Documentary Focus: 

 We hope to offer a space for remembrance, nostalgia, and recognition for the livelihood of the musical atmosphere in Paradise Valley to live on. We hope the Paradise Valley community and the users of this archive will engage with, learn from, and offer their own stories about the neighborhood. When selecting the materials for the archive, we prioritized institutions and archives that are also seeking to have relationships with the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley communities. The opportunity to work with organizations like the Detroit Historical Society and the Black Bottoms Digital Archive is imperative to this archive to assure we are respectful in our approach, and to learn from their experiences with connecting to the Paradise Valley and Black Bottom communities.

Consideration of Archival Concepts and Practices: 

We wanted our archive to feature content related to the once booming music venues in Paradise Valley. Our hope was to create a space dedicated to remembering these venues, sparking community memories (that they would hopefully share), offer connections to popular music history, and reflect on the unjust destruction of the neighborhood. Some community-based archives have emerged to fill a void in the documentation of the thriving Black neighborhoods and businesses that existed in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom Detroit. Similar to the experience of queer/identity-based archives discussed in Wakimoto’s article “Archivist as activist: lessons from three queer community archives in California” (2013), we are aiming to participate in the activist core of community archives to fill gaps in other archive collections and challenge “the limited histories able to be created when marginalized groups were left out of the historic record collected” (Wakimoto, 2013, p. 297). Our archive will give further visibility to the artifacts and stories that have been collected about Paradise Valley's history.

We want to provide a hub that helps Detroiters find a consolidation of Paradise Valley history. We are including an interactive collecting form plug-in for the users of our archive to contribute their own materials. The history of Paradise Valley, Detroit is unfortunately minimally “officially” documented, but it lives within those who experienced the vibrant life of the area. This is why it is a priority for us to include an interactive element, as a way to “create a hole” for our users to contribute their voices (Duff & Harris, 2002, p. 279).

Criteria for Record Selection: 

Our search for materials for the Paradise Valley Collection were quickly met with issues of underrepresentation in the University of Michigan archives. The inability to find materials concerning black-owned businesses in Paradise Valley, Detroit from the UofM archives encouraged us to look towards institutions closer to our site of study. With this push, we decided to reach out to public and community archives with histories of collecting materials related to both the Paradise Valley and Black Bottom communities. These institutions included the Detroit Historical Society, The Digital Black Bottom Archives, and the Detroit Public Library.

When reviewing the mass of materials we found in each of their collections, we needed to determine what criteria would help us identify which resources best fit the scope of our budding collection. We aspired to find materials that could contextualize the community, music, and businesses associated with the Paradise Valley nightclubs. This led us to explore concert flyers, club advertisements, and photographs of concert attendees. As we reviewed the materials, Club 666, The Paradise Theater, The 606 Horseshoe Lounge, and The Flame Show Bar became our project scope highlighting businesses that were either Black-owned clubs or businesses that actively promoted Black performers in Detroit.

Target User Group: 

Our target user group is Michiganders who have a personal connection to, or a general interest, in the history of Paradise Valley businesses and their history. This could branch off into a few more specific interested groups: those who have lived experience, or know someone with lived experience in the neighborhood, those who are interested in learning more about the neighborhood who are encountering information gaps due to the gentrification and subsequent destruction of the neighborhood, and those who may be interested in the neighborhood’s rich history - including its crucial developing role in popular music and jazz. The purpose behind utilizing the archive would likely be for general entertainment or research purposes. We believe users will be looking for items that connect them to the community and history that existed in Paradise Valley, especially if their families existed in the neighborhood from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Our secondary users include: Detroit history enthusiasts, those interested in the history of popular music, genealogists, and advocacy groups. Our users purpose for accessing the archive would be to find items related to the music venues, or neighborhood in general, such as: location information, business history, performance history, menus, connections to artists, etc. Their needs would likely be balanced between needing engaging visual representation, detailed metadata, and interactive possibilities. Having accessibility features such as captions for videos and image descriptions would be important for users who need accessible audio and video components. Those who have lived experience in the Paradise Valley area are typically of advanced age, as the neighborhood was demolished in the late 1950s – early 1960s, so it is crucial that our work is accessible to everyone. To have accessible artifacts, we will utilize the AV plugins, thorough metadata, closed captions, and image description.

Perspectives: 

The perspectives included are rooted in past memories of Paradise Valley and include:

1. Club attendees, concertgoers, etc.
2. Paradise Valley business owners
3.  Performers
4. Those with archiving and Paradise Valley history interests and endeavors

The perspectives lost or unavailable in our archive are reflective perspectives about the business district. If we had more time to complete, and could work beyond the semester, we would collect oral histories that provide a more modern perspective of the impact of the Paradise Valley business district on the Black Detroit community and American popular music.