Book description
A small neighborhood in northern Frankfort, Kentucky, Crawfish Bottom
was located on fifty acres of swampy land along the Kentucky River.
“Craw's” reputation for vice, violence, moral corruption, and unsanitary
conditions made it a target for urban renewal projects that replaced the
neighborhood with the city's Capital Plaza in the mid-1960s. Douglas A.
Boyd's Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community traces the
evolution of the controversial community that ultimately saw
four-hundred families displaced. Using oral histories and firsthand
memories, Boyd not only provides a record of a vanished neighborhood and
its culture but also demonstrates how this type of study enhances the
historical record. A former Frankfort police officer describes Craw's
residents as a “rough class of people, who didn't mind killing or being
killed.” In Crawfish Bottom, the former residents of Craw acknowledge
the popular misconceptions about their community but offer a richer and
more balanced view of the past. Douglas A. Boyd, director of the Louie
B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, is a
coeditor of Community Memories: A Glimpse of African American Life in
Frankfort, Kentucky. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
