in my garage and I'll have it back in front of the house by 8:30 for you." So I thought Wow! This is like really curb service! He did that for three days. He just took my car, put it in his garage, brought it back at 8:30 for me to go to work. I was like what a guy.
That, and then as our neighborhood began switching over we got a lot of new neighbors and I hadn't had this experience since I left Port Huron.
LR: Switching over?
RS: Yeah we had a lot of, our neighborhood was primarily African American when I moved in, I've been in the neighborhood almost 25 years now… and most of the new housing has gone to majority people Caucasians and East Indians. And so we were having dinner, me and a friend were having dinner on a Sunday in December.
LR: This past December?
RS: No. This was several years ago….and a gentleman they knocked on our door, I knew they were the new neighbors because I had been talking to them in the spring and in the summer, because I am a gardener, so I am out in the yard a lot so I meet a lot of people. My friend said "Oh it's the people from down the street…the new neighbors" I said "yeah." So they came to the door, and they said, well I said "come on in" you know, and they said "oh no. We are just bringing bread around to all the neighbors for Christmas." It was a Christmas stolen like, he said: "because you know, it's the holidays and we just wanted to connect with the neighbors." I was like, Wow!
LR: You were not used to that?
RS: Well in Port Huron it happened all the time, but not in Detroit. And that led to a lot of things, we formed a block club and did a lot of stuff.
LR: Did you venture around the city; it says growing up but I guess after you got there?
RS: Well actually I did come to the city quite a bit when I was growing up because I had family here.
LR: Yeah okay, so did you venture?
RS: yeah we went, what we really came for was the holidays. They would have music at the Rotunda, it's gone now, it was a Ford rotunda. Well I guess it was something like a, as a kid you don't know what these places are, maybe their museums, but anyway they always had a Christmas program there and our parents brought us to that and then we would go of course to downtown Hudson's. Because it would be and this was for whatever reason, this is so crazy the kids all thought the real Santa Clause was at Hudson's. That was just a kid this you know? And they would say, so we have to go, we always wanted to go to Hudson's to see the real Santa Clause. Port Huron Santa Clause, I don't know what he was, he was a fake Santa, because the real Santa was at Hudson's. And… of course that was the biggest department store, we knew anything about and I'm sure it was like in New York, he's at Macy's or whatever.
LR: yeah and he probably had the most elaborate costume, the most realistic costume.
RS: Yes, yeah exactly. And so we went there, and actually one year we went to, we didn't do this all the time, but to the train station and they had music there too, Christmas music and so sometimes we would go there when we would make our Christmas trip. But in the summer when we came down we often went to the zoo, and it seemed like it was a million miles. Yeah, we would go, get a lunch, take the streetcar. We actually when we came down here, we were like tourists, because we didn't live here.
LR: yeah especially when you are used to more of a rural setting, and it's so much different here.
RS: Yeah exactly, there is so much going on.
LR: It says, ask them about the decades they grew up in, and what was Detroit like during the sixties?
RS: I was here in the sixties; it was… very busy…I was working and going to school at the time. So that was a lot.
LR: Where did you go to school at?
RS: Wayne. I went to Wayne, I went back to get my bachelors in nursing, I had an A.A. in nursing.
LR: Oh ok, and where did you work while you were in school?
RS: I still was at Wayne County General. I lived in Chicago at that time and umm worked nights and went to school in the daytime or if I could sometimes I would work days and go to school at night.
LR: Yeah, your schedule changes with the semester.
RS: yeah but by that time I had been at Wayne County about five or six years so I could pretty much…
LR: Do what you wanted.
RS: yeah, mix up my schedule. That's the one good thing about nursing, you can work, days, nights.
LR: Are there any stories from your childhood about your neighborhood that you would like to share?
RS: are they still trying to go with like the sixties?
LR: Yeah I guess because we already did that question.
RS: Yeah I had some really good friends, I met some really good friends when I was here. when I lived in an apartment setting, as opposed that was before I got married. Umm… and so you know it was all young, you know, you know what. Everybody is running around and finding the latest bars. It's so funny now when I see the kids and they all think "oh this is like so new" and I'm like "yeah right" [laughter]. And you know exploring places but one of the things that…that we had some really good girlfriends and some guys that we ran around with. We were kind of bowling addicts, we did a lot of bowling, on this league, that league, this place, that place.
LR: Is there anything that you think makes Virginia Park Unique?
RS: Oh yeah, defiantly. The only reason that people are, that people live in Virginia Park is because they want to, nobody lives there because they have to.
LR: So is it just like esthetically pleasing?
RS: Well its people that like historic houses. You know, right from the beginning you have a common, a common thing with your neighbors. You really love old houses. So that is kind of what helped us pull together. The same guys I told you that bought the bread they were talking to me during the summer about things they needed, they were rehabbing some of the houses and they needed some of the brick, like my house. And they asked and I told them "don't waste any time in Detroit trying to find it, people who did this had to go to Lima Ohio, to get this red slate, umm limestone, I said so don't spend any time around here trying to find it, because it's not around here. And so that kind of stuff, so yeah there's a, there's that whatever else people are doing they have an idea that they like old houses because you wouldn't live there if you didn't like old houses.
LR: has your neighborhood changed over the years or has it stayed the same? And if it has changed how so?
RS: oh its changed a lot. Its changed a lot. When I first moved there the neighborhood was defiantly in decline. General motors had rehabbed about five…maybe six blocks…. maybe six houses on our block and they were trying to get people to move back into the area.
LR: When you say rehab, you mean like renovated?
RS: Oh yeah. What they left was the historical structure, all of the electric and plumbing and all of that was gutted and new was put in.
LR: what year was that?
RS: I think that was, I'm trying to think about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago, whatever year that was. So they did our block first, of course, I bought that house, one of the houses. They had five or six that they had done and still, the neighborhood was pretty much all African American. People weren't moving into the city then, you know everyone was saying the last one to leave turn off the lights and all this. It happened though by that time my husband had passed but we lived in the city, even then we lived in the city, our home was in what they call green acres, right outside of Sherwood forest, it was an old home not like on Virginia Park, not that old. And we were going to before my husband got sick, we were going to buy a house on Virginia Park. We actually had staked out one and knew it was for sale and all of that and then he got sick so of course, we didn't do that. But then after a while, when I heard they were going to have some more for sale again, I went back because I really liked the area. And so then, General Motors rehabbed, I'm trying to think maybe five or six more on the second block and umm those were more pricey, then the houses, then we bought because they bid the houses, so they gave them a low bid, they gave them a bid, a start. And so they were a little bit more. But I still think it was primarily African American. They didn't ever, General Motors never did the third block. Virginia Park is a funny street it runs from Woodward to the lodge freeway, so its three blocks then after the freeway it picks up again and those are all newer homes on that side. So it has you know, but the Virginia Park that I think most people talk about, the historic, is that three-block area, it just runs to the Lodge freeway. And then when we had this so-called resurgence. As the homes sold umm mostly Caucasians purchased most of the homes that were for sale then and that been like the last eight, nine years.
LR: Have you ever thought about moving away?
RS: No, I mean I'm going to move at some point, it's a big house and you know I… the big draw for me was that it was a big home and also my office was like ten minutes away, so it was very close to my work and then I retired so that draw is no longer there. And I own a home in Vegas and I spend time there, and my sisters live there and so we have that house, I..I don't like Vegas.
LR: So where would you move, if you were to move?
RS: Oh, I…
LR: Would you stay in Detroit?
RS: Oh yeah! Absolutely I'll stay in Detroit I'll just get, you know, I'll get a condo or something.
LR: Did you stay in the same neighborhood, or did you move?
RS: I moved, I moved from Port Huron like I said, when I was about twenty. And when I was here I lived in apartments until I got married and then we bought a home, but all of it was in Detroit.
LR: When someone says the neighborhood what does that mean to you?
RS: Well for me, since we've had so much about it I know they call it New Center, the New center area which runs from the Boulevard to Euclid to Woodward to the Lodge. But for me when they say the neighborhood I think Virginia Park because that's where I interact with people. That's my neighborhood. Although I'm now on an overarching board which is called Can-Can and there are like 7 distinct.
LR: What is an overarching board?
RS: An overarching board is umm you know, the grass is cut on lots that don't belong, on vacant lots or that kind of stuff. So Can-can we have, one, two three, four, seven groups and these are all places in order to be in Can-can which is a community organization you purchased these properties from General Motors. So yeah some of them are apartment buildings, some of them are condos, of course on Virginia Park its private houses all the rest are conglomerate living of some kind you know, condominiums, apartment buildings, but the common thread is that they were all purchased from General Motors and within our deed it says we are members of this group. Virginia Park are members of that board, the Can-can board, which is the seven.
LR: One of the seven?
RS: Yes, one of the seven.
LR: Is this the group that runs like street parties, street events?
RS: Yeah, they have ah they just had, no. The pumpkin carving hasn't come up yet, they'll have a pumpkin carving, they always have a Christmas event, they have a picnic in the summer.
LR: Is it just for people within Virginia Park?
RS: No, it's those seven. Yeah, and we are going to have an annual meeting on the seventeenth, this week coming up actually. And that will be to elect the new board and to let people know what all things have happened and all that stuff.
LR: How do you feel about the state of your neighborhood today?
RS: Oh, good. It's a nice place, it's a fun place to live I have new neighbors who other than saying hi in the morning I haven't met. But Jeff the same gentleman who brought the bread, we've become quite good friends and he rehabbed that house and then he sold it now, he owns twelve houses on Virginia Park. Most of them he's sold you know, he's rehabbed them and he's sold them.
LR: What would you like to see happen with your neighborhood?
RS: Well we are in discussions now with the city, I have no idea where this is going to go. We have a cobblestone street and do you know what that looks like?
LR: with the brick? The bumpy, bumpy brick [laughter].
RS: yeah, the bumpy brick [laughter]. And they just there is one on Canfield, the short section of Canfield across from umm, what is the restaurant? As much time as I spend in there I can't think of it, ah there's a section of Canfield that is historic and they had some problems, I think it was water or something. So the city has got some good pricing on what it costs to do that. So we've just finished a survey they say it would be like a million dollars. So I don't think we are going to get it re-bricked umm there are still a few brick streets part of Michigan Avenue has still got some of the brick umm and like I said on Canfield there's still got some of the brick. Actually quite honestly they have not done, the city for a hundred and eleven years they have not done any road work here on that street, for a hundred and eleven years. So you know, the argument we are trying to put forth is that if you just do the brick you won't have to do any work for a hundred and eleven years. And what we said is pull up your paperwork on any of your concrete streets, trust me you've done work, yeah in the last hundred years you have not, not done anything on those streets. But they did they pulled up the paperwork during the first meeting and they said we are going to tell you the last record we have of this being put in, which is when it was out in basically, was a hundred and eleven years ago, and we have no records of any other work being done on this street.
LR: yeah, so you would like to see it be re-bricked?
RS: Yeah, there is a portion of us that would like to see it re-bricked, most people want the bumps to stop [laughter]
LR: Well they are like speed bumps [laughter].
RS: [laughter] Yeah, and somebody raised that at the meetings, somebody said nobody speeds down our street.
LR: Well I guess that answered the next question, it says if you could get a project done in your neighborhood what would it be?
RS: Yeah, that would be the street. Yeah, I guess maybe some people have maybe tear downs or things like that. We have now I think in the third block, there might be two houses that haven't been rehabbed but I think that's it but, most of the houses are occupied.
LR: How do you feel about the state of your city today?
RS: boy, that's a hard one…that's a hard one. Umm, it all depends on your point of view I mean I live in what they call midtown, new center whatever which everyone says is the hot area. And so we have really no complaints, we have good police response, we have very regular trash pick-up, we have recycle pick up, we have, you know, there is a lot going on in that neighborhood. And it's ..….
LR: So maybe more of that going on throughout the city?
RS: Yeah more neighborhoods that need to get that kind of focus and that kind of attention.
LR: Do you think that having your group the Can-Can, something like that may be in other areas something like that?
RS: Yeah, we actually before Can-can got to be moving well, block clubs. I really, I'm a firm believer in block clubs I think they do a lot I think they get people together. About six, seven, eight years ago we started our first block club.
LR: Is that like where people have like the barbeques?
RS: Yeah, just the people within the block. And it just makes for and we have, someone at Wayne was doing some kind of a study, I don't know what they were doing, but anyway they came up and they brought flyers, and they said if you want to start a block club we have got students I think they may have been city core students or something like that, that would help us. And they set up an email system for us and umm linked us so we could do one click and the information goes out to all the members. And they helped us a lot in getting started and getting organized. And I think that some of that still exists somewhere I'm not sure who does it. But that's a good project for Wayne because I think it does make a difference.
LR: Yeah, it builds a sense of community, and I feel like when people have that people take more pride, people don't take pride in their stuff anymore.
RS: Right its funny, we have this one neighbor, well everybody kind of has…I'm a gardener so I grow flowers out the front most people have pots, now they've got mums. When I was looking when I came out the other day this guy has, I counted them, because it was so many he has eleven pumpkins on his porch and in his yard. And you know some of them have on little hats you know, it's so funny. And everyone in our neighborhood they are getting into it, I see pumpkins.
LR: Gets a little competitive.
RS: Yeah it does. You know and everyone keeps their grass cut. It's like what you said.
36min 14 sec
end of track
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Virginia Park, Detroit, Michigan, CanCan Organization, General Motors rehab
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Title
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Roberta Sanders
Description
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In this interview, Roberta Sanders discusses her experience in Virginia Park, and her enjoyment and involvement of the community.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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10/11/2018
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Detroit Historical Society
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Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Joseph Zarazua
Brief Biography
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Joseph Zarazua originally grew up in Taylor, Michigan. He moved to the West side of Detroit in 1980. After returning back to Taylor for a time, he moved to Mexicantown, and in 1991 moved to the Hubbard Farms neighborhood. He is currently active at Ste. Anne Parish nearby.
Interviewer's Name
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Matthias Reed
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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11/17/2018
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Matthias Reed: So, when did you come to Detroit?
Joseph Zarazua: I came to Detroit in 1980. Right after high school I got a job with the… National Steel. And… made some friends and left home in Taylor. I came and they lived in Detroit. So… I… eighteen years old, doing what I want and wanted to… found nothing… that excited me in Taylor, but Detroit, the city just invited me. And so… it was like, 1980. …And just because I was on my own it was time to be on my own and leave home, you know, leave the nest.
MR: And what had you heard about Detroit before coming?
JZ: …My mom and dad, they’re Latino, and most of the familiarity with Detroit was… in the Mexicantown area. …I don’t think it was called Mexicantown back then… in 1970s… but, they had a lot of friends here, so they would come on the weekends… I would go with my dad on adventures… So, I kind of just knew as a young boy that I like this place. It’s so different from Taylor! …I just liked the experiences I had here, you know, my dad taking us to Hudson’s for Christmas, the parade… the Thanksgiving Day Parade… big time wrestling at COBO Hall, we always did that… So, I was pretty familiar with city and kind of… that it was a place for entertainment. Not so much, didn’t really realize about the life-giving source that it also provided for people that lived here. But definitely my first impression was ‘This is cool.’ I loved tall buildings. …I was so attracted to the creativity… not realizing that this was actually helping to form me as someone that would appreciate architecture and… history… and different cultures.
My first place to live at in the city was… on the West Side at Plymouth and Greenfield. And I didn’t have a car… Well I had a car… and then I got laid-off, and then I wrecked my car in the city. …So, I ended up having to depend on this… public transportation system, and I really learned… the ins and outs… of how to maneuver through the city. You really discover it on that ground level using the transportation system… So, that was my first place on the West Side.
And then I, once I… got laid-off, I decided to go back to school and I really couldn’t afford to live on my own, so, I moved back to Taylor for about two years, maybe a year and a half… and then my said, ‘Well… I’m leaving my husband, so I’m going to move into an apartment or a flat. I’m going to Detroit, my friends have a house, you’re welcome to live with me,’ and I did and… that was over here on… it’s Mexicantown! I lived on Porter Street for about two years. Porter and Morrell. Which is like, that even enticed me even more about the city because it was one of the first times I actually felt like I was living in a foreign country because there was a lot of Spanish-speaking, and the stores and all of the businesses… that’s all you heard. So, it really made me feel like I was in another country, but yet I knew I was in the city…
So, I would commute to Wayne State… on the bus system and learning that much more about the Cass Corridor, and just how connected Southwest Detroit really does give you access through the… freeway system… you can go east, north, south, or west in a matter of minutes…
I currently reside in… Hubbard Farms. I moved there in 1991, but before that… I moved out into another apartment that was on Fort Street and Junction, so, I know I got too see another part of… life. It’s mostly a blue-collar community, and… I just really enjoyed it. …But in 1991, I had the opportunity to… move to Hubbard Farms… into a house… and I still live there now. …It’s very different from the neighborhood I grew up in, in Taylor, even though, that was a good experience in itself. It was more of at the time, Taylor in the 1960s and 70s, …was more rural, but once the Detroit experienced the riots… a lot of displaced people ended up coming Downriver. And… it’s actually one of the first experiences I had, with going to school with black people. …And that was another change for me as well, but it did help me prepare for coming in to the city, …because I met a lot of wonderful, wonderful African American people here in the city.
MR: So, what is your neighborhood like?
JZ: Currently, Hubbard Farms… it’s a designated historic. So, when I first moved there, I met… some key people that were… active in… a lot of the community… organizations… Homeowners that took pride in their neighborhood and… we found that they were very watchful and mindful of all the things that went on… Very open to inviting newcomers into the neighborhood, to be a part of the organization of homeowners.
… The interesting thing about Hubbard Farms is that, a lot of the people were, that were living there, had already been, they’ve established households there, they had been there for years. And… so, as far as like, meeting your neighbors, you really, you met them briefly but then, everybody kept to themselves. …And I’m not that kind of person so, my neighbors know me… in a good way, I hope. I don’t know. But it… was a, as I grew to learn what the neighborhood was like… it seemed like they were very… well educated… had… their value systems in place, and… you didn’t really know their stories until you actually took time to meet them. But as it is, work doesn’t always allow us to do that, so they still kind of seem elusive, or some even reclusive.
MR: And is it an integrated neighborhood?
JZ: …Yeah, it’s becoming more and more integrated. …Particularly, one of the markers of that integration is the Hotel Yorba… because… anybody can live there. And what I’m seeing now is that there’s the organization of Southwest Business Solutions that is responsible for… acquiring properties and renovating them and providing affordable living… for a particular sector. …And… so, I find that a lot of those residents that occupy their buildings… are displaced from areas where gentrification is taking place… such as the Cass Corridor and Midtown… and the Eastern Market area and even Corktown. …They have to go somewhere, and fortunately Southwest Solutions is one of those… organizations that will help them; help place them.
… In all honesty, I think some of the homeowners in Hubbard Farms aren’t too crazy with that kind of integration… but one of the important things for me is my Christianity and, I …believe that you have to live somewhere. If you have the opportunity to be placed somewhere that’s designated for you then, I guess it’s meant to be… Yeah, it’s a very integrated area. On all levels. From prostitutes to preachers… And I like it.
MR: So, are there any stories from your neighborhood that you would like to share?
JZ: …Gosh, just from living there…who I’ve met, who I’ve seen come through the neighborhood, getting to know the neighbors I do know… Like, for example, I lived across the street from a big Latino family, the Solano family, and… I became close with them and next to them there was… on either side, they had peculiar neighbors. There was Mr. Bob, who was kind of like this artistic recluse… who lived on his own and… took his home and reformed it away from its original architectural aesthetic [He bricked in the windows! Ed.] and would create these… really cool gardens, both in the front of his house and in the back. It almost… it was interesting. It definitely was interesting. And… he was an interesting man.
And then on the other side of them, across the street from me was… a couple. I think he was like an alcoholic… and his wife got sick and he took care of her for a little bit. But there was one particular time where apparently, he was stalking the neighbors next to him. [laughs] And it was a continuing story, a saga for that family until they had to move, he bothered them so much. …So, one day, I’m looking out, I hear this… caterwauling noise like, ‘AEHHHHH!’ And I kept hearing, ‘AEHHH! AAEHHHHH!!’ So, I look out the window and I see, his name was John, and I see him, kind of like, whaling his hands and he’s facing my house… and the neighbors, the house he’s at, are standing there with their camera taking his photo, as he’s trying to, it looked like he was trying to get away. Well, he was harassing them, and as he turned to get away, his suspenders got caught on the screen-door knob, and he couldn’t get away, because he couldn’t reach back to unhook himself. So, [Laughing] it was just, such a peculiarly funny, I mean, I feel sorry for the other family, but that was their proof like ‘Hey, he’s harassing us! And this is our proof!’ So, they did unhook him and he got away and he went back into his house, but just seeing stuff like that…
Passing out Halloween candy is always an adventure too. We don’t get a lot of people, but, one year I was… passing out the candy and an older woman came up and… she was petit, and she had a bandanna on her head, and she was smoking a cigarette and… holding out a little pumpkin basket and… she kind of like, struck this pose of just somebody waiting for something. And so, I asked her what her costume was. ‘It ain’t no costume. My baby’s sick, I ain’t bringing him out in the rain.’ So [Laughing] I just handed her the candy and said ‘Oh, okay…’ and she exhaled and said ‘Thank you,’ and walked off the porch.
… I mean there’s a lot of stories, but… it’s just interesting… you can experience almost anything that… The ‘Yorba Knights’ they’re always; I call them the ‘Yorba Knights,’ the people that walk from the Hotel Yorba to Shaun’s Party Store. So… they… come from the party store and they head east to the Yorba. It’s like a ritual… so I dubbed them the ‘Yorba Knights.’ They go east and they go west and that’s the only direction I ever see them go. West to the party store and east to their dwelling.
MR: …So, what makes your neighborhood unique?
JZ: …I think, I love the fact that on my block… if something happens, say inclement weather… we’re a tree lined street… and I have one of the oldest maples in my yard and across the street there’s also an ageing elm, and the two kind of create an archway up, over the street. …And with inclement weather the older the trees, the more susceptible they are to limbs breaking and falling off. …And when that happens, people in the community tend to come together and say, “Hey, let’s, we need access, we need to get our street cleared… They’re good at forthcoming to help when help is needed. …If somebody’s lawn needs cutting, they’ll either appeal to them to get it done or just, “Hey you don’t have a lawnmower, okay, we’ll take care of it for you.” …There’s a lot of pride with the homeowners there. …One of the things I don’t like is the fact it is historic and… they make us mindful of that more than we wanna be… It’s like living in an association, and I don’t like to be told what I can and can’t do to my own house. But, because there’s this, the whole play of the aesthetic of maintaining a historic dwelling, it’s important, I do believe. …But it’s that thing that some things you want to conform to, and other things we just… conformity, I can go without it. It’s my home.
MR: So, do you feel comfortable in the city?
JZ: VERY, …very. …I rarely find myself being intimidated in my surroundings. …I think that that’s really based on my, I know that God has my back, and if it’s my time, then it’s my time. And for the most part… The thing about living in the city is that… craziness is so accepted… everybody is just… you have this unconditional appreciation for whoever you encounter, and you just know that, “Okay, that’s their story, and that’s who they are, and I’m not here to change anybody, but I’m not here to push anybody away either.”
…I’ve had my car stolen once… [inaudible] But, it was my fault, I left the keys inside. But the fact that they came up the driveway, and they only got as far as; of all the times to steal a vehicle on inclement weather day, when you’re not going to go anywhere in the ice and snow- they didn’t. They got as far as the stop sign up the block and slid into a pole. So, the bad thing was, I had to pay for the storage while they found my car. …I disagreed with that.
MR: So, has your neighborhood changed over the years or has it remained the same?
JZ: No, yeah, it is changing. One of the things about Hubbard Farms is that, again, it was such a close-knit family kind of community, that you almost knew that the real estate was lucrative, because you almost never knew when… someone was selling their home, because you never saw the “For Sale” sign go up. But the next thing you know, you have new neighbors. And they’re somehow connected to whoever was in the house before.
But now, we are seeing, with all of the …rebuilding of Detroit, the Downtown area, and… the rediscovery of places like the train station and Michigan Avenue. ...It’s, the new little pop-up restaurants that come in and that borderline gentrification that’s taking place on Vernor Highway. …The bad thing about that, that I don’t like… is that… a lot of us that live here still … are working paycheck to paycheck, and… to bring high-priced restaurants in this area where the residents can’t enjoy them, that turns me off. …And that’s the change that I see.
MR: So, have you ever thought of moving away?
JZ: No. Mm, nn. I think I’m grounded here, this community makes me grounded… this is home for me, it always will be. …I remember when I first moved to this area… I was probably like twenty-five. …Metro Times started doing their “Best of Detroit,” or their “Best reasons to live in Detroit” thing, and I think somebody asked me some questions, and one of the things that I said was that, they asked “Why do you live in Detroit,” I said, “To get away from my family.”
“And what’s the best thing about living in Detroit?”
“They won’t come.”
But now they do, they’re here all the time, so they’ve experienced what I’ve experienced and now I love it when they visit.
MR: So, when someone says “the neighborhoods,” what does that mean to you?
JZ: [Thinking] …It depends, …if you can visibly see that how sustainable life has been for that community and that… anywhere you drive, like take for example the East Side. There’s so much blight there… but yet, you see the pockets in these neighborhoods where [hits hand on table] they’re there [again hits hand on table] they’re taking care of their properties, they’re looking out for their other neighbors. That defines… that they have a stake in their livelihood and they’re not going to let anybody or any decay or anything… be a part that they’re governed by. They’re gonna survive.
MR: So how do you feel about the state of your neighborhood today?
JZ: Right now, I think its… in a state of rediscovery… I have new neighbors coming in, it seems like every week. Or somebody is discovering something about the neighborhood, where they want to come and stay. …The sad thing about it is that a lot of them are people that can’t afford to stay because the real estate is increasing. And when you’re young and money is a factor, that’s just, it isn’t, I wouldn’t say fair, but unfortunate that they want to be somewhere but they can’t because it costs too much.
MR: What would you like to see happen with your neighborhood?
JZ: [Thinking] …I would love to see… more… I have to go, when I shop for groceries, the unfortunate thing is I don’t have anywhere to go except the supermercado and I find that the prices are a little more higher than I would, if I were to Kroger or Meijer. And I would like to see more, something along the lines of fair pricing for the community. I think it’s sad that because, it’s still considered a poorer community, but the fact that… some people don’t have transportation and they have to rely on the businesses that provide goods and services, I think those businesses tend to take advantage of that and they will infuse their own pricing system, which take gasoline for example. …I think, just because we’re at the border of the Canadian… exit to the US… I think gas stations take advantage of that. …For some reason they think that the Canadians have a higher standard of living and they can afford the gasoline. They raise the prices up at least twenty cents higher than what you could find outside of the Detroit community. …And I think that’s so unfair. But no one does anything about it.
MR: So, if you could get a project done in your neighborhood, what would it be?
JZ: …It’d have to be a price gouging project, and… eradicating that behavior and that attitude of business owners.
MR: So, how do you feel about the state of the city today?
JZ: …I think it’s… it’s doing well, it’s doing better than when I first discovered, my own self-discovery of it. …In 1980 there was the exodus, where everybody was going to Houston because of the job explosion there… Or wherever they went, I don’t know where everybody went… But… downtown was just a place for me to discover, all of these empty businesses, “where did it go?” “Why aren’t they here?” …Now, it’s taken thirty years, but here they are, slowly. …Reconnecting, making… their own self-discovery of the relevance of the City of Detroit.
I think we’re headed in a good direction. …It’s not gonna happen overnight. 1805, the city burned, Father Gabriel Richard stayed to help rebuild it, and look what he accomplished. …We have to be grateful for that. The city, it’s laid out into a wagon-wheel, and all the spokes lead out somewhere, but yet… doesn’t necessarily mean they lead out; they also lead in.
So, it’ll be great to see, we have the Q-Line now, which only goes from Midtown to Downtown, but there’s no reason why that can’t be explored, why we can’t have more rail service out of the city or coming into the city. There are a lot of people that live outside of the city that have to come in to the city to work, but the transportation is lacking; the public transportation is lacking and I for one, who used it, I so appreciated it. I would love to see that brought back… that would really give; put the city in a better state, the people could have an easier access… Just because we’re the car capital of the world, that doesn’t… mean we can’t ride on buses.
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Detroit, Michigan, Mexicantown, Hubbard Farms, Mexican-American,
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Title
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Joseph Zarazua
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Zarazua describes the reasons for choosing to move from the suburbs to Detroit. He shares the community life of the Hubbard Farms/ Mexicantown neighborhood, as well as some interesting occurrences that have happened there.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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11/17/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Rosemary Schofield
Brief Biography
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Rosemary (Solano) Schofield was born in 1944 and grew up in parts of Corktown and Mexicantown in Southwest Detroit. She is Catholic and Mexican American. She currently lives in Livonia, Michigan.
Interviewer's Name
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Matthias Reed
Interview Place
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Livonia, Michigan
Date
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11/1/2018
Transcription
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Matthias Reed: Okay, so where and when were you born?
Rosemary Schofield: I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1944, December 5th. …I grew up in Southwest Detroit my whole life.
I first grew up on, we lived on Porter Street in Detroit. There was a couple of sets of apartment buildings, and …my mom and dad had immigrated, or migrated up from Texas to …Detroit, Michigan and were married and… started a family.
And we lived there until I was about seven… about six years old. And, at that time there were a lotta kids in that apartment building. And there was a big empty lot next door that had a hill on it. And we would go out and play on the hill when… I was little. And the kids would roll down the hill like kids always do.
And it was a very mixed neighborhood, even at that point. And I remember that from my childhood; there were a lot of every… nationality under the sun was in …lived in that apartment building.
We moved from there when I was about seven years old. And we moved to Fifteenth Street in Detroit, which was a few blocks west of … Porter Street where our, the apartment building was. And we moved to a little… home that my dad rented at the time.
And again, it was a very mixed neighborhood, although there were more Hispanics in this neighborhood… there was also a mix of Irish people and African American people… but primarily Mexican people.
And we all… but the entire neighborhood, the really good thing about it was that we, we were all good friends, and we remain good friends to this day, which I’ll talk more about later.
But… we lived in an area where there were… there was a family down the street that I believe were Maltese; the Lemus family. And they had, their father raised… German Shepherds. He actually breeded them. I never went to that house cause they scared the begeebies out of me.
…Across the street were Margie and… the whole Villegas family lived across the street. The Munoz family lived right next door to where my… mom and dad lived at. And then there were some Southern people that lived over on the corner.
And there was a big empty lot between some of the houses, where the boys would all go out and play baseball, because at that time girls were traditionally not allowed to go out and play baseball or things of that sort.
And then at nighttime, the boys from the neighborhood would all get together and they would play kick the can out in the… street. And I still remember that, I vividly remember that because I had a lot of brothers, I had, all total, nine; or, ten brothers. But, it was so cool because they would all… all…
[Interruption]
RS: I was talking about the boys being outside playing kick the, kick the can… and… I could be on the front porch watching them play kick the can.
But… our house… on Fifteenth Street, we had an old… I guess you would call it, like a potbellied stove. It wasn’t what we cooked on, but we heated the living room, the kitchen, the living room with that potbellied stove on wood and coal. Our stove though, was the old-fashioned kind of stove, with the pipe that went up and in, out [inaudible] vented to the outside. And then, I remember my mom being really excited when she finally got a good stove, because my mom was a great cook, she loved to cook. She made tortillas, and beans and she was a wonderful cook, and, and, taught us the value of cooking as well.
My dad was a, a steelworker. He worked at… Great Lakes Steel on Zug Island, and he worked there for thirty-three years. He was a very hard worker; long, long hours. …Very strong work ethic for both of my parents, although my mother worked at home, of course, because we had so many children in the family.
…Mr. Munoz, who lived next door to us on Fifteenth Street, where we lived at, was very religious. And he wanted to make sure that we went to Catholic school. Well he, reintroduced my mom to church, and so she started going to Ste. Anne’s… for Mass. And then my father started going sometimes to Ste. Anne’s for Mass when he wasn’t working. Mr. Munoz at that time decided that he was going to pay for us to go to Ste. Anne’s Catholic School, which was very inexpensive at the time, it was like, ten dollars a, a child. So, he paid for that for a while until I got in high school and I started working, and then I started paying my own way through… Ste. Anne’s. And they would let me pay whatever amount of money I could pay until by the end of the school year I would have the entire thing paid.
… It was incredibly, as I said before, an integrated neighborhood. It was… it was just, we were… it was just a place where you could just love being with the people that you were with. My, one of my best friends, Esther Martinez, who’s still one of my best friends to this day, has the same birthday as me, and she lived two doors down from me. And we would sit on her front porch and just talk and laugh; and she went to school with me, and she remains just as good a friend today as she was back then.
…Other friends from the neighborhood: Salome Alvarado and… Kathy Haggerty, Jenny Haggerty, and “Boots,” her name was Carol Agius, we used to call her “Boots.” She was a very good friend also, and they all still remain really good friends, all of us to this day.
…After we moved from Fifteenth Street, we moved to Sixteenth Street, which was only a block away and then a block over to the… to the north of where we lived at, but just only a block away. The interesting, one of the interesting things about that neighborhood was that there was a bar on every corner. And my understanding of that was that, that was related to when people came to Detroit to work in the steel mills and in the auto companies, um during the war, where, when they were producing of course, things… for the war, not for… autos. But… these men traditionally went to these bars. And I still remember the names of a couple them, one was the … “White Elephant,” one was the “Green Dot.” … I don’t remember the other two, but there was a bar on every corner.
And then there was a little store on the, it was right on Howard Street, and it was called “Woody’s,” was the name of the store. And it actually had a wooden floor and it had wooden cupboards in it, and I still remember to this day, where you would pull the cupboards aside when they were gonna get something out, they would pull these old-fashioned cupboards aside to get whatever it is that you were ordering from them.
…And I don’t remember the names of the storekeepers there, but it was, I can still vividly picture that store in my mind. It was… it was just something that you could picture from back in the old days…
We lived on Sixteenth Street, that was more integrated than Fifteenth Street was. We had black neighbors, African American neighbors on either side of us. We lived in the middle of the block and it was a small house. And the man that lived in part of our house on Fifteenth Street, actually moved to Sixteenth Street with us. And he lived in the back part of the house, and he was an immigrant, he was a Greek immigrant. And… lived by himself, never bothered anybody, and he stayed there in that house for the longest time, and then ultimately, he moved, I don’t know where he moved to… Didn’t speak to anybody; but he was a nice, nice older man.
And… when we lived on Sixteenth Street there were, we had a lot of children in the family by that point. And it was basically, the rules were the same, the boys could go out and play and the girls stayed in the house; well, I was the only girl at the time… and did the things girls were supposed to do at the time: wash clothes, take care of the babies, that kind of thing. …But it was, it was natural so it wasn’t like it was anything that was forced, you just did those things.
My mom still cooked a lot, in fact there was no such thing as eating out. We would always have dinners at home, and it would be tortillas, and beans, and potatoes, and really good food, because it was… that’s what you did, that was just the Mexican culture at that time.
The… black lady that lived to the right of us on Fifteenth [Sixteenth] Street was …kind of notorious for her reputation. The black family that lived to the left of us on Fifteenth [Sixteenth] Street, they worked in the auto companies, and… the… I don’t know where the woman worked at, but I know they worked too, but the men worked in the auto companies.
But again, everybody was just friends with everybody, there was no hostility, and we were basically all in the same boat, nobody had a lot of anything. So… you just kind of learned to just, you didn’t learn… you just, that was the neighborhood.
One of the things that I remember about Sixteenth Street specifically is people running numbers. And they would run the numbers from house to house and you’d hear them up and down the street running the numbers, and they did this every day! And it was kinda like the lotto, but it was way before the lotto time, and that’s just what they did they ran the numbers, and you just got used to hearing that going on.
And then, across the street from us there lived some people from the South. And then there were some more Mexican families there, and then down the street lived Carol Agius and her whole family, and… they used to, there was… well, I’ll get to that other story in a minute.
But, down the street from us on Sixteenth Street, when they would have funerals, they would do the wakes in the home. And so, you would hear this, the singing and the wailing, and mostly singing, and it would go on for hours and hours and all night and all day, and I still remember that vividly to this day.
My girl friend Kathy Haggerty who lived behind me on Six…she lived on Fifteenth and I lived on Sixteenth and there was an alley separating our homes. And her father had a, he was a mortician. And he actually had a funeral home in their home. And so, the front room of the, their home was actually the funeral room and they would have… they had the big wooden doors that would slide together that would separate the funeral room from the rest of the home. And again, it was something that just happened naturally, people didn’t think about it, they just knew that at the Haggerty house there was a funeral home.
And the… their grandmother, my friend Kathy’s grandmother who was from Ireland lived in the home with them. So… it was just a natural progression of generations living together. Kathy and I have been close friends and remain close, close friends to this day. …She lives in Florida now, and I live up here in Detroit still, or in the Detroit area still yet.
… Carol Agius, the girl that lived down the street, the one that we called “Boots,” one of the things I remember about her is that she was an outstanding dancer. She could dance the “Chicken” better than anybody I know. [laughs] She was good.
But…and of course we, many of us went to Ste. Anne’s school, which was right down Howard Street and over to… over a couple of blocks. And it was a school that was affiliated with the church, Ste. Anne’s church that we all went to. And I went there until my, until the tenth grade. And then at the end of the tenth grade, they had to close the school because the third floor was falling in. It has since been repaired, but at that time [chuckling] it was falling in. So… I remember a lot of the names from there: there was Dee Johnson, and Mary Rose Ketler, and… Carol… oh gosh, I can’t remember the other Carol’s last name. Mary Margaret Cormere… Kathy and Jenny Haggerty went to school with me there; Erlin Madrigal, Ruben Flores. So many names of people that… I still that I still know to this day.
… I worked when I was in… We moved from Sixteenth Street to Seventeenth Street…This is what did you do for fun… I’m sorry, I digressed.
When we went, when I went to Ste. Anne’s, I was on the basketball team. And I’m very short, I’m only five-one, but… so was everybody else on the team [laughs]. And..., we just had fun. It was in the old-fashioned days when girls played, that was basically the only sport girls played at that time in that neighborhood. There wasn’t baseball teams or hockey teams or anything. But… we had fun with just the basketball. And… we would… it would be basketball practice a couple times a week after school and then I’d go home and I would do the things I that I traditionally did. Give the, my brothers and sisters their baths, make sure that… that they were well taken care of. My mom was always a wonderful mother, so, I just helped her with all of these things. … Changed diapers, fed them, whatever needed to be done.
… My dad continued to work at Great Lakes Steel. He actually, I’m very proud of him for this, was able to, in spite of working the long hours, and… having this huge family, he managed to educate himself enough to go to…get his certification and become an electrician. Now mind you, my dad and my mom had both been cotton pickers in Texas. And so, for him to achieve that was a huge thing. And he became very politically involved, which I was very proud of him for that as well, because he… knew the importance of being politically involved in order to make changes that had to be… that had to be done. He was very involved in the steelworker’s union, in fact he was a union representative for many years. … Once he became an electrician, he stayed at Zug Island, but then he was working in a much cleaner job. He would come home from work, he would just be covered with soot from head to toe… from all the black soot from the blast furnaces where he worked at originally. So, once he got in to become an electrician, the whole thing… not the whole thing changed, but things got better.
We then moved to Seventeenth Street when he got this better position, and we lived upstairs from a barbershop where I used to take my brothers to, to get their haircuts when they were little. Again, keeping in mind that at that time when you were seven, eight, nine years old; ten years old, you assumed a lot of responsibilities as a, the oldest girl, that children today would never experience, but we did it… and again it wasn’t a question, you didn’t think about it, you just did what had to be done. And… so I would take them there for their haircuts. Well, as luck would have it, we moved upstairs and by then the barbershop had closed, because Sam had moved, had retired. So that room was empty and then there were four bedrooms in the flat upstairs. And… it was cold up there because we had only one space heater and it was in the dining room. But during the day it would be warm because my mom would always cook and so we’d have beans and tortillas, and it was always warm in the kitchen and which then transferred to parts of the… some of the parts of the other house.
We had a lot of children at that point. We had, there were fourteen of us, at that, by that time.
But when I became a senior in high school, and at… well, I left Ste. Anne’s when they closed, I went over to St. Vincent’s. Well, St. Vincent was quite a few blocks away over at Fourteenth and Michigan. So, my friend Kathy and I would walk together across the Fourteenth Street bridge to get over to, down Bagley Street and then over to Fourteenth Street to get to school. And we would rush every morning, cause we were both late every morning. So, we’d end up not being late, but we’d make it there by the skin of our teeth.
And… we’d always have such fun. And then we both got a job at the dime store on Bagley… I think we started out making thirty-five cents an hour, which was kind of funny. So, and again we still played basketball in high school, so we would, you know, go to work and then go home and do our homework, and then I would of course help mom with giving the kids a bath and making sure that things were done, folding clothes, helping with washing clothes, whatever needed to be done. And then I would go… I would work, and then Kathy and I always had to work on Saturdays. And… we would still be, when we belonged to the basketball team, we would still play, but not, we weren’t as free to go to practice as, so we didn’t play for too much longer.
Then… when I was in high school, I actually was, I actually became a salutatorian of my senior year, don’t ask… it was, I loved school, and I learned, and I loved to learn, I still love to learn. I was really good in the sciences, so… math and… chemistry and biology… and… geez what was the other… physics, I just excelled in all of those. And the nuns at that school were really tough, but they taught us very well.
And again, I made a lot of friends at that school, and that was again another huge multicultural experience because there were tons of Maltese people at that school. So, when I was in my junior and senior year in high school, there were Maltese people, Mexican people, Italian people, Southern people… Syrian people, black people. There was, it was the most wonderful learning environment anybody could ask for. I don’t think, I don’t know if you could even replicate that today. And again, we were all friends, nobody was any better than anybody else. There really weren’t any cliques because the school was so small… we just, everybody was just friends.
And we had a clubhouse that was next to the school, they called it the “Clubhouse”; it was part of St. Vincent’s, just a separate building, but right next to the school. And on Friday nights they would have dances there. So, as long as I got my stuff done at home, I could go to the dances. Me and Kathy would walk over and go to the dances at the “Clubhouse” on Friday nights. And I would dance and dance and dance and dance… I loved to dance, I still love to dance. And in fact, when I was at Ste. Anne’s, I forgot that; we would go to the… they also had CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] dances on Friday nights. But then when it closed, of course, it was ended. And we would, again, everybody would go there, and everybody would dance. And you didn’t dance with anybody in particular, you just, everybody got on the dance floor and danced, so it was fun.
…Where did we go shopping?
Kathy and I would walk Downtown to… that Woodward Avenue. And nobody had extra cars in that day, there was no such thing, so we walked a lot. And we took the bus. So, we would go walking down to Woodward Avenue and… there was a dime store there and a Hudson’s, and Kerns and Crowley’s and Himmel Haus, Jacobson’s. We didn’t necessarily have the money for those stores, but we could walk in and dream and look around, which we did a lot of. And then we would go to Kresge’s and we would get ice cream.
And my mom would… keep me out of school, not all the time; every now and then on a Friday for…Hudson’s had like, a budget day and it was always on a Friday once a month. First Friday of the month or something. So, we would go to the budget day, we would go to the downstairs area, cause that’s where the budget area of Hudson’s was and then when we would leave there, we would go to the dime store across the street, and my mom would buy me…ice cream sandwiches. They were waffles, two waffles with Neapolitan ice cream squares in between. And they were wonderful. Then we would just go home on the bus. My mom and I always took the bus.
Back in that day too, you know, I used to pay the bills for my mom and dad. So, I’d go downtown to the Griswold Building, no it was the…yeah, it was the Griswold Building to pay the gas bill. We’d go over to the post office that was on Fourteenth Street to pay the light bill. And I was a kid, but you know, you just did those things… just did it.
So anyway, I graduated from high school and… I didn’t go to college right out of school, it just was… not an option at that time. However, later on in life I did go back to school in my mid-twenties and… ultimately became a nurse.
MR: Did I feel comfortable in the city?
RS: I felt wonderfully comfortable in the city. It was a great neighborhood to grow up in. There was never any fear. Everybody took care of everybody else, and the neighbors were really neighbors. You knew everybody on your block and they knew you. And they knew your brothers and sisters. And they knew, they just knew who everybody was.
…There was one thing I didn’t mention about Sixteenth Street, there was a diphtheria epidemic. And it was a terrible epidemic in the city of Detroit. And our house was quarantined, and there were, I wanna say seven of us who had to go to Herman Kiefer Hospital, where we were housed in wards…depending on your gender, of course, and your age. …And we had to stay in there, I don’t remember the specific number of days we had to stay in there. I remember getting injections while we were there. And I remember the awful food while we were there.
But… other than that, I really have no bad, bad memories of that neighborhood. It was… a good place to grow up in.
As I said, I learned a lot about the Maltese community. I learned a lot about…
One of the things that I keep in mind about that neighborhood was there wasn’t a lot of talk of any such thing as a resume or the business world… or what it was like in the business world. And so, leaving that neighborhood to go out into the working world, particularly as I got older; one of the things that I found was a significant deficit, was the inability to know and understand what the business world really functioned like outside of my little neighborhood. And because we never left the neighborhood anything outside of the Boulevard was so far away. I remember that specifically. It was like the other end of the moon. And…so we just didn’t do it. And we didn’t go to parks and things of that sort, it just wasn’t, we just didn’t do it.
But… the neighborhood was a very enclosed space but with a lot of variety and a lot of good friendships.
…There was a restaurant on… Michigan Avenue called Valli’s, its now Slow’s Barbeque, but it was called Valli’s at the time. And we would go in there at lunchtime… And we all had to wear uniforms to…school. So, we would quick run over to Valli’s and get a quick bite to eat or whatever, Coke or whatever go with our lunches, and then run back to the school. Or maybe if we had time after school before going to work, we would go to Valli’s and just have a Coke and it was kind of the neighborhood hangout. And all the Oldies music was playing and… there was a jukebox, and of course everybody sang songs and it… was a good time.
MR: Did I venture around the city growing up or did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood?
RS: Well, I went to the library and I went downtown… with my friends and… I would take my brothers and sisters to the show… On Fort Street there was a show and I would take them there, we would go on the bus and I would take them, it was like a dime to go there. Everybody was always really nice to us, no matter where we went to, there was never an issue.
There was a “Honeybee Market” on Bagley, and Art, the gentleman that owned it was Art… oh gosh, I can’t remember his last name now. But… anyway, he… expanded his store a little bit before he passed away and then they expanded it more.
There was a “Mexican Village” restaurant on the corner of Eighteenth and Bagley. Its still there, but at the time it was just on the corner. And then they bought out the little section next to them and they expanded. And then they bought out a store that was called “La Colmena.” And that was, it was a pretty big store, and so “Mexican Village” ended up expanding into that whole area.
And there was a little store next to it; right across the alley from “Mexican Village,” and that store remains there to this day. I don’t know if its still in the same family, but its still there to this day, and they sell a lot of… Mexican pottery ware type…
[Interruption]
RS: Across the street kitty-corner from… Mexican Village was a drug store called … Morrie’s. And I remember a lady named Pearl there. She was the nicest lady under the sun. And she would always help me out with finding things that I needed to find and… she introduced me to things I didn’t know about in terms of hygiene and things of that sort. She was a very, very nice, nice lady.
I don’t really remember what was on the other corner of Eighteenth, but I do remember Morrie’s being there, and I remember Pearl specifically.
A block down from there at Ste. Anne and Bagley was a house where… this family lived there… I don’t remember their last name right now. But there were three daughters there and they were always so pretty and always dressed so nice. And I never felt quite like I would ever look like that. Probably still don’t feel that way, but that’s okay. But they were again, very nice people.
… You know, I can honestly say that I was very proud to be a Mexican woman (girl) at the time. And I think my parents, in fact I know my mom specifically was very proud of the fact that we were not ashamed to be Mexican, we were proud to be Mexican. Because their experience in Texas had been so different because of the prejudices that they faced on a daily basis because of their nationality. And we, fortunately, did not have to face that same… issue, at least not where we lived at, at the time. I know things are very different today, which is sad. But at the time it was a good place to be. And I’m still very proud of my culture to this day.
My dad used to play Mexican music on, I bought them a little… record player when I started working when I was seventeen or eighteen years old and I bought a little record player. And my dad would put his Mexican records on there and play his Mexican records and sing to my mom.
And my mom would make breakfast for my dad every morning before he left for work. And it would always be tortillas and beans and whatever else she had going on at the time. And, you know…we never had big houses, we never had fancy houses, but we were always a very close family.
…We did tend to stay, we didn’t venture far from the neighborhood. That’s… very true… we just didn’t do that.
Did I feel comfortable in the city? [repeated]
Absolutely, there was never, never an issue. … A lot of my friends lived over in the Maltese section by Corktown. And that was off of Michigan Avenue which was skid-row at the time. There were so many bars on Michigan Avenue and you’d walk down the bars; past the bars, you would just keep your head really straight and go really fast past the bars. But again, nobody ever bothered you, none of those men or anybody that was there bothered anybody. They just didn’t.
… The decades that we grew up…
It was the, I remember primarily the late fifties and the sixties. Mid-fifties actually. And a lot of the old Doo-wop music and a lot of dancing. We all loved to dance. We’d do the old bop, or we’d do the line dances, or the Calypso. …That’s what we did.
…There was a lot of civil unrest beginning to happen in the late fifties which progressed of course into the sixties. But again, because of the neighborhood we grew up in being so multicultural, multinationalistic; there wasn’t an issue of racism or people having more than the other person, cause nobody had anything. So, we just enjoyed being friends.
I remember the girl next door to us… one of the daughters that lived in the house to the left of us on Sixteenth Street. And she would fastidiously iron her clothes everyday for work. And my brother Steve would iron his clothes. His pants were so well creased and his shirts were starched to the max. And we all learned how to iron really, really well, and wash clothes, and just be very clean.
…Detroit in the sixties was… it was vibrant, it was exciting. There was Woodward Avenue, there was always something going on, on Woodward Avenue. And…just in terms of the stores being open and the people shopping down there. Cars and just lots of store and lots of people. …There was, the library was always there. I loved going to the library when I was in high school. The big library down on Woodward Avenue. I didn’t go to the Art Institute very much, cause I didn’t know much about it. Now I do, but I didn’t then.
And… I’m trying to think about what else about downtown. Oh, they would decorate the Hudson’s windows. Oh my God, they were so beautiful. I still remember that to this day, I can picture it. The Hudson’s windows were all, they would each have animated things in them and they had Christmas scenes. And everybody would just walk through there and look at all of those stores. Or look at all of those windows. And then up on the tenth or twelfth floor, someplace in Hudson’s they had the “Christmas Winter Wonderland.” And I would, on a couple of occasions I took my brothers and sisters there when they were small to go see Santa Claus. And I still remember how beautiful it was.
[Interruption]
RS: My neighborhood changed a lot, actually… after the… riots in sixty-eight, everything about that whole neighborhood changed, Southwest Detroit changed. There were… when the riots happened, my mother in law lived on Wabash Street and I would hear the tanks coming down the street, and we would hear gunfire and course, my husband and I went over there and stayed with them during all that was going on.
[Interruption]
RS: … All the activity going on with the police and the tanks and everybody outside. It was a very scary time. But that’s when the neighborhood really started to change.
Also, urban renewal happened at that time. So, they started [sighs], it was really kind of sad, cause they would just take whole blocks of houses and move people out. And then the blocks would just stay empty for…ever. And there ended up being empty lots in Southwest Detroit for years. Now they’ve got houses built in those areas, but for years those lots just stayed empty. So, it was unfortunate that they chose to do it the way that they did. …But they did.
There were… I’m trying to think about what else there was about that time of urban renewal.
That was a time when they were… when Coleman Young became mayor and a lot of, there was a lot of racial tension that developed that we had never experienced prior to that.
The neighborhood is now coming back, its no longer what it was. Its beginning to come back. There’s a big Mexican community that’s moved back into the area around Ste. Anne’s. They never all moved away, but now there’s more of them there and there’s new housing there, which is really nice.
The… Corktown area has started a wonderful revival, and hopefully it will continue that way. The Midtown area where I used to go walk to the library is… has come full-circle and its thriving and will continue to thrive, I think.
So anyway, …that’s my story, and… honestly, I can say I was very happy with where I grew up.
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, Mexicantown, Mexican-American community, Corktown,
Video
A link to the video
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LkgLTKUdaZw?si=GRVdbuF4yHPMQJh_" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rosemary Schofield
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Schofield describes growing up in the multiracial community in Mexicantown. She discusses the activities done within the neighborhood, friends and neighbors in the neighborhood, and what stores, housing, and schools within that neighborhood were like.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
11/1/2018
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Cassandra Webb
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Cassandra Webb was born in September 24, 1961 on the east side of Detroit on Seminal Street, 48214, and grew up there before moving to Northwest Detroit after the 6th Grade and is still living there today. She works with veterans at the Detroit VA. She is African American and has a daughter, Calebria Webb.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Michael Philip Ostrowski
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, Michigan
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
9/21/2018
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
[Start of Track]
MPO: Michael Philip Ostrowski
CAW: Cassandra Webb
MPO: Alright, we’re recording. The date is September 21, Friday at the
UGL at Wayne State University. This is the interviewer Michael Ostrowski, who is an undergraduate with a major in economics, interviewing Miss Cassandra Webb, and thank you for being here to answer my questions.
CAW: Ok
MPO: And we will be asking about your neighborhood and stuff like that. So...where and when were you born?
CAW: Ok, I was born September the 24th, so my birthday is coming up, 1961. And I was born on the east side of Detroit on a street named Seminal street. Zip code is 48214. My house was 5063 Seminal. And that’s, that’s where I was born.
MPO: So you grew up on Seminal, what was it like?
CAW: Well…in the 60s, I remember that neighborhood to be a nice neighborhood. It was a family neighborhood where our house was a two family flat. We lived on the north flat. My grandparents lived on the upper flat and they owned the home. My parents and my brother and myself we lived on the first floor and our neighborhood was very clean, I remember green grass…streetlights…I remember most of my neighbors…their children I remember playing outside. But we always had to come in before the street lights came on that was what my mom always said, “wherever you are make sure you come in before the street lights came on”, So there were tons of children and it was a family community. It was a safe community. I did not know...I did not have fear as a child growing up on that street. Which is interesting.
MPO: Compared to like…many different neighborhoods and many different…environments. Was it an integrated neighborhood?
CAW: No it was primarily African American. I don’t remember any other families that were of a different ethnicity no. So it was not integrated.
MPO: So you were saying earlier you were out on the street with other children what did you do for fun out on the street before the streetlights went on.
CAW: We used our imagination, we did not have…technology even though I remember when the first Nintendo games came out, as an adult I remember that, but we used imagination and creativity. So for example we would play this game called the rock teacher, and it was you got a rock, and you would put the rock in your hand, make a fist, and then you were the teacher and then the students were sitting on the steps, so my house there were 8 steps, and everybody would start off on the first step and the teacher would put their hands behind their back and change the rock to either the left or right hand and then put their hands together and then as a student you had to pick what hand the rock was in if you picked it correctly you got to move up from like kindergarten up to the first grade. The steps equaled the grade then when you got up to the top, then you had to come down and the first kid who went up and down and graduated became the rock teacher. So those were the types of games that we played, we made up our games. But I remember the rock teacher.
MPO: That’s a very creative game, do you know if children still play that in the neighborhood?
CAW: Nooo cause I tell my daughter you know we have some of our discussions about youth and she thinks I’m crazy like “are you kidding me is this what you guys did”, but we had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun. Jump rope was a big deal, Double Dutch, hop scotch was a big deal, playing jacks, ball and jacks, paddle ball…ball games that we created our own rules. So it was interesting.
MPO: Where did your parents work?
CAW: My mom was house wife.
MPO: Really?
CAW: And so she did not have a job per say out of the community, but she was a house wife. My dad worked when, I was growing up he was a janitor at the sears and roebuck store that was near our house. At the time sears and roebuck stores were in the community. Our neighborhood store was located on Gratiot near van dyke that was where my daddy was a janitor. And then he transitioned into an automotive job working at Chrysler. Warren truck assembly. he was an assembly worker when I was young I remember when that transitioned….yea.
MPO: You said there was a neighborhood shop, where exactly did you go shopping for like the standard stuff?
CAW: Ok so…Gratiot avenue was the main road near our house and that was where the grocery stores were. But the bigger stores were located on Harper. Van Dyke and Harper was a place where we shopped for groceries, there were clothing stores on Van Dyke near Harper. So those were the two areas where we went to in our communities that I can remember. So, Gratiot was a main road, and Harper and Van Dyke.
MPO: Where did you go to school?
CAW: Ok so my elementary school was Hilger Elementary, and it was located near this park that I played in it was called Pingelry Park. I went to that school from K all the way up to the 6th grade. And in the 6th grade, what happened was my parents moved from the east side to the west side. And so, I finished the 6th grade at my school and then I went to Frank Murphy Middle School from 7th and 8th grade, that was located on the west side of the city at Telegraph and Finkle. And then in the 9th grade I went to Cass Tech from 9 through 12 and ended up graduating from Cass Tech. But Hilger Elementary was my elementary school.
MPO: Why did your parents move? Was it your father getting the new job?
CAW: No the reason why my parents moved was because as I was growing up moving into high school, they wanted me to go to a better high school. But even though Cass Tech was a high school you could go to if you lived-where ever you lived you had to apply to get in to that but that was one reason they told me but the other reason my parents purchased their first home. And it was located on the west side of the city, and so that’s why we moved from east, to west.
MPO: Did you prefer the west side over the east side of Detroit?
CAW: I was always still affiliated with the east side because that’s where my grandparents lived, and that’s where my friends were. So even though I lived on the west side I still had connections to the east side because our church was still located on the east side of the city, the Liberty Baptist church and we went to church a lot. A lot of my family members lived near my grandparents like I had cousins that lived around the corner from my grandparents, so I was always over there. So I still maintained a lot of ties to the east side.
MPO: Do you know if the schools like Hilger Elementary, Frank Murphey, Cass Tech, are they still around?
CAW: Well Hilger Elementary closed and it became what was known as the inner-city sub center and that was a community center. Frank Murphey is open, but I believe it is a charter school now if I’m not mistaken. So it kinda changed, I don’t think it’s a middle school anymore I think it’s an academy if I recall. And Cass Tech is still open. It’s a new building, but it’s still open.
MPO: Like you were saying how you had the games with like the rock teacher, do you have any stories about your childhood or about your neighborhood. Both in Seminal and west Detroit?
CAW: Yea you know what I remember…I remember a lot of things about my neighborhood. I remember the families in my east side neighborhood, like next door was the Williams family and then there was the Johnson’s on the other side, then there were the Mors family across the street. The Smiths. So we described our houses on the east side according to the families. Its deep-I feel like I remember more about the families because I think that was the most impressions. Now my west side neighborhood, I still live in that neighborhood today. So I’ve been…my parents are still alive they are in their 80s now, they live in the original house that they bought over 50 years ago. I live next door been up in that house for 30 years and so there are some families that I remember on that street but it’s different. I don’t feel like that neighborhood today is as close as it was in my childhood because you have more renters in that community, so you don’t have the closeness that I once had when I was growing up. There are a few families who I’m close to, they’ve moved on or died out, so I know their children, but Seminal street was a much closer community.
MPO: So Seminal was much more tightknit-
CAW: Yea!
MPO: and each house was their own thing.
CAW: It was much more cohesive. I feel like the Seminal Street community I grew up in was what I would consider homogenous, in that it was a very solid working-class community, African Americans worked! They worked, we worshiped in that community. There was much more connection to that community, we had the block club. The Semi Coys Block Club I remember traveling on a bus trip with my grandparents, we went to New York city with our block club. It was interesting to me! That was interesting. So there are some things that I remember about that community. Now the community that I live in north west Detroit I was much…you know I was in high school…so because I did not go to the community high school I was not really connected to many kids on that street maybe one or two kids went to the same high school that I went to but I didn’t have that big of a connection in that community.
MPO: So you said in Seminal that you-it was pretty much like-it was a very clean area and you only needed to go out until the lights were going out. When you were in the west side did you feel as comfortable as you did in Seminal, or just in general?
CAW: Well it was different when we moved-when my parents moved in northwest Detroit it was a nice community. It was a nice community. But I think because I had so many connections to the east side I did not hang out and play like I did when I was on the east side…there are a lot of people that I really don’t know.
MPO: Even today?
CAW: Even today! Even today. Today is totally different. You basically wanna stay by yourself. I know the people that live next door to me but they’re renters and they’re constantly in and out. So you know I kinda keep to myself.
MPO: So its kinda a revolving door community?
CAW: Kinda, yea there’s always people coming and going yea. My parents are one of the few remaining, what we call “The Originals”. In that after the 1967 rebellion…riot, rebellion there were changes in certain neighborhoods and so we moved into northwest Detroit in the early 70s, and I would say for a period of about 10, maybe 15 years, you had changes in people on that block. And then those individuals eventually died out and so today, we mostly have renters on that block so I don’t really know them cause you know they come and go.
MPO: What street exactly in northwest Detroit are you located on?
CAW: I live on Saint Mary’s.
MPO: Saint Mary’s?
CAW: Mmhmm
MPO: And what would you define as northwest Detroit? As the neighborhood?
CAW: Northwest Detroit…I would say that Woodward avenue in Detroit, the main street Woodward avenue kind splits east from west. And northwest…bordering I would say west 8-mile, one side of the community would be your Southfield communities. Northwest Detroit is located near Mary Grove college, University of Detroit founded by Wayne county community college, northwest district…so that in my opinion is some of the boundaries of northwest Detroit if I got it correctly I think.
MPO: Have you ever thought-cause you’ve said that you and your parents have lived there since you moved there have you ever thought moving to a different area?
CAW: Yea for me I…have thought of moving many times. but one thing that keeps me there is the fact that my parents are elderly and I kinda help to watch out for them. Currently you know there is a lot of crime in our community. My house was burglarized in 2015. Very very frightening. You have drug trafficking in that community you have a lot of individuals in that community that don’t work. So I had decided to leave but one thing that keeps me there is the fact that my parents are die hard Detroiters. They refuse to leave! They refuse to leave, no matter how things change, and Detroit is going through a transformation but it has not yet hit a lot of our communities which concerns me. So there is safety in numbers I would say and so that’s the reason why I have not left at this particular time.
MPO: You were saying that Detroit was going through changes but just hasn’t reached you yet. When it reaches you what exactly would you like to see change in your neighborhood?
CAW: I would like to see better services. Better police services…reinforcement of some of the city ordinances that are there to keep property up…a safer community. That’s the number 1 factor a safer community, a cleaner community…businesses beyond beauty supply businesses…I think that it does have the potential to be but its unfortunate now as the city goes through its transformations most of it is down town.
MPO: Like around Campus Martius and stuff like that?
CAW: Right…right.
MPO: So it sounds like if it was to pass it would be kinda like how you grew up in Seminal just clean and welcoming
CAW: Right.
MPO: If you could get a project done in your neighborhood, like a community project, what would you do?
CAW: Ok…a beautification project beyond the annual beautification projects that they have. So they do have what they call the alive Detroit programs but I would like to see….we have a lot of bordered homes on our block or around our block which is very very unsafe, and its uncomfortable if you have to walk up and down the street where a home is boarded up…but half open. I would like to see those homes totally boarded up. so nobody has access or torn down. So that would be the number 1 project I would like to see in my community, more cleanliness…yea.
MPO: And in general to Detroit…how do you feel about it? As in like its state of affairs…just in general?
CAW: Well...(interviewee sighs)
MPO: Cause as you’ve said your parents are hard core Detroiters. Do you feel its going through like an upswing, or not really?
CAW: Well you know there are two-I feel like there are two Detroit’s. One Detroit is for the well to do and one is for those that are struggling. And so I see both sides of Detroit I’ve seen the cleanups down town, Campus Martius, mid-town…massive change I’ve seen that and that’s beautiful but I also seen the neighborhoods continue to struggle. I’ve seen rent go up where people can’t afford the rent. I’ve seen homelessness and that is what concerns-it concerns me. So in a way Detroit is-has seen some improvements but in a way there are some struggles that are almost forgotten.
MPO: And for…last question, for an outsider looking into Detroit, say like someone who lives over in like Oakland county or anywhere else in Michigan or anywhere else in America. What message would you want to get across about Detroit?
CAW: Well I would like to say Detroit has a lot of potential. Its history…I would encourage individuals just to know the history of Detroit, so they can better appreciate the perspective of the people. I would hope that those that come to visit Detroit...would see its potential and to…build on that potential. But my concern is don’t forget about the people that are struggling.
MPO: Ok…
CAW: Yea…
MPO: Well thank you so much for answering these questions for me.
CAW: Oh ok!
MPO: It was a great time!
CAW: Ok!
MPO: And…do you have any last words that you’d like to say?
CAW: No this was-this was nice! This was nice.
MPO: Alright well thank you so much.
[End of Track]
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, Northwest, rising crime, public services, public renovation, northeast detroit,
Video
A link to the video
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_QQKA2YvJVI?si=FqlL40h6RobfDQNi" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cassandra Webb
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Cassandra discusses growing up on the east side of Detroit, and her experiences there before moving, along with the differences between the neighborhood she was born in and the one has moved too. She also discusses how her neighborhood that has been slowly degrading in community structure over time.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
9/21/2018
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Calebria Webb
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Calebria Webb was born on November 21st, 1989, in Detroit Hutzl Hospital, and grew up in Northwest Detroit, and still lives there today. She is African American and is focusing on trying to expand options for children growing up within her neighborhood.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Michael Philip Ostrowski
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, Michigan
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
9/26/2019
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
[Start of Track]
MPO: Michael Philip Ostrowski
CLW: Calebria Webb
MPO: Alright we are now recording, the date is Wednesday, September 26th here at Wayne State University at the undergraduate library and this is interviewer Michael Ostrowski who is majoring in economics interviewing Calebria Webb and we will be talking about her neighborhood and what it was like growing up in it. And thank you for answering my questions
CLW: No problem.
MPO: Alright, let’s get started! Where and when were you born?
CLW: I was born on November 21st, 1989. I was born here in Detroit in Hutzl Hospital.
MPO: And what neighborhood did you grow up in?
CLW: I grew up and still reside in Aquarius/Saint Mary’s community. Saint Mary’s and West McNickles area right outside of Rosedale park on Detroit’s northwest side.
MPO: How was it like growing up in your household?
CLW: My household is…it’s pretty funny when I talk to people about this. Because me and my mom we lived in one house and literally right next door my grandparents lived next door so anytime I kinda got sick of going from one place I’d say “ok, I’ll go bang on another door and be let in.”. So it was a very cohesive household, very supportive full and vibrant all the time always the tv going, maybe always some music going, always an activity to do. I’d say our community was probably the same with that. There were kids on the block and there were older people, you know lots of sitting on the porch, lots of community talks…things to do in the summer time, and the winter time would be so cold, but you would still see some of the same people. So very cohesive and supportive…much so a village taking-you know taking a village to raise a child mentality. So yea, I remember that as a kid.
MPO: Was it an integrated neighborhood?
CLW: Mostly black. You had a few white families left over from maybe the 70s, 60s or 70s my grandmother used to say, but mostly black. Id say in the 90 of percentile black.
MPO: Ok…you were saying as a kid that it was very like…villagey. And what would you say you did for fun, with like the other kids on the block?
CLW: I remember summers I had a friend that stayed about two or three houses down, she lived there a really really long time every year. And every summer we would be outside playing from maybe 9 in the morning to 9 at night when the street lights came on because then we knew, “Ok we gotta migrate to somebodies front porch or somebodies mother could watch us at the end of the day, or we had to just go inside at that point.” But we did that for basically the whole summer with the expectation of times where maybe somebody went out of town on a family vacation or being enrolled in a summer program, where most of your days you’d be somewhere else…but we stayed outside all the time so…it was a combination of we used to love to take dolls, and do their hair. And braid their hair and put all types of stuff…you know barrettes and beads and stuff like that, lil girlie stuff. We would paint our nails; one time we would distressed some jeans…on the side walk with some spray paint (interviewee laughs), we dug up dirt, you name it! All types of stuff, we played tag when some of the other kids…maybe they didn’t live in our community, but some other people in the community would invite their nieces or nephews or grandkids over. We knew who they were too. So we’d all be outside, red light green light, playing tag doing all types of stuff. I remember that in the summer, not so much in the winter cause nobody really likes the cold. But in the summer all types of kid games, you name it.
MPO: Seems very welcoming…would you say you felt pretty safe?
CLW: I would say so. I would say so.
MPO: What would you say that your parents just did for work while you were growing up?
CLW: My mom was-or still is an occupational therapist, and at the time she was working for the state. So it was a regular 9 to 5 types of job. My grandparents next door kept me most of the time when she was at work, during the day and I would of course visit on the weekends because they were right next door. My granddad I remember as a kid he worked at Chrysler and then he retired in 1995, so my grandma also a home maker the whole time. So I spent so much time with my grandmas, literally my roll doll still to this day. (Nods affirmatively to interviewer) So she was able to stay home…and I remember learning to read with her, learning to sew with her, seeing her cook and having to clean up and complain with her, go to the grocery store with her. She would pick me up from school, drop me off for school, go get ice cream with her after school. She would take me to some of my after school activities if they were off site…so yea, she was able to do a lot of that stuff.
MPO: Speaking of school, where did you go to school say, elementary, middle, high school?
CLW: Elementary and middle school I went to Chrysler king catholic school, which is on 6th mile and Grand River-or McNickles and Grand River. We call it 6th mile in the city anyway. And high school I went to Renaissance High School on Detroit’s west side as well.
MPO: Oh ok, what were they like?
CLW: Totally different. Private school, catholic school was very strict…it was a wonderful experience though. I hear a lot of people say they didn’t like catholic school, I liked it. At the time it was annoying to have to wear uniforms, but it really did teach you structure I think for the rest of your life. Very small class sizes, I think my graduating 8th grade class was 17 kids. In middle school, you know where everyone has lockers and changes classes? We didn’t have lockers…we took our books and we carried them across the hall, there were only three teachers in the middle school department…and then of course your specials teachers, your elective teachers too…but very different. We had to wear uniforms, I remember our earrings couldn’t be bigger than the size of a quarter. (Interviewee laughs) Your hair had to be neat, you know you had to wear a belt, your stocks had to be neat, shoes could only be a certain color, and…it was strict, but really really great! Excellent teachers that cared. It was an urban private school environment which I valued so much. So there were only a hand full of nonblack kids in my class, most of us were black. So you know you had every walk of life in there. High School and public schools much different. Obviously much larger…must of the kids went to other public schools before, so they came in knowing each other. I didn’t know a soul, because I was the only person who came from my school…much more independence, lockers…much more loudness in the hallways. We couldn’t be that loud in private school in the hall…public school was a lot more robust…I would say overall was a good social experience, it was just very very different. I didn’t struggle acclimating cause I was already too social probably for my own good, but very different night and day. Night and day. We went from having 17 kids in my class in private school. My graduating class was like 160 at Renaissance, which I hear is still small for public schools…like Cass tech is even BIGGER than that, I couldn’t imagine that…but I remember our class sizes at the time with DPS were off the chain. So my first two days of school at Renaissance, we had 50 kids in the computer class…5 0!
MPO: Wow…
CLW: And so they had to transfer some of these kids out, cause some of these kids in health…or some other gym that could hold that many kids…but yea at the end it was 35 kids, on 35 computers. Ill never forget that because that was crazy and a hot classroom to me…
MPO: Pretty much a full class!
CLW: Right Right Right! It was two classes, two of my regular private school classes so that was interesting. But totally different but both pretty good experiences for what they were.
MPO: Mmhmm, would you say that you have any memorable childhood stories when growing up through like…just in your neighborhood and in school and what not?
CLW: Hmmm…(Interviewee laughs) so many. Ooooh wow. I remember…my friend down the street, and I could probably say she was my best friend probably growing up, we knew each other from like 7, 8 years old up until…end of high school. I was maybe a year older than her,, so I left first. But she lived about 2, 3 houses down. Boy she had these cousins…that were crazy! Yea I remember getting into a fight with the boy cousin on-(interviewee laughs)-on the sidewalk, I remember that! I can’t remember…I had to be in middle school but, you know I’m sure now we’d be fine. I may not even know him if I see him these days, he might look different you know, but I remember he used to come over and he was ok. He was just a boy, and he was doing you know what boys do was irritate the girls when they in middle school, and…he would say some crazy stuff and I don’t remember what he said to me, but I remember…it may have been something I’ve always been short, and people teased me my whole life for being short, and one day I just got tired of it. I remember shoving him on the side walk and tussling with him…yea. And then kinda getting up a few minutes later…alright where we going next yall? Whatchall wanna do now? You know? Stupid stuff like that, I remember stuff like that, so I remember that…similarly like I said before I remember other peoples kids coming over, nieces and nephews, and they’d come over once a week. And I remember us…having this real massive game of Red Light, Green Light. 10 kids or something, which was rare cause normally there were about 4 of us, maybe 3. And boy we played out there…somebodies mamma had to come out on the front porch and yell at us to come in the house, it was after 10 o clock, I remember that. But good times…good times.
MPO: Mmhmm…sooo when you were growing up, did you venture out in the city a lot outside your neighborhood? Or did you mainly stay inside your neighborhood?
CLW: It was a mix. It was a mix. When I went outside of the neighborhood it was because, you know my grandma wanted to go somewhere, or I had some activity outside of the community. I did a lot of stuff in suburban neighborhoods, but not necessarily…in their neighborhoods. Maybe, take for instance I remember going to The Y as a kid. There was a Y near Grand River and Beach Daily, its not that anymore I think it’s a school now, and next door used to be a Kroger and its now a Spartans food store. It was a Y right there so that’s Redford going into Livonia, stuff like that. We’d go there and meet kids for swim class and other activities but…I didn’t go into their neighborhoods cause they-you know I didn’t go over to their houses. So it was a lil different.
MPO: When you were venturing around, where did you go for like shopping, you know for grocery stuff and clothes and stuff like that?
CLW: Alright grocery store was that Kroger. My grandma loooooved Kroger. Back then there was Farmer Jack too. Farmer Jack…you know they had one…it was like 7 mile and Livernois and they had one in Livonia too so we would pick one, that was where groceries were. You didn’t have all these extra grocery chains back then, you either went to Kroger or you went to Farm Jack, or the corner store…as far as clothes we went to Livonia mall, back when Livonia mall existed. Now it’s the little Walmart and the Sears is still there, but it was a mall with a movie theater in there.
MPO: Really?
CLW: (Interviewee nods) On 7 mile and Middle Belt. We went there, I remember also down the street, Wonderland Mall, that’s not a mall anymore. Wonderland is Plymouth and Middle Belt now. That’s the Target, the Chilis, the Walmart, that was a mall. They had a Jeepers in there…and I remember I think they had a movie theater in there too. Went to Northland a few times when Northland was open. I looooove Northland back in the day. And they had a Jeepers too, they had Macys, JC Pennies…I remember that, and Fair Lane is still there, went there. Value City in Westland, I think that was near Westland Mall. Value City doesn’t even sell clothes anymore, the few that they have sell furniture now, back then, Value City had everything. Burlington you name it. My mom is an extreme shopper, so we went to all those places. I got drug in there whether I wanted to go or not. So…
MPO: So you were saying earlier that you felt safe in your neighborhood. When you were venturing around the city or the nearby suburban neighborhoods, like when you were going around the in city, did you feel comfortable?
CLW: I would say so.
MPO: Yea?
CLW: You don’t really have any fear like that as a kid.
MPO: When you’re growing up?
CLW: Yea, its adulthood that you get the fears.
MPO: When you start recognizing it.
CLW: Mmmhmmm
MPO: Would you say back then to now that your neighborhood has
changed in some way?
CLW: Greatly. Greatly!
MPO: How would you say so?
CLW: For one back then everyone owned their homes. Everyone owned their homes. You had a mix of…older people, younger working people, middle age people that might work, might not work. Everybody owned their homes so…some of the neighbors that we had lived there a decade plus. People like my grandparents have been living there since the 60s…you know? And now that’s not the case. You started getting a lot of the older people that started dying out or you had, I remember about 2007, 2008…was that big recession so a lot of people lost their homes. And a lot of people that worked in the plants, and when the economy tanked, they lost their homes. So then you got this influx starting in of a lot of renters. Which I don’t want to classify renters as being bad people cause everybody deserves and should have a nice place to live. But when you start getting renters in your homes, a lot of times they move out quicker because rent could go up…ownership of the home could change, you name it. It could be some issues that weren’t fixed and they found somewhere else better, you don’t know. So a lot of rental properties now, where people used to own those homes. So you may get new neighbors every year, you may get a new neighbor-somebody might live somewhere for 9 months, then you got somebody new. A lot of the people that we get, we have a lot of…hullett housing, section 8 now which that wasn’t the case with those rental properties. And again not to classify those people as being criminals or anything its just the different mindset, cause a lot of those people have bounced around in that community, they lived around the corner the year before that. Now they live on your block. Next year they live up by Evergreen. And year after that-you know its all kinda within that zip code. And so they don’t think long term. They don’t think about staying. Sometimes people-you will come home, people will get set out, and I don’t know if you know what that is but that’s when they evict somebody or someone has to leave quick, and they leave everything in the house. So now you gotta put all their furniture and all their essentials, whatever was left in that house on the corner…on the curb until the truck comes to get it that week. The balt pickup truck.
MPO: Yea…
CLW: So you get a lot of that. With so many transient people, there’s a lot more crime now. There’s a lot of car theft in my neighborhood now.
MPO: Yea…
CLW: Id say in the past 10…10 15 years lots of car theft. Broad daylight car theft, you name it. Night time car theft, the opportunity is right car theft, it doesn’t matter. There’s been a rise in…home invasions too. Again, daytime home invasions, nighttime-it doesn’t matter.
MPO: Yea.
CLW: Are you home or not? They don’t care, they’re coming in there, where that wasn’t the case. That wasn’t the case when I was a kid. You may have had isolated incidents here and there, you always had some sort of crime, but that’s normal. In every neighborhood you’re going to have an issue but now-
MPO: Of course.
CLW: Now it’s much different.
MPO: Wow, would you ever think about moving away?
CLW: I did move away.
MPO: Really?
CLW: I went to North Carolina for 7 years. I went to undergrad in Winston Salem North Carolina, Winston Salem State University, cause I was like “I gotta get out of here”. When I left Detroit, it was dying. Things were being burnt down or torn down. What was being built?
MPO: Mmmhmmm
CLW: Midtown now is this fancy thing…Downtown now looks good. It didn’t look like that when I left so I was like “I’m ready to go now!”, and I did miss it, cause I am not really a fan of the south to be honest but…it was ok to get out. Cause then you start realizing what you had and how you could make it better, and how much you actually miss it. So I ended up coming back here, obviously.
MPO: So when someone says the term “neighborhood”, what does that mean to you in your past neighborhood, and what it is now? Would you say…what does it mean to you?
CLW: Back then, it would mean more of community.
MPO: Mmhmm
CLW: Not just a living community, but a community in general. Where people come together…regardless of how they come together, they come together. Now…there’s some elements of community coming back, but not really. Now its just where you live.
MPO: So it’s just mainly where you live, would you say it’s a revolving door community? Like you were saying people were consistently moving around?
CLW: Mmmhmm, yep. Mmhmm!
MPO: I feel like you’ve kinda already answered this but…your state of your neighborhood, much crime. How would you want to change that? As in what would you like to do…as in like a project for your neighborhood.
CLW: Wow…well its funny you bring that up cause that’s kinda of what I’m in the process of now.
MPO: Really?
CLW: Mmhmm, I mentioned before, you know off record that…both of my degrees are in music. And they’re in voice, and I’ve started up a private voice study. When I originally was looking for a place to give lessons, of course it kinda started around the Midtown, Wayne State area, cause that’s where I was every day for like 3 years. I am very familiar with that neighborhood, but I got to thinking about it…why does everything we have in the city have to be either down town, mid-town, courttown, or any other cute lil town name that they call em? Why? Why? And instead of trying to find a place in the suburbs to give lessons, I found a church in our community. They used to be bustling with outreach stuff.
MPO: Really?
CLW: Mmhmm, when I was a kid, I used to go there for gymnastics for years. They had all these classes, parents could pay and there kids could come in on whatever weekday that class was and they’d take that class. And they’d go for weeks. They no longer have that stuff and the church is...suffering now. And I talked to one of the ministers and told him what I wanted to do and offered a contract of “Hey I wanna give lessons here, can I use this space here, I think this would be a really good idea. And I think it would help this community”. That’s where I’m starting, in the comm-literally about 6 blocks away from where I live. So it’s actually giving opportunities to students. A lot of our kids in our communities…our not exposed to classical music.
MPO: Mmhmm
CLW: Or they’re not exposed to private lessons. Take for instance I didn’t grow up poor, you know but it is a lil different, culturally for me. So private lessons are a normalized thing for our white counterparts. At 16 years old, they’re kids have been taking private voice lessons, this was year one or two for them. My first private lesson, was when I went to college.
MPO: Mmhmm
CLW: And I always feel like im playing catchup.
MPO: Yea.
CLW: And its just different. Most of our kids we don’t even think that’s a thing.
MPO: Mmhmm
CLW: But it can be a thing. But you have to show and implement better. So that’s my thing, I think if we try to put more…opportunities in our communities and expose our kids. You know I’m not so worried about the grown ups cause, it is what it is. Either they’re going to do it or they’re not going to do it. But you can always change a kid, you can always redirect a child. So if we kinda put things in to incentivize them…perhaps that will change the culture of the neighborhood and perhaps people will feel like they wont have to have a revolving door. They can come in and stay…and you know change the culture.
MPO: Do you think this will show more of an impact in the foreseeable future or more generationally wise? If this gets off the ground and what not.
CLW: I…I think a lil bit of both, in the beginning to get kinda something rolling. But I think it could make a difference…it takes just one ripple, to start a wave. Just one ripple. But eventually…other ripples grow from that, you know? So I think it’s a combination of both.
MPO: Ok. How do you feel about the state of this city today and where it’s going?
CLW: I have really mixed feelings about where it’s going. On one hand, I feel like there are wonderful initiatives. I think leadership is doing a good job of new startup projects for people. I think midtown, downtown, courttown is booming! There are some good restaurants here, there are some good cultural opportunities here. Museums, festivals, outdoor festivals, you know so many different programs that are happening, and some of them are a lil affordable, some of them a lil more costly, and some of them are free! I think that’s a really good thing for people to have access to in the community. However, my concern for Detroit is…why are only some of the neighborhoods are having this exclusive push? What is going on with that? You know if I’m at Wayne State…I’m not even going to put it there cause Wayne State I know has private police and they’re part of Detroit police but it’s still different. If I’m in North End, or New Center and I call the police, they’re coming. Because it’s the neighborhood with the hospitals, newer homes, young professionals are living there, some businesses are there. They’re coming. And they’re coming, relatively quick. But when I call the police from my neighborhood, there have been times where I’ve waited hours. After the home was broken into in 2015, we waited for about 4 hours for someone to come check it out. 4 HOURS! It’s unacceptable.
MPO: Totally agree.
CLW: Really 15 minutes is slow, but 4 hours is unacceptable. But why is it that certain neighborhoods are better patrolled than others? Why is it that certain neighborhoods have more businesses than others? Why are certain opportunities in some places? Why don’t we have some of that stuff in some of our other neighborhoods, some of our more neglected neighborhoods. And we are truly neglected in every sense of the word, the car insurance is higher where I live. I understand the formula has something to do with car theft and accidents and our roads aren’t good in the state period, and that they calculate all that, but when I move to specific neighborhoods my monthly premium goes down $100, what is that? And you already know the population of some of these neighborhoods in Detroit is poor. So you’re monopolizing off of poor people what is that? Its corporate greed, so why are some neighborhoods are profiting and others are not? And so I think, again, in one direction you have growth and diversity in Detroit but in another direction you know people are forgetting about who was here when no body wanted to be here. You know there is a population of people who did not leave whether they didn’t want to, whether they couldn’t you name it. Why is the same support not here for those people?
MPO: Mmhmm, and that brings up a good point of people still being here and there are people who obviously left. For those not living in Detroit say like in the state of Michigan, or maybe across America or maybe outside the world. If they go to Detroit or they think about Detroit, what would you like them…if you had a message to send about Detroit to others who’re not from Detroit, what would you want them to know?
CLW: We are not…Gotham. And I’ve corrected people very aggressively in public before because of their negative connotation. And they-sometimes they don’t even know what they’re saying is offensive but it is offensive. I corrected somebody at Hop Cat about 2 years ago in the bathroom when they came in and they didn’t think I wasn’t going to say anything to em. Hold on, we’re not living in Gotham here. You know this is not the Dark Knight movie. You know we are regular people, with regular jobs, some of us have more needs than others. Also one thing I would like to really say, and I’m perfectly fine with this being on record but…Detroit is majority black city, still does not equate to being Gotham because its majority black. That’s not why we have high crime. That’s not why we have blight in the city. That’s not why we don’t have certain amenities. It’s the choice in the connotation blackness in density is viewed as. So just because we are from the city, and just because we are mostly black, and just because there are even more minorities living here than black people, doesn’t mean this is a negative place, doesn’t mean you can’t thrive, doesn’t mean you can’t visit. Just like going to any other major city, you have to keep your guard up, and be watchful and be mindful of what’s going on around you. It’s a good place with a lot of history to visit. There are things to do, even in the snow. Just stop talking and come give us a try. And then perhaps your perception will be changed.
MPO: Well I am all done with my questions, do you have anything else you’d like to say before we end this?
CLW: I think that’s it!
MPO: Alright thank you so much for taking the time!
CLW: Thank you!
MPO: And this is the end of the recording.
[End of Track]
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Detroit, Michigan, Northwest Detroit, Rising Crime, Rentals, Public Services, Public Renovation, Housing Crises
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Title
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Calebria Webb
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Calebria explains how it was growing up within Northwest Detroit within a the 80s to present day. She explains how the public services of her neighborhood slowly began degrading especially after the housing crises, and how crime has been rising within her area. She also notes that Northwest Detroit has been being overlooked in the “revival” of Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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9/26/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Rose Mifsud
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Rose Mifsud is the daughter of Maltese immigrants who came to Detroit in the 1920's. She was born in Detroit along with several of her siblings, although her eldest brother was born in Malta in 1921.
Interview Place
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Farmington Hills, Michigan
Date
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6/1/2016
Transcription
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Marc: If you could start with your name and birthdate.
Rose: My name is Rose Mifsud, nee Muliett. I was born 12-25-32 (December 12, 1932) raised in Detroit. I came from a family of four brothers, and of course my mom and dad, and one uncle. And that is all the family we had here.
M: You were the only girl correct?
R: I was the only girl. And no, I was not spoiled. [laughter]
M: Did you still have relatives back in Malta?
R: Yes, yea. I had my grandparents both sides. Aunt, another uncle from my dad’s side. From my mothers side, one uncle and one aunt. But my uncle died, Uncle Vincent, Vincenzu. He died, he was in World War II. They claim from shell-shock.
M: In World War I?
R: World War I.
M: My aunt moved to, well probably got deported, back to Italy and raised her two kids. She was a school teacher. Her name was Lilly, and she raised John and Mariu Giumarra. I think they were in a boarding school, because they always had a uniform on. We had pictures of them. That was on my mother’s side. ON my dad’s side we had another uncle, well Francis, Ziju Franz. My grandmothers name was Manuni and his sisters name, my dad’s sisters name was Carmena. And she was, I don’t know, crippled in some way and she had to live in with the nuns as they got older. They say she lived with the nuns. Probably equivalent to our convalesce homes. My Uncle Vincent who lived here supported here, sent money all the time to take care of her. My dad never went back to Malta.
M: Never once?
R: No. Never went back, just worked his life away for the family.
M: Did he ever suggest that he wanted to?
R: My dad was a very selfless man, very selfless.
Madalyn Beteag (Rose’s daughter): Much like you.
R: My mom and my Uncle Vincent, my oldest brother Lorry, my brother Junior and myself, we went to Malta. When I was about four or five.
M: Do you remember anything from Malta?
R: Well, I was pretty sick in Malta. I couldn’t take the climate. But I do remember there was a picture in the park, with palm trees, with my uncle, my brother junior and myself. I remember my grandfather was quite tall. Believe it or not. He was the band maestro, Giovanni Giumarra. And my grandmother, on my mother’s side, was Rose – Rosa, and she was tiny. What a contrast! But I remember him standing on the balcony in his white uniform, I do vividly remember that. A very good looking man. Very good looking. We couldn’t’ stay long because of my illness. The doctor was straight forward, they thought I had leprosy. The doctor was very straightforward with my mother. He said “I guarantee you, get on the next ship and by the time you leave port she will start healing.” That is what happened. That had to be, maybe June or July. I’m not sure on the dates. And I think my grandfather, my mother’s father, died that December.
M: Do you remember what part of Malta you visited?
R: I think they said they came from Birgu…Valletta! They came from Valletta.
M: So you probably visited them there?
R: Yea.
M: Do you remember the ships and the journey across?
R: No but there is a pictures somewhere. Oh, my…uncle Lorry [I believe she meant her brother – my great uncle] was like 17 at the time and they did have a movie showing and you could see us all sitting on chairs on the ship watching a movie. But as far as remembering, no I don’t remember much about the ship.
M: Still very young?
R: Yea I was.
M: When did your dad come to the United States?
R: My dad came to the United States…well Lorry was born in 1919. Somewhere after his birth between ’19 and ’20 he came. Because my brother turned seven on Ellis Island. That is how long it took for them to be able to come here.
M: And your father, what was his job in Malta?
R: He worked in the dockyard as an electrical engineer. That is how he got to come to America. Because he was guaranteed a job.
M: Working with?
R: Well at the time Fords.
M: And then Chrysler?
R: Yes, then Chrysler.
M: So then he obviously sent for your mom and Lorry. I know this, but your mom is not Maltese.
R: No she is Italian.
M: Right and when I was talking with Gerry DeMarco he was mentioning that she actually came to Malta because of an eruption in Sicily on Mt. Etna.
R: Oh see that I do not know.
M: Yea, he told me that they were refugees to Malta because their homes were destroyed by the volcano.
R: Ah, I see. You know what I’m learning here too Marc! My mom and dad were very quiet, they didn’t speak much about their life. Not too much, we don’t really know. Maybe it was too painful, I don’t know.
M: Perhaps. Especially if, well your father never went back.
R: No he never went back, and I tell you something, it never dawned on me until I was in my thirties. We were living here and they used to come over every Sunday and Going My Way was on with Bing Crosby. I don’t know if you are familiar with the movie. They bring his Irish mother over from Ireland and she is old. My dad cried like a baby. And it took that many years for me to realize, “My god, this man was in his early twenties, if, and never saw his parents again.”
M: That’s heartbreak.
R: Oh it is heartbreaking. And a lot of it wasn’t easy to live in the land of plenty.
M: So being born in ’32 you grew up in the Great Depression.
R: I did
M: What was that sort of like? Do you have any memories of victory gardens or…?
R: My dad always worked, because of his profession. He always worked, so we never really lacked. We never had a lot of everything but we weren’t depressed. Matter of fact, my mom and dad would other people who didn’t have jobs. The jobs were not there. My dad did work. I remember one time an Irish lady reprimanded my mother. It is kinda funny because you know they like to dress up their kids and she bought the boys a suit for Easter. And this Irish lady said, “How can you think of buying a suit when people are starving?” You know? Not knowing that they are helping people also, their friends that didn’t have anything. But this poor lady was very, very poor. Very poor.
…We ourselves were not depressed. We didn’t have to scrounge for food you know, and my mom and dad fed people. Every Sunday somebody else coming over or what you know. And maybe some of the bitterness comes from people that did have large families and possibly still gave to the Church fund when they needed it for their table. That was some of their mentality. And Maltese people, as I understand it, said so often, they willed stuff to the Churches in Malta, gold, before the family and so much goes to the Church. Maybe all of it.
M: A long tradition that they maybe bring over with them?
R: But that is simply fear Marc. That is fear. That I will not make it to Heaven without. And I do not believe God works that way. And there is only one God, he is with us all.
M: Alright, so we stopped for lunch and we were talking about the Great Depression and your family being fairly, well your dad still being able to keep a job. Did your mom take in any work? Laundry or sewing?
R: No. No.
M: And at home, did you guys speak in only Maltese to each other?
R: I think we spoke both languages [Maltese and English]. But we did speak Maltese, we all did. I guess we must of spoke English too. Well a child is like a sponge, you’re going to pick it up you don’t have to teach them. And then you go to school or you have friends that are not Maltese and you are learning at the same time.
M: And where did you live in Detroit?
R: We lived on Abbott St when I was born. I believe they might have lived on Labrosse when they first came here.
M: Do you remember the address of the street you grew up on?
R: Yes! 1658 August. Cherry 9270. That was our first phone number.
M: What is it?
R: Cherry 9270.
M: So what is the word in front?
R: Cherry. It was CH – 9270 until the area got bigger. We got a phone early because my brother was in the war. So we had one of those you pick up like this with the ear piece by your ear. Then people became more affluent after and everybody had a phone then. It became Woodward. The number was Woodward 3-9270.
M: So when you called the operator would you have to say Woodward?
R: No you dialed it.
M: So you would dial Woodward?
R: We had a dial, a circular dial. W-O-.
M: Wow, I didn’t know that was how it worked! So then who were your sort of neighbors growing up?
R: Yea, there were the Zarb’s, they were Maltese. The Felice’s. And next door to us was the Cortis’s. They had a very large family. Had this HUGE Victorian next door. A true Victorian with a wraparound porch. They had a lot of kids.
M: You all got along very well?
R: Oh yea. It was nice. It was nice.
M: Did your parents own that home in Corktown or were they renting it?
R: First they rented a smaller house on Abbott Street, they rented it. Then this house, because the family grew, was a two-story and I believe they paid $2,000 for it.
M: Man that would be a great price for a house.
R: Then they added on a kitchen. We had, there was a kitchen but my mother turned it into a dining room. Then there was a huge, huge kitchen and my uncle and his friends actually dug out a basement under that kitchen. Maltese people work hard, but that kitchen was huge. Huge.
M: Did your mother love to cook?
R: Oh yea, she was a good cook yea.
M: So it was probably a dream kitchen for her.
R: The table was smack in the middle of the room. That is how big it was.
M: Well you mentioned the war, and I know the answer to this and we sort have talked about this in previous interviews, but you had several brothers that were part of the war right?
R: Yes, Uncle Lorry who volunteered, enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. My brother Paul did graduate from St. Vincent’s and was enlisted in the Navy. Or did he join too? He must have joined because…well Uncle John was only 17 and he quit school in the 11th grade and he joined up.
M: So he didn’t finish but the other two did.
R: He later finished and graduated college. But umm, he was only 17 years old. And I think he might, not quite turned 18 when he was on an amphibian ship going to the South Pacific. Actually landed on Leyte Island where Uncle Lorry was killed. He went to the grave site. The war ended while he was onboard ship. Thank god, because he was on amphibian and they push those things down [the doors] and you’re out. They don’t have much of a chance.
M: A friend of mine was saying the other day, they weren’t designed very well.
R: They didn’t have much a chance once you start jumping in that water. But thank God it worked out ok.
M: So on the Homefront…so you would have been about 10-early teens during the war. Did the community come together to donate clothes for the soldiers overseas or other things?
R: Yea 12, yea. There was a lot of morale in World War II. There was a lot of morale. And people, even when you saw a telegraph carrier coming you knew it was bad news. And everybody would come over. Everybody supported each other and send meals.
M: Do you remember any Maltese functions or Maltese club that might of…
R: You know that’s a funny question Marc. You know Uncle John and Uncle Paul married two sisters, Rose and Evelyn Tuma. My mom and dad, never went to the club! My uncle used to go to get pastizzi, but my mom and dad never went to the club to the dances or anything. And then Stella and Tony they’d go and they’d go to the dances. And I was just talking about that to Auntie Rose how they used to go. We never went. We never went.
M: But you knew there was a club?
R: Oh yea, oh yea.
M: Do you remember them doing things like clothes drives for Malta during the war?
R: Yup. Oh yea.
M: Did they ask like the women to..?
R: Yup, and my uncle used to send a lot personally.
M: Back to the relatives back home?
R: Oh yea, and they were so proud. They would take pictures with the outfits on. You know, they had it rough in Malta. They had it pretty rough, they are pretty tough people. Having to go live underground like that. I can’t imagine it.
M: Did your mom and dad, I think I know the answer to this, but I’ll ask anyway. Did they ever apply for their American citizenship?
R: My dad was an American citizen. [Laughter] My mother, she didn’t want to be. But one day she said ok, and this was after they left Detroit they were living in Redford because I remember Aunt Madalyn used to go and help her read the words. And she knew everything. Should I say it?? So they take her down there and they take her in and pretty soon she comes back out and she said “I’m not going to be a citizen.” The first thing they asked her was, “Have you ever been a prostitute?” She probably said, “I’m out of here.” She didn’t go through with it. My dad used to have to put in an application every year for her as an alien. Oh yea. Can you imagine my poor dad at war time?
M: Oh gosh, with an Italian wife.
R: Right! By the grace of God the war didn’t come to this land. But who knows my dad might have been worried about that. In retrospect now, I think about that stuff and its funny of course but I don’t think it was funny to him. Every year, fill out a form, she would sign it and that was good enough.
M: And you said before that she really wanted you kids to learn Italian too.
R: Oh yea, she definitely did. She liked to read and she loved the opera. She wanted us to appreciate, become intelligent I guess. And she, poor thing, she would try to teach us and sit us down and try to teach us but if Uncle Paul started to laugh that’s it we all laughed. She finally gave up. But Uncle Lorry would speak Italian, and Maltese. But then, he grew up with it, he was seven when he came here.
M: So he could speak three languages fairly well when he got here. I assume English being the third he could speak.
R: Yea. I asked my sister-in-law Rose a couple of months ago ‘cause you know how things dawn on you. I said, “Did Lorry have an accent?” She said “A little bit, yea he did.”
M: I suppose yea, if you were young you would have thought that was normal.
R: Yea, although I’ve been told that sometimes I have an accent.
M: So where did you end up going to school?
R: We went to Holy Trinity. From first to eighth grade. They used to have a high school years and years before but they condemned it. I guess it was third and fourth floor. There was a big theatre up there too. One time we snuck up and looked at it, it was huge! Anyways, then we went to St. Vincent’s.
M: When did you graduate then?
R: 1950
M: Did you work after that?
R: Yes I worked at Hudson’s.
M: What was your job there?
R: Secretarial.
M: How long were you there?
R: Umm, I got married in 1953, and Madalyn was born in ‘54. So, of course I quit before, about three and a half years.
M: Now you have told this story, and it’s a good one, about your job in the Thanksgiving Day parade.
R: Oh yea, the penguin! [laughter] Yea, yea. I was talked into going because they paid you time and a half. Yes, I was a penguin in the Thanksgiving Day parade.
M: Do you remember what year?
R: Oh yea, it would have been ’53. No….yes, it had to be. Or maybe it was ’52. No I think it was ’53 because grandpa drove me down there. We used to have to go to the warehouse. Hudson’s warehouse. I wouldn’t even begin to know where it is and that is where you go to get all your clothes and all the floats. Of course, it wasn’t as, it was big but it wasn’t as big as it is today. And they were all employees of Hudson’s.
M: And did your dad ever say anything about you working? Being his only daughter?
R: Oh yea, I could have had a job at Chryslers.
M: Oh so he wanted you to work?
R: Oh I could work, but he said stay home with your mother. I could have had a great job at Chryslers. I passed the test and everything but he said you’re not going.
M: To also do secretary type work?
R: Yea, and you can make good money in the factories. Twice as much as at Hudson’s. “No you’re not going, got to walk through the factory to get to the office. Stay home with your mother.” So I did for a couple of months, but I thought I got to do something. All my friends were working so I went to work at Hudson’s and that he was ok with.
M: Do you think it was, he was at Chrysler at this time, do you think it was because he knew the type of men that work there?
R: Right, if you have to walk through the factory he didn’t want his daughter subjected to it.
M: So Hudson’s, retail. That’s ok.
R: Yea, that’s ok you don’t have to walk through the factory.
M: And how would you get to Hudson’s?
R: We would take a bus. We would walk down Abbott and there was Trumball. We would pass 11th street and then the next was Trumball and we could catch the bus there. [laughter] Most of the time I called a cab. [laughter] Because I was always late. They would say, “Here comes the banker.” I wouldn’t get there until 10.
M: What time were you supposed to start?
R: 9! That’s funny, we were talking about that the other day and Madalyn said, “Did they ever say anything to you?” I said, no they didn’t. I was a good worker. I guess so, they were nice bosses yes.
M: And Hudson’s I hear was very beautiful.
R: Oh my god, it was the place to shop. And if Uncle Paul was here he would tell you that Hudson was the demise of Detroit. When they built Northland and then Westland and Southland and Eastland and people started moving to the suburbs.
M: Downtown was at one point gorgeous.
R: It was, everything you wanted! It was everything you would ever want on Woodward Avenue, from high price to low price to in-between. People in the Statler were there and the Book Cadillac on West Grand Boulevard and people would come in from the suburbs or say Flint or someplace where they would have to take a train or a long ride and they would stay at the Statler or the Book Cadillac and go shopping.
M: So hard to imagine that today.
R: Oh Marc, it was beautiful. It was just gorgeous. And you never got on a self-served elevator I tell you that much. Floor please. It was opulent, very opulent. Oh the train station, yea. Although I understand they are putting in new windows.
M: That is what I heard.
R: That train station, it was all marble. Oh man.
M: Do you remember picking people up from there?
R: Oh yea, that is where everybody well all the soldiers came from. We’d picked up Lorry there. And Jerry and Geraldine when they first got here, they came there. I remember I worked at Hudson’s at the time and I had to take the morning off because my mom didn’t drive and my dad went to work so I got a cab and went to pick them up. Geraldine was so young. She was, I think she was a year younger than I am. Jerry was like ten years older, maybe twelve. So she, poor thing it was hard on her.
M: They came and they immediately lived in the States right? Detroit right?
R: Oh yea.
M: I know he said he was in Windsor for a while.
R: He was in Windsor, then before that he was close to Toronto some place. Kitchener, Bromley? Brumley or something? I’m not sure. But then they went to Windsor. He was in Windsor for a long time. They would come over every Sunday for dinner. Him and his friends, men friends. And there was one time, it was so funny. When my mother cooked spaghetti she always broke them and he said “Oh! You just ruined the spaghetti! It’s supposed to be long!” Oh, just funny things like that. Yea but they came over all the time.
M: A lot of them worked in the auto factories and stuff like that?
R: Yea.
M: And I guess about you. When did you met grandpa [John Mifsud]?
R: Well I think we always knew each other. I went to school with his brother Wally. And grandpa of course was a twin, he was four years older so I didn’t really meet him in school. How did I met him? Probably at the lake. Everybody used to come to the lake and hang around Leverette and Church Street. Hmm…and how we started to go out? I don’t even remember. He asked me out I guess. I was a friend of Auntie Marge’s too. So we all hung out together you know.
M: This was your parent’s cabin or lake house out near Walled Lake, Commerce?
R: Near Round Lake, it is in Commerce yea.
M: There is a picture I saw of grandpa when he was younger. I wonder if that was there.
R: Maybe! What was he doing?
M: Just sitting on a log, next to a lake. He looked like he was maybe in his mid-twenties or so. I’ll have to show it to you, I’m sure it’s in the basement here. And then you guys got married in ’53.
R: Yes, ’53.
M: And he went to Korea right?
R: Yes, he went to Korea.
M: So you must have got married after he got back.
R: Yea, after he got back yea.
M: So did you all live in Detroit being married or did you immediately move to the suburbs?
R: No, no we lived in Detroit, we actually lived with his mom first until she sold the house and then we moved everything and went to live with my mom and dad. Until we moved to Westland, about a year. Well Uncle Marty was about a year old when we moved there. Because we had Marty when we lived on Abbott, Madalyn and Marty. They are both baptized at Holy Trinity. Your mom is baptized at St. Damion’s.
M: So you would have moved to Westland in…?
R: ’54. No, ’56.
M: And what did grandpa do for work?
R: He was an electrician. Oh your grandpa! He was a clerk at umm…what is that place on Middlebelt? I’m losing my mind Marc! Getting old! I think it belonged to Chryslers.
M: So growing up, you obviously grew up with lots of kids of ethnic descent. Was there any hostility that you experienced being the daughter of immigrants?
R: No, no there was no hostility. I think when the old-timers first came there was prejudice but then there were to the Irish and everybody else. You know, we are not Anglo-Saxon’s all of us.
M: I imagine especially after the war too. I assume you remember the riots in Detroit in the ‘60s.
R: Yes I do, but we were living in Westland at the time. Actually there used to be tanks going down Middlebelt Road. Just to keep us from going to Detroit I think, or to try and keep them out of the suburbs.
M: Did your parents still live downtown?
R: No I think at the time they lived in Redford.
M: And there were also apparently riots during the war.
R: You know, there probably was. We personally never were affected by it other than hearing about it and that is very sad to hear. We had black people in our neighborhood. They didn’t bother us. They were nice people. Because we really didn’t live that far from skid row, seriously. But everyone seemed to live in harmony nobody bothered anybody. Why the riots were, I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess there are hateful people all the time.
M: Someone always feels injustice somewhere.
R: Well it has to be fed. To be that bad, it has to be fed to you. You aren’t born to hate.
M: Certainly not. Now did you guys, you and grandpa, try to teach your kids Maltese?
R: Oh yea, we would and they did catch on to some few things because my mom and dad were still alive and they would come over all the time. They lived just down the road. So they picked up a lot, especially Madalyn because I would talk to my parents in Maltese. They learned yea. And then they wanted to learn and they would write phonetically, you know not the proper way because I can’t even do that. You know, “How do you say, plate or glass.” And they would write it down phonetically, and they would learn that way. We did it with you guys too!
M: Really? Hmm maybe I do remember some of that. And you guys still hung out with Maltese couples?
R: Yea. We did. They had all Maltese friends. Some were not, some were Irish, Scottish and of course on Leverette it was different. There were a lot of Maltese but there also a lot of Irish and Scottish. They all lived in harmony. And then of course when you go to school you meet all kinds of nationalities.
M: When I was talking to the DeBrincat’s, Chuck and Mary, they mentioned they used to take couple retreat vacations with you and grandpa would be part of that and live the kids at home.
R: Oh my God yes, we would go away and we had so much fun. So much fun! If you have to think back to some of the things we did, they would have to put us away. We did have a lot of fun. We had a nice group, a very nice group of friends. No hostilities, no jealousy’s, everybody got along. Laughing all the time. Laughing all the time.
M: Where would you guys go?
R: We went several times. There’s a place, there was a place in Ohio. Lorain, Ohio. It was like a resort. They had a small golf course, they had swimming pools inside and outside, dances every night. They had everything pool tables. Whatever you wanted they had there. I forget what it’s called, Avon-on-the-Lake! I wonder if it’s still there. And the dancefloor was wooden, the real wooden with the spring to it. So as soon as the drum started playing you felt it because it would vibrate off the floor. That is where we went the most, we went other places but never too far from home. Because everyone had to get home!
M: So my last question, did you and grandpa ever go to the Maltese club?
R: No we never did. We never did.
M: It is interesting to see that. There were some people that never did.
R: You know in our age group, I think they kind of got away from the Maltese club because everyone was moving away and going places. The only time we would get together like in big groups was like New Year’s Eve and go downtown like Knights of Columbus. They had a big hall. Yea, we had a good life. I always say, as bad as it was I would do it all over again. Then I would know you still!
Dublin Core
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Title
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Rose Mifsud
Description
An account of the resource
Rose Mifsud discusses growing up in a Maltese-American immigrant family in Detroit in the 1930's.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
6/1/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
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Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Kalisha Davis
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Kalisha Davis was born in Providence Hospital Southfield in June of 1976. She was adopted at 3 months old and moved to the city of Detroit where she lived her entire life. She grew up in Northwest Detroit, a neighborhood she identifies as slightly integrated. She is currently residing at Southfield Mi.
Interviewer's Name
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Tarek Miah
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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11/14/2018
Transcription
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Start of track:
TM: Where and when were you born?
KD: Actually, I was born in Providence Hospital Southfield in June of 1976.
TM: When did you come to Detroit?
KD: My family is from Detroit, I just happened to be born in Southfield, I was actually adopted at three months, and my family lived in the city of Detroit so I’ve lived here for my entire life with the exception of being born in Southfield. So, you can say Detroit if it's easier, but I was technically born in Providence Hospital.
TM: When you moved to Detroit was it long after you born or is it...?
KD: Like, few months after I was born, I was adopted by my parents who lived in Northwest Detroit
TM: I see, you were here pretty much all your life, did you ever move out of Detroit?
KD: Nope, Nope, my parents were still here.
TM: What neighborhood in Detroit did you grow up in?
KD: In Northwest Detroit, it never had any name, it’s between 8 mile and 7 mile and telegraph.
TM: So, what was your neighborhood like when growing up?
KD: It was a lot of fun, it was a pretty large subdivision and a lot of children were in my age lived in the area. Lots of playing outside, riding bicycles, my parents would hold BBQ, especially when I was pretty young. Great big BBQ where a ton of people would show up, some that we knew and some that we didn’t, so yeah, lots of. Halloween, trick treating, and birthday parties in the backyard those kinds of stuff.
TM: Sounds pretty fun. Was it an integrated neighborhood?
KD: There were few white people that had decided to stay in the community but for the most part it was African American
TM: Where did your parents work?
KD: My dad worked for Ford motor company
TM: And your mother, did she work?
KD: She worked at a retail, primarily selling shoes initially of off livernoise. It was considered a business district.
TM: Where did you usually go shopping when you lived here?
KD: There were quit few grocery stores for basic kind of errands and stuff in the city, not far from where I lived. There was a grocery store like 5 in away on 8 mile and Lashor. There were also a fish market and a fruit market, not too far away maybe about 10 min away. The bank and the bakery and all of those places. My parents would usually head up in different parts of the neighborhood to do all those things.
TM: I see, pretty much everything was there in Northwest Detroit, right?
KD: Yes
TM: Where did you go to school?
KD: For elementary school I went to Saint Thimothy and Saint Scolasika. Saint Thimothy was on evergreen road, both were in Northwest Detroit.
TM: Can you tell men little bit about your school how the environment was?
KD: Sure, and then high school was Renaissance High School, and that was definitely Detroit. Both elementary schools were focused on fundamentals of learning, making sure were grounded with a lot of important information that we would need as we get older. Lots of reading, participating in reading program, lots of book reports, science reports and all those other stuffs including Science fair. Learned a lot of stuff. By the time got to the 8th grade I was pretty much ready for High School and English is something that I excelled in, I loved to read books and I was a very good writer. By the time I got to High school that definitely carried over and I got into journalism. Writing for our School newspaper and learning more about that particular, I ended up studying that in undergrad at college.
TM: I see you have done a lot of stuff in high school.
KD: Yeah, there were good extracurricular activities, I wasn't really a sporty kind of person but yeah drama, newspaper, yearbook those are areas I contributed to.
TM: Are there any stories from your childhood about your neighborhood that you would like share? Like any significant stories?
KD: I just remember being in a good community to grow up in. Really caring neighbors. The Donors who lived right next to us was older white couple actually and he kept his lawn very meticulous, that was something he was very passionate about and at that time he was retired. And he was a very nice person, he would always look out for me as a little girl because I didn’t have any siblings and my parents were working. When I was little, I always tried to venture out further and further away from the house and one time I had the baby carriage and I walked, I was pretty small, and I walked the other way down the street. He was trying to pay attention and he went to go tell my parents she is down the street. It was nice having someone like him and Mr. Williams across the street. They would always make sure you are okay.
TM: It's always id nice to have somebody who cares. You said you pretty much grew up here, did you feel safe and comfortable in the city?
KD: Yeah, because I was living in the city, it was a working-class neighborhood. Everyone took care of their homes and all the children. I never felt unsafe in my neighborhood, we had groups of kids, we never had gangs or stuff but little groups of kids who would hang out. We had one kid we called Bambam, I remember I had just started driving and an ice storm had hit and then we were still in the high school and they send us home in the middle of the ice storm which didn’t make any sense. It was literally like ice all over the ground, and so India and one of my other friend Stacy who lived around the block got in my car and you know we were trying to ride home, about 15-20-minute drive, and there was ice everywhere, people were sliding around. We got into the neighborhood, but I couldn’t get my car up the driveway because it was all iced up and were sliding back down. I remember Bambam had a bunch of boys who would follow him, they came up behind me and pushed my car up the drive way and secured it so the car wouldn't slide. Before I can even get out and say thank you, they were all gone down running down the street helping other people. So that was kind of people who lived in our neighborhood.
TM: You had some pretty nice neighbors. In the decade you were growing up how was entire Detroit like?
KD: Generally, I don’t remember anything, I will watch like in the news or sometime you here some problems. I think socially in mid to late 80s Devils night was something that had kind of marched the city on the national level. Like people would start fires, do crazy stuff before Halloween and that became national news. There were more negative perception watching the media than I had in my own personal experience. In high school we would take the bus from that part of Detroit to back home, we had to get on couple buses, we would take the bus all the time to the various parts of the city and for the most part we were fine but there were kids from other schools who would get jealous of Renaissance and Cass kids because we were considered smart kids, the nerds. So usually we would try to avoid interaction with kids we don’t know. I did had couple boy classmates who got beat up, but that didn’t happen that often. Yeah, we would go downtown, go to Greek town and to the library, I spent a lot of time in the library working on reports and doing stuff. And yeah, I didn’t feel unsafe. You always had to pay attention, you don’t trust just anybody.
TM: Do you think your neighborhood had changed over time? If you compare with back then and now, how you think your neighborhood has changed?
KD: Unfortunately, there are some changes, some of the people who lived there no longer live there, people don’t necessarily take care of their home as same. By the time I got to college there was this thing when they were breaking into garages and stealing tool sheds, we had tool sheds in our backyard. They were breaking in trying to still stuff to sell it. So, more car theft happened more frequently. Our home was broken into couple of times. And that was definitely during some of the economic challenges in the city, so I think it definitely correlated. So that definitely had changed some things around.
I think there should more activities for young people, when I moved to other cities especially Minneapolis, every neighborhood had its own community center, so that is something should be happening here in the city of Detroit.
TM: Do you think crime rate has changed over time? Like decreased or increased?
KD: In the neighborhood when I was getting ready to leave it increased a bit, I think its level off because there weren't enough activities. I really don’t watch local news a lot because it's depressing. I don’t watch a lot of bad news about people being killed.
TM: You mention you were getting ready to leave?
KD: So yes, by the time I turned 18 and went away to college, I have not lived in that neighborhood since then.
TM: How is your new neighborhood like? And where did you move to?
KD: I left and lived in Minneapolis, I went to college first in Mt Pleasant Michigan than moved to other places, came back home few years ago and lived downtown for couple years and currently now in Southfield in my parents house while I look for a house for purchase in Detroit.
TM: So, what would you like to see happen in your neighborhood?
KD: I would like to see a community center, if I had the resource to build something that would be one of the first thing to do mis make sure there is a community center
End of track
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Northwest, crime increase
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tmB0UR3YX2E?si=DFa0trBUCyPVfaDI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Kalisha Davis
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Kalisha talks about how Detroit was in the decade she was growing up. She mainly talks about her neighborhood, Northwest Detroit. Toward the end she talks about how the innocent neighborhood turns violent due to economic condition.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
11/14/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Carmen Solis-Crowley and Rita Solis
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Rita Solis was born in Mexico in 1925, her daughter, Carmen, was born in Detroit in 1955. Rita and her husband moved to Detroit for better job opportunity in 1952.
Interviewer's Name
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Erin McSkimming
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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3/16/2019
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
EM: Hello, my name is Erin McSkimming and today is March 16, 2019. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s “Neighborhoods: Where Detroit Lives” Oral History project. I am in Detroit Michigan. I am sitting down with
CSC: Carmen Solis-Crowley.
EM: And--
CSC: And my mother, Rita Solis.
EM: Okay. Thank you guys so much for sitting down with me today. Can you guys spell your names?
CSC: The whole thing? Carmen, C-a-r-m-e-n. Solis, S-o-l-i-s. Hyphen, Crowley, C-r-o-w-l-e-y. Should I spell [chair scraping] _____(?)(?)? And Rita, R-i-t-a. Solis, S-o-l-i-s.
EM: Thank you very much. So, where and when were you both born?
CSC: Ma? [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: Mexico. [Speaking in Spanish]
EM: Okay.
CSC: You want when?
EM: Yes.
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: May 4, 1925.
EM: Nice.
CSC: And I was born in Detroit, Michigan, May 24, 1955.
EM: Okay. What neighborhood did you grow up in?
CSC: In Southwest Detroit.
EM: Okay. What attracted you or your family to Detroit?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: Ah! [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Uh-huh.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Do you want me to translate?
EM: Yes, please.
CSC: She’s from Mexico, my dad’s from very southern Texas. They got married in 1952 and came here on the train because there were jobs her at that time.
EM: Alright. What neighborhood did your family settle in? Is it the same one that you were born in?
CSC: Yes.
EM: Okay.
CSC: Southwest Detroit.
EM: Alright. Why did you choose that neighborhood?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Because my dad’s sister lived here with her husband already.
EM: Okay.
CSC: And, so, they basically got married, and she said they’re still on their honeymoon because they never went back.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
EM: [Laughter] That’s cute.
RS: And I come with ten dollars.
CSC: On the train.
RS: On the train. And much love [Laughter].
CSC: They only had ten dollars and a lot of love [Laughter].
EM: What did your parents do for a living?
RS: What?
EM: What did your parents do for a living?
CSC: That was back in Mexico, do you want that?
EM: Sure.
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: I never knew.
CSC: She didn’t know her dad, and her mom was a--[Speaking in Spanish] was a domestic.
EM: Well, then what did your parents do for a living?
CSC: [Laughter] My dad worked at Great Lakes Steel.
EM: Okay.
CSC: And she worked at little factories around Detroit.
RS: _____(?)(?) after one year--come here.
CSC: Yeah, but that’s where you worked. Small factories, yeah.
EM: Okay. Do either of you have any siblings?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Two brothers and two sisters. And I had two sisters and one brother.
EM: Okay. What schools did you go to?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish] She’s not going to remember the school in
Mexico. [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking Spanish]
RS: [Speaking Spanish]
CSC: She went to school in Mexico up to the fifth grade. I went to Detroit public schools for kindergarten and then Holy Redeemer for grade school and high school.
EM: Okay. What was your neighborhood like growing up? What was your neighborhood like when you settled there?
CSC: [Speaking Spanish]
RS: [Speaking Spanish]
CSC: Very peaceful.
RS: Yeah. When I settle here I don’t have any car (?)(?). I go to [Spanish], walking [Spanish].
CSC: Do you understand?
RS: Low income (?)(?) when my husband, because everyone knows [Speaking Spanish] for the street, walking and never come back. So the ___(?)(?) where I live.
CSC: So they didn’t have a car, so they used to walk everywhere, downtown, and it was very peaceful and nobody ever bothered anybody. They rode the buses, too, with no problems.
EM: Okay. What was it like when you were growing up?
CSC: I don’t know. It was great. We had a lot of kids in the neighborhood and we played outside. We would go over to Holy Redeemer’s playground, Clark Park. So, there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood, so we had a lot of friends. It was peaceful. It was a great place to grow up.
EM: Did it change at all through the decades?
CSC: It’s changed like any other part of the city. I think this part of Detroit has maybe been a little more stable because there’s still a lot of families here. I mean, it’s seen changes but it’s not as abandoned as other places in the city.
EM: Okay. Are there any stories that you’d like to share from when you first settled in the neighborhood and from you were growing up?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish] West Grand Boulevard? Belle Isle?
RS: Uh-huh. Belle Isle.
CSC: Belle Isle was a place that they used to go to a lot.
RS: [Speaking Spanish]
CSC: When they first got a car, on Sundays they would drive, like, the
horseshoe of West Grand Boulevard because that’s where all the big houses were, so that would kind of be their Sunday drive.
And then, I remember going to Belle Isle a lot, because my mom’s job. They would have a picnic every summer, and they still had canoeing then. It was, you know, it was a lot of fun. It was very family oriented and now it seems like Belle Isle’s becoming a really nice place again to go. It’s always been a nice place and it’s always been a family place--
RS: [Speaking Spanish]
CSC: Yeah. And then, they used to have a Mexican babalu (?)(?) in July, so that was always a big event in the summer. So we’d all go--do you remember the babalu(?)(?) boat? Probably never heard of it? [Laughter] Ask your parents.
RS: [Speaking at the same time] No, you weren’t around when--
EM: [Laughter] No, I haven’t, I’m 18.
CSC: Okay. So, babalu (?)(?) was a boat that went to an amusement park on the Canadian side. And, there was an amusement park, but you’d take a boat on the Detroit River to the island. So, in July, all the time we were growing up, it was a day that was specified Mexican babalu (?)(?), and it was a fundraiser for Holy Trinity Church in Detroit. And, so, there was Mexican food and entertainment.
RS: Señora Cortina (?)(?) [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Mrs. Cortina was a big--she ran one of the Mexican dance groups, and my sisters and I were in the dance group, so it was a big event. They would bring musicians from Mexico, like mariachi. Los Niños de Monterey (?)(?) was one of the groups that would come. It was a mariachi group. It was all younger kids.
So there was entertainment on the boat, Mexican music for dancing on the island, and then we got tickets to go on all the rides.
EM: That’s super cool.
CSC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
EM: When did they stop doing that?
CSC: I can’t remember when the last Mexican babalu (?)(?) was. Probably, I don’t know, probably in the late sixties, early seventies? Yeah.
EM: [Laughter] I missed it by a lot, then.
CSC: [Laughter] Yeah.
EM: What did you and your friends do for fun?
CSC: For fun? Like I said, we had so many kids. We played at Holy Redeemers at the playground, we played baseball in the alley--very narrow but the telephone poles were our bases, sewer tops were like home base. We would, I grew up learning how to ice skate at Clark Parks, so that was a big thing we used to do. We would walk from the neighborhood that we lived, and it was a few blocks over, I don’t know, five or six blocks. We’d grab our skates after school, and go over to Clark Park, and ice skate.
EM: Nice.
CSC: And then, in the summer time, we could still play outside. We had to be in front of the house, when it, you know, got dark, but we could still play outside, and we played badminton in the street! [Laughter]
EM: Batman, or badminton?
CSC: Badminton.
EM: [Laughter] Okay. That makes a lot more sense
CSC: Yeah, no. Badminton in the street. Of course we had to stop when--but there wasn’t as much traffic on the streets either. And all the games that we used to play, you know, Mother May I, Red Rover, Tag, I don’t know, a lot of those games that I don’t see that many kids playing anymore.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Yeah, so, you know, my sisters and I were in that dance group, so we grew up having practice every Tuesday at Holy Trinity School.
EM: Okay. Did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood, or did you venture around the city? Either of you who wants to answer.
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: I used to go to a lot of dances. They used to have a lot of dances with Mexican music. And some of them were in Luna Pier, no?
RS: Luna Pier.
CSC: They would go to Luna Pier for dances.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: So there was a lot of stuff that happened in the neighborhood for them.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: In downtown. And did I adventure out? You mean when I was younger, or?
EM: Anytime.
CSC: I mean, we had friends, we could go as far as into, like, the Springwells area St. Gabriel’s(?)(?). As we got older we had more friends. But I did go away to school. I went to Ann Arbor to UofM, so I did venture out [Laughter]. It was scary.
RS: And you work in Dairy Queen.
CSC: So, yeah. We worked in the neighborhood. There was a Dairy Queen at Vernier, so that was a place that we worked at.
EM: Alright. I think you might have already answered this one, why did you pick this neighborhood to move to and raise your family?
CSC: Well, she came because of her husband’s, my dad’s, sister and her husband already lived here. I came back after venturing out for a while. When we got married we just settled here and raised our girls in Detroit.
EM: Alright. What was the makeup economically, ethnically, racially, of your neighborhood growing up?
CSC: So that would be for me probably?
EM: So, like, when she first settled and when you were growing up.
CSC: I think there was a [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish] Yeah, there was a pretty good mix. I know growing up we had a lot of, there was Mexicans, there was Irish, there was Maltese, and various others.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Maltese.
RS: Maltese.
CSC: So there was a, and I don’t know, everybody seemed to do okay, economic wise. They either worked for one of the big three or Great Lakes Steel, so I think everybody was pretty much almost an even keel, economic wise.
EM: Okay.
CSC: And when they came there was a lot of job opportunities in the fifties, when they came in 1952. There was, you know, a lot of work at that time that’s why they ended up here.
RS: I go to work and I don’t know nothing. And the man say, the owner say, “ I don’t want you for talk, I want you for work.” [Laughter]
CSC: So, she didn’t understand much English, so, when she went for the interview, the man said he didn’t want her to talk, he just needed someone to work. [Laughter] So she got the job.
EM: Alright.
RS: And he was a chemical doctor [Speaking in Spanish]. And he started the plant, they don’t have nothing, only the machines. And they ask and ask the people they had they ask [Unintelligible] and every time because this a new--
CSC: A new factory.
RS: A new factory.
CSC: That was Duralastic Plastics.
RS: Duralastic Plastic.
CSC: That was the name of the company.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish] The first days, I come with my hands like this, sore. And I don’t know where I put them because my husband don’t want me to work. And I go with a friend. She was going to see the work and the guy hired me with her. [Laughter] And I come, and I have my work, and “you don’t know nothing!”
CSC: My dad didn’t want her to work.
RS: Yeah, and he told me, “you don’t know nothing, where you gonna work?” I don’t know. The man say he don’t want me talking, he want me working.
CSC: So she actually just went with her friend for the interview and they both got hired.
EM: Awesome.
RS: [Speaking in Spanish] and I itching all over, because the plastics.
CSC: They were working with these fine plastics, and there was no masks or gloves then, so she was very itchy? Yeah. She was trying to hide her hands from my dad.
RS: But I still going.
CSC: But she kept working.
RS: Yeah. And he want to go, go back to Texas. And he started about six months [Speaking in Spanish] he say, “Let’s go to Texas.” No, I don’t want to go back, I want to go here, and I want to work and you gonna work and I stay here.
CSC: So they stayed. So you know who wore the pants in the house.
RS: [Laughter]
EM: Right on. Alright.
RS: And I go on vacation every year to Texas, and then I come back. And then I have a rent one house when she was born, and then my mother come live with me, and then I’m gonna buy a house on Fifteen--
CSC: On Fifteenth Street. Fifteen Twenty.
RS: Fifteen Twenty?
CSC: No. Thirteen Twenty.
RS: Thirteen Twenty on--
CSC: No, 1320 Fifteenth Street. That was the address. [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Yeah.
RS: And that was close.
CSC: Yup. So they initially stayed at a--they rented from [Speaking in Spanish].
RS: Yeah.
CSC: It was a lady who had been here for a while, and would rent to people coming. Kind of like a starter. A little room and a bathroom.
RS: [Speaking at the same time] It’s only one, little room, a bedroom and a kitchen.
CSC: But a lot of people stayed there until they got settled in and got jobs, and then they were able to both start working and buy their house.
EM: Nice. Alright. Did you feel comfortable in your neighborhood?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: Yeah.
CSC: Yeah. It was a great neighborhood.
RS: I liked the work and I want a house.
CSC: And she wanted a house. [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: Uh-huh.
CSC: Yeah. There were a lot of friends there, and I have always felt
comfortable here. So, I’ve never felt uncomfortable.
EM: Alright. As the decades progressed, did the makeup of your neighborhood change? If yes, how so?
RS: Ah, yeah, it changed a lot. It changed a lot.
CSC: Yeah?
RS: [Speaking in Spanish] It’s not the same unless, when I come in it’s better, and now--you can go walking in every store and nobody bother you, now you’re--
CSC: Now you’re a little more leery.
RS: Yeah.
CSC: Of going out.
RS: And I still here.
EM: Do you remember a moment when you recognized that change?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS:[Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: The riots.
CSC: The riots. People started moving out. Things changed.
EM: Alright. As the decades progressed has your opinion of the neighborhood changed?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: No, no. Where I live, I know all the [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: She knew her street, so she still felt comfortable even though it has changed, she still felt--
RS: I go to the stores and then [Unintelligible] , I go to the stores and [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Yeah, she did get mugged. Once. After church. [Laughter] And so that made her a little more--a little more leery for a while.
RS: More wary (?)(?)
CSC: But it wasn’t anyone they recognized from the neighborhood, it was outsiders coming in.
RS: Twice, I can remember.
CSC: Actually, twice, yeah. Twice she was.
RS: On Vernier.
CSC: On Vernier, and--
RS: The last time was on Vernier they take ___(?)(?).
CSC: Your chain, yeah.
RS: My chain.
CSC: Her gold--her metal, the [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: Yes.
CSC: So she stopped going out on her own for a while, but then she said she wasn’t going to be a prisoner in her own home, so she just ventured out again. We just told her, “Don’t carry a purse.” You know.
RS: Yeah, you have to be more careful.
CSC: Like everywhere.
EM: What about you?
CSC: So, we moved over a little bit more, so we’re in Corktown. I don’t know if I’ve always felt comfortable, but I’ve never felt uncomfortable coming to visit her over here on Campbell. So, for us living in Corktown, things have really changed. Everybody’s kind of, you know, wants to move into the neighborhood now, so we’ve seen changes. A lot, you know, most for the better, some a little bit--it gets a little crazy, you know, everybody trying, you know, to come in and buy up things, but--We’re still here. I’ve been here my entire life, just about.
RS: And, then, I started to go to my mother’s(?)(?)
CSC: Yeah, she goes to a Senior Center, which is very good for the seniors in Southwest Detroit.
RS: It’s where my mother go.
CSC: My grandmother used to go.
RS: And work. And now I go.
CSC: And now she goes. So there’s a van that picks her up, and she goes to the Senior Center.
RS: And pretty soon, you gonna go too. [Laughter]
CSC: [Laughter] She goes to the Senior Center everyday. The van picks her up and they do exercise, and they play Bingo, they have lunch together. I think it keeps them alert, you know, talking. While we’re still at work it gets her out of the house, amd keeps her moving.
EM: Alright. Have either of you ever thought about leaving the neighborhood?
CSC: No. [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: No. [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: I mean, she moved from Southwest Detroit to Corktown because she lives with us, but she’s still basically in the same area. [Laughter] And she’s like, no where’s she gonna go?
RS: [Laughter] I pass everyday my old house. They pick me up to go to the center(?)(?), and they all the time that they get me from the street I live before--
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: No.
CSC: No. Neither of us have ever really, we’ve never thought about leaving.
EM: Alright. If not, why not?
CSC: Like she said, where would we go? [Laughter]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: I mean, where do you go when you’re 94 and you’re used to this neighborhood?
RS: I like to go to Mexico. You know--
CSC: Just to visit.
RS: To visit. But not stay.
CSC: And we did take her. Two years ago, we took her to go see her family--our family. We were gone for--we took her for like ten days. That was nice for her, but, we’re back. And as far as, I don’t know. Mark and I have lived here since we got married, in Corktown, so I don’t see us going anywhere.Maybe when we retire we’d go somewhere warm for a few weeks, but. Well--
EM: You’d come back.
CSC: We’d come back, yeah.
EM: Alright. What makes your neighborhood unique?
CSC: I think knowing everyone in the neighborhood, you know, we know our neighbors on both sides, we know the people across the street, I can walk around the block--I remember my niece visiting me one time and we went for a walk and I was saying, you know, “hi,” to this person, and that person, and she looked at me and said, “Tia Carmen, you know a lot of people.” I said, “Yeah.” You know? It’s just a neighborly place. [Speaking in Spanish]. And, then, growing up on Campbell, we knew everyone, and even as the neighborhood changed my mom always knew her neighbors. [Speaking in Spanish] And they always helped her out. She had, you know, younger neighbors and they would help her until the house got too big for her and we moved over with us. But it’s always been a friendly neighborhood, [Speaking in Spanish].
RS: Yeah, yeah.
EM:Okay. What does the term neighborhood mean to you?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: It’s nice to know everybody.
CSC: It means knowing people by [Speaking in Spanish]. Being able to, you know, to call on your neighbor if you need something, especially, I think, when you’re older, and just being able to work together to get things--either to get things done to better the neighborhood or, sometimes, getting together to maybe prevent something from happening in the neighborhood that, you know, is maybe moving too fast. So, I think knowing people, just talking to people, and I think that used to happen growing up on Campbell, over by Holy Redeemer, and it happens now, you know, in our neighborhood.
RS: Yeah, [Speaking in Spanish].
CSC: Yeah.
RS: I go and I have a church over there and a church over here. I still go to church at Holy Redeemer.
CSC: Yeah she still comes to church at--
RS: And, sometimes, I go to this side at Holy Trinity.
EM: Okay. If you could do one thing in your neighborhood what would it be, and why?
RS: [Unintelligible]
CSC: Huh? No, no [Speaking in Spanish].
RS: [Speaking in Spanish] [Laughter]
CSC: [Laughter] She said what can she do at her age? I think I would just try to get more people to know their neighbors. Especially younger people walking down the street with their phones. And I have a phone too, and I do texting, but, so many times you’re walking down the street, and people don’t say hello anymore because they’re so busy on their phones, you know?
RS: Yeah, yeah. You think they’re talking with you and they’re talking with--
CSC: They’re talking on the phone. I think we need to maybe, you know, put our electronics down a little bit and say hi to your neighbor because that’s the way you get to know people. So, I don’t know, I think, just making people more aware and trying to communicate more. Again. Verbally.
EM: Alright. Well, I’m out of questions, is there anything either of you can think to add? Any more stories you want to share?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: No, [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
EM: [Laughter] I’ll take both types of things.
CSC: Her two biggest things were the two times she was mugged, but
otherwise [Speaking Spanish]. I mean, it was a peaceful place to grow up.
EM: Okay
RS: No, there’s nothing.
CSC: Just a lot of good memories of us. Like I said, on Campbell we had so many kids that we could, you know, I guess we didn’t really have to have playdates because we had so many kids in the neighborhood. You just walked out your door and the kids were there. I can’t think of anything else.
EM: Alright. Let’s see if I remember how to turn this off.
END RECORDING ONE
START RECORDING TWO
EM: Alright. This is Rita Solis-Crowley and--
CSC: No.
EM: Right, Rita Solis and Carmen Solis-Crowley, Part two. Alright.
CSC: We just wanted to mention that, me growing up and my mom when she just came here, we could take the Baker bus downtown and go shopping. Go down one side of Woodward and up the other. And there was, of course, Hudson’s, the big store. There was Federals and Winkleman’s.
RS: Sam’s.
CSC: Sam’s, my mom remembers Sam’s, I don’t remember Sam’s. There was People’s(?)(?), Baker’s Shoes, there was a big Kresge, Sanders where we would go. So there was a--it was just great to be--you know, even growing up and I was in high school--go when you needed a prom dress or a homecoming dress, you’d get together with your friends, hop on the Baker bus, and you’d go downtown, and you did your shopping there. So, that’s something that brings back--
RS: [Speaking in Spanish]
CSC: Brings back good memories of what shopping used to be like in downtown Detroit.
EM: Okay. Alright. Anything else?
CSC: [Speaking in Spanish]
RS: No.
CSC: No.
EM: Okay.
END RECORDING TWO
Search Terms
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Detroit, Michigan, Southwest, Mexico, Immigration,
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fXRJ0497iJc?si=10WELDNkqryjBScl" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Carmen Solis-Crowley and Rita Solis
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Carmen Solis-Crowley and her mother Rita Solis are interviewed about life in Southwest, Detroit. Carmen Solis-Crowley translates for her mother, Rita for part of the interview.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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3/16/2019
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Tim McKay
Brief Biography
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Tim McKay is a local Corktown resident and head of the Corktown Experience which is working to restore and develop the Worker’s Row House.
Interviewer's Name
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William Wall-Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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4/23/2018
Transcription
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WW: Today is April 23rd, this interview is for the Detroit Historical
Society’s partnership with Corktown Experience. This interview is with Tim McKay and I am Billy Winkel. How did you first get in contact with the Worker’s Row House?
TM: I purchased the property that is adjacent to it, both on the side and in the back in 1992. And out of the two buildings that I purchased, one being a four family apartment building , 1906, and the other a wooden Greek revival, 1850, but not original to the site, it had been moved there. The third house was this now known as Worker’s Row House. At the time, we were clueless. We only knew the fellow who lived in it and we knew that he had donated it to Most Holy Trinity Church next door. I had had a
conversation with another resident in the neighborhood, Gordon Buckbee, an architect and an architectural historian who lived in the neighborhood. I was putting financing together for construction, reconstruction, and development of the two properties that I owned next door and the vacant lots behind the Row House. Row House sits on a smaller corner of that lot up to the alley – shares the alley with the church.
So in 1992 when I purchased the property, I was a little overwhelmed with the brick house and the vacant house – everything was vacant by this time. Charlie, who lived in what is now known as the Worker’s Row House had moved out and went into senior living, he was by that time in his mid to late 80s. So I first found out about it then when I tried to put financing together for what I bought. Bankers and lenders said going down the street from the Row House - derelict, vacant - my house that I bought - derelict, vacant - and the apartment building, at least we had an office in it and one apartment, unrented at the time, but up for rent. It was somewhat usable. So we had derelict, derelict, almost derelict. So I began kind of in moderation digging around. Gordon Buckbee and I had met up on other occasions for the neighborhood issues and stuff, and he said the shape of the house and the three chimneys indicate that it’s a three unit building. Even then there were only two doors in the front and two doors in the back. As it turns out, it had been modified. So that’s when the story began with my concern about the house and that it had some historic significance according to Gordon Buckbee.
WW: When did it advance beyond just interest in the property? When did you start taking an active role in trying to do something with it?
TM: What we did was we had the conversation on occasion figuring a plan out and getting financing took some time. In fact, I didn’t get a full mortgage. I bought it on land contract, I couldn’t get financing. The city lenders just weren’t lending anybody money for buying a house let alone rehaping. But there were programs that I could apply for. So overtime Gordon Buckbee would say that the shape of the house, it had some history to it. He said it’s similar in shape with the peak – the Greek revival details are similar to what was built in 1817 as the first U of M [University of Michigan] building. University of Michigan building built closer into downtown. So very few people seemed to have interest in it. We looked at it as never getting into it because I didn’t have access and the church had no plans for it.
We had conversations over the course of years, I was preoccupied, my wife and I were in business, we had employees, we were preoccupied by that. The parking lot that was commercial licensed parking lot that I also purchased and the back yard of these three buildings were being used for commercial parking. I had to run that. I had a lot going on.
So up until 2002, was the first time I was able to get a mortgage. Then because I got the mortgage, I started developing plans for the property to add onto the house next door, which was going to be the house that my wife and I were going to live in. And then the rest of the restoration of the four unit apartment building. All the money I was getting from the parking lot I was putting into the apartment building. That was my resource generating that income. And then a young family moved into the apartment that was most usable. And I had a community development organization using office space and we were developing an apartment building around the corner and we had that office in one of the units. So we had two units occupied and I had a younger man who was a construction professional living and redeveloping the other two units because it needed extensive work.
So while that was going on I was filling out the paperwork for a new mortgage and a construction loan. So from 2002, five years, to 2007 we started to actually get some bites on loans and construction loans. Meanwhile, in 2001, the Community Development Corps had developed with the Housing Development Corps in Corktown and the house next door, because of Gordon’s conversation about its historic-ness and because it was modeling in similar detail as the University of Michigan building that was gone, but the design of it was similar, we had a sense it was very early. Mistakenly we thought it was probably 1820, that’s in about 2001 and 2002. We were convinced.
I was working as a volunteer and board member of the Corktown Development Corps and we were merging with the Corktown Housing Collaboration and we were able to convince the parish to change transfer the deed to the nonprofit combined effort. For a dollar we got that nonprofit switch to happen. From that point, we put a sign out not really knowing what the house was about. Knowing that it had a roof problem with a hole in the roof, we said well it’s workers housing or something like that, a pioneer house, we didn’t know what to call it, we didn’t know anything about it. And we put a sign out front and we were thinking well if it’s historic, Corktown Historical Museum. And so the sign went out front without realizing that probably that wasn’t necessarily the best way to go. House museums don’t attract many people. But nevertheless it was an iconic piece to the neighborhood. So I’m thinking at least its taking a step forward, maybe the Historical Society would get involved blah blah blah. So that’s 2001-2002.
We put together a scenario in the Michigan AIA Foundation had a grant or an award for a historical preservation effort. We submitted it and we won which gave us $10,000 in the David Evans Historical Architectural Preservation Award in 2002. We got a plaque, the strangest name for the house is on there, it’s like the workers house pioneer Corktown place museum. You know, we really didn’t know.
At the same time around 2002, a young woman who lived in the metropolitan area, I think it was Dearborn at the time was getting her masters at Ball State University in Munsey, Indiana and she needed a project for her thesis. So she asked if she could use -she saw the sign, went to the community development office where I was. At the time I had moved from the board to becoming Director of Economic Development which included some of the main street efforts that we were doing and other historic sites, Tiger stadium, because by that time the Tigers had moved out, and the train station, and strategies along with that for the rest of southwest Detroit for cultural tourism. Thinking this house next door could fit into something like that, that’s how it started to evolve.
When the AIA gave us the award, then Ellen Thackary who’s now working with the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, based her research on a thesis that she was going to put together. She started that in 2003 and delivered her interpretive plan, which was her thesis, for the site and her research. From that research, she found a treasure trove of history. Because the builders of that house lived at the corner of Lebros and 6th, houses that face what are now side streets were main streets and the numbered streets were side streets, in most circumstances. And the Andrews family, she found out, both husband and wife died in the early 1850s in cholera epidemics and when Mrs. Andrews died, soon after her husband did, they left a child and because they did not have a will, all their stuff went to probate. Ellen came across that, which gave her the whole story. The whole story is that it was a three unit row house and she had the names on receipts of the people who lived there and the dates etcetera. And then that led to more research via census data and directories etcetera. Pretty extensive, but not as extensive as it could be, but that opened us up for more. Then we began to realize that it was pretty much worker class, not unlike the rest of Corktown. Corktown houses are all about the workers, the wealthier folks lived closer to the river before the railroad tracks went in in the 1860s. That disrupted all of that sort of luxury housing and beautiful farm houses from the strip farms. So then we started really opening up research.
And so I’m working as director with greater Corktown Development Corps on economic development strategies which included main street overlays and collaborations with other communities in regards to economic development throughout southwest. And listing the resources that we would have to exploit, if you will, in an economic development strategy. And from the research that Ellen delivered along with that history there is with [Detroit] Historical Society and the Historical Museum of Detroit, Ellen’s research and conclusions said that you really need to get more information and since that Row House is original to that site, it was a farm before that and before that, native settlements of some sort. Who knows what could come from an archaeological dig, see what you can do from that. So Kathy Much had been someone we had talked to, she was working with the Walter-Reuther Library at the time, she was mounting the local historical conference, she became interested. I took a graduate course in city planning with Robin Bowl at Wayne State. I met some of those folks, including Kathy. After Ellen finished and reported her work to us, we said we’ve got a chucky beautiful piece of history here in actual condition that we could somehow leverage. We got the direction from Kathy to touch base with the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State. We started to get a huge amount of information from them. Just looking at it, they decided that they would initiate a class for archaeological digs at the site and in the fall of 2006, they began what was a three year dig. Extensive research and incredible amounts of material came from that and we’re in 2019. That led to two other residential sites, for comparison to the Row House site, and then on into Roosevelt park, which is a former part of the neighborhood that 110 some houses and buildings were demoed to create the park.
So we have this huge collection of materials and research that keeps building because students are taking that information and doing more research. They’re assembling pieces, fragments, into items and putting them together that were pulled up. There’s like 6000 pieces that just came up from the Row House alone. There’s an additional 2-4,000 in the two other sites and an additional 3,000 pieces from the Roosevelt Park site that are archived. So in the process of developing historic and cultural tourism as an economic development tool, we are beginning to assemble these archived research materials.
So we began to think, we’ve got a site in Corktown we could use combined offices for. We were developing a business association at the time; the nonprofit in Corktown strategically bought storefronts, interviewed potential owners, and resold them. We flipped property as a nonprofit and the profits then went into operational costs for the nonprofit which won all kinds of accolades with other funders so we could start getting money for the Tigers Stadium site to help us envision that because that’s a historic site and to strategically work with the people who owned the train station to see if we could save that. And to be able to go to hearings, to pay people to go to a hearing so we could find out the strategies of the owners of the train station and then begin to link ourselves with other historic sites so we could come up with a cultural tourist strategy that would drive that concept of having tours and having events related to the history.
Being down on the river, being close to where the city was founded, Corktown is strategic in its incredible potential for history. And that takes us back to Native American, not just the Irish landing in the 1820s and 30s and during the famine. And then we also, through that research, in fact we have the title of the exhibit, in 2010 there were two exhibits, one here at the [Detroit] Historical Museum, talking about Corktown and its future, and the other one, simultaneous, was the materials that were dug up from the Worker’s Row House site. And we were going to leverage that into the development of the site.
Unfortunately, the nonprofit closed and for five years the Row House sat with no activity because we didn’t have control of it and the committee was sort of drained out. There was never a board of directors; it was never a separate entity which we had hoped it would become. We had interested a great deal of people, but in hindsight, Ellen came out with a strategy to develop the house as a historical museum and have three units represent certain eras: the 1850s, post-civil war, and the 1920s. Roughly 1900 to 1920 the boom that leveled a whole bunch of stuff, including after Roosevelt Park and after Michigan Ave being gutted on the south side of Michigan, about 90% of the historic Victorian commercial district of Corktown was gone. Then the industrial area to the south of Corktown was gone, then downtown expanded in high rises and office buildings so that the part of Corktown that went into 1st, and 2nd, and 3rd, Plum Street was one of those, that’s all gone. What’s left of Corktown is about a tenth of what was here originally.
So we still felt that it had some guts to it; that the historic designation of Corktown Residential District was going to make an impact. And the people who made up the Community Development Corps were for the most part residents who were active enough on the board. Not necessarily staff, although we did have myself and three out of the six staff, half of the staff, were residents. So it was a neighborhood community effort with community meetings that sort of outlined the strategy on how the Row House was going to evolve. Ellen’s suggestion was house museum, then we took people on road trips to other house museums and we found out that these had these huge financial efforts behind them to make community wide historic commissions fund these houses where when we went on the tour, we were the only people in those houses. So we started changing the direction. We partnered the Worker’s Row House Development Project, now known as Corktown Experience, developing the Row House.
WW: When did that change happen?
TM: That change happened over the time period that the house was stagnant. The nonprofit that owned it never switched the deed but we knew that eventually they would and I was going to take them to court if they weren’t going to because my development –my wife and I had designated the house next door to go to the project because they needed facility and service at the site in order for it to be dynamic and it’s during those concepts that we went from house museum, and this is roughly in 2006, when the dig started.
The house was designated a Cool Cities Project in 2005 which gave the committee $100,000 to do something with the site of the Row House and what the committee decided to do was take it back to its original design elements of three doors in the front, three doors in the back, a window on the second floor and a window on the first floor for each unit in the front and back. And that design element would hold true to the 1850s.
They completed that and we were about to move into the house next door when the nonprofit shut its doors and that transaction hadn’t happened. My wife and I had decided, even after we got financing and historic tax credits approved for an addition that we were going to put on the house next door, when the Row House project started to kind of grow in interest and the exhibits here seemed to be holding a lot of promise in terms of attracting the kind of funds the Row House was going to need to develop the whole site, the two houses, both houses being very significant for separate reasons but still 1850s. So it was right around 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 that we began to realize it shouldn’t be strictly a place for historic exhibit of how people lived in each unit and more a flexible social neighborhood operational center that had that scholarship and had that research that we could partner with the likes of anthropology, the Historical Society of Detroit, along with attracting Corktown’s Historical Society into the project tin some way or another. They have been hesitant because they put on the home tour and they put on the Pumpkin Fest, social events that sort of enhance the neighborhood but taking on a piece of property was a challenge, too much of one.
So it took us a while to finally get them to think that they need to participate. But they’re thinking essentially that idea of pooling co-working space for the business association, which now has spun off and it’s becoming its own nonprofit, for the business association for Historical Society and for the Neighborhood Resident Committee because no one has a meeting space or an office so we thought that the Row House or the house next door could function as that. And build a pavilion so there’s food service on a daily basis, there’s meeting rooms in each room of the Row House and there’s a bigger pavilion space, a glorified year round tent, and facilities of a commercial kitchen and restrooms that service these three locations, but enough of a generating activity that people will go back to the site. If people would’ve come to those three little rooms set up in 1850 or 1870 or 1920, they would see it once and they would go away. Just wouldn’t be dynamic.
So that organization partners with museums and anthropology and we have archived material responsibly taken care of. One of the things in the process of developing this site, we went to the Michigan Museum Association and a former director sat and said that historic sites throughout Michigan are nice and wonderful, but very deficient in responsibly taking care of their materials. We look at our materials as being resources for funding potential. Books, publications, films, conversations, tours, all of that sort of feeds that machinery of cultural tourism. And it’s Corktown’s. Corktown Experience in partnership and relationship has access, priority access, to Corktown related materials. We’re still crafting those agreements, we’re still getting memos of agreement, not just understanding, but agreement. So if somebody goes into, from somewhere upstate, and goes into the archives of our materials, Corktown’s materials, at Wayne State Museum of Anthropology, there’s a connection then that’s made with whoever is in that position to contact Corktown. So that we know what’s happening and we can co-market ourselves with a book, a movie, with lecture series. So that more than answers your question ha ha.
WW: What were some of your first steps in getting the project jumpstarted again after you got the house back, after the five year hiatus?
TM: Well, during the process, because I had just mortgaged and construction loan which was going to include the house next door, I had a substantial mortgage based on a job that I had with a nonprofit that was developing Corktown, Tiger Stadium site, Michigan Ace, and the Row House. I had to get a job and the kind of work that I needed to get was project management for data and telephone systems. And my client that I had worked with previously, mostly remotely, was in California in the Bay Area of San Francisco so I left town and worked out there consistently from February of 2010 to January of 2016. I would come home occasionally. I was staying with my wife’s relatives, her sister, single sister lives in San Francisco. And during the job out there, so my wife would come there to visit, I was coming home on occasion.
Meanwhile I was talking about this project, because it was right next door, and then we got screwed out of selling the house and having that happen. So we’re sitting next to one of the worst dilapidated house in Corktown and that’s not fun because it’s a small neighborhood and people talk. So we got through that, it motivated me in my free time because I was out there and I did one job, which granted it took maybe 12 hours a day, 60 some hours a week in certain times. A lot of times I just had the evenings free which was incredible for me because as a community development corps we were going to all kinds of meetings 4-5 times a week plus events. Because we were selling to businesses, businesses were opening up and you had those things to go to and we had this collaboration so I was really hectic here. When I got there I had free time. When I got there I was able to kind of think it out.
In 2011 I incorporated a new nonprofit and I believe we called it the Worker’s Row House thinking eventually I’m going to get that thing. It’s going to come to me, and if it doesn’t I’ll have to make a legal step to do it. So I started setting aside resources for potential legal fight. That was October 2011 and in the two years that followed, Wayne State kept coming to the site on the day of the home tour and they did demonstration digs, they showed off objects that they had pulled up, students were still writing their theses, still doing research. I would come home for that home tour, I wouldn’t necessarily have much to do with it, but I would be there. I would also participate in walking tours during that time because through this process I’ve learned a heck of a lot of history, just osmosis and listening to this stuff; stuff that’s kind of interesting and exciting.
So right around then 2014 we made the app location in I believe January of 2014, by October of 2014 we had the 501C3 status which flipped me out it happened so quickly, and so we had the nonprofit status for that. And then in 2015 I made some inquiries about the deed and made some suggestions with legal overtones and by January of 2016 the property was transferred not to the nonprofit but to me personally and Sarah my wife. And then 24 hours later we transferred it with no cost, the burden was the nonprofit sat on it and it acquired back taxes. One of the impudence for them to get rid of it was they were facing tax foreclosure. So here you are kiss off. It really cheesed me but we got it and then I didn’t want it personally, it shouldn’t have come to me personally; I don’t know why they did that. It should’ve gone right to the nonprofit even though the nonprofit was new, it didn’t have really capacity, it still doesn’t, it’s 2019. But it’s getting there and having these exhibits on a larger scale outside of the area puts that Row House into the position it needs to be regionally and locally. It’s the only one left like it although there were 30-40 of those scattered about the district of Corktown from downtown 1st street out to 28th from the 1850s and 60s. So it’s significant, that house has a tale to tell and because we’re in a city of workers and a city that was built by workers, Corktown is all about that. Those houses are humble cottages from the 1840s to the 1890s and the Victorians are a little bit more middle class, but still workers so it’s all about the workers. And in the nation of the immigrant, there isn’t anything more historic than a tenement and the stories about those people and so it’s all about what we’ve trademarked, the Courageous OrdinaryTM.
[TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW 00:35:27]
[End of Track 1]
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Detroit, Corktown, Row House, Michigan Restoration
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Title
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Tim McKay
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Tim McKay discusses his involvement with the Worker’s Row House in Corktown. He talks about how he found out about the property and recounts the continuing story of its restoration and development.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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4/23/2018
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Detroit Historical Society
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Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Rhonda McIntosch
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Rhonda McIntosch was born in Harrison Township in 1957. She grew up on the East side of the city on Holcomb. Her father was in the Air Force. Eventually her family moved to Oak Park to live in a more diverse neighborhood.
Interviewer's Name
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William Wall-Winkel
Date
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12/10/2018
Transcription
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WW: Hello, today is December 10th, 2018. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Neighborhoods Oral History Project: Neighborhoods Where Detroit Lives. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
RM: Thank you for having me.
WW: I'm sitting down with
RM: Rhonda McIntosch.
WW: Where and when were you born?
RM: I was born in Harrison Township, Michigan, September of 1957.
WW: Growing up did you come to the city often?
RM: Well, we lived in the city. My father was stationed, he was in the air force, he was stationed in Harrison township, so we were born at the hospital there.
WW: Okay. What neighborhood did you live in when you lived in the city, or when you were growing up?
RM: East side, on the other side of 75. Right in this particular area really. Mack, Charlevoix, Kercheval, all in that area.
WW: What was the area like for you growing up?
RM: I liked, the place we ended up really it was 8936 Holcomb and those hold, the most memories from that, that address holds the most memories for me. We lived in a community where there were Italians, there were African Americans, Sicilian. We had Sicilian neighbors. From all over the, the world actually.
WW: What years did you live on this block?
RM: I lived there probably from 1962, I believe we moved in 1971.
WW: Can you talk a little bit more about that neighborhood. What shops did you go to, what did you do for fun?
RM: Oh, well for fun, we played, there were so many kids on our block, so we played four square in the middle of the street. We played hopscotch, we played rock school, jump rope, baseball, kick ball, dodgeball, everything you can name. We had a yard next to our house that had fruit trees. So there was a lot in front of that where we all played and there was a fence behind it so it was good for really good for dodgeball.
WW: You mentioned that the neighborhood was integrated, did all the children play together or did you stay separate?
RM: Yes, we did. We all played together.
WW: Okay. What schools did you go to?
RM: I went to Nicholls Elementary, A.L. Holmes Elementary, Burls Junior High, and I went on to Cass Tech.
WW: Are there any other memories you'd like to share from the time you were living on that block?
RM: We had a neighbor, his name was Mr. Komatyle and he had the best apricots in this yard, but he didn't like us picking them very much [laughs]. He hated us playing on his grass as well. He's like the old grump in the neighborhood. He was kinda that type of person. I remember, I have a memory living there of the day the riot happened. It was just, people were running up and down the street. I saw a washing machine and a dryer being pushed on one of those carts with wheels, evidently stolen from one of the stores on Harper. So that's just a thought that's always stuck with me, you know. How could somebody do that?
WW: Do you remember your parents reacting to what was going on that day?
RM: My mom just told us to stay close to the porch. We were able to stay out and look and watch everything that was going on. But we had to stay close to the porch.
WW: Why did your family leave that neighborhood?
RM: Well, my mother wanted a better neighborhood. She would always move us. By the time the diversity changed in the neighborhood, she would move us to another diverse neighborhood. So we moved to Griggs and Eight mile and then from there to Oak park.
WW: How long did you live at Griggs and Eight mile.
RM: Seven years.
WW: What was your time there like?
RM: It was a lot of fun. I'm not well, yeah, I would be tooting my own horn, but I
WW: Go ahead.
RM: I was the champ on our block for any, any sort of ball playing or racing or, you know. I was just that good. And I think it was because I had brothers all around me and male cousins, so they kind of pulled me through that rank.
WW: Do you remember what it was like going to the new neighborhood? Transitioning.
RM: Well, one I was busing back to Burls because the semester was gonna end in maybe two weeks. And one of the girls, she started teasing me after school and trying to make a big to do about whatever, I don't know, but she heard that we moved and "Oh you think you're better than everybody else" and all this kind of stuff. So she picked a fight with me. But I wouldn't fight her. I'm like, "I'm not fighting you. What for?" And she and her sisters just stood there and looked at me like. I just hope they realize they couldn't bully everybody. So that was the first memory I have of living on Griggs. And then I went to Cass. So I bussed there for an hour to school, an hour home, but always had time for a game of baseball. And same games we played as smaller children. We brought from that neighborhood over to the new neighborhood, some of the new games that we'd made up or whatever. And I liked living there because I worked in the store around the corner, directly on Eight mile. Our house was the second home from Eight mile. And so I'd go up to the corner and make a left and there was my job. And I worked in there and had to tell on all the neighborhood boys that were trying to steal beer and wine, that kind of thing.
WW: What was the store called?
RM: Leo's Party Store. It's right at, between Grigg's and Birwood.
WW: Growing up in these two neighborhoods, did you tend to stay within the boundaries of them or did you venture around the city girl growing up?
RM: Holcomb, we were younger and my mom became a single parent, so we weren't able to go here and there. You know, if she got a ride somewhere, it would have to be with someone else. So she wasn't able to take us. But my aunt, she would pick us up and take us to Lansing, all over the place to Canada and places around Detroit. So I did get to get out in that respect. , Griggs, as I became a little older, I would get on the bus and go down to Edgewater Park, this all by myself, just to have some fun alone. And I rode the wooden roller coaster. Greater Grace I think is there now.
WW: What prompted your family's move to Oak Park?
RM: Same thing, she wanted us in a more diverse neighborhood. So we moved there and we had, Chaldean neighbors, Arab neighbors, Caucasian neighbors. Oh, Chinese, Japanese. It was just multicultural.
WW: And what year did you make that move?
RM: 1977.
WW: And did you stay in Oak Park after that?
RM: Yes.
WW: While you were living in Oak Park, did you continue to come to the city?
RM: Oh, of course. My younger brothers and sisters that went to elementary in Oak Park, they pretty much spent their time in Oak Park. But my formative years, so to speak, were in Detroit. So that's where I spent my time. Every chance I got, I was going back across Eight Mile.
WW: When did you come back to live in the city?
RM: Well, from Oak Park I moved all around as an adult. But I think, I can't remember the year, but I think after I got out on my own, most of my time was spent in Detroit, at different places in Detroit.
WW: Okay. After you've left those two neighborhoods, did you ever go back to them and see how they are today?
RM: Always, always. It took a long time, but the house on Holcomb was torn down and they rebuilt one of the prefab houses over there. My house on Griggs, the first house from Eight Mile burned down. So the house we lived in became the first house and it's still standing. It looks just as good as it did when we lived there. And Oak Park, that was on the circle part of a cul de sac. And I just love driving in there and going around that corner. My mom's house sat here and our neighbors were just angels. They really were. My mom being a single parent, they did so much for her. That's what I remember.
WW: Are there any stories or anything I didn't ask you that you'd like to share?
RM: Oh, just I have a brother who's two years younger than me. His name was Tony. He and I were a team no matter which season of the year we had jobs. We'd either rake leaves, we'd shovel snow, we cleaned out gardens for the spring. We planted flowers and ran errands in the neighborhood. And we did that. It started off going into the store for neighbors and I was seven, Tommy was five. So there were a lot of times we brought food home for dinner. As young as we were and it was really out of, my brother loves older people, so he would get to know them and realize they needed help. So he kind of incorporated me into the jobs and slowly but surely we were a force to be reckoned with. [laughs]
WW: Did you continue that when you moved to the next neighborhood on eight mile?
RM: No, I was in high school by then and going to Cass Tech there was not a lot of room for games, so I grew up really quick. All my baseball and all the things I loved to do. Well, I did play basketball at Cass for a short time. But after maybe a semester or two, I was done with that. So the physical activity that I used to have, it dropped from a hundred to I'd say 25%. So that was a big change in my life.
WW: That's it? Alright. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
RM: Thank you for having me.
WW: Oh my pleasure.
[16:30]
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Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, East Side, Oak Park, Nicholls Elementary, Holmes Elementary, Burls Junior High, Cass Tech
Dublin Core
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Title
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Rhonda McIntosch
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Rhonda McIntosch discusses growing up on the east side of Detroit. She talks about shops she frequented, and daily life in the city.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
12/10/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Rowena Green
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Rowena Green was born May 20, 1962, and grew up in the Southfield-Plymouth neighborhood during the 60’s and 70’s. She currently lives in Lincoln Park, Michigan, where she moved in the late 1980’s.
Interviewer's Name
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Kenny Lowe
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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10/12/2018
Transcription
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[Start of Track 1]
[INITIALS OF INTERVIEWEE: R.G.]
[INITIALS OF INTERVIEWER: K.L.]
K.L.: This is Kenny Lowe conducting an oral history with Rowena Green at 5:17
P.M. on October 12, 2018 [at] the Detroit Historical Society.
K.L.: So, when were you born and where were you born?
R.G.: I was born on May 20, 1962 at St. Joseph Hospital in Detroit, Michigan.
K.L.: Alright, what neighborhood did you grow up in?
R.G.: I grew up in the neighborhood of Plymouth and Southfield.
K.L.: How would you describe the physical boundaries of Southfield-Plymouth, as in the roads and where exactly the borders of the neighborhood came to?
R.G.: We’ll go Plymouth to Wadsworth and Greenfield to Southfield.
K.L.: That’s how you describe Southfield-Plymouth?
R.G.: Yeah.
K.L.: What do you recall about, what was it like? What was the social environment in Southfield-Plymouth at the time that you can recall?
R.G.: It was just, it was your average neighborhood. We had a party store and we had a movie theater and a hardware store. We would, you know, walk up to the hardware store and party store and get things, or go to the movie theater on Saturday afternoons. We had a community center at the end of the block where we would go roller skating and ice skating. I learned how to tap dance there. I learned how to do ballet there.
K.L.: So [those were] the main ways that you would seek entertainment as a child?
R.G.: Yup.
K.L.: So, in what respects does [Southfield-Plymouth] distinguish itself from the rest of Detroit, do you think?
R.G.: I think, back then, it was known for the trees because they had huge elm trees in front of each one of the houses, so when you drive down the street, it was like a canopy of trees.
K.L.: Yes?
R.G.: And that would be the one thing that people would always say when they’d come over and visit, you know, “Your streets are so beautiful ‘cause it’s just a canopy of trees,” because they all kind of came over and kind of just made this beautiful tunnel.
K.L.: What social groups do you think were represented and in what proportions in Southfield-Plymouth? Such as like ethnic groups, religious groups, occupational groups, socioeconomic?
R.G.: Well, when I was growing up, until, I’m going to say, the first ten years of my life, my neighborhood was all-white.
K.L.: All-white?
R.G.: We had no African-Americans, we had no Asians, it was just all-white. The gentlemen either worked in the plants, or they worked in a factory, or they went to work in an office. And the moms generally stayed home.
K.L.: Okay. Has the size and shape or image of [Southfield-Plymouth] changed over the years?
R.G.: I went back a couple years ago. It’s really sad.
K.L.: Yeah, how do you think it’s changed? And how drastic do you think that change was?
R.G.: It was a huge change. There’s no more community center at the end of the street, it’s been replaced with solar panels. The houses, a lot of them are gone, a lot of them are boarded up, there’s no movie theater anymore. There’s no little party store at the end of the street. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of Detroit – it looks like a lot of the neighborhoods have been forgotten in the city.
K.L.: So, I’m going to move on to your childhood. What were your parents’ occupations during your childhood in the Southfield-Plymouth area?
R.G.: My mom worked at a grocery store, and my dad was in the military.
K.L.: Military?
R.G.: He was in the army.
K.L.: Where did you shop? What kind of stores did you go to, aside from the aforementioned party store?
R.G.: We had a Farmer Jack at the corner of Plymouth and Southfield. And there was a Kowalski deli store and a plaza on Joy Road and Greenfield.
K.L.: Okay, where do you go to school during your childhood?
R.G.: My elementary school was Coolidge Elementary, and then I went to Lessenger Middle School and then I went to Ruddiman Middle School. And I graduated from Cody High School in 1980.
K.L.: 1980, okay.
K.L.: Do you recall anything about the schools that you did go to?
R.G.: I recall that the elementary school was an elementary school, I mean, there was nothing really special about that. When I started going to the middle school, Lessenger, that was when I really first started having friends – African-American friends – because before, it was always white friends.
K.L.: When were your middle school years?
R.G.: ‘74, ‘72, ‘74?
K.L.: Okay.
R.G.: Yeah, right around there.
K.L.: Alrighty.
R.G.: Yep.
K.L.: So, did you venture to other neighborhoods in Detroit or did you prefer to stay within the confines of the [Southfield-Plymouth] area?
R.G.: No, we would go out on Sunday drives, and we would, you know, drive up and down the boulevard, we would go to Belle Isle. We would drive up and down Jefferson. We [inaudible] all kinds of different neighborhoods, just drive around and see things.
K.L: Yeah, do you remember what Detroit was like in the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s?
R.G.: Prior to ‘67, we would go down to Woodward Avenue, we would do our shopping there sometimes. We would go to Belle Isle. We would go to Cobo – Cobo used to have these huge Christmas events. After ‘67, things changed, people didn’t want to come downtown as much, they didn’t feel safe.
K.L: Mhm.
R.G: So, we didn’t do as much down here – we still did, we came down, but I don’t think we came down as much. And it changed a lot as far as the way people looked at it. So, I just remember driving up and down the boulevard – Westgrand Boulevard – and the houses and how beautiful they were and driving up and down Jefferson, especially wintertime, you know, Christmas, you drive around and look at all the lights and everything.
K.L.: Mhm.
R.G.: Yeah, so it was different after ‘67 because so many people left.
K.L.: Yeah, because of how dangerous it felt to be – how unsafe and dangerous it felt to be in Detroit?
R.G.: Right. And we never felt that way. We never felt when we would come down that we were in any type of danger or anything, but there weren’t a lot – some of the things changed, like we used to go – there was a Sears at Open Boulevard, we used to go every Christmas, that had this huge train set. Well, as the neighborhood started to change, Sears closed down, so you didn’t have that place to go in the wintertime. And then, Cobo stopped having their winter events for the kids, and then it was just kind of like a snowball effect.
K.L.: Yeah, I see. Going back to your parents for a brief moment, do you know when your parents were born?
R.G.: My mom was born in 1936, and – well, they both born the same year; they went to high school together.
K.L: Oh, wow!
R.G.: Yeah, they went to high school together. My mom graduated from
Mackenzie High School in 1955 and my dad did the same year.
K.L.: And then, do you have any siblings?
R.G.: Nope, I’m an only child.
K.L.: Do you know when they got married?
R.G.: I’m going to say they got married in 1961? Because I was married [born] in 1962.
K.L.: Are there any childhood stories that took place in [Southfield-Plymouth] that you’d like to share with me?
R.G.: I just remember how much fun it was, you know, walking up to the corner store. And I used to go up there with my grandfather, and we’d go up there and get a pop or something or go to the movies. At the time, a bunch of us would go to the movies, and we’d walk to the movies, and we’d see a scary movie and then come home. And I remember too, back then, you could burn your leaves, so you would gather all your leaves up and you could burn your leaves in front of your house.
K.L.: Oh, wow!
R.G.: Yeah, they didn’t come by and pick them up. And I know this sounds really crazy, but the street used to flood when it rained a lot, so all of us kids would get in there and run around and ride our bikes through it and things like that.
K.L.: Through puddles and whatnot?
R.G.: Yeah, flooded streets, all that sewer water and stuff. Back then, it was different for us ‘cause we didn’t have all the chemicals and stuff that they have now, so you’d ride your bikes through it.
K.L.: That’s so neat. Do you remember what the movie theater and ice skating rink that you went to, do you recall what they were named?
R.G.: I don’t remember what the movie theater was, but I want to say that the community center was Stoepel Park; I could be wrong. It was right at the end of my street, like I said, it’s not there anymore. When I went by there the last time, there was all – they have all kinds of solar panels there now.
K.L.: Yeah, so, do you think that there’s any more childhood stories that you could think of? Like do you have anything specific that you have in mind, or is that kind of at the end of it?
R.G.: Well, it’s not really childhood, but I know that when I started going to Cody High School, it was during the time where the schools were having a lot of issues, and they were calling them “riots.” And at the time, I remember us being in front of the school one morning, waiting to go in – and you could see a bunch of kids coming up across the football field – and we tried to get back into the school and they wouldn’t let us in. So, you know, there were altercations there.
K.L.: Do you think that these were connected to the ‘67 riots?
R.G.: No, I think it was a lot of frustration because at the time, you didn’t have enough books or your teachers – I had a teacher that told me one time, “As long as you come to class, you get an A.” So, students were frustrated; they weren’t getting the education they deserved, they didn’t have the supplies – no different than it is now – so there was a lot of frustration, and there was a lot of frustration that kids were being taken from their neighborhood – they were being bused across town.
K.L.: Yeah, I was informed about the busing situation prior to interviewing you, and I was suggested to ask about it. What exactly was busing?
R.G.: Busing was where they had taken the whole city, and they looked at the whole city, and they were like, “Ugh, well, we got a lot of kids over here, so let’s bus them over to this school, so we can fill this school,” not thinking that you’re taking the kids out of their neighborhoods, out of their environment, and busing them across town because they said, “Well, we’re going to save money, this is going to be a way to increase our pupils.” But you wasted all the money with the buses taking them across town, and the drivers – and a lot of the drivers were not quipped to take care of these kids. I mean, we had a girl one time have a seizure on the bus and they had to call an ambulance. And she’s [the bus driver] kind of just standing there like, “Well, okay, what do I do?” ‘Cause she thought the girl was acting out when in fact, she was having a seizure.
K.L.: Mm. Yeah.
R.G.: So, I mean, if you go back and you look at busing, I don’t think busing did anybody any good. Yes, you met a lot of new people, no doubt about that, but I don’t think it helped the way they thought it was going to.
K.L.: So, you would say it was more of a failure than a success?
R.G.: Oh yeah, I would say busing was a failure.
K.L.: Alright, moving on from your childhood, have you ever considered moving away from the Southfield-Plymouth area during your younger years?
R.G.: No, we moved in 1980 simply because the neighborhood had changed so much, and my mom was afraid she would [inaudible] ever get any money for the house. So, we moved to Southgate.
K.L.: Southgate?
R.G.: Yup, we moved to Southgate, Michigan in 1980.
K.L.: So, that said, you gave the information as to why – when and why you moved there, do you remember what Southgate was like in the ‘80’s?
R.G.: Sounds terrible to say, but it was just an all-white neighborhood. When I got there, a lot of kids in the neighborhood had already grown up and moved away, and you know, you’re coming into a neighborhood where friendships have already been established and relationships have already been established, so it was different moving there than if I had moved there when I was younger.
K.L.: Mhm.
R.G.: The neighbors were nice, but it still was an all-white neighborhood – and it was totally different from where I came from.
K.L.: Yeah. And going back to Southfield-Plymouth, I have a couple questions about that. So, what does the word “neighborhood” mean to you?
R.G.: Neighborhood means to me the smell of burning leaves, the trees when you’re driving down the street and they’re all kind of – they all come together like this beautiful tunnel. Going to the end of my block and roller-skating on a Friday night at the community center, or ice-skating, or dance there. That’s what it means to me. I have really good memories of growing up there.
K.L.: So, how do you feel about the state of Southfield-Plymouth today?
R.G.: It makes me cry.
K.L.: Yeah. Why would you say that it makes you upset to think about?
R.G.: You come downtown and there’s so much going on, and there’s so many wonderful things down here, but if you go out to the neighborhoods, to the people that have stayed here and have not turned their backs on the city, a lot of times they feel they’ve been forgotten. Because you go through the neighborhoods and there’s still a lot of empty houses which are dangerous to the people that are here; there may be one or two people that have stayed, but those one or two people that are just as important as the people that are living downtown, and I think the city needs to recognize that, just like with the kids are going through right now with the schools; they’re having to bring in water filtrations because they can’t drink the water.
K.L.: Mhm, so what would you like to see happen with Southfield-Plymouth?
R.G.: I would like to see it come back as a neighborhood where families want to move back in to.
K.L.: Do you think that Southfield-Plymouth has the potential to become what it used to be again, someday, maybe not exactly?
R.G.: I hope so. Yeah, I hope so.
K.L.: If you could a project done in Southfield-Plymouth, what would it be? What kind of project would you set up to improve the neighborhood?
R.G.: I think a grocery store is very important for the citizens of Detroit – a good grocery store – Meijer has gone into Eight Mile and Woodward Area, but I think a good grocery store where they’re going to get fresh food at a reasonable price, and a place where the kids can go and feel safe, where they can go down the street and play basketball or play baseball. Things like that to bring the community back together.
K.L.: How do you feel about the state of Detroit altogether?
R.G.: It’s come a long way. I’m very happy about it. I love coming downtown, I mean, my son lives downtown, I try and get down here at least once a week. I come to the Eastern Market all the time, I just wander around the library and the DIA for hours. I love the city, I’m not ashamed to say that I was born and raised in the city of Detroit. I think it’s a fabulous place. It’s got a wonderful history, it’s got a crazy history, it’s got a horrible history. But I think – at least I hope – that it will continue to move forward and bring people back to it.
K.L.: Alright, so I’m going to end this segment of the interview right now, it is 5:37 in the afternoon.
[END OF INTERVIEW 00:18:59]
[End of Track 1]
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, Southfield-Plymouth, Lincoln Park, 1967 riots.
Video
A link to the video
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rowena Green
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Rowena discusses her general childhood experiences in the Southfield-Plymouth area during the 1960’s and 70’s.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/12/2018
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Gwen Lanier
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Gwen Lanier was born in Selma, Alabama in 1954. Her family moved to Detroit in 1964. When she thinks of neighborhoods she thinks of unity, closeness, family and caring.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
William Wall-Winkel
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, Michigan
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
9/8/2018
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Neighborhoods Oral History Project and I'm in Detroit, Michigan. Today is September 8th, 2018 and I'm sitting down with:
GL: Gwen Lanier.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
GL: I was born in Selma, Alabama. Oh 1954 and we migrated to Detroit, Michigan in 1964.
WW: Why did your family come to Detroit?
GL: Basically, to be honest with you? My mother's mouth. We were like in the heart of the Civil Rights down in Selma. So my mom has never been the type of person to bow down to anyone. So my grandfather they were threatened so her best bet was to get out of town. So that's what they did.
WW: When you when you when you and your family came up north, what was your first impression of Detroit.
GL: Big, nice, lot of cars.
WW: Had you heard anything of Detroit before you came?
GL: No.
WW: When your family came to the city what neighborhood did you move into?
GL: We lived on the east side of Detroit.
WW: Do you remember what cross streets?
GL: Yeah between Warren and Hancock, Shane and St. Auburn. When it was very affluent and full of houses. Now, it's just property.
WW: What did you think of the neighborhood when you moved into it?
GL: Interesting. It was much different from where we had come.
WW: How?
GL: Well first of all there were like big houses. We had a diverse community because where I live that the Caucasians they had their area and African Americans had their area but in that neighborhood you had a mixture of everybody.
WW: You liked growing up there?
GL: Sure, it was fine. We only lived over there for about a year and then my father was working in this area and they found a house closer to his job.
WW: What's this area?
GL: Northwest Detroit over by the Livernois, the Lodge area.
WW: What was your father doing for a living?
GL: My father worked at Roman cleanser, which was on Six Mile and was that Conant, Dequindre area? So yeah, he was like a foreman there.
WW: What'd you think about your new neighborhood?
GL: It was interesting too. A lot of kids at the time. We had a lot of elderly people. So it was nice.
WW: Was it also an integrated area?
GL: Yes very much so. We made the fifth black family living in the block, on the block.
WW: Do you remember neighbors having a reaction to that at all?
GL: Well, the ones across the street from us, they didn't really care to be bothered. We had a lady living next door to us. Her name was Mrs. Nate. She was really nice and she [inaudible] and then we had Mr. Charles next to us.
WW: What about going to school, what school did you go to?
GL: I went to Dewitt Clinton, which is over on Chalfonte. It's no longer there now. They tore it down about six years ago, and I went to Lauren and Post Junior High which is closed now, and then my high school was Cass Tech.
WW: Would you like to share any stories about growing up in those neighborhoods?
GL: Sure, when I was going up kids would help the elderly they didn't expect to get paid. They were very polite. They weren't rude. Like I said the neighbors once they got to know you and they will accept you. Some decided to move out because they were older so their children who lived out like in Reverent, Livonia, and places, they wanted them to move out. Maybe they may feel threatened. But Miss Nate she and Mr. Charles they stayed in the neighborhood because she felt more safe around us because we would take care of her like she's out grandma and Mr. Charles we took care of him like he was our grandpa. So and schools were different. Clinton, we had a lot of older teachers. There was a few younger teachers. One of my favorite teachers was an English teacher. His name was George Kimbrough. I was always in trouble because I like to talk a lot or either chew gum and he had a rule about that. If you chew gum you had to write 50 times. I would not chew gum in class. So on the nights that I knew I wanted to chew gum, especially after Halloween. I would just come home and write my pages and I would save at least 20 sentences to write in his class.
WW: That is engenius.
GL: And I enjoyed my junior high school because we had teachers over there then, there was three teachers that I liked and I didn't like. I had a met him Kingston, Ruby Kingston. She was my French teacher. She was like, I don't know but you grew to like her and then I had Mrs., what was that lady's name, I think her name was Mrs. Smith. She taught home-ec so she was different and then I liked Mr. McClow, he taught math. And then in high school, I was in the health and welfare curriculum, so my counselor, her name was Dorothy Pat Nellis. We called her Miss Pat and she was something else too. But because of her a lot of students have excelled in a lot of fields that they wanted to go into because she was one of those caring teachers.
WW: Three years after you came to the city was the 67 Uprising. Do you have any memories of that?
GL: Of course. I was near my sister and some friends. We were sitting down in the Palms Theater for the Motown review, swinging time review, and my mother embarrassed us because she caught a taxi downtown and had the ushers to walk down through the aisles with a flashlight calling our name. So that is the most memorable one. We got out and we came out and we started down 12th Street, which is now Rosa Parks Boulevard. That's when we saw all of the looting, fires and so forth. Where we're at now the rioting took place a few Livernois and the corner of Finkle. There was like a good housekeeper there and people started breaking in and so on at night. This whole block you had all types of businesses. On Finkle at that time as on Livernois
WW: Do you remember how your parents reacted?.
GL: Well my mom, she stressed out and ended up in the hospital. My father, he just [inaudible]
WW: Did they ever talk about leaving the city?
GL: Nope. My sisters are older now so they've relocated in the South. One’s in Alabama, one is in Georgia, but my mom is still here, so I'm here. Plus there's crime everywhere. So a lot of my relatives they moved to the suburbs and it's crime out there too. They just don't advertise it as much unless somebody is like brutally murdered and you'll hear. Other than that, you don't hear that much. But I'm happy in Detroit. I love Detroit and I'll be in Detroit until I close my eyes for good.
WW: That's a good segue. What made you love Detroit so much? Why did you stay after you graduated?
GL: After I graduated? Okay, I went to school up north in Marquette. Then I came back here and it was just I just love it like I travel so I go to various cities and countries and everything but as they used to say, there's no place like home and I just love Detroit. It's coming back.
WW: Have you continued to live in the same area that you grew up in?
GL: Yes I moved from the area and I moved back. When my parents got sick I left from where I was living further down around Six Mile and Livernois area back over here. I found a home and I purchased it, rehabbed it, fixed up everything. And so now I'm closer to my mom. Yeah,.
WW: How have you seen the neighborhood change?
GL: Oh drastically. From houses to no houses hardly, from well-manicured kept lawns to individuals that are moving in now, maybe they're renters, they just don't care. We have a block club here, which is the soda Ellsworth AKA Diva. We have new neighbors, which is basically younger adults middle-aged adults and we try to get them involved in the block clubs, but they don't. We have cleanups twice a year. We've had block parties, you know back to school rallies. Last year we had a back-to-school rally over here at the Jay Hawkers Club where we have our meetings at and I would say only like maybe six families showed up from this area and their excuses they didn't know. But we pass out flyers every time we have an event and you know, we call on the phone. [inaudible] I don't know if they're just not interested or what but if something happens to them when they're home, they're always running to the block club president or myself and want to know what can we do and I tell them nothing because you're not part. If you come and you participate then you know, you would be able to learn these things and you will be able to reach out because we have a good rapport with the 10th Precinct. Their captain and there we have a good rapport with the 10th Precinct with Commander Kay and Sergeant Hall and the other NPOs. So, you know if we call them they're Johnny on the spot, you know doesn't take them long to respond. If they're not around they make sure that a scout car, you know come by and come through because this area is basically now full of seniors and most of them grew up here. They've had their children here. Grandchildren, and either they don't want to move or they can't afford to move. So in my case, I don't want to move [inaudible]
WW: [inaudible]
GL: Well, what was it? Two months ago I was getting ready to go to bed on a Friday night, the Friday before Memorial Day, and I heard a big boom. Didn't think nothing of it. Something said go check it out. And when I went downstairs as I was opening the door, a young man was climbing out of his car where he had zoomed across from the street and into my house went through the fence. Luckily, I had a tree there and the gas company when they came out they said had he hit the bricks would have been hit another inch I would probably blown up because he missed the gas meter by an inch and a half. So that's my most memorable story other that.
WW: That's a memorable story!
GL: You're right. [laughs] So, you know thank God, you know, and it stopped and so he got out and ran and I'm in the process now, they're completing my home now. So.
WW: What do you think of the state of the city today?
GL: Oh, it's getting better again. Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with the mayor that we have and some of our neighborhood reps. Yeah, pleased with the city, some of our neighborhood reps, and some of our representatives from the state. They're getting more involved. And so, you know, they're coming out more and the police precincts, like I said the 10th which we live in, and they're really supportive of the area. So I'm happy for that too. And the children. Hopefully we can get them involved in some of the projects that we're doing to you know, let them know, this is your neighborhood. You want to try to keep it up even though your mom and dad don't own the homes. Let's try to you know, keep it clean. Keep all the debris up.
WW: When you hear the neighborhoods, what does that make you think of?
GL: Unity, closeness, family, caring.
WW: Are you optimistic about the city moving forward?
GL: Yes sort of, you know, but I always think positive. I want to think positive and like I said last year we had a session that I think it's called meet with the mayor or the Mayor Duggan. He came to my home last year in April. So he brought his staff from various departments. And so we all met, we had questions and so far some of the things that we had spoke on, things have been happening. Like where I live at there's a lot of empty lots that was across from me that I've been paying out of my pocket personally since 2008 to keep manicured. It's costing me like from 50 to 75 dollars every two weeks. It all depends on how many lots that I want him to do. And when I feel like it if I have days off then I'll just cut the grass myself, but most of the time I have a little lawn company come in and cut the lots there. So my concern was I wanted to try to purchase the lot that land bank had, but I was told that I couldn't because you have to live next door to the property and not across from it. So I voiced that opinion. So he had one of his aides that was with him to make a note which was on a Wednesday. And then that Thursday I got a call from the Detroit Land Bank and we processed. So last year I was able to acquire that property. Right now they didn't sell it to me, I'm leasing it for three years and I had a proposed idea that what I wanted to do on it, but the way the weather's either been too hot or too raining. Now that it's cooling down I'll get a chance to bring that to reality because I want to do a memorial garden which will be for the people that lived on and gone to heaven on Ellsworth and on Desoto. And have a playground to be on next year have enough money saved so I can purchase like swing sets and things like that for the few kids that are here, but I will have guidelines. It'll only be allowed up for children 12 and under and they must be accompanied by an adult because that way the children won't be out in the street and I'm not responsible for babysitting for you because some parents not notice. They'll put their children outside the house and they close the door. Which is very unsafe for smaller children because most of them like to follow big brother and big sister or if they don't have anyone can come through the neighborhood because we have a problem with them speeding through here and get hurt. So that's what I want to do and few weeks from now. I have a young man coming over to give me an estimate about fence pricing so we can like black that whole area in so that way the children will be, you know, safer in that.
WW: That's awesome. Are there any questions that I didn't get to ask you that you want to talk about?
GL: I think you covered everything that you know, I was hoping that you would ask, so yeah.
WW: Awesome. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, greatly appreciate it.
GL: You're welcome.
[17:06]
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, migration, civil rights,
Video
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Gwen Lanier
Description
An account of the resource
Gwen talks about her family moving from Selma Alabama to Detroit during the civil rights movement. She dicusses growing up in an integrated neighborhood and what she wants to see next for Detroit neighborhoods.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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9/8/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Cynthia Keech
Brief Biography
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Cynthia Keech was born in 1957 in Warren, Michigan, and grew up in the east side of Detroit in Copper Canyon. Her father was a stationary traffic officer with the Detroit Police Department and was called on duty during the ’67 disturbance. Her father worked for the Detroit Police Department for thirty-seven years and her mother remained in Copper Canyon until 2009.
Interviewer's Name
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William Wall- Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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8/10/2017
Transcription
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WW: Hello, today is August 10th, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit ’67 Oral History Project. I am in Detroit, Michigan. And I am sitting down with…
CK: Cynthia Keech.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
CK: You’re welcome.
WW: Could you please start by telling me where and when were you born?
CK: I was born in 1957 in Warren, Michigan.
WW: Were you raised in Warren?
CK: No. I was raised in Detroit.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?
CK: I grew up in an area of Detroit on the far east side which became known as the Copper Canyon.
WW: What was that neighborhood like for you growing up?
CK: Um… Well, of course, you know it seemed like a normal up-bringing. The thing that made our neighborhood unique was we had a lot of police and firemen that worked – or that lived in that area. Across the street was Harper Woods, and we even had several families with police as the father of those families too.
WW: Is that what your father did for a living?
CK: Yes. He was a Detroit policeman.
WW: Before we talk about your father, do you want to share any stories of growing up in the neighborhood?
CK: Well, I can’t think of anything unique but, just as I mentioned before, it was unique that so many children had fathers that were policemen. And it wasn’t just in our specific block, but the block down this way and the block that way and then to the east, you know, it was just peppered with a lot of policemen. Yeah.
WW: What was your father’s name?
CK: His name was Claire Keech but everyone called him Bud.
WW: Growing up, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood? Or did you venture around the city?
CK: I would say we probaby stayed in our neighborhood, and maybe when I got to high school I ventured out. We had relatives that lived farther into the city so, you know, we did visit with them, in the Chandler Park area.
WW: Going into the ‘60s, even though you were so young, did you notice any rising tension either in the city or around your neighborhood?
CK: Um… I don’t think I really noticed it, you know, until up around the time that the riots did occur, and then after.
WW: Ok. We can go right into that. You were ten years old in ’67?
CK: I was ten years old, yes.
WW: How did you first hear about what was going on?
CK: Well, it was a Sunday morning and my sister, who’s about six years older than me, woke up suddenly because my mom didn’t wake us up for church. And I guess she had to wash her hair or something so she was upset. And we were running downstairs, and my mom was sitting on her chair where she always sat, smoking a cigarette. And my sister said, “Well, why aren’t we going to church?” you know, “Where’s dad?” My mom said that there was trouble and they called him in early in the morning and told him to bring his riot gear. So, that’s all we really knew, except for what was starting to come in on the news. And a lot of the mothers were, you know, getting together, you know, what’s going on?, and no one really knew much. They knew it wasn’t good, but of course they didn’t have access to telephones so they couldn’t just call home and say, you know, everything’s fine, I’ll be home whenever, but that didn’t happen. So, again, this was on Sunday, and so it was like all day Sunday and all day Monday and we hadn’t heard anything. Still hadn’t heard anything from my dad. We had heard that there were – some policemen lost their lives, et cetera. And then it was late on Tuesday evening of that week. Some of the kids were gathered on one of the families’ porches and a cruiser was coming down the street. And it was going really slow, and of course we’re all watching ‘cause, you know, tension was high. And the cruiser pulled up in front of our house. And one of the policemen got out, went to the trunk, and they had my dad’s rifle. So they walked up – and of course by then my mom was already at the door expecting the worst, and the policeman had just said, “Your husband’s fine, but he did want us to bring his rifle back because they were detaining some of these looters – the jails were full, and they were detaining some of these looters and arsenists and snipers in high school gyms – or school gyms. So they didn’t want these weapons on the premises for safety reasons. And these policemen probably just lived maybe in the next block so they were going that way. And, like I said, we still hadn’t heard from my dad until the following day, which was Wednesday. Then he finally came home. But it was – and then I think it was that Monday night that some of the rumors were that the rioters were now going to out into the suburbs. And they were worried because they didn’t know if it was common knowledge that there were a lot of policemen here, but now those men were not home. All these women were home with these kids, so there was a lot of tension about what would happen, if this would come out into the suburbs. So my dad was – his normal position on the police department at that time was stationary traffic, and they – in the summertime they wore a real powdery blue shirt – real powdery blue short-sleeved shirts, and when he came home, his shirt was like a dark grey. It was just like, you know, saturated with smoke. So he had had those same clothes on for all that time. And I think one of the things I want to say about that was, until I saw the movie 12th and Clairmount, I didn’t have a real clear picture of what was kind of going on there. I mean it was – it was brutal. And I don’t think what the news was capturing was representative, because maybe they couldn’t get into the areas so they were just getting all, like, the outskirts and what we could get on the news. But I think that was probably the closest thing my dad had come to combat, ‘cause he was in the Navy but he was stationed on one of these LSTs where they fly the aircraft from, so they weren’t right in battle. So, I think that was the closest thing he probably came to combat. And that picture in this magazine that I was explaining to you shows him with his stationary traffic garb, holding his rifle with this cigar and this big helmet on, and probably something so that they could breathe – like, just a scarf though, it wasn’t like a aerator or whatever. And I was always real real close with my dad but it seemed like he changed after that. And I kind of wondered if – you know, he never really talked about it, so… you know. I don’t know if maybe he had, maybe shot some people, maybe didn’t know if – I don’t know because, again, he would never – he never really talked about it. But he did kind of change after that and we kind of grew apart after that because, like I said, we were real close growing up and it changed – it changed me as a person. So I don’t think people really think about the impact that the families of the policemen might experience. Because it seems as though there were some dirty cops from, you know, seems like there were, but I don’t think they were all like that, you know, so. You had good Christian people and not expecting to be in a situation like this where they would have to defend property and maybe shoot people, but… It gave me a lot of time to contemplate that after I saw that movie, and I kind of wondered, you know, what maybe really happened? And how many other children were affected by that? Like maybe some kind of PTSD or something. And a policeman - and a man probably wouldn’t seek out help. So, that’s kind of my perspective.
WW: Did your father stay with the Detroit Police Department?
CK: Yes he did. In fact, he stayed for thirty-seven years, which is pretty unheard of nowadays. [laughs]
WW: Did your family stay in the city of Detroit?
CK: Yes. Yeah, we stayed right there in that same house, even after my dad died – he died in 2009. And we just moved my mom out of there three years ago. And that – well, the neighborhood was changing, but the house wasn’t conducive to her needs anymore. It was getting harder to get her out of the house and soforth. So. Yeah, we stayed there.
WW: Just a couple quick final questions. After ’67 did you feel comfortable in the city?
CK: Well…
WW: [indiscernible]
CK: … you know, I did. And I’d like to add one more thing too. It was – this was 1967. I think it was the next year, 1968, that they started bussing. They started bussing some of the inner-city children in to our neighborhoods, and I do remember that the parents were having – a – fit. But you know something? I had never anything against any of those students. I mean, you know, once they were with our class and, you know, we got to know them – and I can name them all by name to this very day. And I was just kind of like… You know, they were different in the respect that their clothes weren’t maybe always the best, or… I remember one girl, Barbara White, she always wore a white cardigan sweater, but it had holes in it. But, you know, we didn’t make fun of her or whatever, but – they were just kids. Just like us. You know, just kids trying to get an education. And when I was going to be going to high school, now they wanted to bus the outskirts into the inner-city. And I remember that causing a great big fuss. And, you know, at the time I was what – fourteen years old, so I probably didn’t understand all of it, but I do remember what I learned in elementary school, you know, that it wasn’t what these adults were getting all… But so many of our friends then left the city because they thought that they were going to be bussed. So, that was interesting and I do remember, “Oh, you’re not going to go down there to Kettering High School, we’ll have to send you to Lutheran High East,” and I’m thinking, “I don’t want to go to…” [laughs] “I don’t want to go to parochial school.” So, just a, you know…
WW: I appreciate that. Thank you. What do you – Two final questions. What do you think of the state of the city today? (14:46)
CK: Well, I think that there – I think that the officials are trying to do some things with the city. I still own property in the city, and the neighborhoods where my properties are are not good, so I see a lot of development and things going on downtown, but I don’t think they’re really doing enough in the neighborhoods. And I don’t know what they can do. So, you know, I don’t have the answers, but I do notice that this is where it’s all happening but on the outskirts of the city, things are still a problem.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city, going forward?
CK: I am optimistic but I think it’s going to take a long time, and I probably won’t be here to see it. So. I wish I knew, I wish I had a crystal ball and I could say. But, I think it’s going to take some time.
WW: One quick question I forgot: How do you interpret the events of ’67? Do you see them as a riot? Do you see them as an uprising? Rebellion?
CK: Huh. I would say it was an uprising. I would say it was a rebellion. I would say it’s probably all three. Because, you know, that definitely was – that was more than an uprising and a rebellion. I mean, that was, from what I saw – from the movie, anyway – it was brutal. It was really brutal. And I think probably the individuals that were reacting got caught up in the sociological crowd group mentality and just kind of went berserk, not giving thought to what they were doing to their own neighborhoods, because a lot of those neighborhoods just never came back. They didn’t give thought to they were hurting Mr. So-and-so who was their friend, always tried to help them, but now they burnt his store down and he could never come back. So, I think it was probably multifaceted. It’s like, you know, the perfect storm sort of thing. It was hot, people were angy, I think there – initially there was some alcohol involved, and it just got out of control.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
CK: Thank you. Thank you, it was my pleasure.
[17:44]
[End of Track 1]
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, 12th and Clairmount (film), 1967 riot, Copper Canyon, Detroit Police Department, far east side, Harper Woods, School integration
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cynthia Keech
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Keech discusses growing up in Copper Canyon in the 1950s and ‘60s and shares her memory of when her father was on duty during the disturbance of ’67. She recalls the social tensions created by Detroit’s efforts to integrate schools from the perspective of a student in high school in the years following 1967. She also gives her thoughts on where Detroit is headed.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
8/10/2017
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
James Jackson
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
James Jackson was born in Detroit in 1948. He grew up on the East side of the city. His family was from Memphis, Tennessee but settled down in Black Bottom.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
William Wall-Winkel
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Detroit, Michigan
Date
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4/2/2019
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
W. W. : Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?
J. J. : Born in Detroit, 1948.
W. W. : Did you grow up in the city?
J. J. : Yes.
W. W. : What neighborhood?
J. J. : East Side, Gratiot and the Boulevard.
W. W. : What was that neighborhood like for you growing up?
J. J. : Oh, just heaven, just like heaven man. It was a mixed neighborhood, mostly white though. Everybody knew everybody for miles around, you knew the whole family. It’s just one of those things, that’s the way it was.
W. W. : Do you know why your parents picked that neighborhood?
J. J. : Economics at the time, that made everything work back in those days. They came out of Memphis, Tennessee, and they settled here in Detroit, and they first settled down in the Black Bottom, down by the market area, old eastern market, and as they started to having kids they got a flat over on Iroquois and Medberry, and that’s where I was born. And they decided that we needed a place for the kids to play and do what they wanted, so my Dad bought a house on Kirby, 6916 East Kirby, there’s nothing there now, it’s just a vacant lot, and we grew up over there. Probably in 1951 or ’52, my folks bought a little grocery store, well they rented, started renting first, and as time went on they bought the store.
W. W. : Where was the store at?
J. J. : 541 Canton at Kirby.
W. W. : Do you remember what the name of it was?
J. J. : Jack’s Market, yep. [Long pause, William begins to speak but James starts speaking again.] My dad always said it was Jack’s Market, the kids said that’s Mrs. Jackson’s store [both laughing.] He’d go crazy about my mother.
W. W. : Growing up in that neighborhood, what were some of the things you did for fun with your friends?
J. J. : We used to ride our bikes down to the river to go fishing, early in the morning, that was really huge. You did that man, that was big, and we did that quite often. We rode our bikes in the area, did all kind of tricks and things on the bikes, played cops and robbers.
W. W. : You mentioned that your neighborhood was integrated –
J. J. : Yes it was.
W. W. : Did black and white kids play together or –
J. J. : Yes we did.
W. W. : Did you ever feel any tensions from that?
J. J. : No, no. It was like heaven back in those days, that neighborhood? Yeah. We saw different sides of this and that, but we all got along. They were very good to us, and we tried to be good to them.
W. W. : What schools did you go to?
J. J. : I went to Thomas Elementary, which has a nice following on Facebook, about a hundred of us kids are on there. I went to Saint Phillips Lutheran, private school, then came back and went to [Riesel] Junior High, Detroit Public, and finally graduated from Northeastern, Detroit Public, High School.
W. W. : Aside from your parents store, what other shops were there in the neighborhood for you to go to?
J. J. : We had a big Sears-Roebuck on the corner of Vandyke and Gratiot, it was just like going downtown, we had Sears-Roebuck there, we had Western Auto there. We had seven-cent hamburgers across the street, [inaudible, Tophat?], [repeats for emphasis] seven-cent hamburgers, and they were dynamite, we had ten-cent hotdogs later on. And we had a place at Gratiot and [Mont Elliot], was right near the movie house, that did homemade ice cream, [Francucos Brothers?], and I’m telling you, you got so much ice cream for ten cents, you couldn’t hardly eat it all, and they had different flavors!
W. W. : As your friends are riding your bikes around the neighborhood, do you tend to stay in the neighborhood itself, or did you venture around the city?
J. J. : You ventured out a little bit, you sure did. Yep, you got in trouble for it sometimes too, somebody see you and say, “What are you guys doing over here, you know you’re not supposed to be over here,” you know about that stuff [laughter].
W. W. : Are there any particular memories you’d like to share from growing up in that neighborhood? Anything that still sticks out to you?
J. J. : I can remember, I must’ve been about seven or eight, we were always asked questions about what we saw, back in those days there was prejudice, but one of the clear signs of prejudice was that we had garbage trucks and the black guys always rode on the back of the garbage truck, you never saw them inside of the garbage truck, and as kids we asked the question, “Why don’t you ever see the guys, the colored guys, in the truck,” and my uncle told us, that’s the way it was, they couldn’t ride in the truck, they could only ride on the back of the truck. When lunchtime came, the white guy that was driving the truck would go dump the truck first and then he’d go home and get lunch, the black guys would walk over to a corner store and they would get lunchmeat or cold pop, you know, something you can sort of eat, and they would eat right there in the neighborhood, in our store, they ate in our store many a day, and we had asked the question, “How come you never saw the black guys in the truck,” so they finally let us know what was going on, but they also let us see the first Negro garbage truck driver for the City of Detroit. He lived on Kirby Street between Helen and the Boulevard, his name was Carl Robinson, and when he came home, with his garbage truck, for his lunch, they lined all of us kids up on the sidewalk so we could see it. Yep, that was something, my uncle said “That’s the first colored garbage truck driver for the City of Detroit, so you guys see it now, you’re always asking questions, now you know.” So, I never forgot that, never forgot it.
W. W. : As you’re growing up in the 1950s and early ‘60s, and you and your friends are venturing around the city, do you sense any growing tensions within the city?
J. J. : “Us against the crooks,” that’s the biggest tension you’d hear. You’ve got to stay on guard against the crooks, because their mission is to take over whenever, wherever.
W. W. : After you graduated high school what did you do next?
J. J. : Graduated from high school, tried to join the military, while I’m going to college, heavy equipment school first. Went to heavy equipment in southern Illinois, Braidwood, and come out with double A’s in that stuff, and really couldn’t get a job anywhere, tried, I was just ahead of the way things were. Back in those days they were not hiring colored equipment operators, and I was one of the few black guys – well, I was the only American black guy in the school, the rest of them, they had about ten or fifteen, came from Africa, we had a bunch of Native Americans, and we had some guys from Canada, but I was the only American black that was there. And the Canadian guys told me, they said, “Man you’re gonna have a problem,” and I’m like “What do you mean,” he said “You know there’s prejudice,” and I said “There ain’t no prejudice, what are you guys talking about, there’s only can you do it or can’t do it,” and he said “O.K.,” and I found out later on there was problems. They would tell you they did not hire colored equipment operators, I could hire on as a laborer, but I couldn’t hire on as an equipment operator.
W. W. : Is that part of the reason why you went back to school?
J. J. : Yeah, I did that, I wound up getting higher, I had to go overseas and work. I was a civilian contractor for [Vector or Bechdel] Worldwide, and I worked for them for a while, about a year or so, and it was overseas, it wasn’t in the United States, and I worked for them overseas, but I couldn’t do anything here to make that kind of money, but that was a government contract. But after I got tired of that I came back, went to college, and I studied law enforcement, after I studied law enforcement, I wound up getting hired in by the Detroit Police Department.
W. W. : And what year was that?
J. J. : ’68, ’68 or ’69.
W. W. : Were you overseas during the uprising in ’67?
J. J. : No I was here, I was here, back and forth yeah.
W. W. : Were you in the city during that week?
J. J. : Um-hm, yes I was.
W. W. : Do you remember how you first heard about what was going on?
J. J. : I used to listen to the police radio quite a bit back in those days and I watched out for the store, because we were right across the street from the store, and I think that’s how we heard it.
W. W. : Was the store threatened or damaged during that week?
J. J. : They did come to loot the store and I was sitting at the front door with a rifle, and I fired a shot at them, scared them off.
W. W. : How did the rest of your neighborhood hold up during that week?
J. J. : There was a white store around the corner from us that was a lot bigger, what you call a neighborhood supermarket back in the day, he got looted, really well they got him, Mr. [Laflore]. He had three stores I think at the time, one of them was actually over here.
W. W. : Did he reopen his shop afterwards?
J. J. : He did later on, yes he did.
W. W. : Did you stay hunkered down in the store that entire week?
J. J. : Yeah, we stayed, it was mostly me watching at night, and in the daytime my dad was there and took care of it. [unrelated conversation about conditions in the car] And during the day my dad was around, at night I was there, so we took care of pretty good business.
W. W. : How do you refer to what happened that week in July? Do you see as a riot or rebellion?
J. J. : It was kind of a rebellion, poor people against the world [laughter], because that’s what it was, black and white guys together, getting what they thought they needed. And there was no real race, race riot, type stuff going on, it was just people getting food, and getting televisions and different things they needed. Most times you could see the blacks and the whites together going down the street, getting what they wanted.
W. W. : Was that what the crowd was like for you when they came to your parents shop?
J. J. : When they came to our folk’s place they were coming to get food, because that’s all we really had in there.
W. W. : Did seeing that first hand, did that make you or your family want to move out of the city?
J. J. : No, no, there was no moving out of the city back in those days, you didn’t want to go nowhere, Detroit was just the place. I mean there was nothing like Detroit anywhere else.
W. W. : So you mentioned joining the police department in ’68, ’69 and earlier you talked about the prejudice you faced in your previous employment, did you face that same prejudice when you joined the police department?
J. J. : Yeah it was worse, yeah. What I faced was over in Illinois, that’s where I was trying to get the work, and as you know Illinois is way worse than Michigan back in the day, and it was rough, that was big time, because we were dealing with big time companies and stuff, and they just told us they didn’t hire any colored equipment operators, and I had never heard anything like that until I started dealing with them. Then when I came back to Detroit and got hired in by the police department, I ran into all that prejudice once I got on the police department. So I guess as a child I was kind of sheltered from a lot of this stuff, I really didn’t know nothing about it, and it was there, but it was kept from us as kids, as young adults. One of my best friends was an older white guy, I worked for him for most of my years as a youngster, I walked his dog and whatever else he asked or had to have done, he and his sister and his brother they were older people, and whenever they needed anything “Call the kid” you know. When I got ready to go for my driver’s test to get my license, the man let me drive his brand-new Oldsmobile Delta 88, can you imagine? Somebody letting a young kid drive their brand-new Oldsmobile, that’s like a Cadillac back in the day. These were my friends man, and they were just real good people in the neighborhood.
W. W. : When you joined the police department what precinct were you assigned to?
J. J. : Well when I joined I was in one of those extended stay classes, they’re longer than the others if you get in at special times of the year. I got in right around Christmas, so we wound up staying in longer, and when they dismissed us they do a break, and when they dismissed us for our break I wound up working at the tenth precinct, which was, at that time, the worst precinct in the city. And when I worked at the tenth precinct I worked inside on a desk, operator, and I also got a chance to work on the cruiser, which was the Big Four, have you heard about the Big Four? [William says “Yeah.”] Yeah I got a chance to work on the Big Four.
W. W. : Did you have any experiences with the Big Four growing up?
J. J. : Yes, yes, yes! [James starts laughing as he is repeating yes, he honks the horn of the car that he and William are in, and there are reciprocal honks from cars in the background.] Yes. Yes, I sure did. Got arrested by the Big Four when I was sixteen, yep.
W. W. : What happened?
J. J. : Riding in a stolen car, didn’t know it was stolen. Trying get home from school, and a guy stopped and there was a bunch of kids in the car, stopped, picked me up. We went about a block and the Big Four got us, yep.
W. W. : What were some of the things you faced in your early years in the police department?
J. J. : Just, grown up racism you know. At roll call they’d call your name, and they’d say you’re assigned to this car, that’s your scout car that you’re working, you and another guy. When they’d call his name after they’d call your name or called your name after they’d call his name, they would groan, stuff like that. And then at, just say, if you’re working midnights, they would go home at half of the shift, and they wouldn’t get docked for it, but they would – [gets distracted] the way the thing worked, if you worked half of the day and you went home sick, they did not charge you for a sick day, so what they would do, in protest of working with me or a black guy, they would work half of the day and then they would go home sick. And what happened a lot of time, the next guy they put with you to fill in, he’d wind up working a couple of hours then he’d go home sick. Just psychological things on you that made you feel bad, you had two white partners, both of them went home sick, they didn’t want to work with you. Young guys who were energetic, full of piss and vinegar, trying to get there and do the right thing? Man, that was a ball buster.
W. W. : Did things change after the election of Coleman Young in ’74?
J. J. : Yep, it did. He knew a lot about how they had treated blacks years gone by, and I guess it had just been over the top of my head, I didn’t know anything about how they had treated blacks. And we got chance to hear from different ones, they’d tell us about it, this is racism, that’s racism, they don’t want to work with you, they don’t want to be with you, all of this kind of stuff, I was like, okay I see now. Because we hadn’t experienced this stuff, going to Northeastern High School? We didn’t have any problems like that. Some of my best buddies, throughout my whole life, I went to Northeastern with were white kids, just never had any problems.
W. W. : During your early years on the force, did you continue to live with your parents?
J. J. : Yeah, we bought this place in ’68, over here.
W. W. : Where’s over here?
J. J. : Chalmers, 785 Chalmers. Yeah, we bought this right after we got on the job.
W. W. : Why did your family pick this neighborhood?
J. J . : Well my mother was an active mother of the NAACP, and she let us know that you’re not going to be able to live outside of Detroit. So you might as well be satisfied with something in Detroit, and we came over here, she knew I liked the water, being by the water and fishing and all that stuff, so she brought me over here and we saw the house on Chalmers – first thing we saw was the creeks, down at the foot of the river, the Fox Creek, and that was it, I was hooked.
W. W. : When you moved into this neighborhood what were some of the shops and the different amenities that it had?
J. J. : Just about what we’ve got now, maybe a few more. All the shops along Jefferson were full.
W. W. : Do you remember what some of them were?
J. J. : We had the biggest hardware store I’ve ever seen in my life was on Jefferson. We had a Bill’s Bike Shop, Schwinn bikes, that was like heaven man, like having a Cadillac dealer if you’re a senior or something [laughter]. We had a Detroit-Edison, had a store up there on Jefferson, we had [Row’s] Jewelers, we had two or three [Cancellation] Shoe Stores, we had clothing stores, men’s clothing, women’s clothing stores, Jefferson Avenue was like downtown Detroit.
W. W. : Did your parents keep up the store?
J. J. : Yeah, they kept it until ’72, ’73, they got robbed and they kind of just gave it up to a guy named [Yoeler], we wound up running it. They had one robbery there that just really scared them, and they had never been robbed before, but this one robbery just really scared my mother, and that was it, she didn’t want to stay in there anymore.
W. W. : As your family transitioned to Jefferson Chalmers, did your family ever go to the Vanity Ballroom or do anything else like that?
J. J. : No, the Vanity was a place for white people. The whites would come on Friday and Saturday night, and they would generally drive and they would park on our side streets and they would get out and they would walk down here to the Vanity.
W. W. : Could you describe some of the people that were going in?
J. J. : They were middle-aged and older white people, mostly older white people. The ladies would have these big, white, wide dresses on, and the guys would usually have some kind of little fancy tuxedo-looking suit.
W. W. : Have you ever been inside?
J. J. : Yeah, once or twice.
W. W. : What was it like on the inside?
J. J. : It was a big like, dancehall type building.
W. W. : Was the floor still working when you got to go in?
J. J. : You know I didn’t find out about the spring-loaded dancefloor until about twenty years ago.
W. W. : As you’re living in the neighborhood, and you’re still a Detroit police officer, how is the neighborhood changing over the course of the seventies and as we’re entering the eighties?
J. J. : When I came over here, I used to ride the bus, because I worked midnights quite a bit the first part of my tenure on the police department. When I would walk home just from Jefferson, walking down here to this house, I would get yelled at “Nigger go home, we don’t want any niggers over here,” and I had never been subjected to that at all, but that’s what we got back then. Then I kind of talked to one of my supervisors at work and let him knew I was having these problems, and he was like “Oh don’t worry about it, just wear your uniform home, that’ll stop,” man he knew what he was talking about. I start wearing my uniform home, and they were sitting on the porch waiting for me when I got there, wanting to know what was going on.
W. W. : Did you see that change happen or those incidents happening more and more, aside from just from your walk home?
J. J. : They got more friendly with me after they found out I was a cop, so that was one of those deals.
W. W. : When did you start patrolling the neighborhood?
J. J. : I think some of those Devil’s Nights, after those Devil’s Nights we got started. Really got into heavy doing it? When they closed up the precinct, when they closed up the police station, I think that’s been about fifteen years ago. That’s when we really had to knuckle down, because when they closed the police station, the neighborhood just kind of started to go crazy. It was more personal, “We gonna get you,” crooks were really busy trying to take over, you didn’t see the police hardly any more at all. Some of the stuff I did back in those days, I was the ice cream man, and all the kids knew I was a policeman, and I was a good-humored guy, and crime was creeping up, things were going on, and they’re like “Mr. Jackson what can we do,” so on, so on. This is happening and this happened, and I’m like “Yeah well, ok we’ll try to help out,” and I probably could have stopped, but when you’ve got that kind of connection with the people and they’re asking for help and you’re right there, you have to try to help them. We wound up starting to help, and I had been to school for community service type work for the police department, they sent me to the Model Neighborhoods school, I don’t know if you remember that, back in ’68, ’69. The Model Neighborhoods program was a program whereby the government sought to teach municipal police departments how to really connect with their communities, and there were about thirteen or fourteen of us that they sent to the school down at Wayne State and different other classes they had. But, I had been through this, I knew, and I had got the biggest part of it done because I knew everybody in the neighborhood, and their mission is, if you’re going to do this kind of work you’ve got to know the people in the neighborhood, so I was halfway there. I knew just about everybody in the neighborhood by first name, so, once we got all of that out of the way, I said, well let me go ahead and help. And we started helping out doing this, that, and the other, we put up rewards for information leading to arrests for guys doing wrong in the area, I know about videotaping, we did videotaping, which was something new to the community, and just the fact that we could videotape them at any time without asking anybody anything, scared the bejesus out of [laughter] – and they’re like, slow down jackrabbit that’s no good! I’m like, “Nah, what’s no good is you preying on all the people.” Back then is when I met the mayor, Mayor Dougan. Yeah, because he was stomping right along later on for the Superbowl, he was the point man for the Superbowl, and he came over and gave his big speech and everything, and I finally told him, I said “Look, I’ll help you, but I want some help from you guys,” [Dougan replies] “What do you need,” I said “We got these drug dealers setting up shop down here in people’s houses, and we can’t have that, we’ve got to do something.” So, he says “What do you want to do,” and I said “Well, I used to do undercover work, I know we can videotape them,” when you work for the feds that’s all you need is some video and some audio and you’ve got them. And he was saying “Yeah,” and I said “Well I think that’s enough, we can get twenty, thirty minutes of these guys selling drugs off the front porch, running back and forth between cars, I think that’s good enough,” and he’s like “Yeah, you want to bring it to me, if I’ve got to have anything else done on it I’ll get Warren to do it,” and he was talking about Warren Evans. And we wound up – we closed up quite a few dope houses.
W. W. : That’s awesome.
J. J. : Yeah, fast. Not with the normal delay. First one was 1130 Chalmers. Then we had another one right along here, and I’m going to show you, there was a nice young guy that lived in a house with his family and he was trying to get along and do well, and these guys were coming and they were setting up shop on the front porch, which is what they did back in those days. And selling drugs they’d go back and forth, and they’d use their cellphones to communicate with their customers and that, and they would come over there and just take over the house right next door to him, he was really afraid for his wife and his kids, so I told him one weekend, I said “This is what we’re going to do, we’re going to take them damn steps apart,” the house belonged to an older white guy who was really nice, but he was out of town and he was sickly, he wound up dying, just leaving the house there, and the house is still standing, it’s in bad shape. We wound up taking the steps apart, and once we took those steps apart going up to the front porch he never had any more trouble. And that house is still here, it’s in bad repair, but you can see where we took the steps apart. And just such as that was some of the stuff we did to fight crime. You had to become very ingenious and very hard on them, you had to get on them, because these guys were really busy. This is the house right here [William and James pause and look at the house.] Couldn’t get up on the steps to do their selling, [inaudible] still lives there.
W. W. : What was some of the reaction in the community to this work you were doing?
J. J. : People liked it, they knew it was working. They would check with the ones – because you know, doing that kind of stuff you usually knew somebody who was directly involved – and depending on the report you got from them, that was the thing that kind of made you ok.
W. W. : Thank you for everything so far, I have a few quick wrap-up questions.
J. J. : Go ahead.
W. W. : If you could see one project done in Jefferson Chalmers, what would it be?
J. J. : Well, I don’t know if you’ve been following me, but they just wrote us up, our neighborhood up, for Arise Detroit in the Chronicle, they asked if somebody was going to do something for neighborhood, what would I like for them to do. And I said well, we needed more lights, because too many people are getting hit at night, and that’s the problem, the poor lighting, and I said we needed some more cameras, and the Mayor got on, on his State of the City speech, and he didn’t talk about the lights, but he said we’re going to add a thousand more cameras over the city to the Greenlight program. So, the cameras work, you’re not going to get as many police officers as we used to have, they just don’t have the money anymore, we don’t have the population, and there’s not enough people paying into the pot. One police officer can watch twenty-five cameras, you can watch twenty-five screens with televisions, and when you see something bad going on you can press the button for record. Some of the new things that are coming down the road are photo I.D., we’ll be able to identify you by your photo, and find out where you live, and all of that stuff, if you’ve been wanted, all of that. So, that’s the way it’s going, and it works, it’s not too late, just something we’ve got to do. We’ve got to knuckle under and get to it.
W. W. : What makes Jefferson Chalmers unique?
J. J. : Well, Jefferson Chalmers is backed up by the water and by it’s being backed up by the water there’s nobody out there to make noise, so it’s quiet. On the other side going east, we’ve got Gross Pointes, which is quiet already, and they’ve got money and resources. So that’s two sides of us that are in good shape, no crime, so all we’ve got to worry about is the other two sides, the northside and then the westside.
W. W. : Are there any stories that you didn’t get to share today that you’d like to?
J. J. : Yeah there’s a few, I could tell you some stories.
W. W. : Go right ahead.
J. J. : I’ve got to think of them, there’s so many. And they relate to streets, as you’re going down the street, this happened on this street, this happened there. Have you been down by the water, seen that creek?
W. W. : Um-hm.
J. J. : Have you seen that park down there at the foot of Altar road?
W. W. : Yeah.
J. J. : Ok, you know that was once the reservation for the Fox Indians?
W. W. : No.
J. J. : Yeah, that was the Indian village for the Fox Indians, and it stretched from all that we have down there, all the way over to Gross Pointe side, and they have a plaque on the Gross Pointe side that commemorates the Fox Indian village that was down there. Now that is at the heart of the neighborhood, the Indian roots and that sort of thing, yeah, the creeks. You know if you look at the neighborhood, there’s no other neighborhood in the city that has creeks.
W. W. : Alright, thank you so much for taking me around and doing this interview today.
J. J. : Alrighty.
38:41
[End of Track 1]
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Detroit, Michigan, Black Bottom, 1967 riots, The Big Four, Police,
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Dublin Core
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Title
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James Jackson
Description
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James Jackson in this interview discusses growing up on the East side of Detroit in a segregated neighborhood. He recollects seeing segregation first-hand, and defending his family's store during the 1967 Uprising in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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4/2/2019
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Elena Herada
Brief Biography
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Elena Herada was born in Detroit in 1957 on the East side. Her grandparents came to Detroit from Mexico and lived in Corktown. Her father worked for Chrysler.
Interviewer's Name
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Lamees Ibrahim
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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3/18/2019
Transcription
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Lamees: Hi my name is Lamees Ibrahim and I’m with Jessie and today is March 9th of 2019. This interview is for Detroit’s Historical Societies Neighborhoods “Where Detroit Lives” oral history project. I’m in Detroit, Michigan and I am sitting down with-
Elena: Elena Herada.
Lamees: Thank you so much for sitting down with us today
Jessie: Can you spell your name by chance?
Elena: E-L-N-A H-E-R-A-D-A
Lamees: So, when and where were you born?
Elena: I was born in Detroit. In 1957.
Lamees: So what neighborhood did you grow up in Detroit?
Elena: I actually grew up in the East side of Detroit.
Lamees: Okay. So, do you know why your parents chose that neighborhood exactly?
Elena: Yeah. I mean my grandparents had come here from Mexico, they lived here in Corktown. But then when my parents got married my dad worked at Chrysler and it was on the East side. And that’s why we lived near his work.
Jessie: Do you have any siblings?
Elena: Mhm. I had a brother and I have two sisters.
Jessie: Oh. Okay, really cool! What schools did you go to?
Elena: I went to catholic schools mostly. I went to St. Annenberg- I went to St. Hamilton first it’s on the West side, its still there barely serving Detroit’s smashing of our schools but that’s another story and I went to catholic schools. I went to St.*inaudible*. And I kinda dropped out of high school and took a long-rounded way around and then I went to Wayne State.
Jessie: Oh cool!
Lamees: So, what was the East side like growing up in?
Elena: It was really interesting. It was – I was there for the riots, immigrations, you know the type of things that were going on. And my family, especially my mom was very involved in the struggle of immigration, so it was a neighborhood where we all knew each other. We either went to catholic school and saw each other in mass on Sundays. Or people went to public schools and sometimes people went to catechism or sometimes there were other denominations. But it was [pretty mixed and there were a lot of immigrants around the world growing up where I grew up. There was black people and Italians and Lebanese. We were Mexicans- very few Mexicans where I was growing up.
Jessie: So, what stores did you go to growing up?
Elena: Well its interesting because my dad had grown up over here in South West and grown up in Bagley, around there. And when we needed tortillas and tamales and Mexican food that he would make, which was really a treat for us, it wasn’t everyday food to us. Then we would come to Honeybee although it wasn’t called that then. I think it was Morales Market and there was Garcia’s market and I’m trying to think…there weren’t very many stores I can remember but um we went to – there small stores they were big department stores. They weren’t big grocery stores and they were just for special items. Like Tenarios, is now *inedible* over here, I remember going there. Tenarios was next to Mexican Village which was there forever. They used to only be a couple Mexican restaurants now theres a lot but there only used to be a few.
Jessie: Did you go to any of those stores with your friends? Are there any places that you guys visited?
Elena: Not until I got a little bit older and skipped school and came across town. Cus It actually wasn’t my neighborhood growing up. I grew up in the East side and then when I began to skip school and explore more then I would come over.
Jessie: Did you have any stories that kinda stick out to you?
Elena: Yeah, I remember one time I came to my girlfriend on the bus, and growing up on the East side where I grew up, our neighborhood was kinda hit. In a way where you don’t think about it at the time when you’re just growing up but I remember there were some people walking down the street and they yelled at use for dropping trash on the ground which was such a normal thing to do in our neighborhood. I remember thinking wow this is a really different neighborhood, like wow we’re really somewhere else. *laughing*. There was one thing that I remember rerally standing out like wow. They were really young like us. They were just more – I felt like they had a sense of ownership in the community that I don’t think we ever felt growing up.
Jessie: So, you feel like there’s a division between two different neighborhoods?
Elena: Definitely. Definitely really different.
Jessie: So, you didn’t stay in your neighborhood, you ventured out.
Elena: I ventured out all the time. My grandparents they weren’t from over here and they were misplaced by the freeways many times. So we were really aware of how freeways cut through neighborhoods and move people out. My grandfather was completely convinced that they followed where he lived to put in freeways because it happened to him at 75, at happened at the lodge and it happened at 96. He absolutely sat on the porch with a shot gun the last time and they took his house by imminent domain. I used to run home from school to watch him on the news to see his gun – he had his shotgun sitting on the chair and there were cranes in the background, and it was the last house. And everyone was embarrassed by him but I thought-
Jessie: He stood his ground!
Elena: Right *laughing* he did until he didn’t. Until they moved him. You can’t be backing freeways but you can buy a little time. And if you’re rich they’ll buy you out and give you displacement money or sometimes even build around you. I learned about that later. They’ll work around you.
Lamees: The highways?
Elena: The highways will build around. If you’re poor, you’re just in the way. That’s the story of every black and Mexican community in Detroit.
Lamees: Like you said earlier about your neighborhood there were a lot of Lebanese people, fewer Mexicans than anything, right?
Elena: Right, very few Mexicans that I remember knowing growing up.
Lamees: Did you feel comfortable growing up there?
Elena: Yeah! Absolutely. It was our whole existence.
Lamees: did the makeup of the neighborhood as a whole change as you grew up?
Elena: Yeah actually. There was- I talked about immigration, the riots. There were racists that used to – like the racist white supremacists’ group would march on our house and call us names and stuff. White people moved out really fast and black people moved in. And there was a huge division-just a really – it was very very hostile. It was really interesting if you look at Detroit right now as like- they – you’re in a neighborhood where people can’t afford to live, they did the opposite during the sort of white flight where the houses would go way down, and people would be like get me out of here. White people were like trying to get out of here and um now its white people returning, and the prices are going so far up that nobody else can- I’ve watched this whole circle. Of segregation, white flight and white return. You can really see it going on.
Jessie: So would you pin that to a certain moment that this happened? Maybe after the 67?
Elena: The 67 was a big part of the riots- I mean the riots were a turning point that scared white people out of Detroit. My family didn’t move, we stayed for a long time after that. We didn’t go anywhere, we were there forever to see that white people don’t stay. They do not stay. Our schools-Catholic schools were very different than public schools in that regard. A lot of the Catholic schools closed because white people left. So those schools were closing. And black people who were in those neighborhoods and went to those schools then came to the school where we were. So, we integrated pretty quickly from being I’d say being multi-ethnic, really multi ethnic. But especially Italian. They used to call our neighborhood little Italy. Which I always felt was really kind of like– we could understand them, we could understand Sicilians, everything that they said. So, a lot of immigrants came, and they wouldn’t be able to speak English so my dad would be able to communicate with them and teach them English because it was so close to Spanish. So, we didn’t have a big culture division, especially with Sicilians. They were very kindred, culturally. Especially linguistically though in – if you think about if you move to a place where you can only communicate to people who speak your same language, its really different than just moving to a place new and has the same language. It is very very limiting. So, you are stuck with the people who speak the same language. And a lot of people never leave that, never really learned English. There are a lot of people who did that but for our purposes we could pretty much communicate with a lot of different language groups.
Jessie: So how old were you when you actually saw the neighborhood changing and people coming in and everything integrating?
Elena: Ten. *laughs* I can definitely see that moment.
Jessie: So being born in 1957, that was right around the 67 movement.
Elena: We could really see it. You know, I moved over to this side of this town in 75. So I’ve been over here for a long time you know back in forth in different places but for the most part I’ve been here. And I have a house that I live in in Corktown that I lived in for 25 years. So I raised my daughters here so we’re kind of the people who that move around and come back and stay. I lived in the Clement Kern Gardens which is a housing project over in Corktown I lived there before I bought the house that I have years before. So that was a really important development is to have public housing in Corktown where the housing has been removed from urban renewal. They tore down blocks and blocks. And part of the decision and negotiation was to restore the housing there so Clement Kern Gardens which was named after Father Kern was developed. And I was on the planning committee of that. It took years and years to go from making a plan for a field, a vacant field into public housing then to be a tenant in the housing. It was a long long project. So, I was the first tenants in the Clement Kern Gardens and you’re gonna see it get torn down by Dan Gilbert. You are going to see that because that is almost all completely black and Corktown is almost completely white. And it is right across the street where Dan Gilbert has that security surveillance place on Rosa Park. So, it’s on Bagley and Rose parks. And I wanna go on the record saying this, I hope this doesn’t get edited out.
Lamees: It won’t!
Elena: Okay because urban renewal which is also know as urban removal; moved the whole body out of Bagley, moved the whole area down. This freeway that came right here stopped us from giving a voting bloc. It didn’t maybe intend to do that but that was a major byproduct of having a completely solid voting bloc. So, we did not have representation politically for years and years and years after that because when you do that then the people are moving. They don’t all move to the same place, they disperse so you no longer have Mexican concentration like we did here. Bagley, over there in Corktown where they torn down everything and they took down houses in blocks and blocks of Mexican houses. Removed the area and turned it into warehouses for like stores that were downtown. Like, Winklemans and Cunningham and those places. If you talk to older people, people older than me they will talk about it. They will tell you about how they were houses and this was all solidly Mexican. And then the urban renewal took up all of Bagley from Ford street to Michigan, which was house after house after house all the way up to Trumbull. Where you know where Bagley Trumbull market is and – all of that which is now the Clement Kern Gardens that used to be houses and houses and houses which was almost solidly Mexican. As the older people would tell you. When they wiped that out, people dispersed and went to places like Ecorse, Lincoln park or further South West like you know Springwell’s area. But, there was no longer concentration. All of this, St. An’s and the bridge right here, this was very solidly Mexican. And it would have been a very different trajectory if it would’ve maintained the solid core, politically particularly. Economically and politically but of course people want to move out, they don’t want to pay the car insurance and people want better schools. It’s not like it was paradise by any means cus people can be offered- like when the bridge came through and bought peoples homes here; they could offer 60-70,000 dollars for a home which they may not have been able to get 4,000 or 5,000 dollars for. And a lot of people were glad to get it and move somewhere else because that’s the house they couldn’t necessarily leave to everyone because they were you know, they weren’t big brick houses or anything. They were kind of decrepit. There wasn’t anything left over here. They took the fire station, they took the school, they took everything. There’s nothing left so pretty soon you’re just there. And then what are you gonna do? So, there’s a really mixed narrative. I wanna be really clear that some people wanna stay, they wanna be there. And there’s a romantic notion of what a community is. There’s a romantic thing of you know, we got moved out of here and we all wanted to be together and that’s not necessarily true for every case and I know a lot of people would be glad to have a nicer house and live in a community where you don’t have to pay exorbitant car insurance and exorbitant home owner insurance and you know have a school in walking distance. And Detroit didn’t have that anymore, for a whole lot of reasons, Detroit did not have that anymore. Having nothing to do with decisions that people made of our own governance here. So there is a mixed narrative of having a ideal community and livable community.
Search Terms
Topics mentioned in the story which may be of larger social interest. Put general search terms in plural form (e.g. horses not horse). All items should have: "1967 riots, riots, interviews, oral history (or written history)". Some possible additional terms might be: "Detroit Police Department, police officers, Detroit Fire Department, firefighters, mayors, Clairmount Street, 12th Street, looting".
Detroit, Michigan, Corktown, Chrysler, eminent domain, immigration, urban renewal, urban removal
Dublin Core
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Title
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Elena Herada
Description
An account of the resource
In this Interview, Elena Herada discusses growing up in Detroit mixed with immigration and rioting. She discusses her grandparents being forced to move due to eminent domain. She also talks about urban renewal and urban removal.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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3/18/2019
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Charnae Sanders
Brief Biography
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Charnae Sanders was born in Detroit on January 23rd 1993 and lived in the Northwest part of the city until her senior year in high school. Charnae currently lives in Lafayette Park and elaborated on her life growing up in the Northwest district of Detroit. She loves living in Detroit and works at the Detroit Historical Society helping the community through her work.
Interviewer's Name
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Jacob Hrcka
Interview Place
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Detroit, Michigan
Date
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10/12/2018
Transcription
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J: So, where and when were you born?
C: I was born in Detroit of course I was born in the Northwest part of the city so actually on Fielding St. right between 6 mile and Evergreen, and I was born um I guess I don’t know if you need the exact date but I was born January 1994 January 23rd
J: Okay, what neighborhood, what would you consider the neighborhood you grew up in, because I was assigned 6 Mile
C: yep, yep, it’s right between 6 mile and Evergreen so it’s technically 6 mile, my neighborhood.
J: And so what like what is right around there? Parks or anything like that?
C: In that neighborhood we have the Redford library branch so that’s not super far off that’s like right on 6 mile and um and that was always something growing up that me and my family went to. There was a fire station there I’m not sure if it still is… and like a lot of different local restaurants, like my grandparents have a business not too far from that neighborhood which they still regularly own and I still regularly attend and which I still help out every now and then, so I think the neighborhood has a lot of local businesses, and it feels very community oriented, like even though I’m not there, every time I come back you still see familiar faces and it’s interesting to see how the neighborhood has changed over time.
J: Was it an integrated neighborhood
C: Um I feel, um to a certain extent I feel of course it was predominantly black, but when you go to like some of the businesses, like mini mart on 6 mile has all these different kinds of meat, like their known for their turkey chops so like that’s their key item, so like that business is owned im not sure of their ethnicity but it’s very diverse and just going into different businesses and seeing the different clientele and customers you can see that there is a lot of integration in the neighborhood but I would still say that it’s predominantly black
J: And so that’s like right right by Redford where you grew up then
C: Mmhmm, yeah
J: Okay, what did you do for fun in your neighborhood?
C: For fun? I was the kind of (laughs) okay like me and my older brother would ride our bikes around the neighborhood like our parents didn’t allow us to go too far, so we mainly just went up and down the street, and it was nice because sometimes our neighborhood would have like we had a block party once before kinda had Fielding St. completely blocked off it was just a good way to get connected with the other kids on the street. But on top of that I went to school not too far from home and you have sleepovers and just kind of hungout with the kids from school, but I feel like it was mainly playing in the backyard or riding our bikes up and down the street and just getting to know other people in the area
J: Yeah so, you only had one block party that you remember on your street?
C: Yep it was just the one I feel like they could’ve had more (laughs) at least during the time I was there but they only had one and I was real young, but it was still nice because I remember everyone like barbequed and people kind of, you know potluck style, you had different people bring desserts and contribute food and things and that was nice cause that was a time when you could actually drive in the street and you weren’t worried about cars just coming out of nowhere.. so it was nice at that point, but yeah it was just one.
J: (laughs) Where did your parents work when you were growing up?
C: My mother worked with Harmon Kiefer, it was kind of like I believe it was a health department and she worked in the early on health department from most of her career when we lived there, in downtown, and my father worked at Circuit City growing up when that was still around and then afterwards he started working at Kohl’s in Westland.
J: Okay, where did you go shopping? I think that means for anything too like for groceries and like (ahahaha) I don’t know clothes too?
C: Um I don’t know (laughs) that helps then, um I definitely went there was an area right off of Grand River and 6 mile, that area its still technically part of the neighborhood it’s not too far from the school I went to growing up and there was like a Rainbow, and I feel like a lot of girls, young girls went to Rainbow because you had a lot of deals, good deals really nice clothes and you had the Gamestop I had a Nintendo Gamecube growing up so that was one of my favorite places to go and it also a I wanna say it was like uhhh one of those chicken or fish businesses, but it was like so much in that area where we spent a lot of our time and did a lot of good local shopping. But then of course you go to the suburbs if you wanted to go actually to the mall or go to Kohl’s or something and we did Meijer like that was our main grocery store. Unfortunately by the time we moved they opened the Meijer on grand river so that would’ve been really nice if it was there when we were there, but yeah mainly went to the metro area for shopping when it come to food.
J: Okay yeah, yeah pretty much still how it goes today.
C: Thankfully there’s some progress with the Meijer on 8 mile but yeah.
J: Where did you go to school?
C: I went to um well I’ll start forward and move backwards, I went to a Communication Media Arts High School and that is on Saint no Mansfield right off of Grand River so not too far from Southfield Freeway and 6 mile and I also went to Ive Ludington Magna Middle School and cook Elementary school which are all Detroit Public Schools.
J: Okay,
C: Proud DPS alum
J: Can you tell me a little about the schools and stuff?
C: Yeah um, I guess for the schools there was like CMA or Communication Media Arts High School that one was a really nice school. Though it wasn’t one of the top three people like to say with Cass Renaissance, and King, I feel like it was a really good school for me because I was always interested in Journalism and there I was editor of like the high school newspaper, and there were so many opportunities, like our school was chosen to be in a kind of clean kind of revitalization project where they kind of wanna say it was Fox 2 News they did a makeover of our school, so it was really coolto get the community to support that area and help uplift the students at the time. And I feel like with Ludington and Cook it was your typical school in Detroit it was nice it was good people there good teachers, theres always resources that could be improved, but I feel like that’s in any school district.
J: Yeah um definitely.
C: (laughs)
J: Are there any stories from your childhood, like specifically surrounding your neighborhood that you would like to share? That maybe stood out besides maybe the block party or maybe elaborate more on the block party I don’t know, your friends that were there?
C: yeah I guess um I guess one of the favorite parts of neighborhood, I guess one time having friends comeover for a sleepover or just getting together right on six mile there’s like an in and out and anyone who knows Detroit or any major city there’s a ton of In and Outs around the area, But I always liked the In and Out because I always thought their pizza was bomb, but like of course it was like that greasy (laughs) pizza that you just know probably wasn’t to good for you but there’s just something about so you know kind of because it wasn’t too far from our house just leaving the house on Fielding going up 6 mile and just going there it always kind of felt just like small things like that made it feel like home. Sometimes the small businesses like my grandparents, you know people automatically it’s like regulars, even going to the Mini Mart, my grandfather goes there all the time and they’re on a first name basis, so I guess my special memories from the neighborhood is just really connecting to the people to the point where it goes beyond just that hi and bye relationship but you kind of really feel like your happy to support this business, and I guess kind of with the block party I was really young I can’t remember the age. I remember being around just the positive aspects that people don’t always focus on Detroit at times just letting kids play around and being innocent not having any crime or drama occurring in the neighborhood having parents and other family members on the street just coming together and just provide a safe and energetic atmosphere to just let people know this is Detroit this is about the people it’s about the heart of the community even though it was only one time. Hopefully it could’ve been more but.
J: How long did you live there?
C: I okay let me go back I moved there when I was 2 from a house that was in a whole other neighborhood in Detroit but I moved when I was 2 and moved right when I was about to graduate High School so 18?
J: Oh wow okay.
C: So yep, my bad I’m not good at math. (laughs) I don’t know what that number is
J: (laughs) we don’t need specific numbers. You mentioned your parents didn’t let you ride your bikes all around that much you had to ride on the block or just around the blocks um but did you venture around the city at all when you were a kid like in your teens or something?
C: Oh yeah I, definitely appreciate my parents for allowing me to see more of the city like we went downtown sometimes going to Belle Isle was really nice and experience that or even going to campus martius like when were younger going skating during the Holiday season, and I always like concerts growing up so when some of my favorite artists like Taylor Swift was my favorite artist growing up so thankfully my mother was able to go with me at the Palace in Auburn Hills, even though that’s not really in Detroit, that’s one of the things we went to. And then just kind of going to Pistons games of course. Sadly they weren’t in Detroit at the time thankfully now they are finally back in Detroit. I think just kind of venturing out in more Downtown and then like other neighborhoods cause having family that lives around the city being able to go further out on the East side I’m more of a West Side person but now I technically live on the East side of the city. So it was nice having an idea of the environment, but its definitely a diverse city so I’m happy to just be able to see Southwest Detroit and always broadening your horizons.
J: Yeah, did you feel comfortable in the City?
C: Oh yeah I definitely feel at most comfortable here than some other areas cause I feel like here is just like diverse but its to the point that theres support like even the saying Detroit Vs. Everybody I think that everybody here has that heart and hustle to where they just want to see the city doing good, they wanna support local businesses they want the best education for our future, so I think just having conversations with people who know the city and have lived here for years and who grew up with this city even despite the history and obstacles whatever remains here of this time are the reasons I love this city and makes it feel like home.
J: Um, one of the questions is to ask you about the decades you grew up in, it’s only like two decades (laughs) so uh what was Detroit like during the 60s no I’m just kidding
C: Im like decades? Okay I mean I was born in 94 but early 2000s..
J: So has your nade neighborhood you know changed over the years even in your lifetime though or has stayed the same you know how has it changed?
C: I feel like its changed like sometimes, I don’t know if it’s strange but sometimes I will, when I am in the neighborhood because the lady who does my hair is in that area I’ll literally just go down Fielding sometimes simply to drive by my old house and its cool because some of the neighbors are still there from when I was a kid so I feel like people of course theres some new people that moved in I feel like the racial mix-up has changed, at least that people that currently live in our old house, we don’t know them but they’re white so it’s nice to see that there is more diversity or progress in that area and I feel like that though Redford Library the one that we used to go to on 6 mile that had some revitalization as well so like just got new computers and just kind of cleaned it up a little bit and made it more modern and of course with the Meijer on Grand River I feel like there’s just more development which is nice because you can always notice or see the development happen in Downtown or Midtown to see have it in the neighborhoods especially ones that you grown up in and you can go back and see some of the changes it’s nice. I still feel like I appreciate very much that some of the same local businesses are still there and even just some of the same faces because that makes you feel like you’re not a stranger in your own neighborhood or community and it really just brings about the reason why it feels such like home, because you need familiar territory to feel like your going home to so I definitely see the growth but I definitely feel like there’s things that are staying the same which I am happy for.
J: Right so it’s growing with the people still in there?
C: Mhmm
J: It’s not excluding them it’s taking them with them and they are willing to go with them too
C: exactly completely agree it’s more like the neighborhood is growing and having more opportunities and at the same time it’s still being courteous and getting community input and not just changing things and throwing people out so I feel like that’s one of the reasons why it continues and has been successful because it feels like people care there about each other they care about the businesses and that the community is a reflection of what’s there now and has been there in the past.
J: Nice, have you ever thought about moving away from Detroit, I mean you went to Central Michigan you mentioned so you didn’t stay in the city for school?
C: I did have the option I had the choice between Wayne State and CMU but I wanted to get away just so I had that distance but funny story is that distance made me really want to come back home like after graduating from Central. Like my family is Southfield now and I knew that I wanted to come back to the city and coincidentally I ended up working here which is perfect because Im learning about so much more about the history of the City, But it felt so good to just be home honestly I don’t think I’ll be here, you know probably for like the next ten years. I love Detroit Michigan you know it’s cool, but I feel like theres other theres just so much else out there that I want to see and do and that’s not a shade or anything to the city sometimes you just gotta challenge yourself, but right now it feels great to be home and a part of a new community, and visit my old community and still have roots there.
J: So was it just more like you wanted to get away get out of the house a little bit get some separation from your parents or whatever?
C: Yeah kinda just get away and Central had a really good Journalism program and I got a full ride scholarship there and so it just. It was god’s plan. (laughs)
J: (laughs) so what prompted your move your senior year in High School to you know get out of your neighborhood?
C: My parents were looking to get a new uh I don’t know how much they were paying for the house but they were looking to see if they could get a bigger house for around the same price point that they were paying so they looked around in the area but in Southfield they found a bigger house with more space and not too much of a price difference versus where they were living on Fielding versus off of 10 mile. So as a kid you go you just follow your parents, so it was bittersweet to leave but at the same time it was nice to see a new change in scenery but I always felt like I was still there because my grandparents still have their business and my hairdressers still here and some of the places I still go to visit people here, my best friend is here, so even though I have that physical distance from the city I still feel like my street was what brought me back because I was here multiple times a week
J: Nice, when someone says the neighborhoods what does that mean to you?
C: When I think of the neighborhoods I think of the people, I think of the heart and soul of Detroit, and I think of the people that have never left the city even though it changes so drastically in certain areas when I hear neighborhoods I always just kind of think familiarity or jus the idea of something evolving but still staying true to its natural roots so I think it’s the heart I think it’s the hustle and I think it’s the core of what makes Detroit Detroit, is the neighborhoods because that’s the representation of the people.
J: How do you feel about the state of your neighborhood today? Not the one that your living in but the one that you lived in.
C: Mmhmm yep umm I take I feel good I take pride in that neighborhood I definitely feel like that neighborhood like every neighborhood has issues that are still trying to be resolved but I feel like with that space specifically there is so much potential as well as so much growth because even just driving down it I can see and feel a difference and at the same time just seeing the community and how people still support one another makes me proud to say I am from that neighborhood and it makes me proud to know that I can always return to that neighborhood even though I don’t live there, I’ll still feel connected cause there’s some areas that you go to where you were connected before but jus taren’t anymore so I am grateful in that sense that I can still feel connected to the neighborhood I grew up in.
J: Yeah um what would you like to see happen with your neighborhood?
C: I think it would be nice and I don’t know because it probably already have something like this in existence but kind of just more neighborhood appreciation events I know of Rise Detroit and Luther Kieth which is phenomenal that they have neighborhood day and you can go out and just go out and clean up or just support local businesses, but it would be nice to kind of even have an oral history project, have people that live there and lived there in the past to really just kind of communicate and jjust share the history because I think it would be nice to have an event where people just learn from other people who lived in that area just so we can all see from different points of views because I’m sure theres things that changed that people who currently live there can say which I had no clue of. So I would want to set up that space for communication would really just draw people together and would really connect the new Detroiters and old Detroiters cause some people probably recently moved there a few years ago so I think it’s a good way to help bring together the city.
J: If you could get a project done in that part of your neighborhood, what would it be?
C: Mmm it would definitely be the coming together kind of like what I just said just kind of getting people together and communicating just story telling like lets just call it story telling in your neighborhood and you just learn.
J: Yeah a performance block party maybe with a little stage at the end of it.
C Yeah you know have another block party there’s some times when it’s pretty warm outside like it’s okay right now but definitely not in the winter.
J: (laughs) yeah.
C: But I think that would be cool a block party in the neighborhood.
J: How do you feel about the state of the city today?
C: I feel indifferent, I am very proud to be a Detroiter and to wanna work at the DHS and be able to learn more about it and connect to different communities through the museum and I am excited because I feel like there is a lot of positive thing happening in the city and at the same time it’s a little bittersweet because there is some change that’s happening that doesn’t benefit people as a whole just certain people so I think there’s areas which can be improved upon, but I am choosing to remain optimistic.
J: Yeah that’s a good way to go about it, um let me just look at the time real quick, alright I will ask you a couple of more questions if that’s okay
C: Oh yeah
J: So, where what neighborhood do you live in now would you say?
C: Now I live in Lafayette Park which is formally Blackbottom
J: Okay oh okay okay yeah a lot of other people I think two people have Lafayette Park and you moved there what a couple of years ago?
C: I moved there actually a little over a year now, I been here a little over a year and a few months, so it’s been good.
J: What brought you to that neighborhood?
C: Honestly I wanted to come back to Detroit that was one of my goals and I wanted to be closer to my job so it’s not too far from the historical museum and its right by the Eastern Market which is really cool and a lot of other local businesses so it just felt like a wonderful spot to be in and I just felt like it was the most ideal choice, and it was reasonably priced (says doubtfully)
J: ehhh there was a little shrug there (laughs) what is it like? Is it integrated?
C: Oh yeah this neighborhood is like an influx of I feel new Detroiters and old Detroiters cause there’s some people that have been living there for years like some over a decade like this is just their home and it’s always nice to meet those people and just hear some of the stories they’ll mention and it’s really cool to meet the new people who have recently moved to Detroit and they might be going to school or working at Quicken Loans but to hear about what they’re adding to the city so it’s definitely a very integrated very diverse from a racial standpoint as well as just with age I think it’s definitely a nice central part of the city with a lot to offer the city and I like it a lot
J: What do you do for fun there?
C: Well now that I am closer to downtown its really nice because now I can hit up all the music venues like you’ll see me at some concerts and its nice to have the Pistons my dad got some tickets to the Pistons they’re back here hopefully they’ll actually have a good season, but anyways I am excited for that one going to the games the Lions pf course Comerica Park it’s just nice I feel like I can do aa lot of different things, and then not being too far away from the museums. Going to the Eastern Market to do some local shopping so I think it’s definitely a great central spot where you can just kind of get out and there’s always something going on whether it’s Downtown or going further in the East side I’m enjoying it.
J: Speaking of shopping, where do you go shopping now? Is there a local grocery store in Lafayette Park Or?
C: Well I still like Meijer the Meijer I go to is the 8 mile Meijer in Detroit so it’s thankfully it’s within the city limits so I’ll go to that one for grocery shopping, but for clothing honestly I still I’m a fan of the mall, I still find myself going to like Fairlane or Twelve Oaks but for local shopping there’s also a Lafayette booze which is right next to the apartment so sometimes I will go there it’s nice because it’s really convenient and its not far at all it’s within walking distance of the apartment so there, Eastern Market, and the Meijer on 8 mile.
J: Have you talked to anybody about how Lafayette Park has changed over the years or no? Just like
C: Ummm the only people I have talked to mainly people from here which is mainly telling me what Lafayette Park was before it was Lafayette Park which is Blackbottom. So I think that history is important and I would promote to anybody currently living there because I mean that neighborhood has its own story that I think every Detroiter should know, but outside of that I’m still, I need to explore Lafayette Park more there’s a lot going on and so many changes but it seems like a really interesting neighborhood because of its diverse mix-up.
J: Right, so you think its changing quite a bit right now like they’re getting a lot of like is there new buildings or what’s changed?
C: uhh I heard that they’re building I think it was a new Meijer, I don’t know something on the TV a new Meijer in Lafayette Park there’s no need for me to go to the one on 8 mile so that will be nice to have that there. I think theres just the changing like you said, add the new buildings of course they’re always adding new apartments, I think that just trying to capitalize off of the different resources that can be available to the people in the area.
J: Alright is there anything you would like to say in closing about your old or your new neighborhood?
C: I would just say to for anyone in Detroit regardless for how long you’ve been here I would make it a point to at least it’s one of my points to really explore the different neighborhoods because I think what’s great about Detroit really goes beyond just what’s Downtown and what’s in the Midtown area. I think if you really want to experience authenticity and really get to know the people and really be able to support how this city has continued to stand strong in the past decades you find that in the neighborhoods so I strongly recommend just going out exploring the different districts really supporting local businesses and really just taking the time to talk to people and see from their point of view because that’s where I believe that’s where you find Detroit’s stories
J: Nice, Sweet, Thank you very much.
C: No problem, great questions, my bad
End of Interview 30:21
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Detroit, Michigan, Northwest, Oral History
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Charnae Sanders
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview Charnae talks about growing up in the diverse Northwest corner of Detroit and how friendly and welcoming it is. She talks about how the city is ever changing and even though there is development downtown and midtown you don’t see it stretching out to the edges of Detroit. Ultimately she concludes that the city is a great place to live because of the people that live within the city.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/12/2018
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society
-
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Carolyn Sanders
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Carolyn Sanders was born in 1966 right outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. Her family moved to Detroit in 1969 to the Northwest side of Detroit. Her parents worked for GM which is a classic story of people moving to Detroit. She raised her family not far from where she grew up on, on Six Mile and now resides in Southfield, Michigan.
Interviewer's Name
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J.D. Hrcka
Interview Place
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Southfield, Michigan
Date
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11/13/2018
Transcription
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J: Hello, my name is Jacob Hrcka I’m interviewing you for the Detroit Historical Society Oral history report, what is your name?
C: Okay, my name is Carolyn Jean Sanders
J: Alright where and when were you born?
C: I was born in 1966 in a small town in Dumas, Arkansas which is maybe about an hour and a half away from Little Rock Arkansas.
J: Okay, when did you come to Detroit then?
C: Ummm my family we moved to Detroit in 1969 you know and at the time I’m the oldest I have two younger brothers and my parents and me and my two younger brothers all moved to Detroit in like I said 1969.
J: Why did you come? Do you know why your family moved?
C: We came cause my dad found a job here working at General Motors
J: Okay
C: A lot of people during that time you know they moved to Detroit, he had an uncle here who was able to help him get a job at General Motors. And then maybe a year later my mother got a job at General Motors as well.
J: Oh, nice you were pretty young when you moved then right?
C: And so when we first moved we stayed with my uncle about a year. And then my parents you know they were working so we were able to get a house and that’s when we moved over on Tracy the address was 17165 Tracy the address sticks in my mind I was five years old and that house was located right off of Six Mile near Schaeffer.
J: What was your first impression of Detroit if you had one at that age?
C: Oh goodness ehhh I can’t remember you know it’s been so long so I am trying to remember and compare what some of my earliest memories were and well I remember being in Kindergarten and I was 5 and the school was maybe about a half a mile away so we would walk back and forth to school, and my neighborhood at the time was really diverse um we lived on a dead end block so I would say that there was probably about 20 houses on the street, and so it was a close neighborhood, all the neighbors on that street knew each other.
J: Did you have a specific name for the neighborhood, or what neighborhood would you consider yours?
C: No we didn’t have a theme or anything but you know back then most of the neighborhoods had a school and mine was Winship and so we lived in the Winship community and that was my elementary school, and I went to that school all the way from Kindergarten all the way up until 8th grade.
J: What was your neighborhood like what was it like living around there.
C: Mmm I guess back then it probably was just a regular neighborhood and then when I was young I really didn’t watch the news much so I don’t know I couldn’t tell you if we had a lot of crime going on, and also I was telling you I was 5 years ol when we moved um in that neighborhood and that was after the riots I am sure you have heard about the riots that occurred in 67’ but that was a year after I was born, we weren’t even in the city at that time and so um you know like I was saying it was diverse and so I remember we had different ethnicities and all of the kids would play together and I didn’t you know if you’re thinking racism or something like that I didn’t experience any of that growing up.
J: Yeah, okay
C: So yeah and some of the landmarks I remember in that community, we had Mount Carmel Hospital which is now um grace Sinai or is it Sinai grace I always get those mixed up and then we had a movie theater it was the Mercury movie theater that was in walking distance that was right there on Schaeffer on Six Mile it took two or three minutes to walk to the movie theater and then we had a wool worth store and a Federal’s Department store, so that area kinda had a lot of stores in it you know when were growing up and I remember one fast food restaurant and a gas station over there as well.
J: Okay, yeah I think maybe so if there was crime happening it wasn’t happening to your family or neighbors or anything like that?
C: No we didn’t hear of anybody breaking in back then we didn’t have alarm systems on the house.
J: Yeah so it was an integrated neighborhood there was a lot of diverse?
C: Mmmhmm and I would remember that me and my brothers would walk to school you know by ourselves and we were little kids so it was really safe back then mmhmm yeah
J: What did you do for fun in the neighborhood?
C: You know the typical stuff ride our bikes and you know the thing about being on a dead end street, well sometimes our parents would let us ride in the street but most of the time we were on the sidewalk, but we spent a lot time playing in the backyard we had a swing set and of course or parents, they would take us to the park cause I remember my mom was really active in sports so she would always play on baseball teams at work we would go there to picnics and visit relatives see cousins, you know they would come over and during the summertime we would always go down south and stay with our grandparents so when school was out me and my brothers would go down south and spend about two months down there.
J: Nice, where did you go shopping in your neighborhood, or did you take your shopping elsewhere?
C: Ummm uh we would I remember going to Sears, uhh I remember going to Hudson’s you know that was downtown on Woodward and so that was a long time ago, and I also remember my mom ordering a lot of clothes from catalogues (hahaha) that was way before the internet days.
J: Did you have a local grocery store you could go to go shopping at all?
C: mmm it seems like the earliest memory I have is my mom would go to A&P and that was before Farmer Jack’s and so that is where I remember going to the grocery store and then there was also a neighborhood grocery store she would go to, it was located on Six Mile not too far from Meijer and as a matter of fact that grocery store is still there it just has a different name.
J: Oh okay yeah that would be interesting so where did you go to school and tell me a little bit about it?
C: I went to Winship Elementary School Ummm it was a small school it was in the neighborhood and so if you were driving down main streets you wouldn’t see it because it was on Hubbel and I can’t remember the cross street but it had a separate elementary and it had a middle school and a junior high and so like I was saying I went there from Kindergarten all the way up to the eighth grade and again the school was diverse and the teachers Im trying to remember, I can remember some of their names like my Kindergarten teacher Miss Terrence a really really old to me it seemed like she may have been in her 70s I don’t even know if teachers teach that long anymore. But umm I had a good education you know I was a very bright student so I would always get awards like citizenship, attendance and honor roll.
J: Nice
C: Yeah and um when I graduated from Winship I went to Cass Tech which is one of the better schools in Detroit
J: Yeah yeah Cass is still and so you didn’t think it was bad school growing up, you thought it was nice?
C: Yeah I thought it was nice and clean you know my brothers went there also and you know it’s hard to compare to any other school because that the only one I had gone to
J: yeah right, exactly um are there any stories from your childhood specifically about your neighborhood that you would like to share?
C: Mmmm I’m trying to think anything about the neighborhood that I would like to share, mmm trying to think, that’s a good question. Can’t think of anything in specific, we can come back to that question?
J: Yeah did you venture around the city growing up you mentioned going to Hudson’s or did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood around your parents?
C: Umm yeah I mean I knew how to catch the bus now and so during the summer I would go to different summer programs like they had one at U of D, so I would go to that, I would go to the libraries on the weekends me and my friends would go down to the festivals, they still have those nowadays. I remember when the Renaissance was first built that was in the early 80s so we would just go down there and hang out in Hart Plaza, that was before the Riverfront was all remodeled like it is now. And so yeah that was just something fun that we would look forward to in the summertime because we would go almost every weekend. It gave us something to do. And one of the malls we started going to was called Northland it’s closed now but that was near 8 Mile of Greenfield.
J: Right yeah they mentioned the Northland Mall
C: Yeah that was our shopping center
J: So you felt comfortable in the city for the most part?
C: Mmhmm yeah and then in the eighth grade ummm not the eighth I am trying to think of when I got my first job, I was in eleventh grade and I started working at McDonald’s and it was brand new and the built that right there on 6 Mile and greenfield
J: Okay that’s not too far
C: nope and so I worked there all through my senior year in High school before I went to college
J: Umm what were the decades like that you grew up in in Detroit 70s 80s?
C: Right the 60s not so much uhh I remember in the 70s we would wear a lot of bell bottoms you know I kinda remember some of the clothes we would wear you know a lot of jeans with different studs on it platform shoes what else different hair styles we had, I’m trying to think what else like I said my parents both worked at General Motors so me and my brothers would walk home from school usually, you know we were considered latchkey kids because our parents were never there when we got home but my mom would always have dinner prepared for us because she worked afternoons you know so she would leave before we got home from school and once we got home from school my dad would be home in about an hour later yeah so.
J: Has your neighborhood changed over the years or has it stayed the same?
C: It has definitely changed because I am trying to remember when I was around 16 years old umm that’s when Mount Carmel hospital wanted to tear down all the houses on my block and build a new parking lot, so that happened
J: Woah
C: They gave every family a great deal! They gave everybody a great deal so they paid off the mortgage, and they gave us a home on snowden and you know Snowden is about two blocks three blocks east of Schaeffer and we were halfway between Six and Seven Mile, so less than a mile away. And so know they gave us the title the home was paid off and they did that for all of the families on the street. Paid off their mortgages and offered them a new home and most people moved, kind of within that neighborhood. And so they did demolish all of the homes, and you know the homes were in excellent condition too and then they made that parking lot and you know that parking lot is still here today.
J: Wow
C: And then movie theatre is gone, the grocery store is gone. You know I notice there is a litter strip mall over there now with a little…
J: With like a Metro PCS or something?
C: CVS, and some kind of restaurant I don’t know what restaurant it is, some kind of fast food (chicken) place, and an auto supply store, auto part.
J: Oh nice
C: And there’s a nursing home, but I think that nursing home has always been there. And Winships School, there still around, they are still open.
J&C: (laughter)
C: I Know!
J: Have you been in there since you went there?
C: No I haven’t been in, I just drove by it, you know I still see it standing and it looks like it’s being taken care of.
J: So you actually did think of moving away at some point from Detroit, why did you want to move away?
C: You know after we moved from Tracy, you know my family we moved over to snowden and I was only there maybe less than two years because you know then I went off to college I went to Western Michigan University and that’s where I met my husband there. So after I graduated from Western you know we moved back to Detroit you know we weren’t sure where we were going to live but you know he had family here also. And so we lived over on clover lawn, that’s over near Chicago and Wyoming area. If you are kind of familiar with that a bit.
J: No
C: Ok, and that area you know and I really wasn’t too familiar with that are growing up because you know I was more over by that, 6 mile and Schafer area and we stayed over there, we came right back to Detroit, 1990 and then we had our kid you know our home was very small you know but it was nice very close knit close community. You know the neighbors looked out for each other, but it was only two bedrooms and then we had two kids we had Sharnay and Victor, we had him in 92 and Sharnay in 94 and so we needed more space and so eventually we moved over on Fielding that was in 1997. So we were there a good 7 years almost. A good 7 years. And now Fielding that was 16877 Fielding and that was one block South of 6 Mile and it’s between Evergreen and Lahser if that gives you an idea.
J: Yea I mean I have mapped that one out, its technically part of old Redford, because they annexed it from Redford in 1926
C: You know we always loved Detroit and never thought about moving to the suburbs or anything we stayed there until about um hmm 8 years ago and like I was saying the only reason we started looking for other homes, was because we had got broken into.
J: Were you home at the time?
C: No we were gone and something tells us it was our neighbor. You know they knew our schedule and they knew we were be gone you know because it was kind of predictable every Thursday we would go somewhere. And then we started thinking about insurance rates and homeowner’s insurance. And then my husband had a friend that is a realtor, and he said “why don’t yall look outside of Detroit, you might get more for your money” and that was really the first time we ever considered moving outside the city.
J: Yea so it was more monetary probably focused.
C: Exactly
J: When someone says ‘the neighborhoods” what does that mean to you?
C: Just neighborhoods?
J: Your neighborhoods, what does that mean to you?
C: If they say neighborhoods, you know I’m thinking your surroundings the area maybe within that mile because we know neighborhoods change even within a neighborhood its different from block to block because you know when we lived of Fielding, that was a nice street, you know we had that little isle in the middle but then you know when you went across the street, across 6 mile it was totally different. You would see some boarded up houses you like I’m saying just like a block away. But that neighborhood has changed too. Cause you know we had a library, police station fire department, all that within walking distance. And now they have a Meijer, strip mall, they didn’t have that just 8 years ago. All of that is new within 8 years.
J: Yea that’s a lot definitely. How do you feel about the state of your neighborhoods today? Well your one that’s a parking lot, so your probably feel a sad about that maybe.
C: Yea but you see Detroit is so different from neighborhood to neighborhood. The last neighborhood we lived in Detroit, I think it’s still good, you know I think I’ve seen some improvements in that neighborhood.
J: The fielding one?
C: Yup over on fielding, you know compared to some neighborhoods where you see burned down houses, boarded up houses I really don’t see that, over on that street, in that particular area that I was staying in. I think that area is getting better. Anytime someone sells, moves out, that home is quickly sold. I think the property value is increasing because when we moved we owed more than the house was worth because the values of homes dropped so dramatically.
J: Yea, so you pay people to move in.
C: Even when we purchased a home, I think it was overpriced, because I think we purchased a home, we paid like 80 something for it, and you know like I said we weren’t even there 8 years and when we moved and that home was resold, I think that family only paid like 16 thousand. Values had dropped so drastically.
J: Wow, 16 thousand?!
C: Yes! But now if you go over there now I’m sure the value has increased.
J: Yea, it at least has to be worth half of what you paid right?
C: Right I know!
J: Is there anything you would like to see happen to your neighborhood? Do you think it’s already on the right track? Do you think it could be better in some ways?
C: I think it’s on the right track. The only thing that kind of disappointed me on Fielding is that we had an island in the middle…
J: Oh like a cross or whatever?
C: You know how you go to some streets you go down it has an island and it has those flowers and trees in the middle I kind of felt like it would have been better if the city had taken care of that, but the neighbors had to do it and the neighbors on that street did not believe in doing yardwork. And so me and my husband ended up doing it most of the time. If you know what I mean. You would think that the city would of taken care of that like they take care of parks but they didn’t. So if you wanted flowers planted, or if you wanted the weeds dug up, you wanted that island mowed, you had to do it yourself.
J: That’s so weird.
C: Yea depending how we felt so we would just do half the island because you know the stretch from one end of the block to the other.
J: Just do your half.
C: Yea and you know sometimes the neighbors would do that, they would just do that one section of their house.
J&C: (laughter)
C: You can picture it can’t you? Kind of tacky.
J: that’s pretty funny. If you could get a project done in your neighborhood, what would it be?
C: Hmm, that is a good question, I’ve always wondered what is lacking in that community.
J: Here I’m just going to check the time really quick.
C: You know I would like to see a movie theatre, and more entertainment for the kids, like a Dave and Busters you know including the restaurant, bowling alley, movie theater all in one location. Because really that area doesn’t really have anything when we went to the movie theatre you had to go all the way out to Southfield. That was like the closest theatre.
J: Yea even now you….
C: You know they had old Redford movie theatre out on Lahser, but they show older movies you know classics but you know as far as the movie theaters they used to have one on Grand River near Southfield, I cannot think of the name Northwest movie theatre I believe but that closed down over 10 years ago. Yup so no entertainment, no movie theatres for the kids. Maybe even um, a roller rink, they have one over on 8 Mile. But that this is so old because we used to go there when we were kids so you know that was one of the activities my mom, you know she would drop us off for a Saturday and come pick us up later, and it’s still there.
J: Yea it is, I still drive by it.
C: Yea we used to go there growing up. So you know I would like to see something new, recreational for the young people.
J: Did you think of any stories from your childhood that you would like to share or about your neighborhood growing up? We kind of skipped that question earlier. I don’t know if you were giving it much any thought or?
C: Right I’m trying to think of some fun story from my childhood. I used to um, me and my friend for the 4th of July we would go down to the fireworks. Now that was one of my fun memories, I would enjoy doing that. And also I had my license, I had my own car I was a lucky child. I got that when I was oh how old was I? 17? I think I was 17 so me and my friends you know we would drive down to the fireworks and stay down there and just eat food and look at the fireworks.
J: Were they friends from your neighborhood?
C: Mhm
J: Ok so yea just…
C: Yea yup my neighborhood friends
J: So yea you just stored them as you know..
C: And so growing up you know my brothers you know they did more exciting things then I did you know they’ll say. Because I didn’t really go out partying, drinking and doing all that fun stuff, you know and coming home late, you know missing curfew. I was a good child. (laughter) But you know my brothers they would have some more stories to tell.
J: OK.
C: You know they did some wild things growing up.
J&C: (laughter)
J: Yea you know that’s ok, you know you just very much lived in your neighborhood.
C: I did I did
J: You met the people, you’re you know, friendly with them that’s yea so we’ll wrap it up with this question how do you feel about the state of Detroit today?
C: I think it’s getting better at some areas but not all, and I think it depends. Seems like it’s based off on income, you know the neighborhoods where people earn a little more or if the houses are worth a little more, of course they’re getting more services, um the property is being better taken care of.
J: Yea like you had to mow your own strip of land in front of you.
C: Yea but compared to some neighborhoods where you know they might have a large population of unemployment and a lot of abandoned homes, you know I wouldn’t they’re getting any services.
J: No
C: You know they just have an abandoned house next to them, that’s probably banked owned and supposed to be taken care of by the bank but it’s not.
J: No they just want to sell it for a couple of thousand dollars.
C: Yea but you know I still see some growth, of course you know people always talk about the Midtown and the Downtown area where you know they see the most investment and most jobs. But I think overall you know Detroit some of the wealth is getting spread around but some of the things I would like to see, is insurance rates being decreased and property taxes being decreased because it’s ridiculous I mean um the amount that we pay for auto insurance here compared to what we would be paying if we lived in Detroit it would be over double. And the rates here are high.
J: Yea
C: Yea because we checked it out, you know for example where my daughter paying, based on her age, she would be paying 500 dollars a month, you know for a car that’s not even new just to have full coverage. And she doesn’t have any points, no tickets, good credit, but still her insurance rate, they say 48207 I think that’s her zip code, they say that is a high theft area. But still doesn’t make sense does it?
J: Yea you pay off your car in like three months or something like that, with you know like 500 dollars. 1500 in three months that’s…
C: 500 dollars a month.
J: Yea, oh my gosh yea no I think a lot of people would agree with that.
C: That you know if she lived here you know it would be, her insurance it would be 150? 150 a month, but you think about it 150 times 12 that’s still overpriced for a car that’s a 2008, but it’s a lot better than 500 dollars a month
J: Yea that’s a lot better
C: Yes yes yes. It doesn’t make sense. But I would like to see that decrease and you know like I said property insurance I would like to see that decrease.
J: Yea just insurance across the board needs to probably go down.
C: Right and even water bills, I mean were surrounded by Great Lakes.
J: Right, yes
C: So water should be a little less.
J: Alright well thank you very much for your time, I greatly appreciate it.
C: Oh no problem
J: Thank you
End of Interview 28:49
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Detroit, Michigan, 6 mile, General Motors, Southfield
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Title
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Carolyn Sanders
Description
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In this interview Carolyn talks about growing up in a diverse neighborhood right off of Six Mile. She highlights the easy-going nature of her neighborhoods which made her want to live in Detroit and raise her family. She discusses many things regarding the nature of Detroit and how things might get better for the city in the future.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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11/13/2018
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Detroit Historical Society