The Scrub: What Interstate 275 Erased
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
Central Avenue ran north from downtown Tampa through a neighborhood that locals called the Scrub. By the early twentieth century it was the Harlem of the South.
The community had its roots in the years after the Civil War, when freed Black people and Bahamian immigrants settled the high sandy ground north of the city center, the area called the Scrub because scrub oak grew where other vegetation struggled. Henry Plant's railroad brought economic growth to Tampa beginning in eighteen eighty-three, and the cigar industry that followed two years later created jobs. But the growth was segregated from the beginning. Black Tampa residents were shut out of Ybor City's centros, excluded from white commercial districts, and confined to the Scrub by custom, deed restriction, and the persistent threat of violence.
What grew there despite those conditions was extraordinary. Central Avenue by the nineteen thirties and forties had barbershops and beauty parlors, dry goods stores, funeral homes, physicians' offices, law offices, churches, fraternal lodges, and night spots that drew Black performers who could not stay or perform in white Tampa hotels. This was not a neighborhood the city had given the Black community. It was one the Black community had built inside a hostile system.
The destruction came in stages, which is part of why it is less remembered than a single catastrophic event might be. First, urban renewal in the late nineteen fifties began condemning and demolishing blocks designated as slum clearance targets. Then Interstate Four cut through the eastern portion of the district. Then Interstate Two Seventy-Five sliced through what remained. The Cass-Orange Connector and related access roads finished the job. By nineteen seventy, the once-continuous avenue of Black commerce had been ripped into fragments separated by highway overpasses and on-ramps.
More than a thousand residents were displaced. The institutions, the clubs, the churches, the evening economies of a community, scattered. Some relocated. Many did not survive the move.
The land under Interstate Two Seventy-Five where it passes through what was the Scrub does not have a historical marker. The highway is the marker.
