By Rod Arroyo
Just north of Detroit’s Paradise Valley entertainment and business district, the Sugar Hill neighborhood became one of the Midwest’s most important jazz and blues districts. The neighborhood name was likely borrowed from the Sugar Hill area of Harlem, which was where many central figures in the Harlem Renaissance lived. It was a location where sweet, good things happened.
Sugar Hill packed in more than a dozen clubs into a few square blocks along John R (known as the “Street of Music”), Hastings, Brush, and Garfield between the early 1930s and the 1950s. Sparked by the end of Prohibition in 1933, new clubs sprouted. The district’s roots ran through venues like the Rhythm Club, which opened at 301 E. Warren in 1933 and hosted bands such as the Carolina Cotton Pickers, and the MDL Club on Livingstone, founded that same year as the Michigan Democratic League before cycling through identities as the Chocolate Bar and, by 1938, the Cotton Club. Also in 1933, the Harlem Cave, 4412 Brush Street, made its debut. These early spots set the pattern that would define Sugar Hill for the next two decades: small, densely packed rooms where local bands thrived, national acts sometimes headlined, and the cradle of the Motown sound evolved.
The Black-Owned Anchors
Black entrepreneurship was central to the neighborhood’s identity. Sunnie Wilson, later celebrated as the “mayor” of Paradise Valley, created an entertainment empire that included the Swamp Room inside the Mark Twain Hotel at 52 Garfield and the Forest Club on E. Forest Avenue, which Wilson claimed was the largest Black-owned club in Michigan — a 107-foot bar, a bowling alley, a skating rink, and a ballroom that drew Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Woody Herman. A few blocks away, Randolph Wallace built his own small empire on Garfield and John R, opening the Garfield Lounge and Hotel in 1945, adding the Wal-ha Room in 1950, and, after a fire destroyed his original hotel, rebuilding as the Randora Hotel and New Garfield Lounge in 1954. On Hastings Street, Mac Ivey’s Cozy Corner stood out, featuring floor shows with the sound of trumpeter Bill Johnson’s band, whose lineup included drummer J.C. Heard and pianist Sammy Price.
The “Black and Tan” Clubs
Sugar Hill was also home to a cluster of so-called “Black and Tan” clubs — venues, often Jewish-owned or Black-owned, that welcomed integrated audiences at a time when much of the city remained segregated. The Chesterfield Lounge on John R booked a young Amos Jacobs, later famous as Danny Thomas; the Frolic Show Bar, owned by Hymie and Bennie Gastman, hosted Louis Armstrong and Dinah Washington; the Harlem Cave on Brush Street, run by Little Sammy Brandt and Morris Wasserman and managed by Sunnie Wilson, became a be-bop hangout in the 1940s with an unlikely link to the Purple Gang through Brandt’s marriage; and the Parrot Lounge on E. Canfield was famous almost as much for the parrot perched over its bar — including one trained to sing opera — as for the music inside, booked by agent Al Green.
The Flame Show Bar: Cradle of Motown
No club, though, loomed larger than the Flame Show Bar, another “Black and Tan” club. Opened by Morris Wasserman on June 24, 1949, at 4264 John R, the 250-seat Flame became the city’s premier show bar, with a house band led by Maurice King and the Wolverines backing a run of performers that reads like a jazz hall of fame: Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Betty Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, and, in 1963, a 20-year-old Aretha Franklin making her first Detroit club appearance during a ten-day engagement, only a few blocks from where her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, preached. The Flame’s deepest legacy, though, is its role as an incubator for Motown: talent agent Al Green, a partner and manager at the club, introduced Berry Gordy Jr. to Jackie Wilson, launching a songwriting partnership that produced hits like “Lonely Teardrops,” and many of the house band musicians became part of the Funk Brothers, the Studio A backing band on so many Motown hits. These connections, forged at the Flame, are what many historians point to as the true cradle of the Motown sound.
A Vanished District
By the 1950s, urban renewal had begun tearing through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, followed by freeway construction and the expansion of Detroit’s Medical Center in the 1960s and 1970s. One by one, these clubs — from the Ace Bar on Hastings to the Tuxedo Grill and the rest — closed or were demolished. Mapping them together restores a sense of just how concentrated and vibrant these few blocks of Detroit once were, and how much of the city’s musical DNA, Motown included, traces back to these places.
