Published: May 28, 2009 02:20 pm      

HAMILTON: Back when we were colored

Negroes.

Colored people.

That’s what white folks called black people in this country when Aaron Griffin became executive director of the newly built Niagara Community Center and Girls Club on Centre Avenue and 15th Street in the city’s North End. Blacks preferred the name negro and colored then; especially in light of the other names that whites, especially southern whites, called us.

Today, the center, as it is called, is “temporarily” closed, and has been for quite some time. And in a neighborhood where younger blacks commonly address each other by the very same name that we hated when the center first opened, older blacks are whispering it as they drive by the weedy lots on Centre Avenue and now Aaron Griffin Way (the former 15th Street) about those board members that were supposed to be maintaining the only black-built institution in the city of Niagara Falls. It is a corner where Niagara has no Movement.

At one time, when blacks had no effective political power in the city, the Community Center was indeed just that, the hub of the Highland neighborhood. That was when the area was a neighborhood, and not just a social experiment. That was when Henry Kalfas taught at the red-bricked Center Avenue School, and then became principal at the new, white-bricked, Beech Avenue Elementary School. Both were then neighborhood schools.

There were also but a handful of churches in a community where thousands of people lived along its core street and generally worshipped together. Employers like Union Carbide’s National and Republic plants, Pittsburgh Metallurgical Company, General Abrasives, Chisholm-Ryder, Carborundum, Autolite Battery, Lehigh Valley Railroad, National Titanium, Vanadium, Wicker Lumber, Taibi Brothers Concrete, Felicetti Concrete Products and others provided thousands and thousands of manufacturing and construction jobs in the area. The goal of their employees was to own their home, have a car or two in their driveway, and to build their community and its character. Virtually every neatly kept home had a vegetable garden in their backyard, where southern-bred sons and daughters of farmers raised everything from short collard greens and green beans to tall green cornstalks. The sidewalks were trimmed with yellow tulip and blue crocus beds; the foundations lined with white peony and red rose bushes, along with pink petunias, marigolds and black-eyed Susans. And the center that they built was bristling with children activities from arts and crafts to library services, Saturday movies, table games, indoor basketball, father-and-son and mother-and-daughter banquets, and more.

Young ones, with eyes filled with joy, hearts filled with hope, and with their laughter and roars rising above the humping and clanking of the railcars in the switchyards on the other side of the street played field games — such as softball, football, kickball, tag, and such — in Center Court Field. The park was later named Vincent D’Amelio Park for the hard working athletic director at the center who organized many of these activities. He died a tragic death, and soon after, so would the park’s neighborhood.

Things have changed. We are now called African Americans and there are some 17 churches in a community of 2,600. Less than 30 people have Highland addresses. Our local legacy now include blacks as president, governor, state senators, county legislators, councilmen, and a black executive director of the local housing authority; yet too many of our sons can’t tell you who grandfathered them.

The red-brick Center Avenue School has been torn down and the white-brick Beech Avenue School is now the Kalfas Magnet School. Its neatly trimmed lawns are lined with yellow school buses that have driven past the controversial Cayuga Island Jayne Park and are bringing in children from LaSalle to across the street from a Niagara Falls Housing Authority destroyed D’Amelio Park: where silent fences, idle construction materials and piles of dirt have replaced softball, football, kickball, tag, and all of its laughter.

The jobs that built the community, for the most part, are gone. Where there were hundreds of Chisholm-Ryder jobs to be had building farm machinery, a score of auto dissembling jobs have taken their place. The old employee-rich Pittsburgh Met is now the employee-lean Globe plant, where they hope to make sub-component materials for the solar energy industry. The sprawling UCAR complexes across the street from it now houses a startup, high-tech, solar cell manufacturer, an industrial pipe distributor, a machine shop and a prospective tire recycler.

Across College Avenue, the General Abrasives and Titanium plants have changed hands and shriveled to a fraction of their former employment numbers. Vanadium, where my dad once worked, is now another plant altogether, and it has fewer employees than its predecessor had on the midnight shift. Wicker Lumber is now Braun Horticulture, and Autolite is now Tulip; both with a fraction of their former employment numbers, and an even smaller fraction of neighbors working for them. Lehigh Valley rail yards are now Unity Park, and it too has a reduced number of residents and is falling apart. Carborundum, Taibi Brothers and others are gone altogether, and the longstanding tower at Felicetti‘s is of little employment comfort. Few members of the Highland community had anything at all to do with its demise, other than their idleness. Taibi’s and Felicetti’s produced no product for the foundations of a failing HOPE VI project that took away a park, closed a swimming pool for the summer, and have in its wake weedy lots, unfinished contaminated foundations and rotting roofs whipping in the wind.

For the next several columns, I will be commenting upon what happened to our Niagara Community Center, and who is responsible for its demise. In the meantime, I am extremely glad to be alive today, and proud to be an African American; but I cannot help but to, every once in awhile, trip back to those halcyon days and play upon the fields of our childhood, and enjoy the moments and memories of when we were colored.

Ken Hamilton is a Niagara Falls resident. Contact him at kenhamilton930@aol.com.