Urban Renewal in Grand Forks

Over the last few years my wife, Susie Caraher, and I have been chatting about the impact of urban renewal on our community and slowly conjuring up a research plan. We’re thinking about this work, in part, to support the Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission’s recognition that urban renewal not only reshaped the city, but also that sites associated with these programs are soon eligible for nomination to Nation Register of Historic Places. More than that, there has been some renewed (heh) interest in urban renewal among scholars, and we imagine that a study of urban renewal in Grand Forks could contribute to this conversation (see, for example, University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality project).

As per usual, I’m the junior partner in this research whose enthusiasm and interest often exceeds his ability to commit real time to moving it forward. Susie has been doing most of the footwork including wading through boxes of unarchived documents that tell the story of urban renewal in town. She also is much better making the interpersonal connections in the city and in city hall to support research into the very recent past.

This past week, she made a brilliant discovery through her connects with the city’s engineering department. She found maps from 1970 that show the city prior to urban renewal. Of particular interest was the neighborhood bound to the north by 1st Avenue South and the rail lines, to the south by 4th Avenue South, and to the east by Belmont. The western part of this roughly triangular shaped district consisted of a residential neighborhood which was home to the city’s Jewish community in the first half of the 20th century. By the 1960s, the Jewish community had begun to disperse and the neighborhood appears to have been in “decline.” As part of the urban renewal process, the city demolished the neighborhood and the Grand Forks Housing Authority built high density subsidized housing in the area.

We’re currently working to get these maps scanned, but here is a hasty digital photo of it:

These hand-drawn maps are important because they show the neighborhood as it was in the 1960s and offer an update to the plan of the district made in the latest Sanborn maps of the area (dating, I think, to 1916). I’ve blogged about this here. Between the two, there’s the basemap used in this redlining map from the 1930s, which appears to be a mid-century cadastral map for the city. (It would be great if we could locate a copy of the area descriptions on which redlining map is based, but they don’t appear to have been archived along with the map in the Library of Congress). It is noting, however, that the redline map of the neighborhood rated it “C” in the 1930s which was not the least desirable rating in the city (which was “D”). “D” neighborhoods tended to be the most recently developed districts in town largely to the west of Washington Street.

For those interested in the history of Grand Forks or North Dakotania, stay tuned!