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
""Boyd's chronicle intertwines history with individual
interviews and poses thought-provoking questions regarding the
contradictions between the prevailing historical record and personal
memory."--Kentucky Living" --
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.
