The neighborhood where Yvonne Townsend grew up doesn’t exist anymore, but she has done her best to recreate it.
She collects in a binder photos of houses on her old block of Clyde Street. On an afternoon inApril, the 74-year-oldlaid the pictures out on the floor in the order they lined the street.
“Just how it looked,” she said.
Her childhood home, street and neighborhood have been gone for more than six decades, destroyed by slum clearance done in the name of urban renewal. The photos are among her only tangible relics from an area known colloquially as “the Bottoms.”
“We’ve lost except what we can remember,” Townsend said, looking down at a photo of adolescent girls posing at the Hamblin Community Center, a place where she spent a considerable amount of time as a kid.
Today, what was once the Bottoms is a cascade of American flags and automobiles that line Dickman Road,part of the "Magnificent Motor Mile."
Kellogg Arena sits on land where the Kalamazoo River once flowed, before it was re-routed as part of a flood control project undertakenin response tothe last of the area's great floods.
That flood, combined with a controversial urban redevelopment plan, would mark the beginning ofthe end for one of Battle Creek's first predominately black neighborhoods.
As years pass, fewer former residents of the Bottoms remain to tell its story, still fewer who knew it as adults. But there are ongoing effortsto keep its memory alive and share the tightly-knit community's place in the city’s history.
HISTORY OF THE BOTTOMS
The Bottoms was located in a low land area called “The Flats,” resting along the southern bank of the Kalamazoo River between the Washington Heights and Goguac Prairie neighborhoods.
The Flats were among the last sections of Battle Creek to be settled. In the 1880s, large factories were the first to occupy the land, bringing with them a demand for unskilled labor and immigrant workers who sought homes close to their jobs.
By 1910, Battle Creek's population of 25,267 included just 575 African-Americans. Blacks continued to migrate to the city at the prospect of new jobs createdwhen white laborersleft to fight in World War I.
By World War II, 21 percent of the city's black populationresided in the Bottoms, the highest concentration for any neighborhood in the city at that time.
In 1942, a wooden-frame house at 242 Hamblin Ave. was built to serve as a U.S.O. club for the African-American soldiers stationed at Battle Creek’s Ft. Custer. It became a gathering place for troops and for the city's black communityduring the war, hosting dances and entertainers. Heavyweight champion Joe Lewis is said to have made an appearance there in 1943.
After the war, the club was purchased by the city, incorporated into the municipal recreation program and renamed the Hamblin Community Center. Under the leadership of the late Julia Milner, who directed the center from 1948 until 1963, it held its reputation as aplace of social activity for the city’s black community.
“That was the place to be,” Townsend said. “If you were bad or didn’t do what you were supposed to, you couldn’t come. (Mrs. Milner) was strict, but everybody respected her. It wasn’t a hangout place. You couldn’t go in and out. We had cooking classes, dances, roller skating, talent shows, dinners, movies. That was the only entertainment we had. It was where our parents went to socialize on the upscale.”
Minority-owned businesses such as Chicken Charlie’s at 162 S. Washington St., the Bellman’s and Waiter’s Club at 86 Capital Ave. SW (the current site of Full Blast) and the El Grotto Lounge at 84 S. Kendall St. served as local landmarks. There’s debate about whether these establishments were located in the Bottoms —the boundaries ofthe neighborhood often depend on who you ask — but they were certainly part of the cultural and economic fabric of the area.
Katherine Walker, 84, grew up on Liberty Street. And, while African-American families like hers eventually became the majority in the working-class neighborhood, she says emphatically, “The Bottoms was not segregated.”
“We lived with, played with and went to school with our neighbors. The white children, there were never any fights with them. We just had a good time,” she added. “It was nice growing up in the Bottoms. We didn’t have a lot. We didn’t think that we were poor. We were poor, but we didn’t know it. Our parents took good care of us, sent us to school clean.”
Jefferson Elementary School at 185 Capital Ave. SW was the school of choice for many Bottoms residents. That’s where Frances Tatley became the city’s first African-American teacher. Mattye Vest, who taught in Albion and was the first African-American teacher in Calhoun County, would later join her on the staff in 1947. The place where it stood isnow the site of The Pancake House.
Between 1920 and 1950, census records show that Battle Creek’s African-American population nearly quadrupled from 1,055 to an estimated 5,000, due in large part to the Great Migration of rural black families in the South to urban cities in the Midwest.
Betty Moorehead, 76, said her family moved to the Bottoms in 1950 after living in a house that once hadbeenslave quarters in Ripley, Mississippi.
“When I moved to Michigan, it was so exciting,” Moorehead said. “I always thought Bottoms was just fabulous because it was better than Mississippi where I lived.”
Moorehead was 7 at the time, and her family of five stayed at a rooming house for several weeks, before eventually settling in a house on the corner of McCamly and Liberty Street.
“It was a great time for me learning to get along with everyone,” Moorehead said. “My mother always taught me that everybody was the same, and I looked forward to going to school with the Caucasian race.
“Everything I remember about it was positive. It was a close-knit community where everybody seemed to take care of each other. It was a wonderful place to live.”
An influx of black families combined with white-flight and suburbanization contributed to the evolving racial makeup of the Bottoms in the 1940s. But it wasn’t until after the flood of 1947 that it became a predominately black neighborhood.
"IT JUST RAINED AND RAINED"
It was the day before Easter in 1947, and Walker could see the water coming.
"At the corner of Washington and Liberty Streetwas a meat market called Doyle’s,"she recalled."They had a mailbox on the corner, and we watched that water come down Liberty from the east, and we watched it go all the way up that mailbox. And it just rained and rained.”
Major floods had hit the citybefore:in 1869, 1887, 1904, 1908 and in 1912. Still, the low-lyingBottoms neighborhood was ill-equipped to handle the flood waters. The rain went on for days.
The city’s director of public services reported that the flood had inundated 107 stores, seven churches and 475 houses, forcing many families to flee or take shelter in the second level of their homes.
Walker and her family escaped their house on a boat.
“When my parents saw the flood was coming, they took the furniture up. (The water) was up over the baseboards,” she said. “It was just something new to us because we were young… They come and took us, and we spent the night at the (Seventh-day Adventist) Tabernacle, which is across from McCamly Park. The next day, we went out in the (Washington) Heights and stayed with my aunt and uncle for a whole week.”
A study made by the United States Army Corps of Engineers estimated the damage at $785,400. That's$8.3 million in 2018 dollars.
The Army Corps of Engineers would later present a plan to the Water Resources Commission, offering five potential solutions: flood control reservoirs, dikes, underground tunnels and evacuation of the flood plain proved to be too costly or impractical.The last option and the one eventually selected by city planners was to widen, deepen and straighten the converging Battle Creek and Kalamazoo Riversfor what became known locally as the “cement river.”
Itis estimated that between 280 and 390 familiesin the predominantly black and lower income Bottoms neighborhood were dislocated, as homes were demolished and land was cleared to make room for the river channel and urban redevelopment project.
DISLOCATION OF BOTTOMS RESIDENTS
The rerouting of the Kalamazoo River would become part of a master plan to upgrade the city’s aging infrastructure and redevelop neighborhoods. Federal money offered through the Housing Act of 1949 paid fornearly two-thirds of the project.
In addition to flood control measures, the city would build a four-lane divided highway into the city from the west – what is now Dickman Road – while also consolidating railroad tracks to ease a congestion of traffic along the Michigan Grand Trunk Railway.
The final component of the master plan was simply referred to as "slum clearance and redevelopment plan."
TheHousing Actsought to revitalize cities by offering federal subsidies forlocally planned redevelopment projects, often built on the rubble of blighted neighborhoods.
But, in many instances, whether a neighborhoodwas deemed a slum had a lot to do with the race of the people living there. Some researchers have found evidence thatthese renewal projects had a long-term economic benefit, but critics have pointed outthat the benefits came at the cost ofproperty rights for individuals and thatthe burdens felldisproportionately on low-income black communities.
According to one study, 50% of 446 Bottoms homes had substandard toilets, baths and heating. While home ownership in the neighborhood was high, the area had fallen into disrepair, and the city commission deemed its clearance to be in the public’s interest.
Federally mandated town hall meetings were held to address the concerns of Bottoms residents.
"I'm not going to get into debt," said Mary Lou Harris, one of 300 people who turned up at a town hall meeting at the Ann J. Kellogg school auditorium in 1956."I'm too old. My house is paid for. I'm not going to sign."
City leaders encouraged homeowners to refuse any offer they deemed unfair, but the threat of condemnation loomed if they could not agree to terms.
The city offered an average of $6,500 for real estate in the slum clearance zone. In 1955, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation gifted $400,000 to the city to be put towards securing the properties, flood control measures, railroad consolidation and highway improvements.
The entire project was completed in 1961.
Townsend’s childhood home had been purchased originally by her great-grandfather and passed down to his step-son and daughter-in-law. She was raised there by her mother and grandparents.
“My great-grandfather owned that house, and he went through a lot to buy that house for his step-son and daughter-in-law. It was passed down,” Townsend said. “I was 13 years old, and I remember how both my grandparents cried and cried that they did not want to leave their neighborhood.”
Townsend recalls “the good old days” growing up in the Bottoms, where kids dubbed “Bottom rats” played kick the can or raced Popsicle sticks down the street in the rain. But she also recalls an older generation that is now gone suffering the pain of losing their community.
“I never will forget (my grandmother) crying, saying, ‘I just don’t want to leave my house.’ That was all she cared about. It was almost like after that, she kind of went down, downhill. She never had all the pep she had in her before when she lost all her friends.”
Under the federal urban renewal plan, the city could not tell any resident where to relocate. But it was required to assist them. And while former Bottoms residents were dispersed following the demolition of their homes, many gravitated or were steeredto the Washington Heights neighborhood, where there was already a black community.
By the time the cement river project was completed in 1961,80 percent of the city's non-white population lived in Washington Heights.
At the turn of the century, Washington Heights became an attractive neighborhood to prominent workers at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a world-famous health spa owned by the Seventh Day Adventist and run Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
The Sanitarium’s decline following the Great Depression and the post-World War II housing boom saw white residents fleeing Washington Heights in favor of newer homes. Many of the neighborhood’s single-family homes were turned into multiple-family rental units, depressing property values.
Vivian Laws-Ritter, 77, moved with her family from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, to Parrish Street in the Bottoms in the mid-1940s. After they were uprooted as part of the urban redevelopment, she says, they “moved up” to 97 Hubbard St.in Washington Heights.
“It was a great move for us. We were the first blacks and second owners to live at the address,” Laws-Ritter said. “We were able to buy the house due to the help of a prominent real estate agent – Miss Avis Phillips… It was such an acceptable situation. We were comfortable making the transition. I really believe a lot of it came from my dad and my mother’s impact too. It had a lot to do with the positive support of others helping us relocate. Ultimately, the move benefited the family.”
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Today, there are few physical remnants of the Bottoms.
The former Ralston-Purina plant at 150 S. McCamly St.was the first industrial property to go up over the cleared land after the four acres were purchased for $77,000 in 1960. Now owned by TreeHouse Foods, it is set to close by the end of 2018.
The former Hamblin Community Center at 242 Hamblin Ave. still stands. It’s owned by the nonprofit Rivers of Gateway, which plans to resurrect it as a community center. The Upton Avenue Church at 265 Upton Ave. continues to hold services.
Sojourner Truth Institute of Battle Creek director Kimberly Holley wants to make sure the history of the Bottoms is told. She curated an exhibitat the Art Center of Battle Creek during Black History Month, with a section displaying photosofthe neighborhood.
Holley was also part of a team that gave a presentation on the Bottoms to the National Civic League when Battle Creek was selected as one of 20 finalists for its All-America City contest in June.
“I think it’s so important that the narrative of Battle Creek’s history be reshaped to include these stories, because these are the individuals and businesses and the places that helped shape this community that contributed not just economically, but culturally,” Holley said.
“I am excited the story is being told, but I also don’t want it to stop here. How will we capture this so that it is a formal recognized part of Battle Creek’s history, and how do we continue to pass it on to the next generation? Because if not, it will be lost.”
Nick Buckley can be reached atnbuckley@battlecreekenquirer.comor 269-966-0652. Follow him on Twitter:@NickJBuckley
More:The Post Addition once thrived in Battle Creek. Will it survive?
More:Battle Creek’s first African-American police officer
More:Land bank looks to restore some of Battle Creek's oldest homes
More:Part of Hubbard Street named for Velma Laws-Clay
