This year, The Blade’s interns explored a variety of Toledo's neighborhoods. The following ongoing series highlights those communities.
When Alicia Smith pulled up to the Popeyes drive-through, the teenager at the window couldn’t stop staring.
To him, she wasn’t just a customer. She was Miss Alicia, the woman who helped him secure this food service job at 16 years old. He was a success story from her Jobs, Opportunity, & Youth program at the Junction Coalition.
Through programs that uplift Junction community members young and old, Ms. Smith has proven herself to be a neighborhood staple.
So is her coworker, Eunice Glover, who was recently stopped at a gas station by a woman she helped with housing.
“I don't get frustrated with people stopping me like that, because they need help,” Ms. Glover said. “It is everywhere I go. I could be at the mall, I can be at the bank. I can be anywhere. And that’s how I make a connection.”
At the nonprofit Junction Coalition, Ms. Smith is executive director while Ms. Glover is housing director. Since 2012, they have led the organization’s revitalization efforts in the central Toledo neighborhood.
Ms. Glover has lived in the community all her life.
She recalled going to her aunt’s house as a little girl, watching I-475 being built in the late 1960s up until 1971. She saw communities separated by the construction, as urban renewal — or as she calls it, “urban removal” — dismantled Dorr Street, the business district.
“The decline began in the African American community as a result of that separation,” Ms. Glover said. “We have to fix that, because that was not fair.”
Historically, where Junction now sits was a Polish community called Kuschwantz. Now, according to the Coalition’s 2018 Junction Master Plan, Junction has 7,721 residents, with 87 percent being African American.
The Junction neighborhood generally is bounded by Dorr Street to the north, I-75 to the east, the Anthony Wayne Trail, Swan Creek, and railroad tracks to the south, and railroad and industry to the west.
Ms. Smith, who arrived in Junction when she was 14, recalled stories of Dorr Street being a “Black Mecca,” with doctors’ offices, a laundry mat, a theater, and other amenities.
The Junction Coalition hopes to reinvest in a community hurt by this urban removal.
“The Junction neighborhood gave me an opportunity to work, pray, and raise my family in a community that was like me, that was like us,” said Shantae Brownlee, a resident of eighteen years. “That was rich in history, rich in pride, and rich in just nurturing each other.”
Ms. Glover offered names of past Junction pioneers, including Rose Newton and Aaron Laramore from Organized Neighbors Yielding eXcellence, Inc., a nonprofit community development group formally called the Brown-Dorr-Collingwood Development Corp.
ONYX had three mechanisms for improving the lives of the 10,000 residents of the area: housing development, economic development, and community organizing.
In 1995, the Toledo Homes project, a public-private partnership, awarded $4.8 million for the construction of 40 houses and the rehabilitation of ten houses in the Junction area — all south of Dorr Street and west of Collingwood Boulevard. The $90,000 three and four-bedroom houses were intended for low-income working families
"After many years of decline, the residents will be convinced that the neighborhood is a place to stay in, live in, and invest in,” Mr. Laramore, executive director of Organized Neighbors Yielding eXcellence, Inc., told The Blade in 1995.
As housing director of the Junction Coalition, Ms. Glover continues ONYX’s efforts to boost Junction’s population.
She coordinates efforts to renovate houses and fill vacant plots in the neighborhood for move-in. For example, the Coalition recently partnered with Maumee Valley Habitat for Humanity to build fifteen houses, with one reserved for Tresser Boles.
For Ms. Boles, the opportunity from Habitat feels like returning home. She was born a street over, and her brother lives in a house just beyond the trees.
She said many people avoid the area because of crime, but she disagrees with the stigma.
“We made it,” Ms. Boles said. “You know, I lived through it, I grew up here.”
Robert Lyons, the Coalition’s community organizer and a bishop at Greater St. Mary's Missionary Baptist Church in Junction, called crime “a way of life” in the community. It’s a tool to survive, he said, adding that young people are often influenced by older people outside Junction.
Ms. Smith acknowledged the neighborhood’s history of gun violence as a call to action.
“Stop having our heads in the hole of self preservation,” Ms. Smith said. “My interest is that we all make it so that I can make it. So my grandbaby can make it. That's what Junction is.”
Junction is ultimately about leveraging community partnerships to meet survival needs, Ms. Smith explained.
Andrea Sanford, children’s librarian at Junction’s Mott Branch Library, said that most of the community members they serve are Black and belong to low-income households. They try to support people, for example, by supplying Wi-Fi boxes for the many residents who lack internet at home.
Junction is also a food desert, with no major grocery store, Ms. Smith said. The Kroger that once stood at Nebraska Avenue and Hawley Street left in the 1970s, leaving smaller convenience stores with expensive prices.
So, the Coalition grows their own food using a community garden that spans two-and-a-half acres of land.
With hundreds of seeds from Toledo GROWS and nutrition lessons from Sonia Flunder-McNair at SONIA Organics, they feed about 165 Junction families.
“When we talk about the Junction and inner-city communities, we have to make sure that these spaces are beautiful, welcoming, because they will feed and be the core of what will represent abundance for the rest of the city,” Mrs. Flunder-McNair, a Junction resident, said.
Unlike past community groups, the Coalition especially emphasizes environmental justice as a pillar of Junction’s future. After all, it was founded in response to the algal bloom’s toxic effects on Junction’s water supply.
Now, nearly a decade later, Junction’s fight for revival continues.
A recent $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to overhaul the streetscapes of both the Junction and UpTown neighborhoods is just one fruit of their labor. It’s certainly an improvement from the mere $50 the Coalition started with.
“Multi generational love — that's what Junction is,” Ms. Smith said. “There's a whole narrative that’ll tell you, ‘Oh, black folks can't live together.’ But either one of you could walk in our community and we’d feed you if you got hungry, we hug you if you need it. The resilience has become our story, but the victory is what we're aiming for.”
First Published December 4, 2023, 9:18 p.m.
