About this archive
Jim Janas — Jimmy j — published ghettovoices.com from August 2000 until late 2010: poetry, quotes, photographs of his neighborhood, and a journal he kept nearly daily. He wrote from Detroit’s East Side, around Kilbourne Street, Hayes and Haverhill, Gratiot and 7 Mile.
The site disappeared from the web years ago. In July 2026 this memorial was assembled from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: 271 archived pages were recovered across three generations of the site (the original 2000–2001 pages, the 2002–2004 static site, and the Blogger-era journal), together with 33 of Jim’s photographs — every image the archive preserved.
What was recovered
What is lost
Roughly 75 poem pages were never crawled by the archive — their titles survive on the index pages, but the texts are gone. Two of the Quotes (“The Mind” and “What Color”) and most of the photo pages’ larger images are among them. The blog was also quiet, or its months uncaptured, from mid-2005 through early 2007 and during 2008.
Sources
In the ghetto amongst the dope houses and garbage both laying in the street and walking the street; many damn good people live. Never forget that when you view my site. — Jimmy j