West 15th district faces the challenge of reinvention

Jun. 12—In 1959, as Anniston was nearing its first rumbles of the civil rights movement, its center of Black life — West 15th Street — mixed grandiosity with the economic comfort of middle-class America.

Everything, or nearly so, could be found then along the blocks between Moore and Crawford avenues: 10 restaurants, eight groceries, seven hair salons and barber shops, five laundromats, four insurance agencies, four furniture stores and three gas stations. Between them was an assortment of electricians, plumbers, hardware stores, carpenters, shoe-repair shops, hotels, taxi services, florists and tailors.

Most of those businesses were owned by African Americans.

Today, that version of West 15th Street isn't experienced. It's remembered, though only by those old enough to recall.

"People my age in Anniston never got to experience that form of Anniston," said City Councilwoman Ciara Smith, who represents Ward 3, "so that concept is foreign to us."

Along with the city's postbellum founding and the Army's stay at Fort McClellan, the rise and fall of West 15th Street is one of Anniston's most-told tales. In it are chapters on Black entrepreneurship, strict racial segregation, urban decay and repeated efforts at revitalization, nearly all of which have generated tepid investment returns.

City Councilman Demetric Roberts, who represents Ward 2, is old enough to remember when "you could get everything you need on this side of town." Now, however, "you can't buy a loaf of bread out here ... Sixty years later, you may have four businesses on West 15th Street total."

That statement alone begs a question: What would represent a successful revitalization of Anniston's traditional Black business district?

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Use the white bar in the middle to "slide" left and right to compare West 15th Street in its heyday with West 15th Street today:

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It's no longer 1959 in Anniston

The underbelly of any effort features uncomfortable Anniston truths, not the least of which is the city's encyclopedic list of revitalization plans for Noble Street, Lenlock and West 15th.

Noble Street, the city's historic center, has been rebuilt, reimagined, revitalized and replanned since suburbanization and the opening of Quintard Mall in Oxford began siphoning away retailers in the late 1960s. But city officials steadfastly defend their optimism. The impending opening of the new federal courthouse, the development of a Noble Street hotel and the extending of the Chief Ladiga Trail are giving the council and Main Street Anniston yet another opportunity to decide the best way to seed downtown's future growth.

Other factors are in play, as well. In 1960, Anniston's population was 33,000; today, it's 21,000, with Oxford poised to soon become Calhoun County's largest city. Twenty-seven percent of the city lives below the federal poverty line, according to Census data. The gains of the civil rights movement birthed competition between West 15th and Noble Street for African American shoppers' dollars, a national byproduct historians often cite when discussing the decline of Black business districts. And the cultural and economic changes that affect cities often undermine efforts to roll back clocks and return declining business districts to the days of old.

It's 2021, not 1959, in other words.

"In my opinion, I don't think it would ever be what it used to be," said Debra Foster, a former councilwoman and longtime western Anniston business owner. "When communities go through transitions like that, they are never the same. To say it can be like it was years ago — never. Downtown Anniston will never be the same again; it's just part of the change."

If reinvention, not revitalization, is key to West 15th's future, a smattering of gains has already taken place. A new coffee house, History Making Coffee Shop, run by the nonprofit Community Development Corporation, is on tap. The city has promoted the West Anniston Gateway, a quarter-acre park on the corner of West 15th Street and Glen Addie Avenue that features an "Open Spaces Sacred Places" outdoor area funded through a Community Foundation of Northeast Alabama grant and assistance from Nature Sacred, a Maryland-based organization. Time will tell if the election of Smith and Roberts, whose 2020 victories gave the city's predominantly African American wards new leadership, shepherds West 15th Street into brighter times.

Foster's notion — that West 15th Street can't return to the past — isn't hers alone.

"I don't think it's going to be (revitalized) in a way that Anniston once knew because I think times have changed," Smith said. "There is some progressiveness that we are experiencing, and you have a lot more young people wanting to be involved in entrepreneurship, so businesses look a lot different these days. But I don't think it's unrealistic at all to say we can imagine West 15th, or even Noble Street, becoming what we think it can be."

For Anniston, though, the need for such a revitalization project is keen. City financial officer Julie Borrelli recently told the council that only 24 percent of businesses are owned by people of color in Anniston, even though the city's population is 53 percent Black.

Nationally, only 2.2 percent of the United States' 5.7 million employer-based businesses (those with more than one worker) are Black-owned, according to the Brookings Institution. That number is significant, Brookings writes, because "Black adults are much more likely to be unemployed, and Black businesses are much more likely to hire Black workers. This shortage of Black businesses throttles employment and the development of Black communities. Furthermore, the underrepresentation of Black businesses is costing the U.S. economy millions of jobs and billions of dollars in unrealized revenues."

In Anniston, that translates to a simple point: Citywide economic development, employment rates and median household earnings all benefit when Black-owned businesses not only exist, but blossom.

The reality for West 15th Street businesses

Foster and Roberts represent divergent points in West 15th Street's reality. She is a former West 15th business owner. Roberts dreams of becoming one. Neither discounts the reality business owners may face in the neighborhoods due west of Zinn Park.

For a generation, Foster's mother, Annie B. Foster, ran her flower shop — Annie's Flower Garden — on West 15th Street. Other businesses came and went; Annie's stayed. When her mother fell ill in her later years, Foster stepped in and helped. When her mother died in 1997, she took it over, a labor more of love than professional aspirations.

"I had no interest in being a florist," Foster said. "But that was her heart, she loved flowers, and I did not want the business to die."

Over time, Foster became skilled at making casket sprays — the stylized floral blankets that decorate tops of caskets — for funerals. Her sister specialized in corsages and boutineers. Foster kept Annie's Flower Garden open for another 17 years, closing it finally in 2013, another West 15th Street business lost.

"Trust me," she said. "It was a very, very tough decision."

As a student at Grambling University, Roberts envisioned a West 15th Street business as part of an accounting class assignment. "It's widely known I grew up in a bootlegging house; my grandmother bootlegged," he said. For his class assignment, he proposed a West 15th Street tavern.

"I've always been fascinated with having a sports bar on 15th Street," Roberts said. "Since I was a kid, I wanted a sports bar. But if I put a sports bar out on 15th Street right now, could I be successful in our current city? No, I couldn't."

Roberts minces no words about Anniston's reality — its poverty, its race relations, its rates of violent crime in specific neighborhoods, either real or perceived. He's quick to admit his dream would fail if he couldn't persuade white residents, and even some of the city's Black residents, to patronize a business on West 15th Street near the now-demolished Cooper Homes public housing site.

Chasing entrepreneurs willing to invest in western Anniston isn't Roberts' preferred method of revitalizing his hometown neighborhood. It's housing.

"The only way we can get back to a semblance of (West 15th Street's past) is affordable housing," Roberts said. "If people died in the house and nobody moves into it, and it falls in, you're creating a hole in that community. And when the next generation is born, they have to live somewhere. There's nowhere for anybody to move out west. And right now, if you create a new business out here, who's coming?"

Roberts is blunt. He talks about West 15th Street with a stinging tough love — vacant buildings, vacant lots, a smattering of businesses. He has sincere hope, though, especially with the anticipated Chief Ladiga Trail opening that could give new business owners a steady stream of customers.

The theme of reinvention, instead of mere revitalization, runs deep through West 15th's strongest allies.

"Let's be honest, Ladiga is coming, and once Ladiga gets here, everybody is going to want to go build that way," Roberts said. "Noble Street is going to be key to the revitalization of everything in Anniston, and if you build a strong Noble Street, everybody can build off of that."

Smith, the City Council's youngest member, repeatedly mentions opportunities — for education, for business development, for wealth creation, for adequate housing. And then she mentions people who believe in the neighborhoods around West 15th Street and their future, whatever it may be.

"I could think of almost a dozen Black individuals who have the education and the resources and the skills to be a part of that transformation in the city of Anniston," Smith said. "I can think of so many who I know who want to be a part of that transformation."

Phillip Tutor — ptutor@annistonstar.com — is a Star columnist. Follow him at Twitter.com/PTutor_Star.