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The Parkridge Community Center on Harriet Street opened in December 1945 as a recreation center for Southside residents. It was funded through a World War II program that built recreation centers for war workers and their families. But, the story of how the Parkridge Community Center came to be located on Harriet Street as a segregated facility for African American families has been mostly forgotten.
In this podcast, historian Lee Azus recounts the struggle by residents of the Southside to build an interracial community center on what was called the “buffer strip” between white and black Ypsilanti near Michigan Avenue. Their story illustrates their vision and its limits as it came up against the power and the purse-strings of Federal bureaucracies and the Ypsilanti City Council.
Lee Azus
Lee Azus is an architectural historian with an interest in how institutional racism has shaped twentieth-century American housing policy and the built environment. In public presentations at YDL he has recounted how government policies contributed to segregated neighborhoods in Ypsilanti in the twentieth century. In addition, he retraced the forty-year controversial history of the Urban Renewal program that reshaped Ypsilanti’s Southside
Images
Parkridge Community Center, circa 1945.