Youth & Schools in the Bottoms
Many of the children of the Bottoms received their elementary
education at Jefferson School on E. Fountain. The school was built
in 1926 on a site that had been used for schools since 1866. It was
a large, symmetrical brick building with a main entrance onto a courtyard
on Fountain Street and another entrance on South Jefferson. A 1931
newspaper article praised Jefferson School for having “the largest
and best playgrounds in the city." The school cost the city $275,000
to build.
 Jefferson
School
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Sam Stellrecht, City Planner during the early 1950s and the
man behind the drive to re-channel the Kalamazoo River, claims
that the Jefferson School was a “problem school”
because of the several safety issues it raised. As a result,
he believes the school district was glad to close it. While
this image of the school contrasts radically with the image
of the school preserved in the memories of former Bottoms
residents, a 1948 American Public Health Association report
on housing problems in Battle Creek substantiates Stellrecht’s
claim. The report concluded that elementary schools in the
Bottoms did not meet minimum standards because of the excessive
distance and traffic hazards between neighborhood homes and
schools. The Jefferson School building was eventually razed
in fulfillment of critics’ wishes, but the event could
not dampen the strong feeling of community in the Bottoms.
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School was one of several ways that children and teens
in the Bottoms could socialize, but by no means the only one. Many
residents of the Bottoms recalled other aspects of life in Battle
Creek that offered them the chance to get together. Beatrice Brooks,
who had come to the city from Arkansas, recalled her experiences at
a theater as a child:
| “I think I was
about eight. I’m not for sure because that’s going
way back but I really had a fear of being close to the white
people because where I came from, we didn’t do that. We
were on one side of town, we were cross the tracks in other
words and the white people lived up town. When we went to the
movies, we sat upstairs and they sat downstairs and if you had
to go to the bathroom you had to go outdoors in the alley where
they had a toilet, you know, an outside toilet. So I really
was, I had fear of things like that and I remember the first
time going to a movie and I can’t remember who I went
to the movie with, it was the Michigan Theatre I know that,
and I didn’t know you could use the bathroom in the movie.
And I wet on myself cause I was scared to be moving around and
the white people was in the movie too. I didn’t know that
you had the freedom to do all these things."
- Beatrice Brooks
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 Washington
Elementary School
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 Southeastern
Junior High School
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Though public events and facilities could often create
angst and unfamiliar experiences, the more comforting counterpart
for children was social life in the neighborhood. Estella Rogers remembers
favorite childhood activities being not associated with one particular
location, but within the whole Bottoms neighborhood:
"As a child, the hangouts were each other’s
homes. That’s what we did. We just went from home to home
playing games, and swimming in the Mill Pond, going skating, going
to the Center, to the Youth Building."
 Youth
Building, Civic Recreation Center
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"As a child, the hangouts were each
other’s homes. That’s what we did. We just
went from home to home playing games, and swimming in
the Mill Pond, going skating, going to the Center, to
the Youth Building."
- Estella Rogers
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 Kalamazoo
River Millpond
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Informal activities and gatherings in the neighborhood
seem almost as frequent a means of socializing as well-organized events
at community institutions like the Hamblin Community Center. When
asked about her childhood recreation, Jan
Doan recalls [ ]
: "[We] played ball under the street lights. (Laughter) Slid
down the hill. We didn’t have TV, got out and laid in the field
there. There was an empty lot between us and we used to play in there
when Howard’s sister didn’t get mad at us and take her
ball bat and go home, a lot!"
"[T]he kids after school, would gather, in old fashioned sleighs
and we’d go up that hill and come down that hill. And slide
until, until maybe 6 or 7 o’clock at night. And you know,
often times I think about all of those nice times that we used to
have. Kids used to have good times, good fun, good clean fun."
Many former residents share comparable stories of pickup
sports, made-up games, and a network of social places and relationships
that could encompass every square foot of The Bottoms. While schools
were an important means of identifying the community you were from,
it was what you did when you were back in that community that made
The Bottoms home.
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