Hope and energy can lift up two distressed areas
There’s more than one way for a community to go downhill. Two recent Dispatch stories show that there also is more than one way for people who love those communities to give them new life.
The onetime coal boomtown of Shawnee in southern Perry County and the Driving Park neighborhood in Columbus don’t have a lot in common on the surface except poverty and disinvestment. Shawnee is Appalachian and white; Driving Park is urban and largely Black.
Shawnee’s rise and fall were driven by one factor: the profitability of coal. In the decades that straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, Shawnee bustled with as many as 4,000 residents who enjoyed the town theater, hotel, shops and restaurants.
As the coal boom faded, so did Shawnee. With few jobs to sustain families, most folks moved away. The 2010 Census counted 665 residents.
Driving Park got its name from the horse-racing, and then auto-racing track that preceded its development as a residential subdivision. In the 1920s, substantial homes were built along and around Livingston Avenue for middle-class shop owners and professionals.
In 1936, when a Columbus version of the infamous “redlining” loan-risk maps that ensured disinvestment in minority communities was created, Driving Park was still new enough to be shaded blue and yellow — in the middle-risk categories. But the redlining of neighborhoods around it inevitably took a toll; white, middle-class families moved out and over the decades Driving Park became poorer.
The damage lingers: A U.S. Census report in 2018 showed that Black people who grew up poor in Driving Park earned significantly less than Black people who grew up just as poor personally but in betteroff neighborhoods — regardless of where they live now.
Driving Park has been the target of many improvement efforts over the years, with local, state and federal funds devoted to improving housing, safety and job opportunities.
Marjorie Chapman’s community garden isn’t like that. The 0.12-acre vacant lot she bought for $1 from a local nonprofit and has transformed into vegetable beds and flower patches, an art space and intergenerational gathering spot is an intensely personal project. It doesn’t have a formal budget or goals or funders — Chapman doesn’t want them — but for those who spend time there volunteering and creating, it has made the neighborhood profoundly better.
It gives kids something healthy and fulfilling to occupy their time and provides a safe space and caring adults for youngsters who have too little of either in their lives. Adults who are burdened by the neighborhood’s problems find an oasis of positivity and possibility.
Down in Shawnee, Cheryl Blosser and other members of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Council have a goal — restoring the town’s landmarks and attracting new development and activity — that is simpler, or at least more concrete, than trying to heal the ills that afflict Driving Park. But it still requires just as much outsized optimism.
The council is an enthusiastic supporter of Black Diamond Development, a group of private investors that has purchased or leased eight buildings on Main Street, with plans for a renovated tavern, a brewery restaurant, a co-working space, retail store and Airbnb rentals.
The two communities have different problems and different needs. Both face steep challenges. But two other things they have in common — energy and hope — could make magic.