Welcome to our Data Forum where we will discuss open data and adjacent topics.
We’ll be joined by the Joel Reyes-Klann from City of Detroit District 6, Office of Councilperson Gabriela Santiago-Romero, Uri Heru House of the Equitable Internet Initiative, and Andrew Bashi from Great Lakes Environmenal Law Center.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect with fellow data enthusiasts and expand your knowledge.
WHEN: Friday, October 23rd, 12:30-1:30pm
WHERE: Virtual
WHAT: Join us for our Data Forum where we will discuss data centers, historical and present proposals
I can’t say I ever thought it might exist, but here we are. None of the proposed expansions matches up with the historical concepts that I’ve highlighted in the past, but they do potentially make sense with a focus on the Downtown bubble. Prioritizing rail connection to the airport is a must and numerous cities with far off airport connections have invested in elevated rail to get it done.
The concepts don’t note an airport connection, but I can only assume that is the natural conclusion to expanding westward. The focus in this report is connecting DPM to the renewed train connections at a new train station near Michigan Central Station. That may not be the highest or best case for expansion unless train travel really takes off.
The eastern expansion concept seems odd and the one sentence about connecting to Eastern Market is lackluster. Again there seems like a larger opportunity to note its connections to City Airport with Eastern Market in between. A previous proposal focused on eastward expansion to connect to entertainment in Rivertown area. Maybe there is more potential with the East Riverfront efforts at Bedrock?
How well do these concepts match with your ideas for DPM expansion? Obviously, we need to talk about elevating the Qline first.
Just north of Paradise Valley, Sugar Hill became an important jazz and blues district, likely borrowing its name from Harlem’s Sugar Hill (where sweet, good things happened). Packing more than a dozen clubs into a few blocks along John R (the “Street of Music”), Hastings, Brush, and Garfield between the early 1930s and 1950s, the district took off after Prohibition’s end in 1933 with venues like the Rhythm Club, the MDL Club (later the Chocolate Bar, then the Cotton Club), and the Harlem Cave, setting a pattern of small, densely packed rooms that mixed local talent with national headliners.
Black entrepreneurship anchored the neighborhood. Sunnie Wilson, a former mayor of Paradise Valley, built an entertainment empire including the Swamp Room and the Forest Club, reportedly Michigan’s largest Black-owned club, drawing Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, and Louis Armstrong. Randolph Wallace grew his own footprint on Garfield and John R with the Garfield Lounge and Hotel (1945), the Wal-ha Room (1950), and later the Randora Hotel and New Garfield Lounge. The district also housed integrated “Black and Tan” clubs including, but not limited to, the Chesterfield Lounge, the Frolic Show Bar, the Harlem Cave, and the Parrot Lounge, known nearly as much for its opera-singing parrot as its music.
No club mattered more than the Flame Show Bar, opened in 1949 at 4264 John R, whose house band, Maurice King and the Wolverines, backed many national and local acts. The Flame hosted Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and a 20-year-old Aretha Franklin in 1963, when she sang just a few blocks away from where her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, preached. Its deepest legacy was as a Motown incubator: agent Al Green introduced Berry Gordy Jr. to Jackie Wilson there, and several house musicians became part of the Funk Brothers, the Studio A backing band to so many hits. By the 1950s, urban renewal, freeway construction, and Medical Center expansion demolished much of this district block by block — but its concentration of clubs left an outsized imprint on Detroit’s musical DNA, Motown included.
Urban planner, Detroit tour guide, and jazz archaeologist Rod Arroyo, FAICP, created this post and map.
There have been many maps of walkability both national and local, but there always seems to be a gap in the data. Researchers at Yale University ran analyses of walkability compared to access to amenities. More from the project:
Walk Score and similar proximity-based indices are widely used as measures of walkability, and often treated as proxies for walking behavior, but they capture access to destinations rather than whether people walk. Using GPS-based mobility data for approximately 18 million devices across 272 U.S. urban areas, this paper tests how well amenity access predicts observed walking and under what conditions proximity translates into walking. We find that amenity access predicts walking only selectively. It explains just 25% of neighborhood-level variation in walking, and 89% of the gap between walkability and observed walking lies within cities rather than between them. Two findings help explain why. First, amenity access predicts destination-oriented walking well (R² = 0.51) but is unrelated to recreational walking (R² = 0.03), which accounts for 69% of all walking trips. Second, even for destination-oriented walking, other features of the built environment—street connectivity, traffic, and building design—shape whether access translates into walking. Well-connected, low-traffic neighborhoods generate substantially more walking than auto-oriented ones at the same level of amenity access. These findings suggest that proximity to amenities is necessary but not sufficient for generating walking.
We used to have a regional rail network. Detroit and the world were wildly difference places then and its too easy to fantasize about the past when a lot of things were not great. But … there was a regional rail network. This map from the Detroit Historical Society shows the reach and extent of the system. The map shows the interurban connections, but even within the City of Detroit streets were served by numerous trolley companies connecting different parts of the city.
HT: Dave Gifford for reminding me I have never posted this map.
