About This Station
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About This City
The area on which the modern city stands was once home to Native Americans of the Hopewell culture, who migrated into the area sometime before the first millennium. Evidence of their early residency still remains in the form of a small mound downtown in Bronson Park. The Hopewell civilization began to decline at some point after the eighth century and was replaced by other groups. The Pottawatomi culture was resident in the area at the time the first European explorers arrived.
Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle is recorded as having passed through the area, just southeast of the present city, in late March, 1680. The first Europeans to reside in the area were itinerant fur traders in the late 18th and early 19th century. There are records of several traders wintering in the area, and by the 1820s at least one trading post had been established.
During the War of 1812, the British established a smithy and a prison camp in the area.
The 1821 Treaty of Chicago ceded all the territory south of the Grand River to the United States federal government. However, the area around present-day Kalamazoo was reserved as the village of Potawatomi Chief Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish. Six years later, as a result of the 1827 Treaty of St. Joseph, the tract that became the city was also ceded.
In 1829, Titus Bronson, originally from Connecticut, was the first white settler to build a cabin within the present city limits. He platted the town in 1831 and named it the village of Bronson (not to be confused with the much-smaller Bronson, Michigan about fifty miles (80 km) to the south-southeast).
Bronson was frequently described as "eccentric" and argumentative and was later run out of town. The village of Bronson was renamed Kalamazoo in 1836 (due in part to an incident resulting in Bronson's being fined for stealing a cherry tree). Today, a hospital and a park, among other things, are named after Titus Bronson.
Kalamazoo legally incorporated as a village in 1838 and as a city in 1883.
On August 27, 1856, Abraham Lincoln spoke at a rally in Kalamazoo's Bronson Park, promoting the presidential candidacy of John C. Fremont, who was running on the ticket of the newly formed Republican Party. The occasion marks Lincoln's only visit or public address within the State.
The Kalamazoo Mall, the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the United States, began with the closing of Burdick Street to auto traffic in 1959. The four block long mall, stretching from Lovell Street on the South to Eleanor Street on the north, has been restyled to match the attributes of the Arcadia Commons development, where the new Kalamazoo Public Museum anchors the north end of the mall. In 1999, however, two blocks of the mall were modified to accommodate auto traffic after a period of political debates on the issue. The creation of the mall gave Kalamazoo the name of "Mall City."
In the Fall of 1971, the Kalamazoo Public Schools system was ordered by a Federal Judge to be integrated after he found the school system to be unlawfully segregated. The judge's determination was the culmination of nearly a decade of racially charged incidents and protests, included several city-wide school closures. A program of two-way bussing was implemented in September 1971, in which the city's black students were transported from downtown Kalamazoo in the north and east sections of the city to predominantly white neighborhoods on the west side, and vice versa. The program was closely watched by education experts as the city's population more closely mirrored the demographic make up of the United States as a whole than any other jurisdiction. The bussing program continued through the late 1990s.
Beginning in 1971, numerous white families moved from the Kalamazoo Public Schools to adjacent districts, particularly Portage Public Schools to the south and Mattawan Consolidated School to the west. Despite a nearly 10 percent population reduction over the next two decades, the integration plan was more successful than in other large Michigan districts where "white flight" was more severe.
Downtown Kalamazoo was struck by an F3 tornado on May 13, 1980, killing 5 and injuring 79.
The city is situated mainly on the southwest bank of a major bend in the Kalamazoo River, with a small portion, approximately 7.3 sq km (2.8 sq mi), on the opposite bank. Several small tributaries of the river, including Arcadia Creek and Portage Creek, wind through the city. The northeastern portion of the city sits in the broad, flat Kalamazoo Valley, whilst in the western portions the terrain becomes a series of low hills spreading out to the west and south. Several small lakes are found throughout the area.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 25.2 square miles (65.2 sq km), of which, 24.7 square miles (63.9 sq km) of it is land and 1.3 sq km (0.5 sq mi) of it (1.99%) is water.
The city's suburban population is located primarily to the south, in the city of Portage, and to the west in Oshtemo Township.
Kalamazoo is located approximately halfway between Detroit and Chicago.
At least part of the municipal water supply for Kalamazoo is provided by the watershed contained within the Al Sabo Preserve in Texas Charter Township, Michigan, immediately southwest of Kalamazoo.
Another watershed, Kleinstuck Marsh, is very popular with hikers and birdwatchers. Kleinstuck Marsh is located south of Maple Street, between Westnedge Avenue (Kalamazoo's major north-south artery) and Oakland Drive.
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