Fort Worth is called the city "Where the West Begins," and 100 years ago, the neighborhood known as Fairmount was where the south side ended. Now considered inner city, the Fairmount Southside Historic District is actually numerous smaller subdivisions including the largest, the Fairmount addition, and the smallest, the dubiously named Swastika Place. The neighborhoods were home to early merchants, lawyers, judges, artists, and small-business owners-many of whom went on to local and national fame. Today that legacy continues. Fairmount welcomes new generations of urban pioneers and benefits from a neighborhood renaissance that has brought this historically and architecturally significant gem of the city back from the brink of extinction.
This new book, first in our Newcomer?s Handbook Neighborhood Guide series, focuses on the neighborhoods within Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin, as well as on all the surrounding suburban communities. It provides detailed information about the types of housing and recreational opportunities found in each community, the character of each area, and helpful data on post offices, police departments, hospitals, libraries, schools, public transportation, and community publications and resources. Part of the Newcomer?s Handbook series, called ?invaluable? and ?highly recommended? by Library Journal.
Settled in 1829 by antislavery Quakers from the south, Fairmount benefited from the many travelers going between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis and became known as a station on the Underground Railroad. From these humble beginnings, a tight-knit community evolved that valued culture, especially education and literature. Decades later, newspaper stories marveled at the Quakers' Fairmount Academy and the number of accomplished individuals affiliated with the area, including writers, scientists, and college presidents. Like several Indiana towns, in 1887 this small, primarily agricultural area participated in one of the most dramatic eras in state history: the natural gas boom. Renowned artist Olive Rush was born and raised in Fairmount. The ancestors of one pioneering Quaker family, the Winslow's, raised film icon James Dean on their Fairmount farm. Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis lived near Fairmount and graduated from Fairmount High School. Their stories and those of their friends and neighbors are captured in these images that represent the best of America's heartland.
In many American cities, middle and upper income people are moving into neighborhoods that had previously suffered disinvestment and decay. The new residents renovate housing, stimulate business, and contribute to the tax base. These benefits of neighborhood revitalization are, in some cases, achieved at a potentially serious cost: the displacement of existing neighborhood residents by eviction, condominium conversion, or as a result of rent increases. Revitalizing America's Cities investigates the reasons why the affluent move into revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods and the ways in which the new residents benefit the city. It also examines the resulting displaced households. Data are presented on displacement in nine revitalizing neighborhoods of five cities — the most comprehensive survey of displaced households conducted to date. The study reveals characteristics of displaced households and hardships encountered as a result of being forced from their homes. Also featured is an examination of federal, state, and local policies toward neighborhood reinvestment and displacement, including various alternative approaches for dealing with this issue.
Annotation Through an exploration of a boys' baseball league in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Philadelphia, this book reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary US public life. Protecting Home offers an account for racial accommodation in a space that was previously known for conflict and exclusion.
Winner of the Richard L. Wentworth Prize in American History, Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize, and the William Rockhill Nelson Award On a hot summer evening in 1958, a group of African American students in Wichita, Kansas, quietly entered Dockum's Drug Store and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. This was the beginning of the first sustained, successful student sit-in of the modern civil rights movement, instigated in violation of the national NAACP's instructions. Dissent in Wichita traces the contours of race relations and black activism in this unexpected locus of the civil rights movement. Based on interviews with more than eighty participants in and observers of Wichita's civil rights struggles, this powerful study hones in on the work of black and white local activists, setting their efforts in the context of anticommunism, FBI operations against black nationalists, and the civil rights policies of administrations from Eisenhower through Nixon. Through her close study of events in Wichita, Eick reveals the civil rights movement as a national, not a southern, phenomenon. She focuses particularly on Chester I. Lewis, Jr., a key figure in the local as well as the national NAACP. Lewis initiated one of the earliest investigations of de facto school desegregation by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and successfully challenged employment discrimination in the nation's largest aircraft industries. Dissent in Wichita offers a moving account of the efforts of Lewis, Vivian Parks, Anna Jane Michener, and other courageous individuals to fight segregation and discrimination in employment, public accommodations, housing, and schools. This volume also offers the first extended examination of the Young Turks, a radical movement to democratize and broaden the agenda of the NAACP for which Lewis provided critical leadership. Through a close study of personalities and local politics in Wichita over two decades, Eick demonstrates how the tenor of black activism and white response changed as economic disparities increased and divisions within the black community intensified. Her analysis, enriched by the words and experiences of men and women who were there, offers new insights into the civil rights movement as a whole and into the complex interplay between local and national events.
