Published: June 27, 2008 01:04 pm      

HAMILTON: Can you hear me now?

Laura Harris, a HOPE-VI evaluator in Memphis, Tennessee said in an Atlantic Magazine interview that, “People ask me if HOPE- VI was successful, and I have to say, ‘You mean the buildings or the people?’”



From an afternoon junket to Syracuse, Rev. Flynn, his lovely wife Deidre and his basketball superstar son turned down Beech Avenue and made the last few tired turns on their way home. His son, who is making Niagara Falls proud by excelling both athletically and academically at Syracuse University, is one of the nicest kids that anyone could hope to meet. No surprises there – Flynn’s whole family is mild-mannered and very accepting of others.

Flynn rolled past the magnet school and then down between the leaded brownfields from the manufacture of WWII flashlight and automobile batteries that are buried on the north and the residue from the city’s former Seneca Avenue incinerator is buried on the south.

The north field was once chock full of pheasants, hares, robins and red-wing black birds, raccoons, toads, frogs, mice, garter snakes and more. As kids, we would skip going home for lunch and go through the paths of the overgrown field to explore nests, catch snakes and collect cocoons, tadpoles, spiders and the preying mantises that dwelled there. Lunch would be the small wild strawberries, blackberries and crab apples that grew there.

The south field was called Center Court Field and in those days, community leaders like Bloneva Bond, Aaron Griffin and others made sure that there were supervised and organized activities in the park for the thousands of kids, and hundreds of adults, that played there.

The pollution remains, but most of what was once is now gone from both the leaded brownfield on the north – where we collected cocoons – and on the south where the sounds of laughter gave way to giant Caterpillar-like earth-moving equipment that consumes both the past and future.

Most of the community’s remaining wildlife is now the few foxes that scores of unleashed neighborhood dogs once kept at bay and the well-compensated Buffalo consultants that hum their drivel as beautifully as the night songs of the forests, but prey upon both the ignorance and apathy of a once-prosperous and happy neighborhood like a pack of cunning wolves in their moonlit hunts. It was community leaders like Bond, Griffin and others that once kept these wolves at bay.

No one who lives in this community, pocked with vacant lots where homes once stood, is actually making any of the decisions about its destiny. With Flynn’s dream of such participation through his Niagara Falls Faith-Based Collaborative ruined by a lawsuit brought on by Legislator Renae Kimble and Niagara Falls Housing Authority Director Stephanie Cowart, he now looks out at how NFHA’s HOPE-VI project is expanding the public housing project near him with small, duplex buildings that are cropping up literally out of the contaminated ashes buried beneath them. He then looks over at the desolated park where adults once hit golf balls and flew kites with their kids; where the Little Leagues once practiced; where there were pick-up games of softball and touch football, where festivals were once held and he slowly shakes his head from side-to-side, saying, “I knew that they were going to build houses, but I didn’t know that they were going to take away the park!”

The retired Eduardo King sits on his porch on Centre Avenue and looks out to where he, and others, once planted community gardens and, at their own expense, literally gave the vegetables away to the neighbors. They won’t be planting this year. Somehow, the seeds of the community’s future are made of concrete; and few, if any, community members are digging the holes, pouring that concrete, building any of those homes or are profiting from them. When done, there will be a fewer percentage, not more, of owner-occupied houses; and Census Tract 202, with an expanded Centre Court, Jordan Gardens, Unity Park and Monteagle Ridge Apartments will be mostly a sprawl of public and Section-8 housing that far exceeds government goals and, given the rising transportation costs, are further away from the center city markets and tourist-area jobs than they were before.

This: The perfect laboratory for the negative elements that “HYPE-VI” had hoped to alleviate.

The HOPE-VI Centre Court project is no doubt more “HYPE” than “HOPE;” and as Hanna Rosin, of the Atlantic Magazine, described such, “What began as an “I Have a Dream” social crusade has turned into an urban-redevelopment project.”

“But, I told you all that this is what was going to happen,” I said to Flynn.

“I know,” the mild-mannered and very accepting Flynn said, “But I guess we were not listening.”

Well, to all of you: Can you hear me now?



Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. He can be contacted at Kenhamilton930@aol.com.