| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 31-May-01 05:27 PM
In Chattanooga, University Housing Revives a Decaying Neighborhood
But some residents of the once-vibrant black district are asking, at what cost?
By MARTIN VAN DER WERF
Chattanooga, Tenn.
Why is it in every city where there is a street named after Martin Luther King, it is the poorest, most neglected street in the city?"
Leroy Henderson icily poses the question from inside the Chattanooga African American Museum, where he works as education director. There are no visitors. The cool lobby echoes with his words.
Just beyond the lawn out front, cars are racing down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard like they are fleeing artillery fire. Thirty years ago, it was turned into a one-way street, making escape to the suburbs even faster, and giving people even fewer reasons to stop at any of the shops that once thrived here, in what was then the commercial and cultural center for African-Americans in a segregated city. Now those shops, a stone's throw from busy downtown Chattanooga, are in full decay.
"Closed" signs hang redundantly on paintless doors and greasy windows. A couple of nightclubs heat up on Friday night, and a numbers racket, according to local residents, still operates out of some members-only drinking clubs. After years of fires and neglect, however, there are nearly as many vacant lots on the boulevard as buildings.
Enter the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which, like a haughty aunt, has watched over this neighborhood from atop a rise two blocks away. Hemmed in by downtown and another historic neighborhood, the university has only had one direction to grow. So a wealthy local philanthropist has been not-so-quietly buying every piece of property that has come open between King Boulevard and the university, and has donated the land to a foundation that supports the college.
The institution is now building $70-million worth of new student apartments on that land and is also planning to build a new neighborhood elementary school. It will be the first new school here in decades -- local kids have long been bused elsewhere -- and may serve as a training ground for university students in a planned doctoral program in educational administration.
For the people in the 25-square-block M. L. King District, however, there are demons associated with the institution, and they are not easily dispelled. Until 1969 it was the University of Chattanooga, an elitist, segregated place. Local African-Americans shied away from the campus rather than face racial taunts. It became a branch of the state system that year, merging with all-black Chattanooga City College. But the mistrust lingered, and even as recently as 10 years ago, barely a tenth of the student body was African-American, and most of those students came from Memphis.
For more on this please read www.chronicle.com
|
