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What Center Street was before redevelopment
Center Street was a center of African American commercial and community life in Des Moines. Its businesses and gathering places included restaurants, social clubs, churches, and nightlife. Musicians traveling through the Midwest also performed there, giving the district a role in the region’s cultural life. Oakridge Neighborhood’s history describes this mix of institutions and activity.
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How I-235 changed the area
A local housing history report places I-235 construction in Des Moines from the late 1950s through 1968. Its timeline says Center Street and portions of Sherman Hill were included in demolition plans for the interstate. Polk County Housing Trust Fund’s report gives this broad construction period; it should not be read as a verified completion date for every segment.
The highway’s impact was not limited to the land taken for its right-of-way. A Des Moines City Council record says the completed I-235 separated Sherman Hill from neighboring areas. That physical barrier reshaped connections between places even where a parcel was not itself acquired for the highway. The City Council record describes this separation as part of the interstate’s lasting effect.
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How urban renewal differed from the highway project
Highway construction and urban renewal overlapped in time and affected the same broad district, but they were not the same process. Highway acquisition and demolition served the interstate project; urban renewal clearance and redevelopment reached beyond the highway right-of-way. The City Council record says nearly the entire Center Street district was demolished in the name of urban renewal, with two structures excepted. It does not establish that all of those demolitions were highway acquisitions.
A city resolution connects displacement of Black residents in the Center Street district during the 1960s and 1970s to both I-235 and nearby urban renewal projects. Read together, the accounts show cumulative change from overlapping interventions, rather than a single project responsible for every loss. The sources do not provide enough project-level detail to divide the displacement reliably between the two mechanisms.
What replaced the cleared land
The City Council record identifies later uses of land in the affected area: parking lots for UnityPoint (Methodist Hospital), Oakridge Neighborhood, and commercial development along Keo Way. These changes indicate the broad direction of redevelopment, but the available account is not a parcel-by-parcel history and does not establish the fate of every former property or institution.
What remains unknown about displacement
The records establish that Black residents were displaced and that the district was extensively cleared, but they do not establish a reliable total of households or businesses displaced. Nor do they provide a complete account of where residents relocated or what happened to each business. Without acquisition maps, relocation files, and other project-level records, a single displacement number—or a claim that one program caused all the losses—would go beyond the available evidence.
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