Detroit’s North End has long been a majestic haven for music and other creative artistry, with African American roots stemming back to the late 1930s.
While Motown Records was once located on West Grand Blvd., less than two miles from the North End gateway, the storied record label’s headquarters – now the Motown Museum – generated dozens of recording artists and musicians in the 1960s, many of whom had strong ties to the city’s North End community. Such recording legends included William “Smokey” Robinson and several members of The Miracles, Diana Ross, some members of the Four Tops, the Vandellas, and more.
Non-Motown artists also lived in the North End, including the Franklin sisters – Aretha, Erma, and Carolyn. In addition, several members of the Dramatics, the Falcons, and R&B and soul songstress Bettye LaVette either lived in the North End or went to Northern High School. Many of Motown’s backing musicians lived in the community, including jazz pianist and composer Sir Roland Hanna and jazz pianist and saxophonist Teddy Harris, who was the music director for The Supremes for 16 years.
The North End is a community just north of the storied Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, both of which had been completely demolished in the name of urban development by the early 1960s. From around 1910 to the 1930s, African Americans migrating from the South to Detroit were mandated to live in Black Bottom/Paradis Valley by racial housing discrimination laws and restrictive covenants.
The North End boundaries – not including the Milwaukee Junction for this story – have largely been defined by Woodward Ave (west) to I-75 (east) to Woodland Street (north just outside the Highland Park border to East Grand Blvd (south).
As African Americans started leaving Black Bottom/Paradise Valley to move into the North End – somewhere in the late 1930s and well into the ‘40s, their music – blues, R&B, and jazz, moved with them to a community made up of European immigrants and Jewish people.
While Woodward Avenue was a major North End artery (going south to north), Oakland Avenue, by far, was the heart and soul beat of what propelled African Americans musically and socially and supplied the needs of a growing Black community.
“Oakland Ave. was alive,” veteran actor, producer, and North End native Lou Beatty Jr. told the Michigan Chronicle in an exclusive interview. “Oakland was alive every day, but on Friday and Saturday nights, the North End was vibrant with its incredible nightlife through the 40s, 50s, and ‘60s.”
Beatty rattled off numerous North End hot spots, which he said were electrifying back in the day, including the Champion Show Bar, Apex Bar, Club Zombie, Lee’s Sensations Club, and many more. However, perhaps the crown jewel of nightclubs on Oakland Ave. or anywhere else in the North End was Phelps Cocktail Lounge, formerly located at 9000 -9006 Oakland Ave. It was branded as the “Midwest’s Finest in Entertainment,” and lived up to its reputation, thanks to owner Edward Phelps, who bought the former Bizerte Jazz Bar in 1960 and converted it into Phelps Cocktail Lounge.
The soul music venue packed in thousands of people over its three decades of operation, booking top national acts in blues, R&B, and Funk, including, but was far from limited to B.B. King, Etta James, The Temptations, George Clinton’s Parliament, Nat King Cole, Otis Redding, Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Main Ingredient, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and hundreds more. The final show at Phelps was said to take place in 1980. After it closed, the nightspot sat abandoned and deteriorated for four decades. Several years ago, the music venue met the wrecking ball, leaving just a vacant lot and unlimited memories.
The Apex Bar, just south of where Phelps once stood on Oakland Ave., was a blues venue specializing in booking live “big-time” national artists in the 1940s, such as blues legends John Lee Hooker, Little Sonny, and Little Mack Collins. The Apex is closed, but the building still stands.
Beatty, who made his acting debut on the sit-com 227 in 1988 and has appeared in several dozen movies and television productions, was so enthralled with his life growing up in the North End that when he moved to Los Angeles, he ultimately wrote and presented a stage play called “Hold Onto Your Dream,” which he said is based on the life and times of people living in the North End, including its many singers, recording artists, musicians, and songwriters.
Beatty’s stage play was presented at the Wilshire Ebell in L.A., and the Millennium Centre in Southfield, Michigan, receiving raved reviews at both venues.
“When I was growing up in the North End, it was filled with singers and musicians that played jazz, blues, gospel, and R&B,” said Beatty, who over the last 13 years has been featured in such movies/television shows as Betty White’s Off Their Rockers (2012), A Million Little Things (2018), Domino: Battle of the Bones, (2012), and The Warrant: Breaker’s Law (2023).
Former print journalist and North End Native Edward Boyer also saw the North End as a vibrant community, especially its music. He moved to the community with his family in the mid-1940s and graduated from Northern High School in 1957.
“At Northern, Smokey Robinson and I both were in the choir, and the much larger chorus. We sang a full-length “Messiah” without a score,” said the journalist who has written for numerous print media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine. “George Shirley, who lived in the North End, also went to Northern High School. He was the first African American tenor to ever sing in a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera.”
North End was once the community where the legendary Black playwright Woody King Jr. lived as a youth. He later went to Will-O-Way School of Theatre in Bloomfield Hills before attending Wayne State University for postgraduate studies in theater. King co-founded Concept-East, a Black community-based theater company in Detroit, before serving as Director and founder of the New Federal Theatre in New York City, where he retired in 2021. King has written, produced, and directed more than 400 stage plays, both on and off-Broadway.
While the nightclubs of yesteryear are long gone from Oakland Ave., a newer brand of music emerged in the North End several decades ago: Techno. According to numerous sources, in the mid-to-late 1980s, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson – known as the Belleville Three, along with others were credited with producing the first wave of Detroit techno as a genre in their basements.
The North End is also home to the first Techno Museum in the United States, located at 3000 East Grand Blvd., further cementing Detroit’s North End’s place in the history of the genre. There is no signage to identify the museum. Those who are interested must email the date they are interested in touring the fascinating place in advance.
In addition to techno music, the North End is a growing hub for many impressive murals that are produced on brick facades throughout the community, telling stories of the community’s resilience, heritage, and hope. One of the most striking murals is “The Girl in D Earring,” created by artist Sydney G. James adorn on the western wall of the century-plus year old nine-story Chroma Building on East Grand Blvd., not far from the Techno Museum.
“The spirit, aura, and soul of Detroit is multifaceted,” James said in 2020. “From the wide range of music, visual arts, fashion, automotive innovation to everything in between, Detroit has been a city of culture creation. Culture and innovation creates figurative and literal ‘chroma’ – the purity and intensity of color. Though this piece is North End specific and it captures the personality of Detroit, the city.”
In addition, thanks to the work of Vanguard CDC with funding from the Kresge Foundation, much of East Grand Blvd., between Woodward Ave. and I-75, has been transformed through the beautification initiative called the North End’s East Grand Boulevard Transformation Project. The streets are pedestrian-friendly areas with planted flowers and trees, exterior displays of public art, colorful banners, eye-catching benches and swings, wayfinding signage, and creative crosswalks with more to come.
There are an array of art galleries and music venues in the North End, including Tangent Gallery & Hastings Street Ballroom. In addition, at 2900 East Grand Blvd, The Jam Handy Building, once a critically acclaimed film studio (1930s to the 1960s), put Detroit’s North End on the national map as the home for shooting and producing industrial and corporate training films, filmstrips, and other audiovisual platforms of the era. In mid-March 2025, Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II officially launched his 2026 campaign for governor at the former Jam Handy Studios.
In essence, the music and pulse of the North End continue to beat loudly and creatively with techno sounds, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Neo-soul, rock, gospel, and other urban experimental wave music.
“I want to merge some elements of my past stage play that featured people in the North End holding onto their dreams to stay,” said Beatty. “I also want to now produce a television series right here in the North End, showing those whose dreams have come to fruition. It will be about the resilience of people in the North End and their evolution and incredible identity of their proud past, present, and what the future holds.”
About Post Author
