The rise and fall of a vital commercial hub is the focus of the program “Detroit Chene Street History Project: A Conversation with Marian Krzyzowski, Deborah Dash Moore and Karen Majewski.”

The Institute for the Humanities presentation is from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery. Since 2002, the Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy at the University of Michigan has been conducting a study of Detroit’s Chene Street. It cuts through the east side of Detroit from the Detroit River to the General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant.

Chene Street was home to hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses, many run by immigrant families. Many came to fill the 100,000 automotive industry jobs within walking distance of neighborhoods along its length. Today, Chene Street and its surrounding blocks are among the most devastated and depopulated in the city. The project team has accumulated several hundred oral histories, scanned thousands of photographs and other documents, and tracked real estate records to provide a revealing, detailed story.

Krzyzowski is the director of the Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy at U-M. Majewski is the mayor of Hamtramck and a project manager at U-M’s’s Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy. Dash Moore is the director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History at U-M.