Many are currently heading to The Medical Center in Bowling Green to receive their COVID-19 vaccine.
On the street corner closest to its main entrance, a sign marks "Shake Rag Historic District," a Black neighborhood once filled with businesses, homes, churches and other signals of life in segregated America.
Reminders of Shake Rag's old days still scatter the neighborhood. There's the George Washington Carver Center, now located in Lee Square along State Street and a block from the river front.
It's across the street from the empty brick gym for what used to be the segregated State Street High School, and kitty cornered from the Southern Queen Hotel, where greats like Tina Turner once stayed.
"Shake Rag was a very thriving Black community. There were businesses there, grade schools, churches, grocery stores, a self-contained neighborhood really," said Alice Gatewood Waddell, who grew up in the neighborhood.
Though Waddell was living away from Bowling Green at the time, she remembers hearing from friends and family about the change in the area.
"The residents in the neighborhood [were] not happy about it and felt that it was another targeted neighborhood," Waddell said.
By "another targeted neighborhood," Waddell is referring to the common 20th century urban renewal practice of developing over Black communities, often at their expense.
"Companies that want to move in and just tend to take property from low income people, Black people, in particular, they looked at it like destroying houses. But what they were actually doing was dismantling and destroying homes. And there's a big difference between a house and a home," Waddell said.
In this case, those "companies" were Graves Gilbert Clinic, who eventually bought Waddell's parent's home, and Med Center Health.
They held meetings with the city and residents, asking them to sell. As people left, however, the area's Black-owned businesses and sense of community suffered.
It's a slightly different script than one seen a couple decades earlier in another Black neighborhood, Jonesville.
"It was about 1954 or 1955, they began talking about taking the Jonesville property. And the people that lived there, they owned the property and did not want to give [their] home and move to another part of town," local folklorist Maxine Ray said.
Ray was young when then-Western Kentucky State College needed land to become a university. Unlike Shake Rag, Jonesville residents didn't have an option to resist selling.
The school brought in the Urban Renewal Commission to condemn the neighborhood that had stood since the early postbellum.
"It was devastating to think that, 'I own this property. All i have to do is pay taxes on it and I'm here for the rest of my life.' And then you try to get new property, and at that age and at that time, Blacks could not go into banks and get loans," Ray said.
She said businesses and homeowners never fully recovered. Western Kentucky University Professor Emeritus and African American Museum board chair Dr. John Hardin said Black neighborhoods often face the perception of being in decline.
"At the time, the notion was that this was a good thing for the broader community that the African American community had to, in a sense, pay the price for progress," Dr. Hardin said.
Today, that progress in Shake Rag looks like sprawling medical campuses, some industrial retail, and seemingly vacant property.
"The Medical Center and Graves gilbert has pretty much bought up a good portion of Shake Rag and turned it into parking lots. they've replaced people with parking lots, and a lot of people have some very harsh feelings about that," Shake Rag Barbershop owner Chris Page said.
He said the issue isn't businesses wanting to invest in neighborhood developments, but the disparity in who benefits from them.
"It was just the problem had been when we wanted to develop something, we never could get some of the loans, we could never get the city behind us. So, we don't have a problem with development. What we have a problem with is displacement," Page said.
The City of Bowling Green has been working to restore some of the neighborhood with the mid-2000s construction of houses in Lee Square. Programs have allowed entrepeneurs like Page to purchase property from the city while Bowling Green's Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districtencourages development.
There are, however, concerns about the legacy of the area as a black neighborhood disappearing while low income residnets get priced out.
"Rent is going up in Bowling Green, and I think they're going to displace people. Not by racism, but by classism," Page said.
He said there are still several property owners who aren't fixing up homes because they anticipate selling to The Medical Center or Graves Gilbert. Both were contacted for this story but did not provide a representative for an interview.
Shake Rag is part of the census tract thecity is currently looking at for neighborhood improvements. Current construction along State St. is narrowing it to one lane to make room for better street parking and a bike lane.
But, for now, with parking lots and businesses dominating the landscape, the spark can feel incomplete.
