Whose history?
America’s experience with urban renewal is national and local, political and personal. The estimated 1,600 neighborhoods demolished by urban renewal nationwide displaced millions of Blacks, along with many thousands of Whites, Italians, Hispanics, and Jews. If any photo on this map is of a place you know – your old neighborhood’s corner store, your old home, or the church you used to know – comment beneath with your memories.
Most writing about cities comes from the perspective of those in power. Politicians and newspapers only record what they think deserves to be remembered. Academics write about cities from the comfortable isolation of the university’s gated community. But it is the testimony and writing of the rest of society that animates urban history and brings history to life in new ways. These are the voices of the less powerful, the working classes, immigrants, and victims of urban renewal.
This is a website of essays and photographs illustrating the extent of urban decay: Baptist churches and tenements demolished, highways sliced through the urban form, and entire neighborhoods cleared for parking lots. But what did these places mean to the people who lived there before? From the perspectives of the university academics, realtors, and politicians who created redlining maps in the 1930s, these neighborhoods were Black, blighted, and not worth saving. But beauty and meaning are in the eyes of those who live and work there. To make this website meaningful, and to transform this website from a collection of photographs into a collection of memories, you are invited to contribute.
Media contact
Myles Zhang, mylesz@umich.edu
Support
I am covering all costs associated with creating and maintaining this website. This includes annual recurring fees to rent storage space on servers. This also includes the value of my own labor for the several hundred hours it took to create this website. To express your support and to ensure this website remains active for years to come,
donations are welcome through PayPal.
The Belmont neighborhood on June 18, 1961
Looking down northeast from 10th floor Martland
And the identical view on September 24, 1967
Looking northeast from roof City Hospital, leveled area Hunterdon Street (foreground) to Bruce Street (distance, West Market Street (left) to Cabinet Street (right)
