;COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Young, working-class and black, Henry Bolden Jr. was not the kind of person who bought a new house in 1946, even in the North.
But Bolden was also a U.S. Army veteran who’d spent World War II driving supply trucks in Belgium and France. With help from the GI Bill, he was able to buy his house in a Columbus neighborhood that was revolutionary in its day: Hanford Village, an enclave of single-family homes marketed solely to blacks.
“I would have been stuck, like a lot of other people are still stuck, renting houses in the poor, rundown neighborhoods,” said Bolden, who at 82 still lives in the same small house on the city’s east side.
Some of the early black homeowner neighborhoods around the country are trying to win historic recognition before their place in the history of homeownership fades.
The residents want to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which would make them eligible for federal tax credits or grants for historic preservation. The designation doesn’t protect against demolition but requires anyone involved with a federally funded project, including developers, to take the listing into consideration when the work could endanger the structure.
In New Orleans, developers in the early 1950s created the Pontchartrain Park subdivision around a golf course designed by black landscape architect Joseph Bartholomew.
Pontchartrain Park residents were preparing a 50th anniversary celebration and an application to the National Register when Hurricane Katrina severely damaged the homes in 2005, halting the effort.
In Las Vegas, residents of the Berkely Square neighborhood on the city’s west side have applied for a listing for the subdivision of modest ranch homes built after World War II for the city’s growing black population, many of them veterans.
The neighborhood is a reminder that home ownership for blacks, once rare, became a reality for many, said Ruth D’hondt, who has lived there since 1959. Just a few years earlier, city developers were advertising homes in “whites only” subdivisions.
“It just grieves me we would walk away from something that was so hard fought for and was so valuable,” said D’hondt, 65, a retired server at Caesars Palace.
The neighborhoods were developed as the G.I. Bill made home ownership a reality for millions for the first time, including blacks. Cities partnered with the government – the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority – and private developers with a conscience.
Thomas Berkely, for example, who helped finance what became Berkely Square, was a black civil rights activist.
One challenge to historic recognition is how much the areas have changed. In Delaware, owners have made improvements from new windows to adding a story to houses in the Dunleith neighborhood south of Wilmington, created in the 1950s as the state’s first housing development marketed to blacks.
Early residents included blue-collar workers and teachers as well as veterans. Like Pontchartrain Park and Berkely Square, it’s still largely a black community.
The Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs considers Dunleith potentially eligible for the National Register but would need to know more about what made the houses unique if an application were made.
Another challenge is the relative youth of the housing developments. Eligibility for the National Register begins after 50 years, a timespan that could now make “historic places” of split-level ranch subdivisions and shopping plazas.
“It doesn’t seem to be imperative to save these buildings right now,” said Christine Madrid French, president of the Arlington, Va.-based Recent Past Preservation Network. “Versus an 1890s mansion, where it might seem more obvious.”
