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    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor
    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor
    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor
    Ebook156 pages43 minutes

    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor

    By Shannon McRae

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    About this ebook

    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor portrays twin cities with very different personalities weathering a time of great change. Long established as thriving centers of manufacturing, fruit farming, shipping, and tourism, both towns faced the enormous economic and cultural transformations of post-World War II America: rapid demographic shifts, urban renewal, social unrest, and the collapse of industrial manufacturing. Through hard work, creative effort, and above all community cooperation, each southwest Michigan town reinvented itself, emerging into the 21st century revitalized and transformed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJun 8, 2015
    ISBN9781439651780
    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor
    Author

    Shannon McRae

    Shannon McRae, a Michigan native and descendant of Manistee pioneers, is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia who specializes in early-20th-century literature and history. Working closely with the Manistee County Historical Museum, several other local heritage centers, and many citizens of Manistee who generously offered their time and expertise, she has assembled the images they have provided in order to preserve their stories.

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    • 5/5
      What a great book about two great towns! My father and his sisters were some of those St. Joe “sand rabbits.” Through frequent visits to the Twin Cities, I always felt that the Twin Cities are a second home. This book sure brings back memories and did the area justice. Thanks!

    Book preview

    St. Joseph and Benton Harbor - Shannon McRae

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    INTRODUCTION

    America was a different country after World War II. In the 1950s, the newly prosperous global superpower was driven by expansion, modernization, industrial production, technological development, and consumerism. The Great Lakes region offered good jobs in automobile and parts manufacture, steelwork, and shipping. These opportunities, and a hope of less culturally oppressive conditions, brought thousands of African Americans up north from the South in the Great Migration. Unions ensured good wages and safe working conditions, federal benefits such as the GI Bill assisted veterans with low-rate mortgages and college educations, and an abundance of newly built affordable housing made the American Dream seem attainable for many.

    The reality was more complex. The cumulative effects of the Great Depression and a restricted wartime economy created infrastructure decay. The steady influx of workers into Northern cities and thousands of newly returned veterans meant overcrowding, poverty, and insufficient housing. The Housing Act of 1949, designed to address these issues, had mixed results. Federally funded urban renewal programs calling for lower-income neighborhoods to be leveled were often enacted with neither clear plans nor sufficient funds to relocate the residents. The fact that these residents were typically poor and black led poet Langston Hughes to famously refer to the program as Negro Removal.

    Black people attempting to find housing in white neighborhoods were typically not welcome. With urban centers demolished, new interstate construction that cut some towns through the middle and bypassed others, and city planning increasingly focused on cars moving quickly and efficiently between destinations, business owners relocated to newly built shopping centers and moved their families into the suburbs, taking the tax base with them. This phenomenon, called white flight, left many Northern urban centers impoverished, decayed, and crime-ridden by the 1970s.

    To make matters worse, the heavy industries that brought prosperity also polluted the environment. Federal regulations designed to address the demonstrable dangers proved extremely costly for companies to implement. With growing consumer demand for automobiles increasing the demand for oil and gas, instability in the world’s oil-producing regions, an unstable manufacturing economy, and a global energy crisis, the Northern industrial economy collapsed in the early 1980s.

    Some regions, such as the financial centers New York and Chicago, recovered quickly. The oil and aerospace-rich Southwest and the research and technology sector in the south San Francisco Bay area known as Silicon Valley emerged as the new centers of the energy and information economy. The steel and automotive production centers located around the Great Lakes and the East Coast became the Rust Belt, settling into cultural and economic decay from which some regions have not yet recovered.

    Others came back. Realizing that their city centers were the heart and soul of their communities, their citizens began to revive them. With the realization that the old manufacturing economy was gone for good, they reinvented themselves, became research and technology hubs, arts and cultural destinations, or tourist towns.

    This American story is the story of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, small adjacent cities in southwest Michigan on the Lake Michigan coast, some 90 miles from Chicago. This book chronicles how the citizens of the Twin Cities, through vision, effort, hard work, and cooperation, reinvented two struggling Rust Belt towns as thriving, unique, 21st-century destinations—St. Joseph through planned development that emphasized its hometown charm and attracted tourists, and Benton Harbor as a new urban center for the arts.

    This book was a community effort. Residents, local historians, business owners, libraries, and historical societies in both cities contributed nearly all of the images. The stories are theirs, related in person or written in local history books and in newspaper accounts from the News Palladium/Herald Press, which later became the Herald Palladium. The enthusiasm, generosity, and wealth of knowledge of these contributors is extraordinary.

    Some questioned whether the relatively recent events of the late 20th century counted as history. Particularly for older citizens who lived through what seemed a golden age of 1950s small-town American prosperity, history ended sometime in the late 1970s, brought down by economic forces and social changes largely beyond their control.

    Others were concerned with how I intended to represent Benton Harbor. The town’s recent history of racial tension, economic loss, slow recovery, and continued struggles remains difficult to discuss—a fact that has not been helped by periodic waves of negative and often sensational media attention. In 2003, a fatal altercation between a resident and a police officer resulted in rioting all too reminiscent of earlier upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s. When in 2010 it became one of the first cities in America to be run by a state-appointed emergency manager rather than its own elected officials, Benton Harbor was featured in the national spotlight once again, as were

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