Bridging the racial divide

Located between the GeneseeRiver and the Erie Canal,
the 19th Ward is the most diverse neighborhood in Rochester.
Residents say that’s a choice, not an accident. The mission of the
neighborhood, according to the 19th Ward Community Association’s website, is
“to create a conscious multi-racial community where individual and cultural
differences are not only tolerated, but celebrated and where people share a
sense of community.” But the face of the 19th Ward is changing. Rapidly.

About 50 years ago, the neighborhood’s population was almost
100 percent white. All that changed in the 1960s, when the federal government
passed the Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts. By the 1990s, the 19th Ward had
become about 50 percent white and 50 percent black. Since then, white
population has been declining, and some wonder if the 19th Ward will soon be
almost entirely black.

“Is this integration that’s here to stay, or is this
integration because it’s a snapshot in time?” asks Eric Van Dusen,
program director at Neighborworks Rochester and a
19th Ward resident. Judging from other Rochester
neighborhoods, and indeed urban neighborhoods across the nation, it’s only a
matter of time before the pendulum swings and the 19th Ward again becomes a
segregated neighborhood — a poor, segregated neighborhood.

But part of the reason whites and blacks move into the 19th
Ward, says City Councilmember Dana Miller, a longtime 19th Ward resident, is
the area’s diversity. The 19th Ward, for example, is home to the city’s highest
percentage of bi-racial couples, he says. And, he adds, children who grew up in
the 19th Ward are beginning to start their own families in the neighborhood.
The Community Association’s motto is “Urban by Choice.”

The neighborhood includes upscale areas. Most houses were
built around the turn of the century, and many have stained-glass windows, wide
porches, and hardwood floors. The 19th Ward tends to attract newlyweds, says
Miller. He notes that some houses can sell for as little as $70,000, less than
half the cost of a comparable house in the suburbs. And about 1,600 University
of Rochester students, staff, and
faculty live across the river from the main campus.

But a more rugged urbanism marks other parts of the 19th
Ward. Violent crime and drug activity have blighted the neighborhood’s main
commercial arteries, Thurston Road
and Genesee Street. The
sidewalk cafes and boutiques that line Park Avenue have
failed to materialize here, for the most part, and Miller says it’s been
increasingly difficult to attract larger retailers. Investors, he speculates,
are wary of a predominantly black area. “I think there is a racial bias,” he
says.

His comment illustrates the limits to the 19th Ward’s
diversity. The area around Genesee Park Boulevard
tends to have more white residents than do the blocks east toward Genesee
Street, which are becoming increasingly black.
Within the same neighborhood, there are both racial and economic differences,
which Miller and Van Dusen suspect will grow, absent
some sort of intervention.

True integration, says Van Dusen,
doesn’t appear to occur on its own. “Is there is a place in this country where
it is just naturally happening and holding?” he asks. “I don’t know of an
example.”

Historically, though,
the 19th Ward has an edge. Residents there recognized years ago that
integration wouldn’t just happen, and they set up mechanisms to retain the
area’s racial diversity early on, Miller says. The impetus for the move arose,
ironically, from one of the most racially polarizing events in Rochester’s
history: the 1964 race riots.

Blacks began moving to Rochester
and other northern cities following World War II. Initially, they came as
migrant workers, but many began to establish roots. “They were able to find
some jobs and kind of manage to stay here,” says Miller, “but the housing was
extremely segregated.” Prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, racial and ethnic
discrimination in real estate was legal. “You could legally write a restriction
in your deed that the house couldn’t be sold to a black or a Jew or anybody
else you didn’t want it sold to,” Miller says.

More subtle discrimination was also used. “If you were an
African-American family and showed up in a quote, unquote ‘white neighborhood’
and a house was for sale or an apartment was for rent, unfortunately when you
got there it would magically be no longer available.”

This concentrated blacks in less desirable areas, such as
the Third Ward to the west of the 19th Ward, Corn Hill, and the Seventh Ward in
Rochester’s northeast quadrant.
“When you have everybody congregated in those areas,” says Miller,
“dysfunctional things start to happen. People who owned houses over there said,
‘I’ll take this single-family house and I’ll make it into five apartments.’ Or
‘I’ll take this double and I’ll make it into 10 singles.’ So you started
crowding people.”

“People were crammed into too-small areas, and that all kind
of boiled over in ’64,” Miller says. The riots were followed by urban-renewal
efforts that further displaced black people. And with its attractive housing
stock and proximity to their former residences, the 19th Ward was a logical
place to go.

But a more pernicious
trendworked its way into the
19th Ward in the mid-1960s: blockbusting. Unscrupulous real estate agents would
convince a black family to move into a predominantly white neighborhood. “Once
they had that house on that block owned by the black family,” says Miller,
“they would go to all the other neighbors up and down the street and say to
them either outright, ‘A black family just moved in down the street,’ or in a
little bit more subtle way, they’d have a photograph and say: ‘Here’s a
photograph of a new neighbor that just moved in.'” Fearing that the value of
their property would decline, some white homeowners fled to the suburbs.

Meanwhile, real-estate agents bought up city houses at rock
bottom prices and resold them to blacks with huge markups. That process would
continue, says Miller, “until that whole block had gone from being a 100
percent white to 100 percent African American.” This was happening not just in Rochester
but in cities across the country.

In Rochester,
however, real-estate agents didn’t anticipate the spirit of solidarity that
arose in the 19th Ward, Miller says. “A number of people in the neighborhood
got together and said, ‘We have no problems with the 19th Ward being an
integrated neighborhood. We do have problems with the way it’s being integrated
and the unnatural way that the market’s being manipulated essentially to create
just exactly what they’re telling everybody is going to happen.'”

Incensed, residents formed the 19th Ward Community
Association in 1964. It is one of the oldest neighborhood associations in Rochester
and among the oldest in the country. In 1968, the association secured a
cease-and-desist order from the state attorney general’s office, forbidding
real-estate agents from practicing in the 19th Ward. They then created a
volunteer real-estate service, effectively ending blockbusting in the
neighborhood.

Miller pulls out a map of Rochester
delineating city areas by annual household income. The differences are
pronounced. Incomes in the 19th Ward range from about $63,000 to $84,000. In
the neighboring Third Ward, however, where blockbusting ran its course
unabated, average incomes range from $21,000 to $42,000.

Now, however, almost 40
years after thecease-and-desist
order took effect, the area is about 65 percent black, a 10 percent increase
since Van Dusen moved there just seven years ago.
Whether the 19th Ward managed to halt re-segregation or merely stall it remains
to be seen.

And while Census data looks at the 19th Ward as a whole,
it’s not clear how cohesive the neighborhood is. “There really is diversity
throughout the 19th Ward, from my perception, although it’s not necessarily the
same proportion all through the 19th Ward,” VanDusen
says.

That disparity is evident at the Thurston Road YMCA’s TeenCity program for children ages 10
to 17. All the children are black. Few have white friends. And most live within
walking distance from the Y.

KareinLangdell,
an eighth-grader at the WilsonFoundationAcademy on Genesee
Street, says she would be friends with white kids
if she could meet any. “There’s not really a lot of white people in my school,”
Langdell says. Ayonna
Titus, a seventh-grader at FrederickDouglassPreparatory School agrees. “For
every 10 black kids, there’s like one white kid,” she says.

Van Dusen distinguishes between
integration and diversity. Diversity, he says, implies mixed races living
together, whereas integration implies mixed races living and socializing
together. “You can get all the people in the same proximity,” he says, “but
that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to integrate.” Some of the
19th Ward is integrated, he says, but much of it is not.

That’s a distinction that another Great Lakes community has spent a long time
wrestling with. Shaker Heights,
about 20 minutes outside of Cleveland, Ohio,
is perhaps one of the most diverse cities in the country. Like the 19th Ward,
residents in Shaker Heights
resisted blockbusting tactics early on and have struggled to maintain a
racially mixed community ever since. But they have taken the movement one step
further, using city ordinances to provide preferential housing options for
minority groups in certain neighborhoods, and busing students to keep schools
racially balanced.

“It’s not perfect, but it works,”says historian Virginia Dawson, who is writing a book about Shaker
Heights. The community, she says, was founded by the
Shakers in the early 1900s, and residents resisted blockbusting as early as the
1950s, a decade before the civil rights movement gained full momentum. “The
whites and the blacks got together, and they formed this association, and they
worked very hard to attract white buyers into the area to keep it balanced,” Dawson
says.

Twenty years ago, Shaker Heights
created a nonprofit organization called Fund for the Future, which provides
down-payment loans to whites looking to move into predominantly black areas and
blacks wanting to move into white areas. Since its founding, says the Fund’s
executive director, Gail Gibson, the organization has provided about 400 loans.
Repayments go back into the organization’s rotating fund.

“If we didn’t need to make any loans, that wouldn’t really
upset us,” Gibson adds. But even more than the 19th Ward, Shaker
Heights has a huge housing disparity, with the most
expensive houses, in the north, selling for about $1 million and those in the
poorest areas in the south selling for about $80,000. That means, says Dawson, that
blacks tend to be concentrated in the south and whites in the north. The middle
section is fairly integrated. But, adds Dawson,
“it’s becoming more black than white now.”

Shaker Height’s strongest selling point, most agree, is a
school system that consistently ranks among the best in the nation. And it’s
racially balanced. That’s because, almost 20 years ago, the city reorganized
its public schools, centralizing students of all races in single junior and
senior highs. School district officials also implemented busing in minority
communities to maintain racial balance in the city’s four elementary schools.

A New York Times article from several years ago, however, indicated
that the system still has its flaws. Whites tend to outperform blacks, and
cafeteria tables during lunchtime remain racially segregated. But most agree
that Shaker Heights is leagues
ahead of most other school districts in the nation when it comes to racial
integration.

Wouldn’t it be
interesting if the 19th Ward could create its own school district,Miller says wistfully. In Rochester,
students can select the school they’d like to attend, but waiting lists for the
higher performing schools tend to be long. Ayonna
Titus says she didn’t get into any of the top schools on her list.

Shaker Heights’
advantage, says Dawson, is that it
is a city entirely separate from Cleveland.
Overall, she says, the Greater Cleveland area is among the most segregated in
the country. MonroeCounty
is also highly segregated, ranking among the top 20 most segregated counties in
the country, according to the 2000 Census. (There is a caveat, says Van Dusen. Whereas cities in some parts of the US
can annex neighboring suburbs, New YorkState banned the practice long ago.
“If we could annex all of our surrounding suburbs, statistically we wouldn’t
look as concentrated in terms of racial groups,” Van Dusen
says. But, he adds, we would probably still be pretty high on the list).

If overhauling the school system to match Shaker
Heights isn’t politically feasible, though, the 19th
Ward may have one advantage: job potential. Spurring economic growth, says Dawson,
remains one of Shaker Heights’
greatest challenges.

Shaker Heights originated
in the early 1900s as a planned community, Dawson
says. “The whole idea of it was this was going to be an exclusive suburb,” she
says. “It had no industry. That was the whole point.” Instead, the founders
placed Shaker Heights on a public
transportation line to Cleveland,
and focused their efforts on creating a powerful school system. Now, however, Shaker
Heights has little room for commercial growth, which
keeps property taxes high.

Conversely, the 19th Ward, which emerged in the late 1800s,
was built around industry, says Miller. Taylor Instruments, which had multiple
downtown locations, wanted to build a large factory, and chose the remote
location now known as the 19th Ward. The city annexed the 19th Ward in 1902,
when annexation was still legal in New York.
More factories followed, which led to residential and commercial development.
The 19th Ward grew into its own “little village,” says Miller, which included
movie theaters, ice cream parlors, restaurants, and other businesses.

“You didn’t have to get off the street to buy anything,”
recalls Bill Hunt, whose family opened Hunts Hardware in 1914. Hunt has worked
in the store for some 60 years. “This street has changed, like all other
streets throughout the city,” he says. The 19th Ward’s retail shops are mostly
gone now. Hunt’s family has chosen to stay, he says, because the neighborhood
needs its own hardware store.

Hunt holds up a key. It is long and thin with a jagged edge.
It’s a skeleton key, used to open bedroom doors a hundred years ago. “Almost
every house in this area will have a door that will take this key,” he says.

But staying on Thurston Avenue
has been a challenge. Hunt says he isn’t sure when the decline in the area
began — maybe, he says, reflecting, sometime in the ’60s or ’70s.

That squares with
Miller’s thinking. The 19th Ward, says Miller, was hit hard by the
spillover from the race riots, and it hasn’t ever really recovered. “We lost a
lot of business,” he says. “We lost most of the good businesses on commercial
streets, like Jefferson Avenue,
like Genesee Street, like Plymouth
Avenue. On Genesee Street,
you had Dorschel Buick, which is now out in the
suburbs. Right around the corner from that, you had O’Connor Chevrolet, which
is now out in the suburbs. Right next door to that you had Ralph Pontiac, which
is now out in the suburbs.”

But the 19th Ward, says Miller, could be poised for a
renaissance. Because as Rochester’s
manufacturing base has eroded, another economic powerhouse has emerged: the University
of Rochester, now the city’s
largest employer. And that economic giant is located in the 19th Ward’s
backyard.

Rochester is not
the only former manufacturing city looking to capitalize on growth in academia.
“Now more than ever, higher education is seen as the key to helping
manufacturing-based cities catch up and compete in a highly skilled global
economy,” write Karin Fischer in an article for The Chronicle of Higher
Education. She cites cities such as Chicago,
Detroit, Philadelphia,
and Rochester as examples.

Nor can universities afford to become an island in a sea of
decay. It was a lesson, says Miller, that the University
of Pennsylvania learned the hard
way. Located in Philadelphia’s notoriously rough west side, the university
began pouring money into struggling neighborhoods following violent attacks on
people affiliated with the university about a decade ago, Miller says.

Julie McWilliams, aUPenn spokesperson, says that initially investors were wary
about participating in the university’s West Philly Initiatives program. “At
first,” she says, “we had to take on all of the risk.” The university built a
grocery store, an eight-theater movie complex, and even its own elementary
school. “That encouraged an awful lot of other retail to move in,” McWilliams
says.

Crime in the area has significantly declined since the
university introduced its initiatives, according to the university’s website.
“Overall crime dropped 36 percent in the past five years, with auto theft down
74 percent, robbery down 62 percent, and assaults down 54 percent,” it states.
Consequently, demand for houses in the area has also been rising.

Miller says UR President Joel Seligman flew several Rochester
community leaders down to Philadelphia
this summer to discuss that university’s efforts. “We sat in a conference room
in a building that was a former General Electric warehouse. It had been
abandoned. The college bought it, completely renovated it. The first floor they
use as offices, and the remaining five floors they have luxury apartments
there. Luxury apartments rent for $3000 a month,” Miller says. “And they did
this right on the edge of their campus.”

But there are marked differences between the University of
Pennsylvania and the University
of Rochester. Whereas UPenn could no longer afford to idly watch as surrounding
neighborhoods fell into disrepair, the UR’s location affords it greater luxury.

The UR, says
Miller, “has a little bit different situation because for much of their history,
their argument was, ‘We can isolate ourselves successfully from anything that
goes on around us. We have a river on one side. We have a cemetery on the other
side. We have our medical campus on the third side. And we can block out the
fourth.”

“It was only in the 1980s that they started to come out of
that whole island mentality,” Miller adds. The first real thaw between the two
communities occurred in the early 1990s when the groups came together to build
a bridge over the river that connects the campus to Plymouth
Avenue.

And for more than 20 years, says Miller, 19th Ward leaders
have hoped to create a college town at the Plymouth-Brooks intersection — a
project that languished until just a year ago.

Upon completion, says Miller, the Brooks Landing Project
will house a café, restaurant, hotel, and office complex. The hope, as with
most urban-development projects, is that Brooks Landing will push growth into
surrounding neighborhoods to reduce blight, vacancies, and open-air drug
markets.

Creating a college town in the 19th Ward, however, might
take more than just a bridge. The GeneseeRiver has been not only a physical
barrier but also a psychological one, with the east side home to the haves and
the west home to the have-nots. Indeed, as the Brooks Landing project sat mired
in red tape, U R students dubbed their new passageway the “bridge to nowhere,”
Miller says.

This schism is true not just of Rochester,
but also its surroundings, with wealthier suburbs to the east and more modest
ones to the west. So, on a deeper level the bridge between the University
of Rochester and the 19th Ward
connects not just two communities, but two Rochesters,
one rich and the other poor. And, by extension, one white and the other black.

While the University
of Rochester cannot cross that divide alone, Miller says, it could make the
first step. The University of Pennsylvania,
he says, invested $1.2 billion dollars in developing its surroundings. “That’s
about $1.2 billion more than the U of R’s put in,” he says.

UR President Seligman says he, like his predecessors,
understands the need to develop the 19th Ward. “We can’t any longer afford to
think of ourselves as living in an ivory tower,” he says. And the university
plans to use part of the Brooks Landing office facility.

But Seligman’s hesitant to talk about money. “I’m not ruling
anything off the table,” he says, “but I’m not starting in the same financial
position that the University of Philadelphia
did. We have sometimes made investments off campus. We have sometimes reached
the judgment that we can’t afford it.”

Seligman also demurs when asked if the university will
actively recruit its guests to visit or stay in the Brooks Landing area. “We
anticipate that this is going to be a hotel and restaurant that will be used by
the community,” he says. “Even if we don’t formally direct them,
that will happen.”

But Miller and Van Dusen aren’t so
sure. Currently, gigantic mounds of dirt mark the Brooks Landing Project. A big
sign announces that the dirt will eventually yield a hotel. Nearby rests the
future home of Urban Brew, planned as a student-friendly café to be run by the
Sector 4 Community Development Corporation. The building is boarded up. It has
no big sign. The café’s opening date, says Miller, has been pushed back to the
spring of 2007.

The 19th Ward cannot fix itself by itself, Miller says. It’s
not just a matter of money, but perception. People, he says, must see the 19th
Ward as a desirable place to visit and live. The University
of Pennsylvania, says Miller, took
charge. “The point is that the university played a very active role in making
(change) happen,” he says. Economic and racial integration, he continues,
requires constant, leveraged support.

“Integrated neighborhoods are still relatively rare in America,”
Miller says. “You have to be active in how you create and how you maintain an
integrated neighborhood. It’s not just kind of a passive thing that happens.”

The 19th Ward Community Association holds its annual convention
this Friday, November 17. The event, which will include the election of
officers and an auction, will be held at the DanforthCommunity Center,
200 West Avenue, beginning
at 6 p.m.

This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.