In the Neighborhood: Everyday Life on Hastings Street
Jewish Historical Society of Michigan
at the Detroit Historical Museum
Detroit, MI, 2024
Historic Immigrant Life, Recreated
For the first century of Detroit’s history, the Black Bottom neighborhood was the entry point of nearly every immigrant community seeking the American Dream in the rapidly growing city. Jewish immigrants, in particular, built a thriving marketplace and residential hub on Hastings Street. As with almost every American city, mid-20th Century urban policy, as led by largely white corporate and legal power, destroyed the minority center and scattered its communities. Hastings Street is now I-375, a trenched expressway.
When the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan teamed up with the Detroit Historical Museum to commemorate the Jewish community’s history in the city, they had discovered many powerful stories to tell, but they faced a challenge: the neighborhood and material culture that formed the setting for those stories had been lost to urban development.
Flutter & Wow partnered with the exhibit team, including exhibit designer, Eric Keller, to develop, design and recreate a sense of what life on Hastings Street was like for Jewish immigrants. We built a kosher butcher shop and recreated a tenement home right down to the custom, historic — distressed — wallpaper and potbelly stove.
The JHSM collected heirlooms and artifacts from regional families, and with additional support from the archives and collections of the Detroit Historical Museum, were able to curate an evocative exhibition of important and demonstrative objects. F&W designed a unique display for the immigrant family’s travel chest.
The result was an acclaimed and award-winning exhibition that immersed visitors in a time and place lost but not forgotten: life on Hastings Street as it was a century ago.