For more than fifty years, Red’s Jazz Shoe Shine anchored the North End, functioning as both a cultural touchstone and a commercial hub. Though modest, the venue saw the city’s top performers, politicians, and other notables cross paths, a place where a shoeshine offered more than a polished pair of shoes—it provided cover for a speakeasy that saw regular visits from the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and Aretha Franklin. In collaboration with Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, Akoaki is working to resurrect this space, not as a mere relic of the past, but as a hybrid urban attractor—a place where the lines between service (shoeshine and cobbler), commerce (boutique), and social gathering (intimate performances and family-sized events) blur in a way that honors the history while inviting new possibilities.
2017
Funding/ Grants:
University of Michigan OVPR
Principals:
Anya Sirota, Jean Louis Farges
Design Team:
Christopher Campbell, Jonathan Watkins, Megan Mohney, Morgan Stackman