How people use existing neighborhoods for new purposes The United States was founded by immigrants, and the diversity of our people is not a new story. Two cities at opposite ends of the continental mass have been home to multiple demographic groups since their very beginnings, and the 21st century proves no different.
Burlington, an all-American town in New England, is becoming one of the country's most attractive locations for recent immigrants. And highway development along Sacramento?s main thoroughfare may have transplanted a historically diverse population, but it also succeeded in expanding the reach of its communities of color.

Burlington

Written by Patrick Sisson
Photographs by Shane Lavalette

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The northwest face of a Flatiron-shaped brick building in Burlington?s Old North End neighborhood is graced with an image of Muhammad Ali, gloves up, a symbolic bee and butterfly orbiting around his head. The memorial to the boxer, painted the day after he died, was partially inspired by the experience of Prince Nartey Awhaitey, the 28-year-old son of the Mawuhi African Market?s owner, Pat Bannerman, an immigrant from Ghana.
As a child, Awhaitey just happened to have Ali as a seatmate on a domestic flight from Tennessee to New York; he remembers the icon entertaining him, performing magic tricks with a knowing wink the entire flight.
The mural was just the beginning of the makeover for the building, part of the motley crowd of co...