Maxine Gross was a child when she first heard the words “urban renewal.”
Her father, Elwood Gross, had walked into their Lakeland home with a roll of design plans and laid them out on the table.
“I just remember single-family homes and straight streets,” Maxine Gross, 65, said.
The fifth-generation Lakelander didn’t know this at the time, but the community redesign her father helped advise would change her close-knit community and motivate her life-long work to help Lakeland.
Urban renewal was a 20th century effort by local governments to redevelop properties on urban land. The process is widely criticized for displacing and targeting Black communities nationwide.
Lakeland, a historically Black community in College Park, was a target of urban renewal in the 1970s. Community members reached out to the city for help after flooding damaged many structures in the community.
The resulting redevelopment displaced 104 out of 150 households and destroyed small businesses, according to the Lakeland Community Heritage Project. After townhomes, student apartments, Lake Artemesia Park and other structures were built on the old land, the neighborhood was too expensive and unavailable for many past residents to return.
More than 50 years later, Maxine Gross still feels the effects of urban renewal. Now, she works to solidify Lakeland’s place in local history and seek justice for her community.
Maxine Gross’ father served on a committee about the urban renewal project during her childhood, hoping to make his community’s voice heard. While Lakeland residents had heard how destructive urban renewal had been to nearby Black neighborhoods, Maxine Gross said she thinks Lakelanders were reluctant to believe their neighborhood would face the same fate.
“People just believed that their council people, their city government, wasn’t gonna do that,” Maxine Gross said.
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But as a high schooler in 1975, she watched her community be demolished. It wasn’t until she was finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland in 1981 when buildings began to be constructed on the vacant land. The plans her father worked on, aimed at fixing their community, were ignored and the neighborhood became unlivable for most Lakelanders.
She wasn’t the type to just sit and watch.
“She has always been someone who is very involved, very busy,” her twin sister Delphine Gross said.
Maxine Gross ran for College Park City Council and won. She served as a council member from 1989 to 1997, which was only the beginning of her regular appearances at city meetings.
In 2002, Maxine Gross began to document and present Lakeland’s history to the public through a Lakeland Civic Association committee. She spearheaded events to educate others about urban renewal’s impact.
“A lot of the people who were holding the whole concept of Lakeland as it was together, they’re dying,” Maxine Gross said. “I often say that the whole concept is, let’s wait until enough of them die and nobody will tell us it, we’ll just get away with it.”
A few years later, Maxine Gross founded the Lakeland Community Heritage Project — a nonprofit she also chairs that is dedicated to preserving Lakeland’s legacy. She began to digitize the Lakeland archive and set up events for the neighborhood.
Maxine Gross’ work came front and center in June 2020 when the city council introduced a Black Lives Matter resolution without mentioning Lakeland or the city-led urban renewal. Instead, there was a pledge that the city would look at its history to see if it had mistreated its Black residents.
“I got really angry,” Maxine Gross said. “What do you mean ‘if?’”
Council members had previously attended heritage project meetings, but the 2020 resolution proved to her that city leaders never connected the destruction of Lakeland with city policy.
Soon after, Maxine Gross and her daughter made a video about Lakeland, asking the city to formally apologize to the Lakeland community and commit to restorative justice.
The city council passed the new resolution she pushed for, which catapulted the city into restorative justice talks and Maxine Gross to community forums, a steering committee and more city council meetings than she had in years.
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Now, whenever restorative justice, urban renewal or senior issues are on the council agenda, Maxine Gross is sure to attend.
She is the chair of the city’s restorative justice commission, a contributor to the University of Maryland’s 1856 project and she successfully secured historic designation for her family homes last summer. She also chairs the College Park City-University Partnership.
Ruth Murphy, the Lakeland Civic Association’s vice president, has worked with Maxine Gross on a series of projects that support the Lakeland community.
“She has a big picture that many of us don’t have,” Murphy said. “It’s so personal to her. She just wants, clearly, whatever is best for Lakeland.”
Maxine Gross is working to create a Lakeland Legacy Center in a student apartment building expected to open in 2027. The center would include exhibits and a digital archive where visitors can learn about the neighborhood’s history.
Her Lakeland Community Heritage Project also advocates for changes to improve the neighborhood and community for future generations. She recently helped get city funding for Columbia University to create a historical record of Lakeland.
The Lakeland Civic Association is pushing the College Park economic development team to give Lakelanders opportunities to purchase homes in the neighborhood and to rename community cornerstones to remember Lakeland, according to Gross.
“It’s unrealistic to think that you’re gonna get back what was,” Maxine Gross said. “But I think it’s realistic to bring back opportunities for people.”
