Once an LGBTQ hub, Detroit considers options for new gay business district

On Monroe Street, not too far from where the One Campus Martius building sits now in downtown Detroit, was the site of the city’s first gay bar, Club Frontenac. 

Opening in 1936, the establishment was the first place patrons didn’t have to conceal their identity, guide Michael Boettcher explained to a group of 10 on a recent edition of his Detroit Comes Out Tour, where he takes an extensive look at the city’s rich LGBTQ history. At a time where drag parties were becoming popular across the country, Club Frontenac became a hot spot but only lasted for seven years before it closed down in 1943. 

Other LGBTQ bars began popping up downtown around the same time, Bottecher said. The first lesbian bar in town, Sweetheart Bar, opened in 1939 on Third Street and in the mid-1940s, Club 509 launched on Woodward. And popular Detroit bars today like the Checker and the Detroiter bars were once LGBTQ haunts. 

Club 1011, which opened in the 1940s on Farmer Street, became a premier spot for the community, Boettcher said. 

“The 1011 was opened by a gay couple, and it became the anchor of the neighborhood,” he said. “They did female impersonation in the 40s, which was against the law, so they had to keep quiet. During World War II, they would give themselves names like ‘Miss Victory Garden’ and things like that.” 

Once a hub for the LGBTQ community, with dozens of bars, restaurants and other businesses, Detroit now has 8 queer spaces today, according to Kevin Heard, the founder of the Detroit Regional LGBT Chamber of Commerce. To stop Detroit’s vibrant LGBTQ scene from becoming a thing of the past, he’s working to create one centralized LGBTQ business district in the city where members of the community can shop, eat and play.

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The chamber has partnered with Rocket Companies, New Economy Initiative, the City of Detroit and others on distributing a survey, which was released in June. The 10-minute survey asks participants for their race, gender and sexual orientation as well as questions on whether their city is LGBTQ friendly and if they believe Detroit is LGBTQ friendly. Participants’ responses are confidential and they do not need to give their name or email to respond to the survey. As of Wednesday, 1,041 people have completed the survey, with 850 of those responses coming from LGBTQ community members in metro Detroit, Heard said. He plans to close the survey by Labor Day and have the results by October. 

“It’s a survey that will serve multiple purposes,” he said. “The chamber will be able to prioritize resources and services in certain areas in which a lot of the respondents live. In addition to that, we’ll be able to hopefully move into phase two, which will be focus groups and phase three, which would be a site selection for the area.” 

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were four dozen gay bars in the city. Now, there’s a fraction of that within Detroit, Heard said. Some of those places include Good Cakes and Bakes on the Avenue of Fashion, downtown wine bar The Royce and historic gay bars Menjo’s in Palmer Park and Gigi’s in the Warren Avenue Community. Detroit recently lost the Midtown LGBTQ haven Temple Bar, which is closed indefinitely after the building partially collapsed in May. 

Heard hopes the district can become a thriving area like the Avenue of Fashion on Livernois and Seven Mile, which has a mix of Black-owned restaurants, bars and shops.

Creating an inclusive environment 

An LGBTQ business district could be a boost to Detroit’s economy. 

According to small business network Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), LGBTQ small businesses contribute $1.7 trillion to the American economy each year. In addition, the LGBTQ community holds an estimated purchasing power of $917 billion dollars in the US. 

“I believe if there was a collective area where people know that this entire area is safe for you, your family, your friends that are coming from out of town – that foot traffic, that intentionality, will create a sustainable neighborhood,” Heard said. 

To distribute the survey, the chamber reached out to LGBTQ groups and institutions in the area, such as Motor City Pride, Corktown Health, LGBT Detroit, the Ruth Ellis Center and the City of Detroit’s LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group (ERG). In addition, LGBTQ research firm Community Marketing and Insights have also sent out the survey to people in the area who have previously taken similar studies. 

Greg Everett, vice president of programs at Corktown Health, is one of the people who has taken the survey and is supportive of a business district. He said Detroit needs to catch up to other big cities with gay neighborhoods like New York City and Chicago. 

Everett would like to see a district in Palmer Park, which has historically been a gay neighborhood. Everett said he could also envision a district downtown or in West Village where he lives.

“It’s one of the most diverse places I’ve lived in and there’s a lot of LGBT and LGBT-friendly people in the neighborhood,” he said. And you already have businesses like the Red Hook, Metropolitan Bar and Marrow and they have Pride flags hanging in the windows.” 

Nazarina Mwakasege, the director of development and advancement at the Ruth Ellis Center, doesn’t have a particular neighborhood in mind but would like to see the district set along Woodward since it’s already a commercial corridor in the city and close to LGBTQ spaces like the center and Affirmations in Ferndale. 

She wants the district to have affordable food and clothing establishments, as well as health and fitness centers. 

“It’s really about what’s best for the community…as well as what could support some of our most vulnerable people within the LGBTQ community, something that is affirming,” Mwakasege said. 

With club and record shop Spot Lite being one of the few queer spaces in Detroit she hangs out at, Mwakasege is looking forward to seeing even more LGBTQ places in the city. She also hopes the district can be a model for spaces that define themselves as inclusive. 

“This is an incredible city and the beauty of it is not only its resilience and just how scrappy it is, but it’s also quite innovative and very progressive in ways that a lot of environments aren’t,” Mwakasege said. “I just want to see this beautiful community shine, all parts of it. I want to see Detroit get what it deserves, and it deserves to be shown as the brilliant star that it really, truly is.” 

LGBT Detroit Director A. Nzere Kwabena has not completed the survey yet, but said he’s eager to see an LGBTQ district in the city. He can see a business district doing well in neighborhoods like Bagley, Morningside and Russell Woods, where more LGBTQ families are planting their roots. 

“My hope is that whatever is decided, it would bring in economic opportunities to people who would come to visit and shop and I’m hoping that the survey would help guide that,” Kwabena said. 

After the survey is closed, the chamber plans to analyze the results, share them with their partners and conduct a focus group with additional questions, Heard said. When the work with the focus group is completed, the organization will put out a Request For Proposals for a market analysis company to assist with the site selection. The process of building a full district will likely take between five to 10 years, Heard said, but he’s hoping the first parcel can be purchased by 2026. 

“They have the ability to look at open parcels or open buildings in the area and use the survey responses to pinpoint their site selection,” he said. “When we pinpoint the top three areas the survey results state…we will be going into a capital campaign to acquire properties in that area and lease to new and existing LGBT-owned businesses within the space or whoever has a sustainable business model that is going to be friendly to the LGBT community.” 

The rise and fall of Detroit’s ‘gayborhood’  

While Ferndale and Royal Oak are known as hubs for the LGBTQ community locally, Detroit does not currently have an obvious “gayborhood.” In Chicago, there’s Northalsted and Andersonville; in Columbus, the Short North; and in New York City, there are several neighborhoods like Chelsea, Greenwich Village and Hell’s Kitchen. 

But Detroit hasn’t always been without a gay neighborhood. From the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the Palmer Park neighborhood off of McNichols and Woodward was home to many in the community. After World War II, the original hub for LGBTQ folks was downtown, which had several gay bars, according to WDET. But by the 1950s, they began moving northward. 

Tim Retzloff, an LGBTQ+ historian and adjunct professor at Michigan State University, said Palmer Park may have been an attractive area for the community due to the residential part of the neighborhood consisting of more than 50 apartment buildings. Plus, the park itself was a place for gay men to hang out as early as the 1950s. 

“Detroit, unlike New York or Chicago, doesn’t have a lot of apartment districts, but the Palmer Park district certainly has lots of buildings and they’re also architecturally distinct,” Retzloff said. 

A number of gay bars were also opening in and around Palmer Park at that time. Samuel “Bookie” Stewart managed and owned several gay-friendly establishments in Detroit starting in the 1940s, Retzloff said. In 1970, he purchased a former jazz supper club at 870 W. McNichols in Palmer Park, naming it Bookie’s Club 870. The bar and rock club became another hangout spot for the gay community. 

Besides Bookie’s, other gay-friendly establishments in the area included Tiffany’s, Ted’s on the Park, The Gas Station, Backstage, The Glass House, Chosen Books, the headquarters of Metro Gay News and Metropolitan Community Church, Retzloff said. The only bar left over from Palmer Park’s vibrant club scene is Menjo’s. And in the 1970s, a future pop star used to “get into the groove” on the dance floor. 

“It’s where a dance instructor named Christopher Flynn took one of his star students, Madonna, clubbing and she had her first exposure to gay nightlife at Menjo’s,” Retzloff said. 

By May 1977, the growing gay neighborhood had caught the attention of mainstream media like the Detroit Free Press. The Free Press article claimed that 3,000 people lived in Palmer Park, with estimates that the gay population was about half of that number. The neighborhood was a hot spot for single people – students, young professionals, the retired and the elderly. 

But by the mid-to-late 1980s, white people began leaving Palmer Park for the suburbs. Ratzloff believes it was because the older Baby Boomers were ready to settle down and buy a home. Another large factor was the increase in crime in the neighborhood, such as carjackings and murders. 

“HIV and AIDS certainly was becoming a factor as well,” Ratzloff said. “Some people were dying in metro Detroit, so you had people who lived in Palmer Park pass away.” 

However, the area has since become a hub for the Black LGBTQ community, Kwabena said. LGBT Detroit, originally known as Kick Publishing Company when it was created in 1994, became the third Black LGBTQ media company in the country. The following year, Kick began its annual multi-day pride event Hotter Than July, which usually includes a picnic at Palmer Park. Kwabena said more than 3,000 people attended this year’s event, coming from as far away as California, the United Kingdom and South Africa. 

“You saw this new kind of occurrence where people felt safe and so I’m very proud to be a part of that experience. We picked up the ball and LGBT Detroit continues to pick up the ball,” he said. 

Wanting to be seen, heard and valued 

Brian George, who attended the Detroit Comes Out tour, said he wants the district to be anywhere but downtown. Like Everett, he wouldn’t mind seeing a district in Palmer Park.

“The city outside of downtown needs a lot more support and more incentives for businesses to come in and bring residents and bring tax dollars as well as bring infrastructure improvements from the city for their businesses,” George said. “They (city officials) are doing the city a huge disservice by focusing all their efforts downtown. It’s time to expand their interests to the rest of the city.” 

George wants a neighborhood where he can hang out at a cafe, get a bite to eat from a restaurant, do some clothes shopping, or pop into a souvenir shop. While he lives in West Bloomfield, George wants there to be other LGBTQ destinations besides Ferndale. 

“I’d like it to be a holistic community that provides services in response to the needs of the people that live there,” he said. 

Creating an LGBTQ district is a full-circle moment for Heard. He remembers going to a meeting at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center in 2013 with 26 other people discussing plans on building a district. Nothing came to fruition at that time, but Heard and four others created the LGBT Chamber of Commerce shortly after. 

Since he moved back to Detroit from Atlanta 12 years ago, Heard said the environment has changed towards LGBTQ businesses in the city, as people have become more accepting. But Heard is still seeing people leave Detroit and Michigan for more inclusive places, even if that city has a higher cost of living. 

“They want to be built, seen, heard and valued, and they want those spaces. So, why not create or curate several spaces within the city of Detroit?,” he said. “We have the opportunity here with one of the largest LGBTQ legislation caucuses in any state across the nation. It’s time that we do this.” 

Kwabena said he hopes the survey is providing an opportunity for people to get their voices heard. 

“I want the survey to capture the data needed to think about what the citizens would like to see in their neighborhoods and their districts and it also gives an opportunity for those who want to engage in that effort. That’s what I’m hoping to see.”