← Analysis Walkabout — wander by real connection, not category
Lived places displaced by power
A university expands, a highway gets built, a reservoir gets filled -- and a real, lived community disappears from underneath it, sometimes twice, fifty years apart, at the same institution. Not always a racial story, though race is where it hits hardest and most often in America. Always a story about who actually held the power to decide.
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Where this connects
One Billionaire's $7.5 Billion Bet Helped Pull Detroit Out of the Largest Municipal Bankruptcy in US History.
Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history in July 2013, carrying roughly $18 billion in debt. It exited in eight...
ExxonMobil Built Baton Rouge Into an Oil City in 1909. A Century Later, It Bought Out and Razed the Neighborhood That Grew Up Beside It.
Standard Oil broke ground on former plantation land along the Mississippi River in 1909, and within a year Baton Rouge had a working refi...
Chicago Drew an Invisible Line in a Lake in 1919. By 1962 It Was Concrete. Today It's 30 Years of Life.
In 1919, a Black teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after crossing an invisible segregation line, and the riot that followed killed 38 peo...
Decay Came in a Few Sharp Years in Newark's Central Ward. The Repair Took Five Institutions and Five Decades.
By the time Newark's Central Ward exploded in July 1967, two separate government projects had already spent years demolishing it. A highw...
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