The Detroit History Podcast: Recent Episodes
The Detroit History Podcast
The Detroit History Podcast. We’ll look at this city’s history, telling the story through this town’s cultural, social, political, musical and automotive heritage.
The Michigan Central Station reopening has given Detroit a great story to tell, specifically: how we took a wreck of a building and turned it into something glorious. The Detroit History Podcast takes a dive into how the place slid into such disrepair. Spoiler alert: maybe the station is a symbol of something bigger. Times...
As a child growing up in metro Detroit during the 1970s and 1980s, Curtis Chin watched the world go by from an unusual vantage point. His family owned Chung’s, a popular Chinese restaurant in the Cass Corridor, which enjoyed a 60-year run before closing in 2000. Chin, now a nationally recognized author, has written about...
The Ford Motor Company had momentum going into the mid-1950s: a young Henry Ford II, who inherited the CEO job from his grandfather roughly a decade earlier, was reversing the company’s fortunes. But then, the company laid the biggest egg in automotive history. It introduced the Edsel in 1957. Despite working with the best brains...
On a fall day in 1830, convicted wife killer Stephen Simmons was hung in downtown Detroit. His execution was as public as anything could be. Bleachers were set up on three sides of the scaffold, as people came from miles around to witness the execution. Maybe they didn’t like what they saw, because Michigan soon...
Here’s where Detroit was, art-wise, in 1917: a middling art museum on the east edge of downtown Detroit, with little to attract notice. We tell the story of the next 10 years, when the entire world began to pay attention. The magnificent Detroit Institute of Arts building on Woodward went up, with paintings by the...
The Blue Bird Inn was a cathedral of musical wonder in 1950s-era Detroit. This now-defunct west side club featured bebop jazz, featuring musicians such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Barry Harris, Thad Jones, and a longer list of jazz masters. The place was pretty much abandoned a few decades ago, but a local preservation group...
A group of soldiers from metro Detroit and Michigan boarded a trip ship bound for war-torn Europe during the closing months of World War I. Instead, they were diverted to Russia, just south of the Arctic Circle. They battled the Bolsheviks, who had just deposed Russia’s Czar. They fought in temperatures as low as 40-below...
The Sheik (real name: Edward Farhat) was the most feared bad guy in Detroit wrestling during the 1960s and 1970s. He threw fire. He cut his opponent. He bit them, often winning with his “camel clutch.” His business model was simple: to behave in such a vile manner that people would pay money to watch...
It’s been 5 years since the Detroit History Podcast originally released their podcast on the 1957 NFL champion Detroit Lions. Much has changed with Lions brass in the past few years, and it has finally led to post-season success in the Motor City. The Detroit History Podcast revisits the improbable run the 1957 team made...
Ketamine has found wide uses since the 1960s: as a painkiller, an anesthetic, a street drug consumed at raves, and — now — considered by many to be an exciting new treatment for depression. We explore how ketamine was developed here in Detroit, at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, with help from a Wayne State University...
Newscaster Fran Harris’s life was a lifetime of firsts. She was the first woman newscaster in Detroit radio during World War II, persuading her bosses at WWJ to abandon its “guys only” tradition. And when television came along in Detroit on Channel 4 in 1946, she was on the air for that, too. When she...
A longstanding community called Mexicantown on Detroit’s southwest side has persevered for around a century. The area of restaurants, shops, and bakeries anchors a key ethnic community in Detroit. For many, the journey here was prompted by a search for jobs. We explore the rise of the community, and the decline when Depression-era policies due...
Thousands of phonograph records were destroyed, as were thousands of needles used on the old-style record players. Teenage sleuths were conducting their own investigations in the great conspiracy theory of the fall of 1969: Beatle Paul McCartney had died, but that his death was covered up. However, as the theory went, clues could be found...
Sometime in the mid-1940s, an Italian immigrant bar owner by the name of Gus Guerra started making pizzas in his joint to bring in a few extra dollars. Decades later, Gus’s creation is big business, and world-renowned. Detroit Style Pizza is being served up in uber hip places in Brooklyn. The big chains are in...
It was horrific, even by the low standards of the urban drug trade. Three dead bodies found in a van on Detroit’s east side one night in 1979. All three had been decapitated. We explore the street politics that led to the massacre. And we tell the story of Frank “Nitti” Usher, a crime lord...
The beginnings of Detroit are inaccurately pinned to the arrival of Cadillac on these shores in 1701, but there were various Native American tribes in the area for centuries before that. Thousands of years ago, people came over on a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. The earliest indigenous people around Detroit were suspected to...
Smack in the middle of the Civil War, Detroit experienced a riot that was characterized as “the most brutal and bloody riot that ever disgraced any community.” A local bar owner, Thomas Faulkner, who was thought to be African-American (he wasn’t) went to trial in March, 1863 on sexual assault charges. The accuser was a...
On a cold winter day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, some 3,000 or more people met at a park on Detroit’s southwest side. They hoped to march to Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant to present a list of demands to Henry Ford. By modern day standards, those demands weren’t all that...
Joe Louis may have been the most famous person to come out of Detroit. He arrived here in the mid-1920s as part of the Great Migration, that influx of African-Americans who came north to escape the Jim Crow South. When he took up boxing as a teenager, there was no stopping him. He became heavyweight...
Jeff Montgomery was a born activist who played an important role in saving Orchestra Hall. When a hate crime brought tragedy to his personal life, he channeled his talent and drive to working on behalf of the LBGTQ+ community. His stellar career and sad decline are documented in America You Kill Me, which lost its major...
Between 1955 and 1974, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed like a possibility. We armed ourselves by placing Nike Missiles around many major cities across the U.S. — including 16 in and around metro Detroit. Six of them — including one on Belle Isle — were outfitted with nuclear warheads. A nuke on...
Hank Greenberg, who entered the Hall of Fame as one of the greatest hitters in the game’s history, was the first Jewish star in team sports. He interrupted his baseball career to serve longer in World War II than any other major league player, and led the Tigers to World Series championships before and after...
GM spied on a gadfly and got caught. It was the ’60s, and it changed the auto industry forever. When consumer advocate Ralph Nader began hounding Detroit to produce safer cars, the world’s largest corporation took affront and went snooping. Its chairman, James Roche, had to apologize in the U.S. Senate chambers. Ralph Nader’s rise...
Barely two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order #9066. Some 120,000 Japanese Americans in this country’s western states were ordered into internment camps. We report on the order, and the post-war period. When the camps were finally emptied out after the war, some 1,000 came to Detroit. We...
James Vernor invented his ginger ale in downtown Detroit just after the Civil War. More than 15 decades later, we’re still fans. The Detroit History Podcast tells the story of this enduringly popular soft drink. You thought Vernor Highway in southwest Detroit was named after the drink? Actually (spoiler alert), it was his work in...
For decades, segregation forced African-Americans migrating from the South to Detroit into one neighborhood: “Black “Bottom,” an area just east of downtown, which is now Lafayette Park. Urban renewal plowed the neighborhood under in the 1950s, destroying what had been a thriving place that gave the world Joe Louis and Coleman Young. But the memory...
Waiter, is there a ghost in my soup? The Whitney, one of Detroit’s great restaurants, began life as a grand 19th Century mansion. David Whitney, one of Michigan’s richest lumber barons, would be startled to learn not only that the public is dining on Faroe Island salmon and shrimp and scallop sauté in his Woodward...
An underwater tale of two cities. With the auto industry booming and with Detroit’s population surging in the 1920s, we needed a way to get people and car parts back and forth between Detroit and Windsor. The solution: Just dig a massive trench beneath the Detroit River current, drop massive concrete tubes into the trench,...