Budget & hostels / Detroit
Norwood Hotel
Closed – archive entry
A Paradise Valley hotel on East Adams that gave Black travelers a bed when downtown hotels turned them away, listed in the Green Book from 1938 to 1962.
03 / The story of this place
What was here?
The Norwood was one of the Paradise Valley hotels where Black travelers could sleep when downtown hotels turned them away, and the Negro Motorist Green Book listed it from the Detroit section's first year, 1938, through 1962. The same address, 550 East Adams, shows up for the Dunbar Hotel in guides of 1930–41 and for the Club Plantation nightclub, which billed itself in its 1935–36 souvenir booklet as 'Detroit's smartest sepia night club' and appeared in Green Books of 1938–49. Paradise Valley's clubs drew stars like Duke Ellington and the Ink Spots, and Black entertainers playing elsewhere in Michigan stayed in the Valley. Freeway building and urban renewal from the 1940s on erased the district.
- Green Book listing 1938–1962
- Same address as the Club Plantation
- In the heart of Paradise Valley
- Green Book
- Listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, the travel guide that showed Black travelers where they could stay safely during segregation.
- What’s there now?
- The building is gone; the heart of Paradise Valley around Adams and St. Antoine was cleared by urban renewal and later development near Ford Field.
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