Five years ago Wednesday, a tornado whipped across the Connecticut River Valley — plucking trees, destroying homes and killing three people. Springfield was one of the places hardest hit.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Storm Stories: Path of Fury

In just one neighborhood, known as Maple High-Six Corners, 132 apartments and houses were condemned. Some people lost everything and moved away. But the storm is also bringing in millions of government dollars, and more people are getting involved in the neighborhood.

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This is one of Springfield’s oldest neighborhoods. People who worked in the old mills lived here, along with the industrialists who owned them. Walking down Pine Street, City Councilor Melvin Edwards points out that diversity still exists.

“To your right, facing me, you got houses that are 40 rooms, have swimming pools in the basement,” Edwards says. “But just two blocks over, you’ve got people who are on section 8, low-income, poorly-maintained rental properties with absentee landlords.”

Edwards says the neighborhood generally has some of the lowest voter turnout in the city.

“Not a lot of significant political influence or power,” he says.

He says the tornado may have actually changed that, bringing millions of government dollars to improve housing, parks and schools. But there was a huge cost. Linda Langevin remembers the exact moment disaster struck.

4:37. 4:37 on a Wednesday on June 1st,” Langevin says.

Like any other day, Langevin came home to the nineteenth century Victorian house she and her husband, John, had restored. She poured herself a glass of iced tea and settled down in front of the TV.

“All of a sudden, it got really, really dark outside and there were full-length bay windows, four of them, that got sucked out of the house,” she says.

Seeking cover, she fought the wind to pry open a door so she could stand in a doorway.

I could actually see the house twisting,” she says. “You could see the wall paper popping off the walls and actually the plaster pulling away and the house actually twisting and I could hear crashes and whatnot.”

Less than a half mile away Alicia Zoeller was under her basement stairs with her cats.

“Probably the scariest moment I’ve ever experienced in my entire life, because I really wasn’t sure what was happening upstairs,” Zoeller says. “I could hear glass breaking. I could hear smashing. The house was shaking, the cats were cowering with me and then all of a sudden it was still. It was done and over.”

Despite its brevity, the tornado turned the neighborhood upside down.

Linda Langevin found slate shingles from roofs stabbing her walls, like darts. She started to sweep up, then climbed the stairs to the second floor.

There was no roof,” she says. “It was just daylight upstairs. And, in addition to that, there was another roof from one of the apartment blocks across the way, that actually bisected our house.”

Alicia Zoeller also had roof trouble. Her partner, Rosemary Morin, says they’d just paid for a new roof, but now a huge locust tree had sliced right through it.

“It took out the supporting beams up there and we could stand on the third floor and we’d be standing through the roof,” Morin says.

A half-mile northeast, Yolanda and Clyde Talley and their 10-year-old son, Caleb, couldn’t even go inside their home.

“The tornado lifted up the house, blew away the foundation and then just dropped it right back inside the cellar, and thank God we weren’t there because that’s where we would have went.” Clyde Talley says. “The house would have fell right on top of us.”

A firefighter was waiting when the Talleys arrived home.

He stopped us. He says, ‘You can‘t go in there.’ And I said, ‘Well, we literally just have the clothes on our back. Everything we own is in that house.’ And he says, ‘It’s too unstable,’” Talley says. “Instantly we were homeless and with nothing.”

The Talleys recovered their computer, photographs and — later — Caleb’s teddy bear. A firefighter emerged bearing something that inspired Talley, who is a pastor.

“There was dirt and debris all over the place, but when he brought out the robe and the bible you couldn’t tell it had been through a tornado,” he says. ” So, that was, I believe God’s message to me, that ‘I still called you to preach. Even through disasters like this, don’t be discouraged. My calling is still on you and I’ll provide for you.’”

Insurance paid for three months in a hotel and a new home for the Talleys, next to a nature preserve, in Worcester, closer to the pastor’s church.

Meanwhile, the city painted a red X on Linda and John Langevin’s home, marking it for demolition. Worried about looting, the couple stayed put.

“It was raining and we were living in a house without a roof and without windows and there was mold everywhere and it stunk,” Langevin says. “There were no trees and it was just so incredibly hot. And of course, a personal item that had absolutely nothing to do with the tornado; my mother passed away four days before.”

The Langevins were trying to convince the city to give them more time to find a place to live and see if they could rebuild.

Instead of getting support from the city you have people pounding on your door telling you that your house is condemned [and] you have to leave immediately,” she says. “It’s like, where do you go?”

Langevin had been a long-time volunteer in Springfield, having served as president of her neighborhood council and on the Board of Directors of the Springfield Preservation Trust. But she felt the city turned its back on her.

About ten days later the couple moved to Agawam. She says the only way she wants to see Springfield now is in the rear-view mirror.

While some left, others rolled up their sleeves. Linda and Jim Bartlett, who own a newspaper distribution business, began to volunteer.

“This whole area got pretty well socked,” Linda Bartlett says. “There used to be apartments here. There used to be houses here.”

As the Bartletts drove their paper route after the tornado, they kept a list of places that needed attention and submitted it to the city.

“Every night I’d see all these piles of  rubble,” she says. “And when it rained, it smelled! It just took a long time to get it cleaned up.”

Bartlett had been concerned about the children who walked by the debris each day on their way to Brookings School, which was also damaged by the tornado. It’s now closed. And a new $27.5 million school has replaced it.

As government funding became available for new homes, Jim Bartlett says neighbors wanted to make sure the owners would live in them.

“When you have people that live there, they’re invested more in the property,” he says. “Whereas there’s a lot of properties here that are owned by people in Connecticut, Longmeadow, East Longmeadow and they don’t live here so they don’t really care about it. They just come and collect the rent and that’s all they care about.”

The neighborhood is getting some of what it wanted. Of the 132 apartments and houses that were condemned, 40 have been repaired or rehabbed and 18 new units are being built mostly here on Central Street. City Councilor Melvin Edwards points out about a dozen new houses, that will be owner-occupied.

“The quality of these homes are beautiful,” Edwards says. “The design is outstanding and they’re not cookie cutters. As you can see, each one looks different.”

Edwards says things aren’t perfect. In some areas there are still drug sales and gang activity.

“But it’s significantly less than it was and it’s not as blatant,” he says. “And it’s not..as much…out in the open.”

Five years ago, a few days after the tornado, Alicia Zoeller heard a kitten crying under a big pile of trees and branches.

“We named her Dorothy, appropriately,” as in the Wizard of Oz heroine, Zoeller says. “She  only survived and was rescued because she has a huge voice.”

Zoeller says she hopes the neighbors’ voices continue to be heard and their newly built clout stays strong.