Lorita, Looking Back.

Let me introduce myself. I'm Lorita Harrison, Jason Harrison Junior's sister. Emma, our mother, is the wife of Jason Senior. I'm a social worker and historian in Lake Union City. After receiving my doctoral degree, I moved here in 1976 to be with my family. Over many years here, I have come to love this City, and especially our Fourteenth Ward. In the coming pages you will learn about my family, as well as many other fascinating people. For now, though, I just want to set the stage, so to speak, for the many, often surprising, places, and events to come — the stage on which all our joys, dreams, sorrows, struggles, victories, and passions play out. At the outset, I must add that in a number of places in this extraordinary development there will be unpleasant events and times.

I will start with some background information about this surprising Fourteenth Ward Community in Lake Union City. Then, I will lead you through some, though by no means all, of its early development, before turning to more than fifty years of striking, recent history involving its place in America and the World.

Lake Union City's earlier history came when runaway slaves first settled on a dirt road, with a few old, empty houses, running from the lake inward into the otherwise unoccupied Ward. That was about 1840. After the Emancipation Proclamation, and end of the Civil War, a few more free slaves joined them along with immigrants from some other countries and some poorer Ward residents. The free slaves and others supported themselves by working in agricultural fields. In 1900 that road was paved, and named Freedom Lane. And by then it was part of a much larger racially, and ethnically diverse community. Some descendants of the first slaves were later able to relate something about that early history when they met with the larger community at our beachside meetings every year.

The incorporated part of present-day Lake Union City proper has an area of about forty square miles, with about forty additional square miles of suburban or semi-rural political districts beyond. Overall, it is a fairly typical New England development, with the exception of the Fourteenth Ward, as will become clear as our stories unfold.

Lake Union City got its name because of two early glacial lakes on its west side. These lakes were originally filled with water flowing southward from the melting continental glacier receding to the north. The glacier eventually disappeared about 20,000 years ago. The two growing lakes were joined into a single lake by progressive submergence of a narrow, shallow connection between them that eventually reached a depth of about twenty feet, as it is today. Hence the name Lake Union City because it developed along the joined eastern shores of the two original lakes. The two large lake basins reach two to three hundred feet at their greatest depths. Across the Lake from the City lie natural forest slopes.

The Fourteenth Ward stretches narrowly for about eight miles along the eastern shore of Lake Union, and extends inward into the City for two to three miles. It is the original and oldest part of the City, and the only part along the Lakeshore. Development began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with quite large and elegant houses set back from the Lake along a narrow dirt road leaving a wide, and beautiful, natural area of scattered large trees and open spaces between the road and the Lake. Further development created more residential roads, eventually streets, inland with smaller, but still fine, houses. The first name of the area was Primrose. In 1910, when Lake Union City with multiple wards was created Primrose became its Fourteenth Ward. When the road along the lake was later paved it was named Primrose Street.

In the early Twentieth Century most of the Fourteenth Ward entered a steady physical and economic decline because most commercial and residential development went on inland, and because foreign immigrants, and particularly AfroAmericans, settled into smaller houses in many parts of the Fourteenth Ward. No doubt, cultural, ethnic and racial biases had a lot to do with the avoidance of the Ward by many, though not all, wealthier Caucasians.

Most prominent early on was the settling into the Ward of Middle Eastern families from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey in the nineteen twenties after the First World War. Unlike the present, angry, often violent interactions of the Muslim, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawhites, and others, did not occur. All got along well in the Fourteenth Ward, creating a sense of universal belonging that has helped the Ward avoid some later hostilities elsewhere in America. An area of restaurants and small shops along South Street, and a bank on the corner of South and Prospect Streets, became known as the Monsour District. It was named after that wealthier part of Baghdad, Iraq. Quite a few more people came to the Monsour District in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, along with other Middle Easterners.

During the period of the Ward's economic decline, real estate agents intentionally steered foreign and AfroAmerican customers to the Fourteenth Ward, and Caucasians, whether more wealthy or not, to other wards. The far eastern neighborhoods of Lake Union City soon became the areas of greater wealth. So, it became a segregated city in several ways. With similar dedication, realtors also steered wealthy, educated Caucasians to the suburbs. People of many more backgrounds eventually chose to live in the Fourteenth Ward: Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and more. Deterioration of property in the Ward continued to a lesser extent. Real change was coming.

Awareness of their depressed situation caused the Ward's people to talk a lot with each other, and they began to organize sometime around 1970. First, there were just friendships blossoming among neighbors of all backgrounds. During the 1970s wider groups formed clubs of many kinds, and in the fall of 1979 the first "All Community Gathering" on the Lake shore was organized by the newly formed Fourteenth Ward Citizens Association. Hundreds gathered with food, and music, and unending conversation, not to mention quite a bit of dreaming. Jason Senior and Emma arrived early that year to have their house on Primrose Street, just in time to be part of that Gathering. It was like a whole new life had opened up for them.

Those Gatherings continued every year, but much more was happening. Plans and money had been obtained to construct a waterfront complex farther up shore with docks, a swimming area, and a large picnic area. Next to it a small shopping unit of four stores for clothing, pharmacy, hardware, and foods was created.

Shortly after I arrived in 1981 my biggest surprise came at the third Community Gathering when I started talking with five teachers from all four...