Oct 31, 2021
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...
Oct 24, 2021
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...
Oct 18, 2021
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...
Oct 10, 2021
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: dig a massive trench beneath the Detroit River current,
drop massive concrete tubes into the trench,...
Oct 3, 2021
The low-budget, upstart and, to some, shocking dance show on a pioneering African-American-owned TV station put a screenful of Detroit teenagers on the air every day. If you were of an age in the 1970s and 1980s, you watched. Today's Detroit History Podcast gives the back story of a most unlikely -- and important --...