Filmmakers save stories of Topeka’s Bottoms neighborhood

LAWRENCE — A 30-minute version of the documentary film “Reclaiming Home: Remembering the Topeka Bottoms” premieres at 6 p.m. March 27, closing out the related exhibition at the University of Kansas Department of Visual Art’s Off-Site Art Space downtown.

But that is hardly the extent, or the end, of co-producer and co-director Matt Jacobson’s work on the project. The professor of film & media studies has also created 40 short video clips that can only be accessed via QR codes printed on posters and cards made by his collaborator and the project’s director, Maria Velasco, professor in the KU Department of Visual Art.

Jacobson is also working on a longer documentary telling even more stories of the senior citizens — mostly African Americans and Mexican Americans — who were children when urban renewal took their neighborhood for an interstate highway and city and corporate landlords starting in the late 1950s.

The full, unedited 80 hours of interviews with 40 individuals that professors Jacobson and Velasco have collected over the past four years will eventually be made available to researchers through various historical archives.

Jacobson said it became a labor of love to document the memories of women like Loretta Ortiz and Rosalie Negrete, who reminded him of his Mexican American immigrant grandmother and great-aunt. Ortiz, Negrete and their peers hold the last living memories of the Bottoms neighborhood, which was tucked against the Kansas River and the railroad tracks in northeast Topeka.

Jacobson said Velasco learned of Bottoms native Tom Rodriguez’s 2012 memoir and the annual “Bottoms Kids” reunions, and the professors used grants from several sources, including KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities and Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, to pursue the story’s expansion into the art and documentary project. Rodriguez, who died in 2024, is one of the main voices featured in the film.

There is no narrator by design. Instead, the Bottoms Kids are able to tell their own stories, in their own words. Nor does Jacobson refer to the former Bottoms Kids as “subjects” of the documentary, rejecting the stratification that implies. Rather, they are “the community partners” in the film’s creation.

“We attended and filmed three reunions,” Jacobson said. “Afterwards, we filmed the interviews with certain prompts for the community partners: ‘What was it like when you grew up? What was it like with your family in the Bottoms? What businesses do you remember? What sounds, what smells?’ — so as to start everyone at the same place and then ... let their memories take them to different places.

“Everyone remembered the noon whistle, the trains going through the neighborhood and the smells coming from the slaughterhouse or the dog-food plant at the north (end). They weren't all good sounds or smells. The fun part was hearing all these people talking about these things that took them back to when they were children 60 years ago.”

If it was a poor community, several of the Bottoms Kids said they didn’t realize it.

“This was a community that had been there for over 100 years,” Jacobson said, “and it had seen every wave of immigration coming through: Greeks, Mexicans who came north to work on the railroad. Polish and Russian immigrants. A large number of Exodusters that came in from the South.

“But this was the place where they could all forge a peaceful community; where they may have been racially segregated, but they weren't constantly facing abuse. They protected each other. And in many ways, that that was our biggest takeaway from everybody's memories. 

“These were people who didn't see race. They didn't see color. They had friends who were Black and brown, who were Russian and Polish, who were Latinx. They didn't use those phrases. ... They were just your neighbors. You knew them. You grew up with them. Your parents trusted theirs. Their parents trusted yours.”

The Bottoms Kids tell in the film how their parents — many of whom were noncitizen, Green Card-holding immigrants — resigned themselves to the neighborhood’s destruction as Interstate Highway 70 carved a path through it in the name of the “Key Way” project.

“One of our people said that when the government came in and told you these were the terms, most people said, ‘Well, how am I going to fight the government; fight the highway?’ No, you couldn't,” Jacobson said.

And so the Bottoms Kids and their families scattered with the “pennies,” as the filmmaker put it, that the government gave them for their homes and commercial properties.

“Remembering Home” represents the last chance to preserve the Bottoms Kids’ memories – both on film and in the form of artwork.

“Memories are ephemeral,” Jacobson said. “They're going to go away when all of our community participants pass away. And so we're really saving that memory of the Bottoms as a place — not just for their relatives, but for the world. We're saving these stories for a time when they can be celebrated instead of just forgotten.”

The film’s premiere showing at the Off-Site Art Space, 924 Delaware St., is free and open to the public.