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6 2 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.14 she says. Wearing a royal-purple blouse and cherry-red glasses, she carries two FedEx envelopes. One's stocked with old 8-by-10 photos of the area. Te other holds thick packets — homemade yearbooks of sorts — flled with photocopied portraits and bios of Smoketown alumni. Hyde pulls out a one-page written story that documents, perhaps, her favorite tale to tell. It involves Muhammad Ali, then still going by Cassius Clay. He formed his frst proper punch at the neighborhood Grace Hope Community Center (later known as the Presbyterian Community Center) on a stage in the basketball gym. His trainer, Fred Stoner, set up four wood poles, duct-taping rope to each corner to simulate a ring. When girls hit 13 years old, Stoner let them hold out water jugs and rags for his boxers. Hyde remembers the more she and the other girls cheered, the more animated Clay got. "Te rest is history," she says, laughing. Now she saves her cheering for her old neighborhood as volunteer director and founding member of Smoketown Pride. While Hyde moved out of the area at 16 years old, she's yet to sever ties. And as a young adult, she could sense poverty's grow- ing presence. Her job as a census worker drilled down the facts. Census fgures from 1970 indicate that women headed almost half of the families in the Smoketown area. Te median income was just less than $4,000. About 14 percent of area residents were unemployed — although the Rev. Louis Coleman, then the director of the Presbyte- rian Community Center, told the Courier- Journal he suspected up to 40 percent of neighbors were without work. Two-parent households were rapidly dwindling. Families who had the means joined a citywide exodus to the suburbs. Two Courier-Journal articles from the late '60s mention older Sheppard Square residents being fearful of gangs of young men who roamed the area, although many of these men were not from Sheppard Square. In 1971, two cops were killed in the neighborhood. As Hyde revisits Smoketown on this afternoon, she smiles when talking about the fresh start the neighborhood's about to receive. She's attended every press conference and close to every planning meeting leading up to the HOPE VI project. She believes this mixed-income approach could provide a new generation the serene childhood she experi- enced. "I pray and hope that (the people who move in) are people of character," she says, sitting in the Sheppard Square rental ofce — a historic white chapel just south of the complex. In her day, Ursuline nuns moved through this space and taught at an adjoining schoolhouse that no longer stands. Te struc- ture now functions as an orderly collection of small rooms with white walls and black plastic waiting chairs. Two women work at two long desks. Before leaving, Hyde introduces herself to them. "I'm going to bring you some booklets and things," she promises. "Pictures to hang on the walls." Sheppard Square's a storied place. Hyde wants all who are new to know. A house is easy to defne: walls, door, roof. Home presents a trickier task. Anyone who's moved around a lot knows some places ft. Hop over one zip code or a couple state lines and it could feel totally wrong. It's a bit like falling in love: You know it when it happens. If it's a good connection, it sticks for life. When Gloria "Ms. Jeanie" O'Bannon, a lifelong Smoketown resident, moved briefy to Newburg in the 1980s, she longed for her old home, the place where, if she was spotted outside, she'd probably hear a friendly voice tease, "Hey, Ms. Jeanie, you still alive?" Now 71 years old, O'Bannon is back living in Smoketown a few blocks from Sheppard Square and the Presbyterian Community Center, a place she worked more than half her life. Opened in 1898 by the Rev. John Little and six Presbyterian seminarians, PCC originally had two locations, one in Smoke- town, the other in Phoenix Hill. Known as the Grace Mission and Hope Mission, they merged in the 1960s, creating the Presbyte- rian Community Center on South Hancock Street. (In 2000, the organization moved to a new building a few blocks away.) Old photos show African-American youth learning to sew, kids practicing carpentry skills, women and children visiting a health clinic. Flash-forward a few decades and the skills classes diminished, but PCC always had something to fll time: basketball, fencing, homework help, weekend dances. Pluck any Sheppard Square kid from any era, blindfold them, spin them fve times, and they could still zip to those front doors, no problem. After construction began in 2012 for the revitaliza- tion of Sheppard Square, and its 270 house- holds relocated, PCC lost its crowd. A lack of funding followed. Its doors closed last year. But back in 1964, when O'Bannon frst moved to Sheppard Square, PCC bustled. She worked at the daycare. It would take her just a few minutes to walk from her apartment, the frst place she and her two young daughters lived all on their own. She says she'll never forget the thrill of move-in day. She packed up two spring beds for the girls, one mattress for herself. With hardly any other furniture, O'Bannon set out her children's Chatty Cathy dolls in the center of the living room on a table. Her daughters pushed and pulled win- dows open and shut, giddy captains inspecting their ship. O'Bannon says her neighbors tended to their small patch of grass. Elderly tenants re- siding in the southernmost section of the hous- ing project stocked their yards with colorful fowers. Beyond that, though, "people watched out for each other," she says. Tat phrase sur- faces a lot in talking with former residents. "It was block watch before that became a thing," she says. By the 1960s, dealers quietly moved heroin and other drugs on street corners around Sheppard Square. O'Bannon says they posed no threat to residents. Tey didn't bother her; she didn't bother them. She recalls drug use not being much of an issue at that time. "People smoked the marijuana, a little sip of wine, some of that," she says. Nothing more than what you'd fnd in any part of the city. O'Bannon says the addiction to "hard stuf" came toward the end of the '70s, as best as she can remember. And by the '80s and '90s, the crack epidemic arrived. By 1978, O'Bannon wanted to move. Many households were now generations-deep living at Sheppard Square. She noticed that, rather than people tending to their yards, garbage collected in them. For Sheppard Square, like all housing proj- ects, decisions made far away largely deter- mined quality of life. A change to federal law in the late 1960s allowed individuals with no income to live in housing projects — a well- intentioned piece of legislation that fooded buildings with the very poor. In the 1980s, One afternoon, when two young men were found shot dead next to a dumpster in Sheppard Square, everyone just went about their business. Kids rode by on their bikes. Police didn't bother to cover the corpses. No one paused at death. 58-63 Shepard SQ.indd 62 4/21/14 12:49 PM