Black Bottom Street View (BBSV) is a project to visualize and help preserve the history of Detroit’s historic Black Bottom neighborhood. In 2018, BBA acquired the Black Bottom Street View (BBSV) project to bring the histories & the sacred spaces that were present in the neighborhood to Detroiters in real time. BBSV, named as a nod to Google street view’s similar capabilities, allows viewers to walk the streets of Black Bottom. The Burton Historic Collection at the Detroit Public Library has a collection of photographs of every house in a large area of Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood. The photos were taken from 1949 – 1950 by the City of Detroit as part of the eminent domain process. They show a snapshot of life in Black Bottom right before it was demolished. BBSV maps the Burton's photographs as panoramic images, so that visitors can explore the neighborhood as it was. Although this story remains underacknowledged, the rich history of Black Bottom persists in the memories of its former residents, and through the efforts of local historians and storytellers.

It is our mission is to build a platform for sharing family and community histories, and to promote the legacy of Black Bottom and the impact its residents have had on the city of Detroit and the whole of contemporary culture. As a traveling exhibit, with an accompanying oral history repository and digital archive, BBSV centers the long-gone neighborhood as it was before the “urban renewal” process that demolished the Black family homes, businesses, and cultural spaces there.

BBSV shows 20 blocks of the historic neighborhood with panoramas composed of over 2,000 archival photographs. Accompanied by a large, digitally recreated map of the neighborhood in 1951, two built “porches” offer a stage for the oral histories recordings, live storytelling and other programming.

In this contemporary era, where we are still seeing and experiencing mass displacement, demolitions, and major changes to Detroit’s urban fabric, it is critical to learn from our city’s history through centering and amplifying the story of Black Bottom. BBSV is an opportunity to share important lost histories. It challenges our communities to make important connections between historical practices of disposability & disinvestment that displaced Black communities then & the conditions we see in our communities today. We want to advance our preservation priorities by expanding our capacity to make this traveling exhibit more accessible and sustainable.