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84 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Review Essay Oral History and Recovering a Vanished Kentucky Neighborhood Jennifer Abraham Cramer C rawfish Bottom is a balanced blend of oral history, folklore, geography, and public history, and will be of interest to the general public and academics alike. Urban renewal destroyed this once-maligned, now-celebrated section of town in Frankfort, Kentucky, and it now lives only in historical documents and a series of oral history interviews. Doug Boyd examines all available primary source materials relating to this vanished neighborhood and presents a cohesive study to guide readers to a balanced understanding of Crawfish Bottom. He demonstrates the role that residents and historians play in shaping a dynamic community identity. A neighborhood in Kentucky’s state capital, Crawfish Bottom was later known as “Craw” and “the Bottom.” It emerged in the 1870s during a post-Civil War period marked by population expansion, the growth of the nearby logging industry , and turbulent social changes. Many of downtown Frankfort’s buildings were constructed at that time, and in North Frankfort, Crawfish Bottom developed on fifty acres of land near the Kentucky River. Located in a low-lying neighborhood prone to flooding, Crawfish Bottom became the site of inexpensive housing. The neighborhood was racially integrated, though most people today remember the Craw as mainly African American. However, residents consisted of recently freed slaves, families of incarcerated prisoners, freed inmates who lived near the penitentiary , and poor German and Irish immigrant families. The working class residents were unified by social milieu, rather than divided by race. Many of those who lived in the area worked in the nearby hemp factory and in the local distillery , the leading industry in Frankfort at the turn of the twentieth century until Prohibition shut the distilleries down between 1920 and 1933. The neighborhood quickly acquired and retained a reputation as the bad part of town, especially from the 1870s through the 1930s. Boyd shows that this reputation was well founded, but not well balanced. By 1880, thirteen lumber mills operated in Frankfort. Men employed in the logging industry, most transporting logs to nearby factories, spent their wages in Craw bars and saloons, JENNIFER ABRAHAM CRAMER SPRING 2012 85 Douglas A. Boyd. Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 236 pp. ISBN 9780813134086 (cloth), $35.00. gambling, fighting, and soliciting prostitutes. Most of Frankfort’s sex trade operated in Craw, and several houses of prostitution concentrated in specific areas such as Gas Alley. State legislators worked directly across the street from the red light district, and although polite Frankfort society openly objected to the prostitutes, saloon proprietors, and dishonest politicians who exploited the neighborhood during elections, vice in Craw operated pretty freely at the turn of the twentieth century. But the perceived lawlessness of Craw met waves of resistance throughout the neighborhood ’s existence. Frankfort temperance groups, individual churches, and groups such as the Citizen’s Improvement Association called for destruction of the neighborhood soon after its inception and persisted throughout the twentieth century. When Prohibition encouraged black market bootlegging and brought increased violence, respectable citizens likened the neighborhood of Craw to a disease and described it as a slum beset by vice. Following World War II, Frankfort’s civic leaders sought to expand downtown and the Craw neighborhood, considered blighted, became the target of urban renewal proposals. By the mid-1970s, the North Frankfort Urban Renewal Project’s “slum clearance” had destroyed 345 buildings and displaced 369 families at a cost of more than ten million dollars. Today, Crawfish Bottom is the site of Frankfort’s Capital Plaza, containing a civic center, federal and state buildings, a plaza of shops, and a YMCA. Clearly, the perception of Craw as a blighted slum rife with violence and depravity played a role in its vulnerability to urban renewal and destruction. Early historical records referred to Craw as the seedy underbelly of Frankfort, and that version became rooted in public memory until more recent renderings of Crawfish Bottom’s history and culture portrayed a more complex story. Twenty years after the demolition of the neighborhood, James Wallace conducted oral histories with former Craw residents to provide an alternative perspective...

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