For the future fate of the First Ward, the issue two years ago was the land.
Now it’s the roads.
A May 9 hearing on a city staff proposal to convert Fifth and Sixth streets to two-way brought out long-held feelings regarding the city’s northeast section. This is similar to a string of 2022 sessions that led to rejection of “Green Zone” abandonment for light industry and warehousing to replace the shrinking count of residences.
For the status of Fifth and Sixth, no decision was scheduled or made, and more hearings will transpire. But like two years ago, some of the storytelling went beyond the question at hand to larger historic damage that includes I-675 cutting off the northeast end and the rail yard serving as the neighborhood’s largest slum landlord. The closing of Third Street’s connection to Potter, executed only after residents picketed on the tracks near Mama Lillie’s restaurant in a 1977 protest, also was mentioned.
Those among an audience of mostly elder women, some who lost their husbands early to the rigors of foundry labor, shared memories as painful as children perishing in a 1979 Fifth Street house fire above the new railroad underpass, while firefighters from downtown were slowed in their arrival by the change in street patterns.
Thus, there were questions of trust among residents who asked why the change suddenly is on the agenda, after so many decades of decline and lost population.
An irony is that city staff’s explanation is not tied to the geography of the First Ward, or even to the underpass that connects the Potter-Longstreet neighborhoods that are named for the elementary schools that have been demolished. Instead, here is the stated scenario, keeping in mind that southbound Fifth becomes Thompson as it heads for East Genesee, while northbound Sixth is a product of Genesee’s turnoff onto Cherry:
- The Hunger Solutions Center (East Side Soup Kitchen, Hidden Harvest) is moving ahead with an expansion plan that would close Thompson for added storage space to the rear, and therefore food delivery trucks that have departed I-675 with a southbound turn onto Fifth, to head for the site, would lose that route.
- Sixth Street could serve as a new truck route if the one-way were removed and a southbound lane allowed.
- Because long-range “master” plans are larger in scope, entire street corridors are studied and included, and so that is how the First Ward comes into play.
A potential compromise could involve changing to two-ways on Fifth and Sixth south of I-675, while maintaining one-ways to the north, into the First Ward.
In response to traffic speeding into the hourglass curves beneath the underpass, a possible answer is four-way stops along side streets, mainly at Kirk and Sears. Action also was promised for flaws that have caused flooding at the bottom of the underground passageway.
Reports indicate that a national trend in declining urban neighborhoods is to convert formerly busy one-ways to slower-moving and safer two-ways. Saginaw already has revised sections of the Jefferson/Owen pairing. Down the line, Hess and Gallagher could become targets, even Holland and Remington. On the West Side, Mason and Woodbridge are top candidates, but State and Davenport were not mentioned.
Also not part of the May 9 agenda were state MDOT plans for roundabout intersections at Holland and Warren and/or Remington at Sheridan, similar to I-75 in Buena Vista.
