Sunday, March 12, 2006
















Shots of the McLean Park projects. After the City of Vancouver slated Hogan's Alley for demolition, and started work on their planned inter-urban freeway, they built these as well. The idea was that all the people displaced by the freeway would move here. It was essentially the same sort of plan that they had across the United States, the spectacularly inhuman failure that created the infamous inner city projects in cities like Detroit, Chicago, etc. Urban planners called this "urban renewal" but in the black community is was known sardonically as "Negro removal." In Vancouver it never quite happened according to the city's plan because community activists stopped the freeway project -- though not before the building of the viaduct razed a good part of the community. Instead of moving into McLean Park, the black community spread out across the Lower Mainland. Basically, for black Vancouverites, the city became fully integrated at this point.

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