Rapp Road has been in the headlines several times in recent months as history and development collide. WAMC's Capital Region Bureau Chief Dave Lucas takes a closer look the rich history of one of Albany's unique neighborhoods.
Stephanie Woodard is a board member of the Rapp Road Historical Association and a descendant from "The Great Migration," a time between 1910 and 1940 when hundreds of thousands of southern African Americans resettled in the North in search of better lives. "Through the association, what we do primarily, is to make sure people in the community know about the Rapp Road Historical District. We are both on the state and the federal registry. Just last year we received our federal marker to designate when people come through the community they can see we are designated on the federal registry. And so what we do as an association is we meet and we try to promote the district as much as possible within the community. We work a lot with the Discovery Center. They host a lot of our fundraisers. We are now embarking on a new partnership with the Albany Howe Library on preserving the history of the people lived in the South End and how they migrated out to Rapp Road."
Beverly Bardequez is president of the Rapp Road Historical Association. In May 1939, her grandparents, their children, great-grandparents and a few cousins boarded a Greyhound bus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi bound for Albany's South End. "They lived in a basement at 39 Duncan Avenue. And they lived there until the grandparents were able to find work. My grandmother found work as a domestic worker. My grandfather would get day work wherever he could because they didn't hire a lot of blacks at that time. He would go to the Port of Albany and various places for a day's work until he finally able to find a full-time job."
Bardequez says Wilborn Temple First Church of God in Christ and its pastor Reverend Louis Parson assisted the family. Parson had come to Albany by way of Cleveland after receiving a monetary settlement for an injury suffered at a lumber company he'd worked at. Parson and William Tolliver put their money together and bought what is now the Rapp Road community from a farmer for $400. They began parceling out the land, offering it to migrants living in downtown Albany. Bardequez's family moved to the site, and built their home.
Woodard says Rapp Road was one of Albany's best-kept secrets. "The whole entire time they lived there until the Washington Avenue Extension was developed, nobody even knew people lived out in that area. With that came discrimination, there was rumors that Erastus Corning had given land to people of color out on Rapp Road as a way to just help move more people out of the city of Albany, because during the time of the Great Migration, the area of the South End and Albany in general had almost tripled the number of African Americans that were just living there. People felt it was a significant strain on the city to have so many African Americans moving from the South to Albany, New York. So that rumor permeated for a very long time - until Crossgates was built.”
Woodard says the construction of Crossgates Mall changed the community forever. Some land was lost, some homes were physically moved to make way for the shopping center. Today, Crossgates wants to build 222 apartment and townhome units with a 405-space parking lot on nearly 20 acres of what is known as the Transit Oriented Development District, a site located on the west side of Crossgates Mall just southwest of the intersection of Gipp Road and Rapp Road.
