During the 1950s, civic and business leaders led an urban renewal effort to transform the heart of Battle Creek. Many American cities undertook such redevelopment campaigns in the decades after World War II, aimed at improving commercial and transportation facilities — and at erasing what local leaders saw as the social and health problems of “urban blight.” In Battle Creek, urban renewal was inextricably tied to the effects of urban flooding. The flood of 1947 was the worst episode in a long history of damage to factories, railroads, and homes near the confluence of the Kalamazoo and Battle Creek Rivers. Now city fathers turned to new urban renewal policies and national resources to solve the flood problem once and for all. Armed with massive Federal and state aid and the expertise of the Army Corps of Engineers, the “Cement River Project” rerouted the Kalamazoo River through the Bottoms; the city closed streets and bought out many residents, and began to lay out the landscape of large recreational, commercial, and parking facilities that occupy the district today.

The Bottoms had long been afflicted by the floods and the poor housing and public health problems that came with them. Yet the Cement River Project was focused more on controlling rivers and improving infrastructures than on revivifying the local community. Local officials and civic leaders sought to relocate African-American residents to Washington Heights, whose higher ground and larger houses, many leaders believed, would represent an improvement over the “slums” of the old neighborhood. By the late 1950s, most blocks in the Bottoms were dotted with abandoned homes and empty lots. Many neighborhood institutions, businesses, and social networks did not survive the move.

The Cement River Project

In response to the inundation of 1947, Battle Creek officials, the Kellogg Foundation, and commercial leaders initiated a city-wide campaign for urban improvements. The city hired the nationally-known St. Louis planning firm of Harland Bartholomew and Associates to survey, analyze, and re-plan the riverfront districts. The resulting report recommended detailed plans for the river control, the consolidation of the city’s tangled rail network, street improvements, and what was called “slum clearance.” A flood crisis, in short, sparked a full-blown effort to shape the future development of the city center, one that called for a massive combination of municipal, state, Federal, non-profit, and commercial resources.

Unfortunately for the Bottoms, all four of these problems were concerned with the area at the center of town that boasted the railroad tracks, the confluence of the two rivers, problematic traffic conditions, and combined industrial and residential conditions. This was the area that residents referred to as the Bottoms, as well as the adjacent Midway. Four developmental projects were initiated. They were organized to operate separately, but they overlapped in some areas. The most significant overlap concerned funding strategies. Without combining financial resources and timing the projects to occur simultaneously, the city might never have been able to implement its ambitious plans.

Thus the motivation for relocating residents from the Bottoms was not only a strategy for flood control. The success of the flood control project would have obviated the need for a multi-street relocation of inhabitants of the flood plain. The city of Battle Creek was motivated by the identification of the Bottoms as a “slum.” Later discussions criticized the slum clearance and urban renewal movements of the mid-twentieth century for failing to adequately identify and quantify the less visible aspects of human existence that contribute to individual and communal welfare. National policy has shifted to accommodate these criticisms of early planning and development policy.

The 1949 Housing Act specified that federal aid for slum clearance was to be used to redevelop residential neighborhoods. This meant that cities implementing slum clearance projects were required to replace lost housing stock with new housing stock. Some of the early slum clearance proposals for the Bottoms discuss the construction of new housing. However, later proposals barely discuss this possibility. This change in local policy corresponded with changes on the national level. By the time Congress finally approved the city’s application for slum clearance in July 1954, Congress had already altered the Housing and Slum Clearance act to accommodate commercial and industrial development in the mandate. Consequently, the city was able to avoid the significant investment of providing new housing as part of slum clearance. The policy that was ultimately implemented simply relocated Bottoms residents to underutilized housing within the city limits.

All four urban renewal projects were funded through combined public and private investment. In particular, the federal government provided some assistance for flood control and slum clearance while the concerned parties, the Grand Trunk Railroad and the New York Central Railroad systems shouldered some of the financial burdens for railroad consolidation. The city of Battle Creek had cost sharing responsibilities with these parties. For slum clearance, the city shouldered 1/3 of the total cost of the project. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, a local philanthropic group associated with the Kellogg Cereal Company, subsidized the city’s costs for the initial acquisition of land in the most important part of the flood control and slum clearance areas – in the Bottoms.