Hastings Street & Black Bottom

Here’s Detroit’s version of standing on a corner in a song — except the corner is under a freeway. When John Lee Hooker recorded “Boogie Chillen'” in 1948, its narrator walks down Hastings Street and hears about Henry’s Swing Club — both real places, both the beating heart of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, the Black business-and-music district that was, acre for acre, one of the most culturally significant neighborhoods in Michigan history. Then the city buried it: Hastings and the clubs around it were razed in the 1950s and ’60s, and the sunken I-375 freeway was poured directly over the street. The studio where Hooker actually cut the record, United Sound Systems, still stands a few miles north — but the street he sang about is gone, and the land became the Lafayette Park development (where, full circle, Motown greats including Martha Reeves have lived).

You can’t visit Henry’s Swing Club, but you can stand where the neighborhood was: a Michigan Historical Marker for Paradise Valley sits at the old corner of St. Antoine and Adams, beside Ford Field. Read it, then drive the I-375 service drive — you’re riding the ghost of Hastings Street. And you’re doing it right as the city tears that freeway out to bring the street back. On our list.