Encyclopedia Virginia has been working for more than a year on a special section on the impact of urban renewal across the Commonwealth. Last week we debuted the entire package at an EntryPoint event dedicated to the history of urban renewal in Virginia and the devastating effects of “redevelopment” on Black communities in Richmond, Roanoke, Norfolk, Northern Virginia, and Charlottesville.
It was our desire here at EV to learn more about the history of urban renewal and gentrification in our home of Charlottesville that was the inspiration for this series. We had just moved into new offices in the historically Black 10th and Page neighborhood in Charlottesville, which survived the upheaval of urban renewal while its next-door neighbor Vinegar Hill was bulldozed in the name of progress—if progress is defined as a four-lane roadway, fast-food restaurants, and lots of parking lots.
All of us on the EV staff were surprised at how little we knew about these histories in Charlottesville and beyond. We were also struck by the similarities across these histories, from the legacy of segregation and the creation of “slums” in largely Black neighborhoods, to the influence of city planners like Harland Bartholomew who saw these Black communities as disposable, to promises of new housing that disappeared into configurations of pavement and highway.
As part of this new series, we worked with our section editor, Johnny Finn of Christopher Newport University, to develop a story map that shows in vivid detail the impact of urban renewal in the five cities in our series. This interactive map uses a wide variety of maps, aerial photographs, master plans cooked up by urban planners like Bartholomew, and historical images to provide a unique window into the geography of loss that is the story of urban renewal for many communities.
We’ve also transcribed dozens of relevant documents, from city council meeting minutes, to excerpts from city plans, to newspaper articles. It’s especially interesting to see how differently the white newspapers of the day portrayed urban renewal, which was almost uniformly promoted as a way to clean up unsightly slums and revitalize downtown white businesses, while Black newspapers focused on the tightknit, self-supporting communities that were threatened by redevelopment. They also questioned why resources weren’t being devoted to helping communities that had long suffered from disinvestment at the municipal level, with unpaved streets and housing codes that went unenforced, thrive instead of being torn down.
Together with the expertise of the contributors who made this section possible, we hope to tell a comprehensive story that shows how the past continues to affect the future throughout the Commonwealth.
