Community Builders

EIGHT - Hamilton Hill: A Low-Income Neighborhood Struggling for Survival

8 Hamilton Hill· A Low-Income Neighborhood Strugglingfor Survival In neighborhoods that face the double disadvantage of being poor in a poor city, there are limits to how far lobbying and protest strategies can go in improving residential life. In such neighborhoods it is difficult for neighborhood associations to mobilize needed resources, define common interests, and overcome neighborhood fragmentation, even ifthey do everything right. The political , economic, and social fragmentation common in U.S. cities is particularly detrimental in poor neighborhoods, because it pits one weak group of residents against another. It also reduces the possibility ofusing protest-the only resource the poor have, some researchers believe--to draw attention to their harsh living conditions. Poor residents are transient, and their poverty not only contributes to the sense of neighborhood instability in low-income neighborhoods but undermines their attachment to a neighborhood and their solidarity with their neighbors. Community groups in such neighborhoods have a harder time defining common interests and organizing residents around them. Hamilton Hill, the poorest neighborhood in Schenectady, is a good example ofhow economic restructuring fragments a community and inhibits collective action. Poor residents ofHamilton Hill lack adequate incomes, social services, police protection, and decent housing, conditions related to the restructuring ofthe U.S. economy as a whole and General Electric's drastic reduction ofjobs in Schenectady in particular. The city's tax base has shrunk, and the number of jobs, real-estate values, and the quality oflocal services have declined, forcing HAMILTON HILL 165 many residents to move. At the same time, competition for jobs and resources has increased the conflict between ethnic groups in the residential communities that survive and has left little room for them to organize to address neighborhood problems. All ofa neighborhood's residents are affected by the physical deterioration oftheir neighborhood, by a rise in crime, and by a decline in local services. But they may have different views on who and what causes neighborhood problems and on how to solve them. The strategies long-term residents and home owners in Hamilton Hill supported were designed to keep the "wrong people " out and to bring the "right people" in. However, most Hamilton Hill residents are the "wrong people"-poor people. The Decline ofHamilton HiDNeighhorhood In the nineteenth century, Hamilton Hill, with its easyaccess to Schenectady's factories, emerged as a typical ethnic working-class neighborhood. The Hill was known as the Bower Woods or Bower Hill, from the Dutch name for the higher lands lying between Albany Street, Veda Avenue, and Paige Street. forested with till, stately pitch-pine trees that extended eastward to Albany. Today's name was derived from Hamilton Street, named after Henry Hamilton , one of the owners of the Bower lands along the summit of the hill that were deeded to the city in 1842 (Hart 1975). Hamilton Hill developed rapidly as a residential neighborhood in an industrial city, bounded on the east by South Brandywine Avenue and on the west by Veeder Avenue, where the county jail stands now. State and Wyllie Streets defined its northern and southern boundaries respectively (see Map 6). Hamilton Hill was always fragmented along religious and ethnic lines, with each ethnic group congregating at its own church, a source ofeconomic and social support. ''The French who had lived on Stanley Street attended Sacred Heart; the Irish, clustering on Emmett, Craig and Steuben Streets, went to St. Columbus; the Albany Street Germans went to St. Joseph's; and the Italians along Schenectady and Strong Streets attended Our Lady of Mount Carmel" (Kurp 1986:A17). The residents gained a sense of community by sharing their daily round. The main Hamilton Hill shopping district was Albany Street, a busy retail area with a variety of specialty stores, some of which remain today, even though Hamilton Hill is known as a crime-ridden neighborhood and shopping malls have put many small inner-city retailers out ofbusiness. For busi- HAMILTON HILL 167 nesses like the Albany Pork Shop, founded in 1900 by a German family; Ralph's Cleaners, established by Irish settlers in 1910; and Schenectady Hardware, begun in 1920, the Hill offers amenities worth staying for: low rent or low taxes and infrastructure (a smokehouse for the Albany Pork Shop, for example). Most ofthe remaining stores are specialty shops that have not suffered from the neighborhood's bad image. They are a source ofpride for residents and a sign of neighborhood vitality...