Ann Street Black Business District
For most of the twentieth century, the 100 block of East Ann Street was a hub for Black-owned businesses in downtown Ann Arbor. A rotating set of barber shops, shoe shine parlors, dry cleaners, restaurants, blues bars, and pool rooms formed the backbone of Black social life, especially for men. The district stretched around the corner onto North Fourth Avenue where the Colored Welfare League housed Black-owned businesses and community organizations such as the early Dunbar Center.
Media
AACHM Oral History: Hortense Howard
Hortense Howard was born in Bloomington, Illinois in 1927. Soon afterwards, her family moved to Ann Arbor, where she and her sisters became known as the “Bacon Sisters” for their choral performances at sorority houses and other venues. Ms. Howard attended a music school in Detroit because she “wanted to sing like Sarah Vaughan,” and she met many African American singers while working at the Gotham Hotel. She ran her own daycare, Sitters Unlimited Family Day Care, in Ann Arbor for twenty years.
Accident Scene Of Parked Car Hit On N. Fourth Avenue, June 1947
Year:
1947
Ann Arbor News, June 16, 1947
Caption:
THREE CHILDREN HURT IN PARKED CAR: Kenneth, 3, and Herbert, 5 - sons of Dunbar Center director Douglas Williams - and Jackie Taylor, 7, of 114 E. Kingsley St., suffered minor cuts and bruises when the above car, in which they were sitting, was knocked through the plate-glass window of Sadie's Beauty Shop by another machine that went out of control in the 200 block of N. Fourth Ave. this morning. The other automobile, being driven the wrong way down the one-way street by Jack A. Predovich, 26, a disabled war veteran, hit two other vehicles and burst into flames after knocking down a gasoline pump at the Abbott Gasoline station, N. Fourth and Ann. The driver was only slightly injured.
Wolverine Barber Shop and Pool Room, May 1944 Photographer: Eck Stanger
Year:
1944
- Read more about Wolverine Barber Shop and Pool Room, May 1944
- Log in or register to post comments