The fictional world of Paradise Blue is set in the real neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, in Detroit, Michigan. From the 1920s until the construction of Interstate 375 in 1964, this area of Detroit has experienced many changes.
During the 1920s, the Black population of Detroit grew from 41,000 to 120,000 people. Because of segregation and restrictive housing laws, much of the Black population was concentrated into just a few neighborhoods. This led to overcrowding–and white landlords who didn’t maintain the housing of the Black residents who rented from them. But it also led to a vibrant Black middle class of lawyers, dressmakers, dentists, and doctors alongside a commercial and entertainment district that boasted almost than 400 Black-owned businesses in 1952.
Paradise Blue is set at the beginning of the end of Paradise Valley’s entertainment boom. The Detroit government had already been looking to expand housing in its suburbs when Mayor Cobo was elected in 1949, just before the action of the play begins. Cobo ran on the promise to remove “urban blight” (aka rundown buildings, like those in Black Bottom), and the promise that Black residents would never be allowed to move into the white suburbs of Detroit.
Cobo’s “slum clearance” saw the entire Black Bottom community bulldozed for an incoming highway project; by 1950–a year after Paradise Blue was set–423 residences, 109 businesses, 22 manufacturing plants, and 93 vacant lots had been condemned for the freeway project. Most of the former residents of Black Bottom moved to public housing projects around Detroit. The community that Pumpkin loves so much were scattered across the city.
—Monica Flory