Refugee Renewal Absorbing the displaced from overseas can be a tough urban task. But
for a city in decline, it can be an unexpected opportunity. Sarah Harney | May 2005
Mohawk Street in east Utica is a typical old ethnic retail street a block or so of three-story brick buildings, flanked on either side by another block of wood-frame houses turned into small shops and modern- day convenience stores surrounded by parking lots. Mohawk Street isn t downtown, but it s less than a mile away, built more than a century ago to serve as the commercial center of the Italian neighborhood around it.
Every industrial town in the Northeast has a street like Mohawk, sometimes two or three, depending on how many different groups arrived during the great European immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of them are struggling today especially in places such as Utica, which has lost almost half its population in the last 50 years.