It's not unusual to hear someone reminisce about the old neighborhood.
But there's something more than wistfulness in Kenneth Turner's voice when he talks about the blocks where he played as a kid.
Turner grew up on Lenawee Street, between Logan Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) and Rulison Street, just southwest of downtown Lansing.
Quick trips to the corner store, meals at neighbors' homes, the rush to get home when the streetlights came on — such memories are common to folks who grew up in the close-knit urban neighborhoods before malls and freeways.
But Turner's old neighborhood is different.
It's been a ditch for 50 years.
Between 1963 and 1970, about 800 houses and businesses between Main Street (now Malcolm X) Street and St. Joseph Highway, a few blocks south of downtown, were wiped out at a stroke by the I496 freeway.
The freeway cut through the heart of Lansing's black community, from Friendship Church to the Tropicana Lounge, from Bob's Shoe Repair to Dr. William Harrison's office, from Kalush's Grocery to Clinton Canady's dental clinic.
There's nothing left even to mourn. These once-vibrant city blocks had no chance to gentrify or decay over time. You can't go back to the old house and marvel at how small it looks now, or lament that your favorite restaurant is a cell phone store.
Last week, Turner's friend, Adolph Burton, started going through a cache of photos left behind by Burton's father, Frederick Richardson, a photographer for General Motors who died last year. Burton grew up in the neighborhood too.
The photos brought familiar faces and places to life.
Why go through the old photos now?
Because this story has not been fully told.
"Paving the Way," a major research project announced Friday by Lansing Mayor Andy Schor, will use a $39,400 grant from the National Parks Service to gather and preserve the history of a lost neighborhood.
Turner and Burton had been researching the subject for years before joining forces with "Paving the Way." They are filming interviews with eyewitnesses to the area's life and its demise.
Now the Historical Society of Greater Lansing is putting its full weight behind the project and the city is pitching in. A digital, interactive database of the lost neighborhood, house by house, is in the works. In a year or so, there will be an exhibit at the Michigan History Museum and traveling version that will go to schools and other places. A film documentary and other projects are also planned.
The call is out for anyone with memories to share, photos to scan or anything else to contribute.
If you didn't know the name of a record you wanted, you went to Johnnie's Record Shop, at 812 S. Logan, hummed the song to Johnnie and he'd come back with the wax.
"That's where everybody went to go buy records," Kenneth Turner mused. "Any music you wanted, Johnnie had it." Turner was a diehard Temptations fan. Period ads show that Johnnie's carried everything from swing and big band to rock, soul and R&B, and it didn't stop there.
Other record stores lasted long enough to die of old age (or the Internet). Johnnie's died young — T-boned by an Oldsmobile.
In the 1960s, Johnnie's became the field office for the state highway commission. The building still stands next to the freeway, alone in a sea of concrete, now home to a paint company. From this unlikely command center, engineers tore a neighborhood in half to build I496, first known as the Oldsmobile Expressway.
The freeway girdles Lansing from west to east, from Delta Township to MSU. From end to end, I496 is 11.9 miles long, including the 3.4-mile "Pine Tree Connector" from Kalamazoo Street near East Lansing to I-96.
The project's impact didn't stop at razing homes and displacing families. Some 35 streets were bisected and dead-ended. The results are still dramatic — streets that once wove the city together end abruptly in berms and guardrails.
Knowing the disruptive potential of the expressway, Hannah got on the phone to Washington, D.C., and stopped it. Ann Arbor avoided the fate of Lansing, Detroit and Grand Rapids by opting for a ring of bypasses.
But such restraint was the exception, not the rule, during the 1960s highway boom. For Lansing and most other American cities, the prospect of quick travel across town, not to mention dozens of construction jobs, on the federal dime, was too good to resist. The federal government paid for 90 percent of the $42.6 million cost of I496.
Jeffrey Horner, a senior lecturer in urban studies and planning at Wayne State University, has studied the effects of freeways that cut through Detroit's largely residential Black Bottom neighborhood and Paradise Valley, a mostly commercial district, east of the city's central business hub downtown.
"The I496 expressway, much like I375 in Detroit, went where it did because it was the most politically defenseless area, by far the most African-American district in the city," Horner said.
The pattern repeated itself around the country as the interstate highway system spread.
In Tennessee, I40 was routed through the flourishing Jefferson Street corridor, home to about 80 percent of Nashville's black-owned businesses. In Miami, I95 and I395 displaced about half the Overtown neighborhood, a thriving center of black life. In New Orleans, elevated Interstate 10 turned Claiborne Avenue, a bustling black district and center of Mardi Gras celebrations, into a deafening tunnel of automobile exhaust. Businesses and residents fled, leaving the street to decay and crime.
These problems don't stop when the freeway is finished. Freeways lower property values and keep marginal neighborhoods marginal, as anyone who ventures into the dead ends created by I496 in Lansing can attest. Noise, pollution and the permanent problem of getting around town when you live next to a freeway all have a disproportionate impact on poorer residents.
There is still vigorous debate about the freeway's longer-term impact. Before I496 sliced through Lansing, redlining and other forms of discrimination kept many African- Americans concentrated in defined neighborhoods like the one in the path of the highway.
As the freeway cut through the city, the black population dispersed into surrounding neighborhoods, especially the south and west sides, despite persistent discrimination. With the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act in 1968 and piecemeal local civil rights victories, the city's racial mix gradually changed.
In the 20 years after I496 was completed, the west side evolved into one of the city's most diverse and thriving neighborhoods. Starting with meetings in her living room, Lansing resident Ann Kron formed the city's first neighborhood association with a primary goal of fighting white flight, redlining and racism.
"We have one of the most diverse cities anywhere and we're proud of that," Schor said after Friday's project launch.
But Horner thinks the breakup of a black community and resulting diaspora was a mixed blessing at best.
Burton is among those who mourn the loss of the neighborhood carved up by I496, and not just because he lived there.
"We were self-sufficient," he said.
One person's ghetto is, to another observer, a base for building economic self-sufficiency in an otherwise beleaguered community.
"Whether it's a black, Jewish or Hispanic community, when you disperse, you don't have any wealth or power base," Horner said.
"Paving the Way" will also look at the connection between the juggernaut of I496 and civil disturbances that tore through Lansing in 1966, centering on the near west side area affected by the freeway.
Lately, Schor has been reading about the titanic struggle between New York's über-planner Robert Moses and activist giant-killer Jane Jacobs, author of "The Life and Death of American Cities." Jacobs tirelessly fought the projects and superhighways that wiped out whole neighborhoods, and won some major battles.
"Moses provided the infrastructure to move people, to get to a city of 7 or 8 million people, but he also created massive concrete jungles, took out parks and houses," Schor said.
The damage done by grand social engineering projects of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the loss of black neighborhoods to urban renewal projects and freeways, has yet to be fully assessed.
Horner said today's urban planners have taken these hard lessons to heart.
Many of Horner's students loathe the isolation of the suburbs and want to live where they don't need a car. They long for walkable, close-knit neighborhoods like Lansing's lost I496 enclave.
As "Paving the Way" assembles a mosaic of a lost Lansing neighborhood, the result will be a cautionary case study as well as a proud reclamation of black history.
Burton and Turner are only starting the interview project, but it's already bearing fruit. Last week, they caught up with another former Lansing resident, Robert Joe Williams, who was director of the Capital City Anti-Poverty Program and lived on the 1600 block of West St. Joseph Highway in the 1960s.
"Just don't play any of that jungle music," the bank manager told the men.
"We went to another bank," Williams said. To jog Williams' memory about 496, Burton and Turner started talking about their old haunts. Williams beamed at the names — Matthew's Restaurant, Johnnie's Records, Friendship Church.
"I remember all of those," Williams said.
Many of the houses lost to the freeway were very well built, in the style of the older existing west side houses, Burton said.
Williams came to Lansing from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where "Black Wall Street," a thriving African-American community, was similarly scarred by urban renewal projects, including an expressway loop, in the 1970s.
"This wasn't by accident," Williams said.
Turner grew thoughtful. Sharing memories with Burton and Williams was sweet, but for all three of them, the walk down memory lane came to an uncomfortable dead end.