West Rock was a community of people related to one another. They attended church together, socialized with each, and supported each other.[1] The community had their own column in the Arkansas State Press. When considering West Rock, one must think of it more as a community than a neighborhood. What is the difference? A neighborhood, according to Boykin and Ring, it is “a bounded area wherein certain land use activities are attracted and retained by sets of linkages…[these] may be thought of as external economies or centripetal forces. It is the periodic interaction between people or establishments that draw and hold them together.”[2] This definition represents the academic explanation of a physical neighborhood. A neighborhood, therefore, could just simply be a shared area defined by those who live in it. In today’s world, people may live in a neighborhood and not know who resides there.
A community, on the other hand, has more aspects than a neighborhood. These include family ties, emotional ties, and economic ties. This means it is much more on the sociological scale. A community can be a person’s cultural environment and their social network. It can be an environment comprised of family members or, as Merriam-Webster explains, it can be “a group of peoples regarded as deriving from a common stock.” This common stock for West Rock residents was race. This fits nicely into Wade and Tavirs’ definition of a community as being “tied to a person’s social and ethnic identities, where they feel the most comfortable.”[3]
Yet West Rock had an added layer: although it “was an urban neighborhood…88% of residents were related to at least one person the area.[4] The connection of blood, economy, and land formed generational bonds years in the making. In addition, according to August Comte, a “family, when confined to a labour which directly produces only what will satisfy a small portion of its own wants, is forced to recognize the importance of other families to itself as well as its own usefulness to them.”[5] Simply put, employment based on segregation did not pay much. The importance of family members in the neighborhood proved useful beyond the physical space. The economic, emotional, and mental relationships made West Rock a community.
[1] The name has variations. When referring to Project ARK-4, I will use the Westrock moniker. Otherwise, I will use the West Rock throughout the paper as this was the area’s original name.
[2] James H. Boykin and Alfred A. Ring, The Valuation of Real Estate, Fourth Edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Regents/Prentice Hall, 1993), 97-98.
[3] Carole Wade and Carol Tavirs, Psychology, Fourth Edition, Part Six, Society and Behavior, (New York: HarperCollings College Publishers, 1996), 626-661.
[4] “Project ARK-4: Relocation in the Westrock Urban Renewal Area Project: Planning and Building For A Brighter Tomorrow…” Housing Authority of the City of Little Rock, September 1960.
[5] Kenneth Thompson, August Comte: The Foundations of Sociology, (Halsted Press, a division of John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1975), 133.