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 [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] 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? >