Two weekends ago I took a walk around The Gorbals in Glasgow, where my Lithuanian relatives first settled after arriving in Scotland. Nothing of the neighborhood they would have known remains. The area has been the target of urban redevelopment, twice now. Only a small part of the street they lived on still exists. The rest is buried under fairly new looking apartment buildings.
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| By my estimation, this building sits on top of where my family once lived. |
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They lived at 178 Rose St, which became 178 Florence St while they were still
living there, and eventually was mostly built over with new apartment
buildings. |
I found an old map, dated 1896, that shows the neighborhood largely as it would have been when they arrived, around 1900. It's incredible to see just how dramatically the place has been altered. The old tenement buildings have been completely removed and some of the street names have been changed.
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| South Glasgow, 1896 |
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| Gorbals, 1911 |
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Side-by-side, 1896 and 2012. Notice that not just physical human histories
(buildings, etc) were erased in redevelopment, but also cultural ones.
Shamrock Street was re-named Pine Place, undoubtedly in an attempt to
remove all traces that this used to be a hotbed of Irish Republicanism. |
In visiting this place, I couldn't help but feel a sense of injustice in the way it looked. The neighborhood had been unsafe and filthy,
by all accounts, but it was all they had. It was a working class neighborhood filled with immigrants, mostly Irish Catholics and "Russian" Jews, but also a fair number of other eastern Europeans like my ancestors. These people came to Scotland with virtually nothing, leaving their homes and their families behind. They labored in the factories and mines for dismal pay and often in deadly conditions. But at the end of the day, they had little to show for it. Fortunes were made, but the workers saw none of it.
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| Gorbals, 1950s |
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| Gorbals |
In boom times, they could survive, but each time bust inevitably came, they lost everything. Factory and mine owners could weather the storms on accumulated wealth, but the workers were abandoned. Without a daily wage, desperation comes quick. Urban decay leads to violence and crime and, soon enough, a place like the Gorbals gets a reputation.
The greatest injustice of all, however, is that it is the people themselves - including my ancestors - that shoulder the blame for it all. The Lithuanian immigrants were described in this way in a newspaper editorial from 1900 (
cited here):
They are most filthy in their habits of life, being a source of danger to the health of the community with their primitive ideas of order and cleanliness... They are fearfully intemperate in their habits [and] appeal to the knife... They are in short a most barbarous people and ... we seem to have the very scum of their nation.
But I just can't accept that the blame was attributable to the people themselves being somehow intrinsically different from everybody else. In reality, the problem is rooted in unfair pay and uneven distribution of wealth. It is a social problem stemming from broader inequity, not the result of personal failings and individual shortcomings! They are the victims of social injustice, not simply the perpetrators of crime.
But this understanding is too complex, too nuanced for it to be picked up readily by those without some knowledge of the longer history of a place. It is far easier to fault those most immediately associated with the problem. So those in power sell the solution of redevelopment: move the people out, tear down their crumbling homes, and put something clean and productive up in their place.
Injustice is what I see when I look at a place like the Gorbals. Human histories have been wiped away. Hard working people have been exploited and abandoned, and worst of all, they have been blamed for all that has happened. I only wish the older generations of my Lithuanian-Scottish relatives were still living so that I could hear from them, firsthand, about what happened there.
