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| Brent Leggs addresses Albina Preservation Initiative |
The leader of a bold national initiative to preserve Black
historic sites took a walking tour of Portland’s Albina neighborhood and
offered a few tips about big plans to create a new neighborhood on the bare
bones of the old Albina.
Brent Leggs is the executive director of the African
American Cultural Heritage Action fund that is using $150 million in donations
to help preserve important Black historical sites nationwide. The intent of the national campaign is “to
add missing chapters of our American history,” Leggs said.
His tour of Albina showed Leggs that “you can literally see
how urban renewal erased physical history,” he said. Nevertheless, “I saw beauty. I saw community resilience. It’s exciting to see the reclamation of
history.”
Albina’s physical landscape, amounting to the “downtown” of
Portland’s Black retail, dining and entertainment community, was seriously
fractured by construction of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and by
an Emmanuel Hospital urban renewal plan that wiped out several blocks of small
businesses. After the urban renewal plan
lost funding in the 1970s, some of the land remains vacant 50 years later.
One attendee at Leggs’ speech noted that plans for the new
Albina consist of taller buildings than ever existed, meaning that the
neighborhood will have nothing of the urban feel of old Albina.
Leggs said the important steps are to preserve what is
left. And to work with developers who
can be convinced that the new plans should try to save and complement the
past. “The stories of every day matter,”
he said, adding that Albina’s community history should be recognized as part of
Portland’s history. Leggs studied
marketing and business at the University of Kentucky before becoming involved
in historic preservation, giving him an idea of the upsides and downsides of
working with developers.
Leggs also urged that donations be made to complete
restoration of the Billy Webb Elks Lodge, a building with a century of Black
Portland history that was seriously damaged by fire. The wood-frame building was erected by the
YWCA in the 1920s for Black residents when Portland’s downtown YWCA was
segregated. After integration of the
downtown YWCA, the building was sold to a Black assemblage of Elks
members. Restore Oregon is leading the
renovation [project.
The appearance by Leggs was sponsored by the Oregon Black
Pioneers, Moreland Resource Consulting and Restore Oregon. Leggs, who also is a senior vice president of
the National Trust for Historic Preservation, ticked off several recent
preservation victories for Black historic sites. They include the Washington, D.C., home of
Frederick Douglass; the boxing gym of Joe Frazier in Philadelphia; the A.G.
Gaston Motel, a civil rights venue in Birmingham, Alabama; the Sojourner Truth
Legacy Plaza in Akron, Ohio; and Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, N.C.
In the 1980s, Cathy Galbraith, then executive director of
the Architectural Heritage Center, undertook an extensive history of significant
Black properties in Northeast and North Portland. The “Cornerstones of Community” volume could
prove to be a useful reference in rebuilding the “new” Albina.
----Fred Leeson
Join Building on History’s email list by writing “add me” to
fredleeson@hotmail.com
"' The stories of everyday matter.'" Yes, the humblest cottages, no matter the condition, tell the story that big displays of pictures and text in newly constructed buildings cannot.
ReplyDeleteYes, multi- story buildings overshadowing those cottages is not the neighborhood this project is supposedly honoring.
This project is adding insult to injury to the African American community. It is an effort to assuage the guilt of the development industry that wiped out so much of a community that was given no choice. And, yet, big money is doing it again while claiming that they care.
Throwing big money at the Albina community has never been an antidote to racism. It still isn't.
Barbara Kerr