Caption By Joyce Dallas
Mark Twain is the only public school still located within the Boynton–Oakwood Heights neighborhoods. Formerly known as the Frances G. Boynton School, it was built in 1926. In the 2011–12 school year, Mark Twain enrolled 277 students.
Caption By Al Poe and Rosa Maria Zamarron
Brown’s Bun Baking Co. has been serving various restaurants, food services, sports stadiums and institutions in Detroit and beyond since 1929. Their 30,000 square foot production facility is located in the heart of Southwest Detroit on Vernor and Ferdinand near Junction. The wholesale operation is now being run by the founding family’s 4th generation who bakes and delivers Brown’s baking products daily.
Caption By Joyce Dallas
The view from the Downing/Omaha block of South Deacon Street looking toward Omaha and Visger Road. This area, once home to Slovak and Italian immigrants, became a thriving African American community in the 1950s.
Caption By Joyce Dallas
People’s Bakery on Fort Street is a Southwest Detroit institution. Founded as Cephuses Bakery by Berthonius and Gertrude Cephus in the 1950s, Eugene, Mack and James Peoples took the helm upon the Cephuses retirement. Noted for their sweet potato pies, dinner rolls and cakes, People’s Bakery attracts customers from all over Detroit.
For the past year community members, friends, and visitors of Inside Southwest Detroit have been documenting their neighborhoods using a series of hashtags on social media sites. Some have been trained to do so. Others have shared what they learned with friends. Several specific groups have had trainings on how to document and archive their work. And still others have just done so because they’ve seen others doing it. Inside Southwest Detroit has been promoting, following, and archiving this documentation via Instagram by creating a series of hashtags for communities, groups, and individuals that publish hourly to the website to create collections of photos that tell stories. Together these collections of photos and the words that accompany them are creating narratives about the people and places of Southwest Detroit.
