Martin Luther King Park & Community Garden, Crawford Roberts: 201 Kirkpatrick Street
Today, the Warren Branch Memorial Field and MLK Community Garden are quiet, green spaces surrounded by leafy trees. It’s a very different look and feel from 1923, when the Soho Playground was established slightly north of this area. At that time, before highways cut through the neighborhood and vehicles sped through the streets, this was a densely populated area. Over the next twenty years, significant changes would come: Terrace Village, one of the largest public housing complexes in the United States, would be constructed in this area. Hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of earth were removed to level steep hillsides, enabling nearly 3,000 families to have affordable housing with “modern” features such as indoor plumbing.
For a few decades, Terrace Village was a brightly burning star of hope. But it would not survive the economic, political, and social upheavals of the latter twentieth century. Today, the area still has a mix of income-dependent housing for families, seniors, and people with disabilities, built over the last 20 years, but it’s a fraction of what once stood on these flattened hills.
And so, the green has returned. The place that once had an abundance of people and a lack of trees is quite the opposite today.
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