Scott,

I have no sources to suggest to you but in Binghamton they were
forever tearing down the more run down sections of town with their
urban renewal projects. This of course included the cheaper rents
with the low income people could afford.  So they moved to the lower
rent areas in another part of town and many of those were eventually
torn down. People were given assistance to get moved but they
eventually ended up in higher rents for the most part. A lot of these
were welfare cases and were kept in the system to pay the higher rents.

They tore down part of the North side in the late 1950s and that area
became what is now businesses and malls. To extend that area, they
put a lot of dirt over what had been the city dump on Stow Flats which
had once been a flood plain between the residential area and the dikes
built along the Chenango River after the floods of the 1930s. That
dump was not at all like what we do today as land fills with all the
details worked out for gases and etc. The garbage trucks just backed
up to the edge of the last pile and they would throw dirt over it after
a section had quite a bit of garbage.

SO, where they built the one plaza over the dump site, there was a
row of stores which at that  time included a large Grandway, a grocery
chain and many other smaller stores plus a bowling alley/lounge on
the far end. Building was obviously not what it is today either because
the Grandway and other stores all experienced floors that sagged as
the dump and covering-dirt settled. The bowling alley experienced
gas odors and many stores often had a musty or 'funny' smell to them.
I remember they drilled holes from time to time in the parking areas
and around the back side of the plaza to let gas escape. Nothing
fancy, just large holes in the pavement they hoped would give the
gas someplace to get out easier. Along this same area, on
the apron of thecovered dump were also fast food restaurants
which were built near the also defunct garbage incinerator which
was now at the edge of the roadside. It looked all new but it was
just a covering on what had been an eyesore because no one
would want to live in the new housing and look out at the dump.
In earlier years, they changed the course of the Chenango River
and dredged it deeper so they did not have to worry about the
flood plain being needed.

One large area of that urban renewal was a large housing project
which was considered lower rent but most of the people who
rented there were not the people they displaced but many young
people just starting out or who had good jobs.

Another project years later on the Northside would remove another
area of run down houses and businesses and built another batch
of upgraded apartments. This displaced quite a few people who
had moved from the first renewal project. Many of these people
then moved to the East or West side of Binghamton. I remember
St. Paul's church and school on the North side saw a loss of
people because they moved to another parish. St. Paul's sat
on the edge of the first renewal and then was on the edge of the
second project. They came right up to the property of the church
and school with each. They even took out Thomas Edison which
was a public elementary school next to St. Paul's and started busing
the North side children to other schools out of the neighborhood.

A recent trip to Binghamton took me through that area. It looks old
and tired like it did back in the 1950s and it has been reconfigured
some to add more fast food restaurants but it now looks like part
of the past.

God Bless
Ruth Ann
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On Wed, 18 Dec 2002 10:19:50 -0500 Scott Monje
<[log in to unmask]> writes:
> I have run across a couple of instances of "urban renewal" projects
> in small cities or towns in New York in the 1970s in which old
> structures were razed but little or nothing new was built to replace
> them. Was that sort of thing common, or were these most likely local
> eccentricities? Has anything been written about this?
>