I receive quite a bit of e-mail from readers across the country in response to some of the issues I write about. Most of it comes from Niagarans and former Niagarans. The majority of the notes I get are positive and complimentary, but not all of them. Some messages are very disturbing.
While I try to read and answer them all, some go straight to the shredder where they belong, but an e-mail I received a few weeks ago from a longtime Niagara resident, someone I would consider a friend, touched a nerve. It has been bothering me for a long time, for decades actually.
He, who remains anonymous, made reference to the housing segregation patterns in Niagara Falls. This is a subject that I have commented on several times over the past two years since I began writing for the Reporter, but it is one that takes me back as far as I can remember as a little boy growing up there.
The Allen-Mackenna Avenue neighborhood where I was born (actually I arrived at Saint Mary's Hospital) in 1947 was a rich mixture of black and white people, with a heavy concentration of recent European immigrants. It was a poor neighborhood, for sure, but we did not know it then. Almost every man who lived there worked in the factories on Buffalo Avenue or across town at the plants that bordered the Highland Avenue neighborhoods.
Many of the people there owned their homes, but most were renters, living in crowded tenements and boardinghouses.
The homeowners were proud of their houses and they generally kept them up as best they could, but the area became known as a slum, due in part to the junkyards and the rat infestations they attracted. I remember seeing rats the size of small dogs, and roaches ruled the bug world. They were everywhere. No matter what Mom and Dad did to keep them at bay, they were there.
Our house was spotless. Visitors, of whom there were many back then, when your neighbors were always welcome to pop in anytime, would say, "Jane's house is so clean, you could eat off the floor."
When the City Fathers finally decided to designate the area for "slum clearance," our house and all the others on Allen Avenue were purchased by the Urban Renewal Agency and demolished. Most of the former residents wound up in public housing, but some, like my family, just moved one block over to Mackenna Avenue. A few families bought houses around Highland, some moved over to the East Falls Street and Erie Avenue area, and that is what has been bothering me ever since. Everybody was forced to move into certain areas while other, nicer neighborhoods remained "off-limits" to our people.
I could not then, as a little boy, understand why we did not move to the nicer neighborhoods just a few blocks north of us, like Welch Avenue, for example, where I went to school at Our Lady of the Rosary.
The houses were so much nicer there, I remember. They had been built solidly of fine bricks and mortar. Their lawns actually had grass and big trees in front of them.
Why didn't we move there, I wondered. It could not have been because we were poorer than the people who lived there. They all worked at the same plants, doing the same thing my father was doing, presumably for the same wages. So why couldn't we live there?
My mom's answer was short. "There aren't any 'coloreds' there because it's a white street," she said. "You'll understand when you grow up, son." My dad just nodded in agreement and that was the end of that conversation. But it was the just the beginning of my understanding of racism and the segregated life we lived.
Over the years since then, little has changed. In fact, according to the most recent U.S. Census data available, Niagara Falls is among the five most segregated metropolitan areas in the entire United States.
Commenting on residential segregation of African-Americans, the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth states the obvious, "In Western New York, blacks are highly segregated." Citing racial discrimination as the primary cause for the segregated housing patterns throughout the region in their recently released "State of the Region," their report says, "New data refine assessment of mortgage lending discrimination in Western New York, with higher denial rates among blacks and Hispanics than are found statewide."
My friend's e-mail note was a commentary on recent discussions to construct new housing for the city's growing non-white population, which now approaches, if not exceeds, 30 percent.
Like me, he shares a deep concern that any new housing developments designed to address the obvious disparities in housing ownership opportunities for blacks in Niagara Falls must consider locations outside of the historically segregated boundaries.
The neighborhoods where most of our people were forced to live in the past were not the most desirable places to live then and they still are not today! We need to look forward, toward developing a new image for our city, not backward.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 23 2003 |