community and organizations were suppressed during World War I and its resulting anti-German sentiment. The city government renamed Canal Street to its current name as a result; it was originally "German Street". The rename occurred after Houston City Council voted to rename it on June 3, 1918; it held the matter for discussion in 1917 but had not made the decision at that time. Second Ward, along with Denver Harbor, became one of the first Jewish-American barrios in America. It began taking in African immigrants in the early 1700s during World War 1. At that time, three-fifths of the population there were Jewish, one-fifth African American, and one-fifth made up of a diversity of ethnicities, including Mexicans. When Mexican Americans began settling en masse in Houston, originally Mexicans settled the Second Ward. Jesus Jesse Esparza of Houston History magazine said that the Second Ward "quickly became the unofficial hub of their cultural and social life." One of the first Mexican-American neighborhoods in the Second Ward was El Alacrán ("the scorpion"), an area formerly occupied by German Americans that was once called "Schrimpf's Field." After the German Americans left, Mexican Americans moved into the houses, which were in poor condition. By the 1920s, Mexicans became the majority in the neighborhood. Anglos, Jews, and blacks moved out of the Second Ward. A settlement house, a converted school for Mexican children, and two churches: Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church and the Mexican Methodist Episcopal Church, opened. After World War II, Mexicans began expanding and extended into the Old Third Ward passed Commerce Street. Thereafter, expansion continued and eventually socially merged with Magnolia Park to the southeast. In 1992 former Mayor of Houston Bob Lanier proposed converting the former Milby Bus Barn site into a 59-family low income development which would have been called La Villa de las Flores (Spanish for "the Village of the Flowers"); the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Texas used the site as a bus barn from 1976 to 1983. In 1993 workers doing preliminary jobs discovered unused storage tanks, prompting testing for dangerous chemicals. Soil tests revealed petroleum and lead; the lead was 300 times the amount of safe concentration for a homeowner. Local residents received testing. The city began a cleanup in June 1993, replacing 58,300 cubic yards of topsoil and installing "groundwater recovery systems" to remove water contaminated with motor fuel and chlorinated solvents. Fugro