When 86-year-old Laverne Summerlin looks out on the ribbons of highway just west of downtown Cincinnati, she remembers choirs singing and bakers baking.
"There were all these major bakeries here, and this great smell, the doughnuts and whatever."
The city tore her neighborhood down 60 years ago. As Summerlin walks around the edge of where it used to be, she points to the stretch of concrete where her family's apartment was and the former location of the Catholic church with her beloved choir.
"Holy Trinity was on Fifth and Mound," she says. "Now that's the Fifth Street exit ramp south, 75 south."
Summerlin and thousands of other people lived in the southern half of Cincinnati's historically Black West End. The city received federal funds to demolish half of the neighborhood to make way for I-75 during a process called urban renewal.
By the early 1960s, 25,000 people, mostly Black, had been displaced.
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Now, a new project is coming to remake parts of that same highway. Officials promise it will reconnect the West End. But can it undo the damage urban renewal did?
Northern Kentucky University American History Professor Eric Jackson has studied the impact the highway had on the neighborhood.
"It just devastated the West End," he says. "It cut the West End in half. It forced folks to move out of the West End. It closed businesses down."
At the same time the West End was being demolished, the federal government was building the Brent Spence Bridge just to the south to carry I-75 across the Ohio River.
Six decades later, planners are in the design stages of a federally funded $3.6 billion project to build a companion bridge for the Brent Spence and redo the highway corridor that passes through the West End.
City and state officials say the project will help heal the neighborhood by freeing up land and reconnecting streets severed by the original highway.
Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval formally apologized last June for urban renewal.
"An apology alone is not enough," he said. "I understand that. What do we do now to support the West End? That's why we have aggressively pursued opportunities to begin stitching the West End back together."
Those efforts to reconnect parts of the neighborhood divided by the highway will include bike lanes, traffic calming and even building a bridge that carries Ezzard Charles Drive over the highway that could someday include housing or parks along both sides. Other bridges crossing the highway at 9th, 7th and 6th streets would also get shared-use paths, landscaping and visual screens to separate them from the highway and make them feel more like a neighborhood instead of highway infrastructure.
"The purpose of this project is to reconnect the communities," Brazina said in an interview last October. "So these treatments on these bridges are going to reconnect the Queensgate area to the West End."
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A transportation activist group called Bridge Forward is pushing more ambitious plans that would reclaim more land — up to 30 acres — reconnect more streets and add developable space with caps over some streets that could be home to parkland or buildings.
Some who lived through the original highway project say all of this sounds OK, but there's a difference between rebuilding infrastructure and rebuilding trust.
Rachel Anderson's mother Imogene Valentine had owned their home at 938 Hopkins Street in the West End for 11 years when the city told her family they would have to leave in 1959.
Anderson, in high school at the time, remembers her family feeling cheated by the price they were offered — about half the average price of a house at the time.
"Homeowner's homes are more valuable than $6,000, you would think. It was an insult."
When you Google the address of Anderson's former home today, it still pops up on the map, a little red flag in the middle of I-75.
Her family moved to Evanston, another historically Black neighborhood, and were soon watching houses around them torn down again, this time for I-71.
She says those experiences make her wary of things like the Brent Spence project.
"I don't get angry when I use the expressway," she says. "But I am very suspicious today because I see guys with all these instruments getting ready to do something."
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NKU's Jackson says while urban renewal and other events in the West End made trust in the government very difficult for many Black residents, the feeling isn't monolithic.
"That's one kind of legacy, that the trust is broken down," he says. "However, that's not the case for every person of color who is in that community."
Summerlin says she's glad the city apologized for urban renewal. She's less sure about efforts to reconnect the neighborhood. She and Anderson both mention specifics they'd like to see. Support for the neighborhood's remaining churches, more affordable housing, a grocery store, and renovation of the West End's Regal Theaterinto a new multicultural arts center.
"You said you're going to do something, what is it, that's tangible?" Summerlin says. "That you can say, 'This is really benefiting Black folks.' "