Sidewalks and road are deserted along much of the city’s central corridor. Whispers of a happy afterlife float around the centuries-old structures that line the most commonly unoccupied artery.
It looks like an open-air black history museum, filled with empty, built-in buildings, an unhappy tribute to a once bustling business that has won an apocalyptic coup.
“It looks like the haunted mansion now,” said Bruce McNorton, a Midtown local who had a 10-year NFL career and has returned to Daytona Beach as part of helping Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
Like the community around it, Boulevard Mary McLeod Bethune was built in the early 1900s against all the odds. But in 1970, a combination of government decrees, a changing business landscape, and new civil rights combined to implode Midtown’s main street for commerce.
McNorton is part of an organization of others who are passionate about the community seeking to spark a renaissance. They hope they will be strong enough to elevate the center of the once-thriving advertising thoroughfare that runs from Nova Road to Ridgewood Avenue and runs through the campus of Bethune-Cookman University.
Longtime Midtown citizens say that two occasions in the 1960s combined to stifle the side street that has been the lifeblood of the community for more than part of a century.
First is urban renewal, a federal program that wiped out many businesses and homes that lined the highway that until recently was called Second Avenue. Three social housing complexes were also razed, leaving other handicapped people with less housing.
Then desegregation took away his motivation to erase the mess of urban renewal and reconstruction. Blacks who had been forced for 75 years to do almost everything within the Midtown limits were nonetheless on the loose to live, buy and run businesses in other parts of the city.
Related Coverage: Daytona Beach Executives Explore Ways To Increase Affordable Housing
It’s a quick descent for the network concentrated around Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, traditionally known as Midway. Mass demolition and desegregation also brought down the entire domain of Midtown, which stretches north and south of International Speedway Boulevard and is bordered to the east and west by Ridgewood Avenue and Nova Road.
“Midway was the middle of the lifestyle for black people this time,” said Harold Lucas, who lived his entire 88 years alongside Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
Before the neighborhood’s decline, almost everything a Midtown resident needed on the boulevard: supermarkets, gas stations, repair stores, pharmacies, beauty salons, barber shops, newsstands, restaurants, and bakeries. There were also furniture stores, dry cleaners, insurance companies, dentists, doctors, discos, hotels, a movie theater, a taxi rank, a bus station, a tailor’s shop, a billiard room, a photography studio and a fish market.
“You couldn’t walk down Second Avenue on Friday afternoon,” Lucas said. “From 3pm on Friday to Saturday night, it was incredibly busy. It’s where they all came from. “
Related Coverage: Midtown, Daytona Beach’s Historic Black District, Fighting For A Better Future
Lucas “has intervened in the urban renewal and has ruined everything. “
“The entire black business sector has been affected,” he said. “There were far fewer people in the houses around them. There were no more walk-ins. “
Some corporations that have been successful in urban renewal and desegregation may just not be a 1990s roadmap that destroyed Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
Now, a handful of small businesses dot the entire stretch of Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard between Nova and Ridgewood. Ironically, most of those businesses are west of the railroad tracks, the maximum domain affected by urban renewal.
There’s Moe’s Market, Bethune Village Market, a tire store, a laundromat, and car washes. There’s Kiki’s Kitchen, which sells island food and vegetables, Kinfolks Cafe serves sweetbreads and oxtails, and CJ’s Place offers hearty breakfasts, burgers, and fish. There is a flower shop, women’s boutique, gift shops, nail and nail salons, hair salons, pawn shops, and funeral homes.
There is even a small space converted into a coffin sales business.
“These hits hardly happen,” Lucas said.
If the recent legal and economic turmoil in B-CU had deteriorated further, there was a genuine option that the sprawling campus in the middle of Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard would be the next void in the road. It appears to have been avoided, as the university received $ 13 million in new investment last year, after recently improving its credit score and learning in September that it would maintain its accreditation.
Past Developments: Long-term Bethune-Cookman Looks Brighter Thanks to State Investment and Local Donations
Recent News: Fitch Raises Bethune-Cookman’s Score to B-minus
Lucas, a retired manager, attributes much of the neighborhood’s demise to urban renewal.
“It just replaced the topography of the region and it hasn’t recovered yet,” he said. “The Midway I knew will never be the same again. “
Lucas and other longtime locals have been fighting for a revival in Midtown. They are encouraged by a new wave of small investors buying vacancies scattered throughout the community to install new homes.
There are also some marketers who want to open new businesses on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard. And the city is in the middle of a $ 291,300 street allocation to upgrade existing trees with crepe myrtles, point out pavers at the base of the trees, and load new benches and trash cans from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Ridgewood Avenue.
It remains to be seen if all of this will be enough to start resurrecting a once thriving mall.
From the 1890s to the 1960s, Midtown was the only place in Daytona Beach where blacks were allowed to live, and it may be a difficult place to live. For decades, the citizens of Midtown have lived without cobblestone streets, interior plumbing, and good enough storm drain systems.
But the near-absolute segregation has helped some in the poor neighborhood. Given that white-owned outdoor businesses in Midtown abstained from black consumers in the early part of the 20th century, there was a gap in the position to be filled through entrepreneurial Midtown citizens.
In the 1920s, some 30 years after Midtown was founded, city directories indexed more than 40 black-owned businesses along Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard. Boards of this era are prominent among black-owned businesses with a B and white-owned businesses with a W, said Leonard Lempel, a retired history professor at Bethune-Cookman University.
Directories showed whites owned several on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, Lempel said. They saw a captive clientele and got paid.
“In the 1940s and 1950s, whites were almost fighting for a place on Second Avenue,” Lucas said. “It’s like the Costa Dorada. “
Black business homeowners were only discovered on the west end of the street in the Midtown neighborhood. Most of the white-owned businesses were east of the exercise tracks, closer to where the white and business districts began. However, some whites also had businesses west of the tracks.
An ancient perspective: Downtown Daytona started out as a charming, old-fashioned place to live
The Ritz Theater, west of the slopes, had white owners. And Warren Trager’s father, a white man, owned a clothing store west of the railroad tracks in 1925.
White consumers most commonly stayed east of the roads. But on the day, blacks sponsored businesses on both sides of the racial divide.
“On Friday afternoon, when they got their paycheck, the other blacks came to the east end of the street,” recalls Trager, an 85-year-old Daytona Beach resident.
Trager remembers other black people walking into the Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard bar his parents owned before they took over in the mid-1960s. But black shoppers would be in the back and drinking.
It also remembers Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the school that the university bears her name, venturing to the east end of the street to shop.
“He used to come there and sell cakes for school,” recalls Trager.
More: Sculpture of Mary McLeod Bethune statue in precious marble started in Italy
On this eastern segment of the road were the A&P and Piggly Wiggly grocery stores, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a furniture store, a shoe store, and a men’s clothing store.
Trager’s life has been associated with Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard since her birth in 1935. In the 1920s and 1930s, her father bought several houses on the road, most commonly east of the railroad tracks, and Trager inherited them.
Over the decades, he has maintained and rented the homes with his wife, Ruth Trager, a Daytona Beach city commissioner.
One of his father’s first purchases was the Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard bar that had been in Operation Prohibition. It was executed through a guy who ended up in prison for shooting someone who said she was going to make a giant money deposit in a bank. Trager’s father bought the bar around 1933 and reopened it after alcohol consumption became legal again.
More Background: Daughter of Former Slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune, Midtown Lighthouse, and More
Trager was only 3 years old when his father died of cancer and his mother took over the business. In the early 1950s, when Trager was a teenager, he recalls that “on Saturday mornings people would come from everywhere and pack at the bar to watch black and white television. “
His mother ran the bar until 1965, and when she retired, Trager took over. The waterhole has gone by many names over the years, adding The Raggedy Edge, Bloody Bucket, and The Tavern Bar.
For a time, Trager ran a radio and television repair shop next to the bar, but later turned it into an extension of the nightclub.
Trager still owns the construction of the bar, now in ruins, which the city almost condemned at one point. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, he occasionally opened the bar for parties or special occasions like Bike Week and Speedway races.
Trager loves to tell about the tavern, which once had a team of horses in front of the two-story building.
The horse hitch is long gone, but the original brass rail footrest still works for the life of the bar inside. Brass spittoons did not triumph in the 21st century, nor did an old piano and a pool table on the bar.
A carved wooden design from the late 1800s containing liquor bottles was on the counter, but Trager sold it.
Over the years, he discovered old jugs and bottles that once contained alcohol, and upstairs, where there was an apartment rented for $ 20 a month, he discovered a silver longsword in a sheath. on the floor of the moment.
Trager laughs as he locates random relics in the buildings he owns on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard. It came by way of a sterling silver teapot, a Model A van wheel, and a rusty 1933 Florida license plate, orange with black lettering. One of her favorite discoveries is a 1916 rubber stamp.
Trager is one of the few local citizens who can see what was in the buildings along the boulevard. It is a business that sells live chickens. The floors were covered with sawdust shavings and cages lined the walls.
“When I was a kid, other people didn’t have refrigerators,” Trager explained. “You would decide on a bird for dinner. The girl squeezed his neck, tore it off, cleaned it, cut it, and wrapped it in brown paper.
He also remembers an agent through J. C. Beard, who had his workplace across from the Trager family circle bar. According to local tradition, the gendarme’s dog, Pepper, would convict those accused of crimes.
Beard turned to the dog and said, ‘How much time do we give it? “” Trager said. “Every time that dog barked, they gave you a month. “
Trager and his wife now own 10 apartment buildings that have 17 storefronts on the east end of the boulevard.
One of his buildings west of the bar, which was once a pawnshop, has become too dilapidated and is about to be demolished. The Tragers say it was difficult to construct several buildings in the early 1900s.
“Over the years, we repaired buildings over and over again,” Trager said. “They are all between one hundred and 120 years old now. “
He has been plagued by code violations over the years, and would have been fined if he had agreed to demolish the old pawn shop building.
Learn more: Tragers asset problems are piling up on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
Most of their houses are now empty. One of the few buildings of him with an active business is Kressman’s repair shop home, located across from his bar, where Trager maintains everything from motorcycles to lawnmowers. Kressman’s building was once the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.
Trager said he was in a position to sell his properties, but would prefer to sell them in one transaction.
“I’m waiting to make myself a baby offer or to marry Array,” he says.
He hopes the new Brown & Brown head on Beach Street at the eastern end of Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard will draw investor interest west of his properties.
There is also an ongoing task to build apartments and parking on Ridgewood Avenue, north of International Speedway Boulevard. A third assignment just south of the Brown & Brown building on Beach Street still wants city approval, but if all goes well, it will bring in more new apartments, parking, offices and a hotel.
There are giant red ribbons and swirls of green garlands wrapped around street lamps along Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, the city’s attempt to make the aisle festive for the holidays. But there weren’t many Christmas shoppers in a hurry with bags full of goodies last month.
The side street would be a difficult position to do a lot of Christmas shopping right now. Not the Tragers Bar is the Nature’s Essence gift shop, as well as the artsy florist and salon.
The other businesses open on the east end of the road are Kressman and a pawn shop.
Patricia Heard, who runs the Second Avenue Plaza gift shop in a building she owns west on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, sells a t-shirt that lists the names of businesses and places in Midtown, beyond and provides Array Around 130 names are se distributed on the back of the shirt, however, dozens of them live in reminiscence of middle-aged and elderly people.
Few millennials have probably heard of Biggins & Meeks Drug Store, Duggan’s Diner, or Toots Grocery Store. Or the Wimpy restaurant, whose owner Bethune-Cookman scholars will eat for free.
Decades from now, if someone is nostalgic for what will be on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard in 2020, they will have less to remember. On several stretches of the highway there are now empty masses where businesses once stood.
Heard, who moved to Midtown in 1950 when he was seven, said the community peaked around 1960, just before it was drastically replaced through urban renewal and desegregation.
“It was anything on Second Avenue,” the 78-year-old said.
Heard, a retired Campbell High School instructor and counselor, does not blame urban renewal and desegregation at all for the deterioration of the neighborhood. Drug trafficking has also harmed the community, he said.
“You’d have more business if those other people weren’t hanging around,” Heard said. “This has been going on for at least 20 years. “
Police leader Jakari Young showed that officials responded to drug court cases on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard “fairly regularly. “
Some roadside businesses have bars on their windows and their outer walls have warning signs that loitering, drugs, and other crimes will be tolerated.
The Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard Police Station is no longer normally used, but Young said its purpose is to open a new substation in the 800 block of the highway in the future. Right now, a giant cell phone police command truck is parked on the street.
More: Jakari Young Becomes Daytona Beach’s New Police Chief
Heard also needs the city code enforcement formula to move faster to the right problems.
Heard, who owns residential rental homes in Midtown as well as his advertising building, also blames young people who inherited and took over Midtown businesses from their parents.
Other homeowners along the side street echoed the comments, saying the youngsters of the original owners had moved in and were doing little more than paying taxes on vacant properties.
He also believes that corporations don’t paint enough in combination.
Trager said Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, like Beach Street in downtown Daytona Beach, is also a victim of the conversion of economic forces.
“When they build the malls, other people go to the outlets with air conditioning and loose parking,” he said.
Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard had parking meters and nothing but enthusiasts to keep consumers calm.
Lucas, 88, who has spent his entire life in Midtown, is running with a gift to the Midtown community over assets his father bought in 1920.
His father built the family’s two-story space on the site in 1925, and Lucas was born there in 1932. The space surrounded by a plethora of flowers and 30 other types of trees, adding the sooty palm. Arrangement of banana, grapefruit, papaya, orange and lemon.
A woman accidentally entered the space a year ago and broke it, and the interior had deteriorated. So, Lucas used the insurance cash he earned to demolish the space and make a fresh start on the property.
One of his sons, who is an entrepreneur, is building a one-story concrete block construction at the assets at the northeast corner of Jefferson Street and Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard. Lucas said that he would make the new facilities for gatherings, birthday parties, and demonstrations of non-public memorabilia of him, old community photographs, and Mary McLeod Bethune memorabilia.
The route will also have an area for his daughter, who is a lawyer.
For him, it is not just a construction on land. The $ 150,000 design is a birthday party where Lucas grew up, and it’s a chance to put something meaningful on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
It is also conveniently next to his current home on Jefferson Street.
Lucas, who was an instructor and coaches at the school of segregation, hopes it will be an informed position and a small step toward revitalizing Midtown.
As a child, Lucas would point a gun through his bedroom window and shoot birds without worrying about piercing someone with a bullet. There were only two other houses on his street, that contrary to a box and near the forest.
It recalls two men from the community who used large tracts of land to grow a wide variety of vegetables that they sold at the stalls. Even Mary McLeod Bethune University grew and sold vegetables and chickens.
Lucas saw a quiet community in a popular business district.
“Second Avenue was a dirt street until the 1950s,” he says.
Now, in his sunset years, he is watching the community decline.
Some argue that urban renewal has done the region a service by cutting down the most dilapidated structures in Midtown, adding the log cabins with tin roofs. But when ramshackle houses and dilapidated advertising buildings collapsed, little was built to update them.
The eastern end of Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard was largely intact through the urban renewal of the wrecking ball. The demolition stopped on the train tracks. But businesses on both sides of the road were still financially affected, as were businesses in other parts of the neighborhood.
“When urban renewal came along, it made a difference,” Trager said. “People were paid for their houses and many moved north of the hospital in Halifax and built new houses with the logo.
At a city assembly last month to discuss the new trees, benches and trash cans the city is adding to Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, some citizens accused city officials of not doing enough along the years with the hall. Some said they also sought to reform the street, parking masses and sidewalks.
Some of the other two dozen people who attended the assembly in Daisy Stocking Park on a bloodless night also said they were involved in that the new backless steel benches can also simply be magnets for the homeless. City officials have said they have yet to tidy up the banks and would possibly be running with homeowners who don’t need them in front of their businesses.
Opinion: Midtown’s story and it deserves more media coverage
Ruth Trager doesn’t need to see benches near her buildings between Ridgewood Avenue and Segrave Street.
The Tragers have discovered an elaborate homeless camp with furniture hidden in a thicket of trees, one of their properties. They also discovered evidence of drug use: needles and bags.
“We have an organization of other people who have Second Avenue in their sitting, standing and lying position,” Ruth Trager said. “We had an organization having lunch and they are leaving garbage. “
Some have left buildings worse than trash, defecating since a nearby gas station on Ridgewood Avenue began closing its bathroom doors.
“We had to kick them out of our doors,” he said. “We need customers, people, to pursue customers. “
A new generation of commercial homeowners is going to right Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
Tim Ivey hopes to open a seafood place this year. David Lucas spent a year and a portion opening a place to eat in Jamaica next to the Bethune-Cookman University campus, welcoming its first consumers a few days ago.
He hopes A Golden Taste of Jamaican Food & Treats will do as well as Bethune Grill, a place to eat near his place to eat that he says is known for its bird wings and honey fried fish sauce.
In the 1990s, Lucas had a side street eating place called A Good Place to Eat, as well as a convenience store. He exited One’s business and sold his construction to Bethune-Cookman University when he moved to Jacksonville. He returned to Daytona Beach since 2009.
The 58-year-old grew up in Midtown and is passionate about helping the neighborhood. He has fond memories of going to the Ritz Theater on Saturday mornings and playing basketball at Joe Harris Park.
Now there’s an empty lot where the Ritz once stood, and several buildings around it have either disappeared or are full of new business. You remember seeing the business room collapse.
“When the integration took place, all the businesses on Second Avenue died,” said Lucas, whose father is Harold Lucas.
When the citizens of Midtown, despite everything, were able to go to other parts of Daytona Beach, their business allegiance temporarily changed.
Businesses on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard have been hit the hardest by the opening of Volusia Mall and a Nova Road Winn Dixie store in the west of the neighborhood.
“He killed the Black stores,” Lucas said.
You need to dive now and make a difference in Midtown. He hopes that in a year he can start filling empty windows with an ice cream parlor, a Subway place to eat, and a Domino’s Pizza. He also plans to start a non-profit organization to mentor, teach, and educate children ages 6 to 16.
McNorton, the longtime Detroit Lions cornerback who returned to help out his old neighborhood, said there is a wonderful prospect of redevelopment in Midtown. Investors can simply capitalize on the neighborhood’s rich history and revive places like the Campbell Hotel, where musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and athletes like Jackie Robinson have stayed, he said.
The hotel, which also housed the Stardust nightclub, is one of the few places black visitors can stay. The remnants of the neon sign still cling to the building.
“History is lost,” McNorton said.
McNorton, who is now a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers, bought the old Singleton Cleaners build at Mary McLeod Bethune 4 years ago. The 3,400-foot design had been used for garages for more than a decade.
Now you need to make it a unique venue to host Sunday afternoon jazz concerts, wedding receptions, bridal showers, popcorn movie nights, post-funeral dinners, and other events. That can be arranged through the restaurants on Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
He hopes his business will attract blacks and whites. It runs on a one-story layout built in the early 1960s and hopes to open this year in time for Bicycle Week.
McNorton also hopes to buy more buildings across the street, adding the Campbell Hotel, which has been converted to apartments but has recently been vacant. The 61-year-old has said he should revitalize the side street to make it look like ‘high-end Florida’.
He sent a one-page vision map to city officials, suggesting that the hallway is home to department stores and cafes, pizzerias, galleries, department stores, and sports bars. You need to see seating, brick pavers, palm trees, and a “South Beach feel. “
“It would take the network back to a time when Second Avenue was the place to go,” he wrote on his map. “This region has been fading for a long time. Our purpose is to revitalize the region, bring business back, bring life and economic progress back to a historic region, a region of which we, as African Americans and residents, can be proud of anything smart in our network before it be completely forgotten. or repositioned through structures that do not constitute the history of this region. “
He hopes other investors will join his vision. She told the owner of an empty nightclub north of Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard about the opening of a new club.
“People are waiting to see if it opens more,” McNorton said. “If I can open my place, it will be like a forest fire. “
“We’re going to paint in combination to see Midtown added to Daytona Beach attractions like Beach Street and One Daytona,” McNorton wrote in his plan.
He said some city officials asked him why he didn’t need to invest in Beach Street or One Daytona than in Midtown.
“I’ve had this question,” he says. “I need to be here. I grew up here. This region can come back and be what it was. “
He said city officials have now accepted his resolution and are waiting for it, adding grants.
Heard said community seniors like her and McNorton can’t fix everything on their own.
“I hope the young people wake up and get more involved,” he said.
Harold Lucas is too optimistic about the long road.
“It’s very dark,” he says. “I think a lot of other people were waiting to sell because they think Bethune-Cookman University would buy it for a stadium or whatever. “
As the university continues to emerge from its monetary hole, battling lawsuits similar to a failed student housing allocation, and battling the COVID-19 pandemic like everyone else, a campus expansion is unlikely in the near future, a- declared.
You don’t see all the new progression between Ridgewood Avenue and Beach Street, as well as the Riverfront Park redesign, for both Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard.
From a Midtown perspective, the gleaming new Brown & Brown Tower overlooking the Halifax River, a few blocks east, looks like the tallest building in the land of Oz.
“It’s a total universe,” Lucas said. “There may be no consequences. I think we will have to be self-reliant. “
TODAY