KJZZ partners with the Arizona Republic to bring you the Arizona Storytellers series. We record the live events and share them with you on the radio. Storytellers share stories about our community or the life events that have shaped them.

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John Dunlap shares his story at the Tempe Center for the Arts on Aug. 10, 2022.

John Dunlap grew up in Flagstaff. His grandparents came to Arizona from segregated areas of Texas and Louisiana because of the logging industry. John’s elementary and junior high schools were very close to the Northern Arizona University campus and he says it always felt like going to college was an attainable goal.

So growing up in Flagstaff, I went to NAU and I was able to work for the city of Flagstaff Parks and Rec after I graduated from high school and was attending NAU. This recreation center, the Cogdill Recreation Center, was in the neighborhood.

We had the ability to do cultural things for the kids in that neighborhood, things like having a Black Santa Claus, which was everything for those kids in the neighborhood. Was a guy named Ricky, he was a heavyset guy and all he asked for was just in a couple bottles of Crown Royal 'cause it was cold. And he would ride around in the back of the truck and be the Black Santa Claus.

And it would be cold, it would be freezing and we couldn't wait for it to be over but to see the kids' faces to see a Black Santa Claus meant everything to those kids and it meant everything to us to do it.

We were able to do Juneteenth celebrations — this is before Juneteenth was a holiday. We celebrate it up there in Flagstaff, and it was nice because it was summer time. You know they have Juneteenth here and I'm like it's 115 degrees. It's not like how it was growing up in Flagstaff.

So being able to have these experiences and being able to have these cultural moments just instilled so much pride. It was such a great neighborhood, you know, there were Black churches, probably like four Black churches within a mile radius. But it just lets you know how the diversity was of that community.

Now if you go up to Flagstaff there's a street called San Francisco Street and San Francisco Street starts towards the end of the NAU — the north end of NAU. NAU doesn't call it San Francisco Street, it’s something else but it's actually San Francisco Street. So once you cross into Flagstaff the dynamic started to change. So you go through NAU, you hit South San Francisco Street and you start seeing this cultural neighborhood, but by the late '80s and early '90s the crack cocaine epidemic had really affected my neighborhood.

So you started to see a place where we would walk to school and you would see broken glass. There was the homeless shelter, all the bars and all the nightclubs are on San Francisco Street, so we lived in this background in the '80s and '90s. This is what I saw in junior high and high school.

So this street — is, you keep going up San Francisco Street, you eventually cross the railroad tracks. You're into downtown Flagstaff, turn into at that time, which was more of the tourism areas, the lawyer's offices, the restaurants, everything that made up downtown and City Hall.

But it was like night and day from where we live, from, so we were in the middle of these two different worlds. You have the university on the south end, you have our neighborhood in the middle, and then you have downtown Flagstaff across the railroad tracks.

Now my uncle was murdered on San Francisco Street. He was murdered during a dice game and it really affected my grandmother. Any errands that we had to run with my grandmother, my grandmother would take the long route, so a drive that probably would have took 10 minutes, it took us probably 20 minutes because she wouldn't go down this street. And the ironic part about it is we grew up — we found ourselves on the same street.

So this dynamic eventually brought on gentrification. At one point me and my family lived in — pretty much a studio — with, me and my sister had two bunk beds in the kitchen, my dad had a pull-out bed in the living room, and we had the bathroom/shower area. We probably paid about $400 a month rent, my dad did. So now if you go on Zillow and you see the prices for that same house or some of my friends' houses that were right in the backdrop of NAU, that house that we grew up in — it's not there anymore but someone's built the house on top of that property is worth a million dollars.

My son who's here tonight who will never get to know that Flagstaff — you can't gentrify my memories, you can't gentrify these stories, you can't gentrify this experience. So when you guys go back up to Flagstaff, when you're in that South Side neighborhood and you’re in the area where you may see this mural that says “south side” and you see some of the pioneers in that community, and you can say, “I remember that guy that told that story; he told us about this neighborhood,” and you'll have more of an appreciation for that.