Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310075
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Why, he wants to know, did the promised neighborhood renewal fail? Where did the millions of dollars go?
For more than 25 years, the Gainsboro dentist has been obsessed by what he sees as a boondoggle that profited city government and a slew of developers but did next to nothing for Gainsboro.
Claytor blames scores of powerful people, white and black.
Dozen of people oversaw the Gainsboro project - mayors, city staffers, City Council members, leaders of city-sanctioned Gainsboro organizations, housing authority staff and board members.
"Why didn't they stop it?" Claytor asks. "Who came to our aid? All the people who knew things, and knew things were going bad, they did not tell the people."
When his father, Dr. John B. Claytor Sr., decided to build a Gainsboro home for his wife and four children in 1922, Roanoke's white builders refused to construct it.
It was to be a 22-room mansion, designed by a Washington architect. Walter Claytor said Roanoke construction crews thought the house too grand for a black man. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the property.
John Claytor's father-in-law brought men out of east Tennessee to build it. On dental-school breaks, Walter Claytor helped them haul bricks from a freight car to build the house.
When the Claytors welcomed neighbors to a reception in 1923, The Roanoke Church News, a community newspaper published by Gainsboro's First Baptist Church, reported that "the home was pronounced by all that attended the opening that it was a model home from every viewpoint and a credit to the owners, the builder, the community, and the race."
Eventually John and Roberta Claytor had four more children. Their home became a kind of social center for Gainsboro.
In 1949 the Claytor Memorial Clinic opened on Gainsboro Road.
Gainsboro residents poured into the medical offices of John Claytor Sr. and five of his children - physicians John B. Claytor Jr. and Frank W. Claytor, dentist Walter Claytor, laboratory technician Bernice Claytor Boddie, and accountant and business manager Ralph V. Claytor.
It all fell apart during urban renewal. People moved, and the drugstores and dry cleaners that kept commerce brisk were gone. "The money doesn't circulate the way it used to," Walter Claytor says. "We don't have a black economy like we used to. We've now become beggars. We're now on the welfare rolls."
Most of his family has died or moved away. The house burned, then was torn down.
The family's Claywood Service Station burned, too. Claytor says somebody - he doesn't know who - set those fires. "We've had more fires in our section than we ever had in my lifetime."
Walter Claytor quit Gainsboro citizens' groups years ago, warning residents that those groups were toothless entities set up only because federal law required them.
He says nobody really cared about the people. "It was the transferring of the ghetto, that's all it was. They tore us up. They raped us."
When planners unveiled new street patterns, Claytor protested that they ignored the way the land lay - that Gainsboro had grown up in the little valleys running east-west between the hills, not along the north-south streets. He protested when planners designed streets so that water meters would have to be installed under the sidewalks, and when they forgot to install natural gas lines. Many homes still use propane.
To try to preserve black history, he drew up a list of 144 businesses, churches and institutions that once stood in Gainsboro and Northeast, and of the 27 black doctors, dentists, pharmacists and lawyers who practiced in the neighborhoods. He found that only six of the businesses set up shop again after their buildings were torn down.
For years, he's written Virginia senators, members of Congress, U.S. attorneys and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development asking for a "no-holds-barred, complete, line-item audit" of the millions of federal dollars appropriated for Gainsboro. He's been told it would be too hard, maybe impossible, to retrieve decades' worth of government documents.
At his urging, HUD paid for a 1991 study of Roanoke urban renewal by Reginald Shareef, a professor of political science and public administration at Radford University. Shareef found that uprooted families believed urban renewal was about getting them better housing, when, instead, "the politics of urban renewal revolves around the profit margin for both land developers and the local government."
Shareef's report asked for an independent audit to determine whether money earmarked for Gainsboro was diverted to other city projects, an official apology to uprooted families from the city and the housing authority, and unspecified compensation to property owners who had to leave the urban renewal areas.
Claytor sent the report to libraries, to state and local officials, to President Clinton. Claytor got little response.
He says the city has broken so many promises that black Roanokers have little faith in government. "Until the city says, `We're not going to take your houses for 30 or 40 years,' nobody's going to fix them up. People are living in fear."
A year and a half ago, his brother Ralph was walking to his car in front of the clinic when a decayed building across the street collapsed and knocked him to the ground. He was hospitalized briefly. A few months later, he died of cancer.
Walter Claytor, 69, retired a year ago. Right away, someone shattered the clinic's windows and broke into the building. Walter Claytor tried to shield it from the surrounding gloom but now it stands dark and cold. Now, he says, "It's going to pot like everything else."
by CNB