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When Lynn Ray Ellison lived in “The Rectangle” — the area of Texas City where the city’s African-American community lived and thrived in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s — life was different, he said. The Galveston County Daily News reports more than 500 black families lived in a 10-block radius between the borders of Texas Avenue to the north, Bay Street to the east, 10th Street to the west and Fourth Avenue to the south. Now The Rectangle and the residents who lived there have been replaced. The Texas City African-American Cultural Park, a 12,000-square-foot brick memorial to the African-American community in Texas City, is a decades-old effort by Ellison and others that’s finally paying off, he said. Concrete was recently poured for the project, which the city budgeted $250,000 for at a council meeting in December. Construction will continue over the next couple months for an expected mid-March completion.