Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places by Krysta Ryzewski
2022; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mhr.2022.0045
ISSN2327-9672
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
ResumoReviewed by: Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places by Krysta Ryzewski Gregory Sumner Krysta Ryzewski. Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 352. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Table. Paperback: $79.95. Bringing the tools of the archaeologist to the study of Detroit history, Krysta Ryzewski’s account of the fieldwork she oversaw at six locations across the city expands and revitalizes our understanding of its familiar contours. Ryzewski takes us through the painstaking process of the coordination and planning necessary for her line of detective work as she and her Wayne State University students literally dig deep into the selected sites—overcoming the challenges presented by each and fashioning dense narratives out of the most fragmentary and seemingly mundane artifacts. Hoping to go beyond ghost-story myths and “barstool conversations,” Ryzewski’s team looked for hard evidence of the “Little Harry” speakeasy said to have operated during the darkly glamorous Prohibition days in a building near the riverfront that today houses Tommy’s Detroit Bar and Grill. Sure enough, down the staircase and under the main floor, the archaeologists unearthed bricked-up walls, doors, tunnels, and layered decades of refuse (such as lightbulb sockets and wiring, broken dishes, and bottles) that allowed them to situate the enterprise within the larger currents of the city’s bootlegging underworld. The search was worth the effort, attracting interest among history buffs and local media, even though precise answers to questions about the property’s chain of ownership may never be fully known. Connections, if any, to the infamous Purple Gang crime cartel were particularly hard to pin down, since Little Harry engaged in “ephemeral and illicit activities that were intentionally designed to leave behind minimal physical traces.” The casual observer would never suspect the importance of the battered and otherwise unremarkable west-side building at 5021 Tireman Avenue to the saga of Motown’s global musical legacy. Scavengers had rendered the Blue Bird Inn, a crucible of modernist post-swing “bebop” jazz in the late 1940s, an unpromising site for archaeological excavation. Undeterred, Ryzewski and her charges (with the help of the Detroit Sound Conservancy and other partners) ran their investigation anyway and were rewarded by the discovery of a cache of business receipts improbably preserved above a dropped ceiling. Meticulously kept by the owners during the period, the Dubois family, those receipts are, in the right hands, a treasure trove—a record of the club as cultural anchor for the neighborhood and as a Black-owned business successfully negotiating the rules of Jim Crow. The documents are also invaluable as a window into the Hastings Street section of “Paradise Valley,” a more famous cultural mecca that sadly now lies entombed beneath Interstate 375. [End Page 129] Four other sites get chapters: the Gilded-Age Ransom Gillis House; Gordon Park, a long-neglected public space at the epicenter of Detroit’s 1967 rebellion trauma; the Grande Ballroom, a sacred shrine in rock-and-roll history that closed its doors in 1972; and the now-demolished Halleck Street Log Cabin. Each is tackled with the same intrepid thoroughness, and each gives up unexpected secrets along the way. Those expecting another installment in the tired genre of drive-by “ruins porn” or a dry and soulless exercise in social science methodology will be won over in the book’s first pages. Ryzewski proves a gifted guide and storyteller, occasionally even reaching for the poetic flourish (describing the Blue Bird Project as “improvisational ‘jazz archeology’”). The background information and a wealth of diagrams, photographs, and other images, many of them in color, make this an attractive volume for the general reader and for college-course adoption. Detroit Remains is a model of engaged, collaborative scholarship, animated by passionate commitment to rescuing stories of marginalized communities overlooked or erased in the mosaic that is the city’s history. Gregory Sumner University of Detroit Mercy Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan
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