Rainbow-colored homes spring up from the street grid in New Bedford’s West End like children’s play blocks. However, underneath the colorful patina of the Temple Landing Apartments lays a dramatic history of protest, neglect, and reuse.

To understand the full history of these bright new houses you must travel back half a century to the summers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the Civil Rights era, Black residents of New Bedford increasingly voiced their discontent over high unemployment and discriminatory hiring practices, poor public schools, and inadequate, unsafe housing.

In a series of actions called “the rebellion” by protestors and “the riots” by many others, the summer of 1970 erupted in arson, looting, sniper fire, and street confrontations in an increasingly hostile relationship between New Bedford’s Black residents and the police department. At one point, the National Guard was placed on alert in nearby Fall River.

These conflicts started in a variety of ways. Protests arose over the arrests of young African American men without obvious justification, and again when three white teenagers from surrounding towns drove into the neighborhood and shot indiscriminately into a crowd, killing one bystander and wounding several others. A white resident driving through the area told police he had been shot in the ankle as he passed the protest headquarters. The following day, New Bedford and state police raided the building, targeting the Black Panther-affiliated organizers. Twenty-one people were arrested, including unaffiliated activists, community supporters, and bystanders, and were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, anarchy, and riots.

Following this unrest, a group of community members established the United Front Development Corporation, which supported the construction of more and higher quality housing in the neighborhood on the site of the New Bedford Cordage Company, established in 1842 by ship owners and captains who needed rope for whaling vessels. The company grew and eventually filled a four-acre parcel bounded by Court, Emerson, Ash, and Kempton Streets, before closing in 1964. In 1973, a massive fire destroyed a two-block section of the vacant rope factory, and the remainder was demolished, along with older, blighted housing to make way for the United Front Homes.

The project was progressive and experimental for its time. Closed off from the general street grid, the 200-unit affordable housing development was accompanied by green space, a community center, and a daycare facility.

However, these 200 units did not meet the demands of the housing shortage. Meanwhile, the closed-off nature of the compound prevented police from driving through the development. Crime flourished, much of it committed by the United Front street gang, further damaging the development’s reputation. In 2008, a quarter of all shootings in New Bedford took place in United Front.

The tide began to turn after 2009, when several gang members were arrested. In 2010, the Boston-based group Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH) extensively renovated the complex, partnering with United Front Development Corporation to improve 138 units, demolish 62 others, and build 35 new units. The net loss of 27 units was caused by reopening the complex to the street grid, connecting United Front with the rest of the city, and making crime prevention easier.

The new developers, eager to shed the connotations that United Front carried, renamed the development “Temple Landing” after Lewis Temple, the African-American inventor of the toggle harpoon that revolutionized whaling. Crime in the neighborhood has decreased since the opening of the new units, but only time will tell if this project serves the community better than its predecessor.

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Staring at the endless concrete in the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park, it seems impossible that this was once a vibrant neighborhood. Laughing children ran across neighbors’ yards, caught up in games of hide and seek. The smell of coffee, oranges, and kerosene filled the air. Fruit trees grew everywhere. On a warm day you could hear cicadas sing, and, at night, the frogs chirped. Everybody knew each other.

A close-knit neighborhood, old West Elmwood referred to the community bounded to the east by Mashapaug Pond, to the north by the railroad tracks at Huntington Avenue, and to the west by Niantic Avenue.

Dennis Maynard grew up in West Elmwood in the 1950s: "As a child living in that area it was like Disneyland. It was just a playground. To this day we always talk about West Elmwood as probably the best place you could grow up. It was a combination of residential, country, a lot of gardens. Not farms, but gardens. Lots of fruit trees. You had the access to the water. Everybody knew each other. Regardless of your race, everybody knew each other. As kids you were in everybody's house."

Today, old West Elmwood is gone.

Providence was one of many American cities drastically altered by so-called “urban renewal” projects in the mid-twentieth century. Supposedly “blighted” and deteriorated neighborhoods were demolished to make way for highways, industrial parks, and other modern urban structures. These changes were supposed to improve cities, but in many cases, they destroyed vibrant communities and negatively altered people’s lives. This is what happened in West Elmwood.

The Providence Redevelopment Agency bulldozed West Elmwood to construct the Huntington Expressway Industrial Park. Studies describing unhealthy and unsafe living conditions in this portion of West Elmwood were used to justify the city’s action.

Knocking down this portion of old West Elmwood forced families to leave both their homes and their community. As a result of implicitly racist practices of banks and lenders, people of color often could not get mortgages to purchase new homes in new suburban developments. “Many neighborhoods, [the government] classified as white,” explained Cliff Montiero, a longtime activist and opponent of urban renewal. “People of color could not get mortgages [to live] in those areas.” For the former residents of West Elmwood, who could not afford to buy a home in desirable neighborhoods outright, that meant they were forced to live in sub-prime housing. ”Many people [in West Elmwood] used to be homeowners. After losing their home ownership in the Mashapaug Pond area, [they] became renters,” Montiero said.

Some West Elmwood homeowners fought to save their homes with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Two hundred people signed a petition. People attended city government meetings, speaking out about the injustice of the urban renewal project and the Providence Redevelopment Agency’s misrepresentation of West Elmwood. Arguing that “urban renewal is Negro removal,” they highlighted the implicit racial discrimination in urban renewal projects, which disproportionately negatively affected colored people.

For five years, the people of West Elmwood fought for their neighborhood, but in the end their struggle failed. Most of the houses in old West Elmwood were knocked down. Over five hundred families were forced to leave. "They came in and tore down the houses, bulldozed the hill," recalled neighborhood resident Ed Hooks. Now, West Elmwood survives only in the memories of the people who once lived there.

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