Stop the Road - University of Warwick · neighborhoods were targeted by the highwaymen. In other...

10.1177/0096144204265180 ARTICLEJOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2004Mohl / STOP THE ROAD

STOP THE ROADFreeway Revolts in American Cities

RAYMOND A. MOHLUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham

This article analyzes the freeway revolts that erupted in American cities in the 1960s and early 1970s. Untilthe mid-1960s, state and federal highway engineers had complete control over freeway route locations. Inmany cities, the new highways ripped through neighborhoods, parks, historic districts, and environmentallysensitive areas. Beginning in San Francisco, citizen movements sprang up to challenge the highwaymen.New federal legislation in the 1960s gradually imposed restraints on highway engineers, providing freewayfighters with grounds for legal action. Leaders in the new U.S. Department of Transportation pushed for amore balanced transportation system and more sensitive highway decision making. Case studies of freewaybuilding and citizen opposition in Miami and Baltimore illustrate larger patterns of the national freewayrevolt.

Keywords: transportation; expressways; freeway revolt; Miami; Baltimore

Beginning in the late 1950s, a nascent freeway revolt emerged in San Fran-cisco and a few other cities. Typical of the countercultural sixties, theantifreeway movement accelerated nationally as interstate highway construc-tion began penetrating urban America and knocking down neighborhoods.Pushing expressways through the social and physical fabric of American citiesinevitably resulted in housing demolition on a large scale, the destruction ofentire communities, severe relocation problems, and subsequent environmen-tal damage. Opposition movements sprang up to defend neighborhoodsagainst the “concrete monsters” rolling through the cities. Initially, the strug-gle pitted grassroots citizen organizations against the state and federal high-way engineers and administrators who directed these vast constructionprojects. Later, freeway fighters sought the intervention of political leaders orused legal challenges to halt highway projects. In some cities, freeway con-struction coincided with black political empowerment and the rising civil

674

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author would like to acknowledge research support provided by the Poverty andRace Research Action Council (PRRAC). Thanks also to PRRAC’s executive director, Dr. Chester Hartman.William Issel generously shared research materials from his own project on the San Francisco freewayrevolt. Jessica Elfenbein shared her knowledge of Baltimore’s urban history. Mark Rose, Joel Tarr, andZachary M. Schrag provided close readings of different drafts of this article and helped improve itconsiderably.

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 30 No. 5, July 2004 674-706DOI: 10.1177/0096144204265180© 2004 Sage Publications

rights movement, developments that took on added significance when blackneighborhoods were targeted by the highwaymen. In other cities, protectingparklands, schools and churches, historic districts, and sensitive environmen-tal areas stimulated citizen movements to “Stop the Road.” At some point inthe 1960s, then, many Americans came to focus on the negative consequencesof highway building, as opposed to the demonstrable advantages of modern,high-speed, express highways serving a nation addicted to automobiles and tomobility.1

The timing, progress, and outcome of the emerging freeway revolt differedfrom city to city. With a few exceptions, in cities where the highway buildersmoved quickly in the late 1950s to construct the urban interstates, the innerbeltways, and radials, opposition never materialized or was weakly expressed.In southern cities, where African Americans had little political leverage at thetime, building a freeway through the black community was not only the mostcommon choice but the choice that generally had the support of the dominantwhite community. Where freeway construction was delayed into the 1960s,however, neighborhood leaders, institutions, and businesses had time to orga-nize against the highwaymen. In some cases, freeway fighters forced the adop-tion of alternative routes, even shutting down some specific interstate projectspermanently. In their writings, influential urbanists such as Lewis Mumford,Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, and others provided a powerful critique of urbanexpressways and other redevelopment schemes. In the late 1950s, plannersand policy experts also began questioning the interstate program. The ink wasbarely dry on the 1956 interstate bill when city planners began challenging thesingle-minded devotion of highway engineers to pouring concrete, urginginstead the need for comprehensive planning and a balanced transportationsystem that included mass transit. In an influential 1960 article in TheReporter, rising urban analyst Daniel Patrick Moynihan criticized urban inter-states for their lack of comprehensive planning and potentially damagingimpact on urban life and metropolitan structure. In later years, these argumentsfor coordinated planning, mass transit, and preservation of small-scale neigh-borhood life in the modern city resonated with freeway opponents andbuttressed antihighway movements.2

As a collection of discrete, bottom-up movements beginning at the neigh-borhood level, the freeway revolt shared many aspects of sixtiescountercultural and change-inducing activity. Typical of the time was rejec-tion of top-down decision making, the normal practice of the highway estab-lishment in routing and building highways. Freeway fighters sought citizenparticipation in important decision making on expressway routes and urbanpolicy. However, the citizen army of homeowners and neighborhood groupsusually came up against an inflexible bureaucratic force of state and federalhighway engineers and administrators reluctant to yield professional and legalauthority to popular protesters. Only when decision making on controversial

Mohl / STOP THE ROAD 675

interstate routes became politicized and subject to litigation in the late 1960sand after did freeway revolters achieve a measure of success and satisfaction.3

The freeway revolt involved organization and political coalition building indefense of neighborhood and city. But each city had its own history, geogra-phy, demographic characteristics, physical structure, neighborhood patterns,political culture, and other unique features. These variations help explain whyfreeway fights had different histories and diverse outcomes from place toplace. Nevertheless, successful freeway revolts generally shared several com-monalities. First, persistent neighborhood activism, committed local leaders,and extensive cross-city, cross-class, and interracial alliances were needed tobring a high level of attention to the freeway problem over a sustained periodof time. Second, such movements needed strong support from at least somelocal politicians and from influential newspapers and journalists. Third, asZachery M. Schrag has suggested, cities that had strong and historic planningtraditions, such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C., responded more pas-sionately and more effectively to the freeway threat. Fourth, legal action overhighway routing was a necessary ingredient; litigation sometimes delayedland acquisition and construction for years, but without such legal action, statehighway departments could move ahead with dispatch. And, in the last analy-sis, the freeway revolters often needed a final shutdown decision from thecourts, from highest levels of the highway bureaucracy, or after the early1970s, from state governors. Grassroots, populist struggle against the urbaninterstates was crucial, of course, but without these other ingredients, therewas a very good chance that the freeway would get built anyway.4

THE FREEWAY AND THE CITY

Passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956 set the stage for dramaticchange in urban America. During the previous two decades or so, big-citymayors, civil engineers, urban planners, public-works officials, and down-town business and real estate interests all envisioned new urban expresswaysthat would revive the declining urban core. “Saving” the central business dis-trict (CBD) became a primary goal of the urban elites by the 1940s. Similarly,over many years, state and federal highway engineers developed their ownvisions of technologically efficient freeways that would speed autos and trucksto their destinations, bypassing the monster traffic jams that increasinglyclogged downtown streets. In the late 1930s, these conceptions of an urbanfreeway future coincided with new urban imagery inspired by the stunninglypopular Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939 New YorkWorld’s Fair. Futurama portrayed the “Cities of Tomorrow” and featuredmodernized expressways speeding traffic through great skyscraper cities atone hundred miles per hour—all part of a contemplated free-flowing

676 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2004

“National Motorway System” connecting all cities with populations of morethan one hundred thousand. Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes used theFuturama exhibit and his subsequent book Magic Motorways (1940) to pro-mote the advance of technology and link the nation’s urban future to the auto-mobile and the freeway. Futurama seemingly had the desired effect. TheGeneral Motors exhibit, one scholar has suggested, “stimulated public think-ing in favor of massive urban freeway building.” Advocates of these variedfreeway visions anticipated that central cities would have to be at least partiallyrestructured to accommodate the automobile and essential, high-speed trafficarteries.5

The urban expressway vision was given concrete bureaucratic form in twomajor highway reports prepared by federal agencies. In 1939, the Bureau ofPublic Roads (BPR) issued Toll Roads and Free Roads, an early statement ofthe need for a national highway system. Largely written by BPR commissionerThomas H. MacDonald and his assistant Herbert S. Fairbank, both engineers,the 1939 report conceptualized the links between highway building and urbanredevelopment, suggesting that “the whole interior of the city is ripe for . . .major change.” The report contended that proper planning of highways wouldfacilitate slum clearance and rebuilding along modern lines. In 1944, theNational Interregional Highway Committee, appointed by President FranklinD. Roosevelt and headed by MacDonald, issued a second report, mostly writ-ten by Fairbank. Titled Interregional Highways, it built on the 1939 study andmapped out a 40,000-mile interregional highway network not too differentfrom the system that was actually built in the late 1950s and 1960s. Like the1939 report, Interregional Highways recommended that new limited-accesshighways penetrate the heart of the nation’s metropolitan areas, where carefulplanning would integrate the new roads with “the future development of thecity.” The committee’s plan also called for inner and outer beltways encirclingthe largest cities, as well as radial expressways tying the urban systemtogether. Pushed by state highway engineers, road builders, truckers, and othermembers of the emerging highway lobby, Congress passed the Federal-AidHighway Act of 1944, incorporating much of the Interregional Highwaysreport.6

Wartime financial exigencies prevented any immediate efforts to fund andbuild the system. Disputes among highway builders, engineers, truckers, andautomobile interests over who would pay and who would benefit from the pro-posed road network further delayed congressional appropriations until theearly 1950s. Meanwhile, MacDonald and others, such as public-works builderRobert Moses of New York, embarked on a long campaign promoting urbanexpressways. As in the federal highway reports of 1939 and 1944, MacDonaldand Moses also argued that building these new traffic arteries provided anopportunity to clear out central-city slum housing and rebuild the urban coreaccording to modern standards. Big-city mayors and city managers, alongwith downtown developers, landlords, department store operators, and their


advocacy organization, the Urban Land Institute, also championed the post-war dream of new downtowns and high-speed traffic arteries crisscrossing thecities. Virtually all of the powerful interests involved in urban America sharedthese widely held views about the links between expressways and “reconstruc-tion” of the postwar city.7

The concrete jungle of elevated and depressed expressways that rammedthrough city neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s never came close tomatching the artistic designs of the futuristic and technological city beautiful,as depicted for instance in Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit. Interestingly, theever-practical Robert Moses dismissed Bel Geddes as a melodramaticdreamer: “The Futurama sold cars, but solved no highway problems and, ifanything, made the task of the road builder tougher because the public wastaught to expect magic.”8 Even the more practical, nuts-and-bolts approach ofpublic builders like Moses and highway engineers like MacDonald eventuallyran into tough public opposition in many cities. The problem was that the free-way visions of the highway technocrats and urban business and political elitesnever anticipated the widespread and negative popular reaction to the massivedemolition of the physical city. However, much business and political leaderstalked about a downtown revival, the destruction of densely populated residen-tial neighborhoods to make way for freeways was a tough sell among residentsin affected communities.

Experienced highway builders expected public opposition when they beganknocking down neighborhoods. In a 1954 statement to the President’s Com-mittee on a National Highway Program, generally known as the Clay Commit-tee, Moses noted that urban expressway segments of the interstate systemwould be “the hardest to locate, the most difficult to clear, the most expensiveto acquire and build, and the most controversial from the point of view of self-ish and shortsighted opposition.”9 Moses was prophetic on this point. By themid-1960s, citizen-led freeway revolts stalled urban interstate construction ina dozen or more major cities. Rather than negotiate or compromise on routelocation, most state and federal highway officials initially sought to forgeahead, the operative theory seemingly being to build expressways quicklybefore opposition coalesced and politicians caved in to an outraged public.

The freeway revolt first found expression in San Francisco in 1959, whenthe city’s board of supervisors withdrew support for any new freeway con-struction and then maintained that position into the 1960s. But trouble hadbeen brewing there since 1955, when public outrage mounted over construc-tion of the massive double-decked Embarcadero Freeway, a preinterstate free-way that ran along the city’s historic waterfront, cut off the city from the bay-front harbor, and enraged aesthetic sensibilities. San Francisco had a longplanning and environmental tradition dating back to the early twentieth cen-tury, a tradition emphasized by freeway opponents. Plans to extend theEmbarcadero and push additional freeways through the city’s Golden GatePark, upscale residential neighborhoods, and some outlying business districts,


primarily for the benefit of central-city business interests and suburban com-muters, stirred opposition at the neighborhood level. The multiple freewaysplanned by California state highway engineers and San Francisco city plan-ners were sidetracked by a powerful coalition of neighborhood associations,by environmental groups, by the locally oriented board of supervisors, and bythe eventual commitment of the city’s business and political elite to alternativeforms of urban transit. Providing important support for the freeway fighters,the city’s major newspapers conducted a long campaign against the plannedhighway system. In an editorial endorsement of the local freeway revolt in1959, for example, the San Francisco Examiner noted that the road opponentswere “rebelling against freeways that barge along in an unyielding straightline, knocking down everything in their path, or that stride along as huge uglyelevateds or that slash great gashes through residential or business districts.” Asupportive press was significant, but one additional feature, unique to Califor-nia, contributed an essential element to the early success of San Francisco’sfreeway opponents. Under state law, no street or road could be closed untilapproved by local government authorities. Because freeway building involvedmultiple road closures, this provision gave the San Francisco Board ofSupervisors veto power over the entire freeway system for the city.10

San Francisco’s freeway fight pitted neighborhoods against CBD interests,as well as city residents against suburban commuters. It also brought environ-mental, aesthetic, historic preservation, and mass-transit issues into thedebate. Housing destruction was only one of several concerns, and not themost important one, involved in the San Francisco’s freeway revolt. By con-trast, this issue—especially black housing and black neighborhoods—assumed a dominant role in most big-city freeway controversies. In Washing-ton, D.C., for instance, expressway issues became racialized in the mid-1960s,when a black militant group distributed flyers demanding “no more whitehighways through black bedrooms.” Concentrating on building the interstatesystem, highwaymen were slow to react to opposition movements such as theone in the nation’s capital. Since the 1930s, they had used traffic-flow studiesand cost-ratio analyses to determine highway and then expressway location.Engineers expected individual citizen complaints over housing demolitionand haggling with owners over property values but settled most of those mat-ters in the course of acquiring right of way. When the first large-scale opposi-tion to housing and neighborhood demolition appeared in the 1960s, roadengineers were ill prepared. In response, state highway engineers and federalhighway administrators at the BPR adopted a uniform, hard-nosed, techno-cratic stance: their job was building highways; housing and relocation prob-lems were the responsibility of other agencies. From their perspective,housing destruction was a necessary social cost if new highways were toaccommodate growing traffic demands. After the mid-1960s, however, itbecame increasingly more difficult for highway agencies to rigorously sustainthis position as the reality of massive urban housing demolition began to hit the


public consciousness. Indeed, by the late 1960s, according to the U.S. HouseCommittee on Public Works, federal highway construction was demolishingover 62,000 housing units annually—affecting possibly as many as 200,000people each year. And as one urban planner noted, “Displacement will be par-ticularly serious in the big city black ghettos where the supply of housing isinadequate and relocation beyond the confines of the ghetto is severely limitedby racial segregation.”11

HIGHWAY POLITICS IN THE SIXTIES

As the interstates pushed into the central cities in the 1960s, Congressresponded—tentatively at first—to rising levels of citizen outrage. Severalimportant legislative initiatives gradually altered the structural framework ofinterstate construction and imposed new requirements for state road builders.For example, the Federal Highway Act of 1962 required state road depart-ments to work with local governments in developing “a cooperative, compre-hensive, and continuing urban transportation planning process,” a process thatconsidered both other transportation modes and local land-development pat-terns. These mandates had the potential to challenge the power of state high-way engineers. So also did a second provision that for the first time requiredstate highway departments to provide relocation assistance to displaced fami-lies and businesses. However, these new requirements for transportation plan-ning and housing relocation did not take effect until July 1, 1965, thusundercutting the intent to protect urban communities from arbitrary highwaydecisions. Subsequent study also demonstrated that the BPR, which workedwith the state road departments in building the interstates, developed a seriesof policies and procedures that for all practical purposes undermined and frus-trated congressional intentions as expressed in the 1962 Highway Act.12

A second initiative, creation of the cabinet-level U.S. Department of Trans-portation (DOT) in 1966, had major implications for the interstate highwayprogram. An administrative reorganization pushed by President Lyndon B.Johnson to rationalize and concentrate executive power, DOT legislationbrought together a number of previously separate agencies involved in trans-portation. Formerly within the Department of Commerce, the BPR nowbecame a subagency within the DOT’s Federal Highway Administration(FHWA). In past years, senior BPR officials such as Thomas MacDonald hadlargely exercised a free hand, but now, federal highway engineers were sub-jected to a level of administrative supervision and control they had neverbefore experienced. A similar process was underway in the late 1960s andearly 1970s at the state level, where state DOTs were replacing highwaydepartments and where governors were taking control of state highway policythrough appointment and funding powers.13


Creation of the federal-level DOT provided the start of something new infederal highway policy—an effort to provide a balanced or “multimodal”transportation system. Moreover, the first DOT secretary, Alan S. Boyd,responded to the public clamor over the damaging impact of the interstates inurban neighborhoods. An attorney with varied experience in several state andfederal transportation agencies, Boyd seemed willing to challenge basic BPRhighway engineering strategy—that is, that transportation policy simplymeant building more highways, pouring more concrete, and worrying aboutthe consequences later. Speaking in California in 1967, Boyd must haveshocked his audience of transportation experts by stating, “I think the so-called freeway revolts around the country have been a good thing.” He elabo-rated by urging more citizen involvement in highway decision making andadvocating a balanced transportation system. In another speech in 1968, Boydasserted that expressways must be “an integral part of the community, not acement barrier or concrete river which threatens to inundate an urban area.” Toreign in BPR highway engineers and administrators, Boyd appointed LowellK. Bridwell, a former journalist and former deputy undersecretary for trans-portation in the Department of Commerce, as FHWA administrator. LikeBoyd, Bridwell wanted to get the interstates completed, but he too displayed anew sensitivity on issues of expressway location. Boyd also directed DOTstaffers to set up a new monthly reporting system on interstate “trouble spots”so that the agency could react before local controversies reached “crisis stage.”Responding to serious highway displacement issues, in 1968, Boyd’s DOTissued a new policy and procedure manual requiring two public hearings oninterstate routes (only one had been required previously). In addition, Boydtook seriously provisions of DOT legislation that required him to assure thatparks, historic districts, and environmentally sensitive areas were protectedfrom road builders. Reflecting these concerns, as Zachery M. Schrag notes inhis article in this issue, Boyd became deeply embroiled in the long-simmeringbattle in Washington, D.C., to halt the Three Sisters Bridge linking express-ways across the Potomac River. Within a year of taking office at the DOT,Boyd had seemingly become the most effective national spokesman for thefreeway revolt (see Figure 1).14

Several other initiatives brought further structural change to federal high-way policy. For example, the Federal Highway Act of 1968 required that statesprovide decent, safe, and sanitary relocation housing prior to property acquisi-tion for interstate routes. Considerable federal funding was made available tostates for moving expenses, housing relocation, and housing and rent supple-ments. The 1968 law, along with the subsequent Uniform Relocation Assis-tance Act of 1970, required greater attention to the troublesome relocationissue than ever before.15 Moreover, additional environmental legislation—theNational Environmental Policy Act (1969) and the 1970 amendments to theFederal Clean Air Act—posed new mandates and regulations curbing high-way builders and opened new avenues for litigating the freeway revolt.16 By


that time, John A. Volpe had replaced Boyd as DOT secretary in the first Nixonadministration. A building contractor and former public-works director andgovernor of Massachusetts, Volpe had been a “hard-line road builder” who“possessed a record of unfettered prohighwayism,” critics said, but new legis-lation and congressional mandates forced him to consider environmentalissues and alternative transit methods. Soon after taking office, Volpe con-fronted two highly publicized urban trouble spots on the interstate map, end-ing long-running disputes by canceling the New Orleans RiverfrontExpressway in 1969 and approving a costly restudy of a contentious inner-loop highway in Boston in 1971, effectively killing the project.17

By the end of the 1960s, interstate troubles had become political troubles,both locally and nationally. Freeway revolters took to the streets, noisilypacked hearings and meetings, and forced highway issues onto the front pagesof metropolitan newspapers. Congress became a major battleground, as con-flicting interests faced off in House and Senate committee hearings. Duringthe Johnson years, the appointment of a new breed of administrator in thetransportation and highway agencies signaled greater receptivity to local con-cerns about housing demolition, relocation problems, environmental damage,and civil rights issues. The Nixon administration, too, proved receptive tocommunity concerns about urban interstates, a responsiveness that eventuallyled to the Federal Highway Act of 1973 and other legislation in the mid-1970sthat permitted states to cancel interstate sections and that opened the Highway


Figure 1: Transportation Secretary Alan S. Boyd Makes a Presentation on DOT Programsto President Johnson and Cabinet, October 3, 1968

SOURCE: Lyndon B. Johnson Library, photo by Yoichi Okamoto. Reprinted with permission.

Trust Fund for mass-transit alternatives.18 The freeway revolt had a majorimpact in raising these issues to the national level. Local freeway revolts hadmany common elements, but specific circumstances differed from city to city,as illustrated in the following case studies of expressway building in Miamiand Baltimore.19

EXPRESSWAYS IN MIAMI

Initial interstate planning for Miami called for a single north-south express-way that cut through the central city. Given South Florida’s unique geography,with the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Everglades to the west, and no othermajor cities to the south, the Interstate-95 route simply terminated in down-town Miami. As in many other large cities, Miami city planners began map-ping an urban expressway system even before the federal interstate highwaylegislation in 1956. A 1955 Miami expressway plan sliced into downtownMiami on the edge of residential neighborhoods, along an abandoned rail cor-ridor, and through warehouse and “low-value” industrial areas. As the plan-ners noted, these locations had been chosen “in order to preserve and helpprotect existing residential neighborhoods and promote an economicallydesirable use of land.” A year later, after Congress fully funded construction ofthe interstate system, Florida State Road Department officials assumed controlof interstate planning in Miami. They hired outside highway consultants, whoin short order scrapped the 1955 expressway plan and advanced a new routewith substantial changes. Prepared by the engineering consulting firm ofWilbur Smith and Associates, which designed interstate plans for many statesand cities, the new expressway plan shifted the downtown portion of the high-way several blocks to the west, as the Wilbur Smith report noted, to provide“ample room for the future expansion of the central business district in a west-erly direction.” It also anticipated an inner-city beltway with the eastern legbuilt on stilts along the Biscayne Bay waterfront, as well as a huge midtowninterchange with a planned east-west expressway stretching from MiamiBeach to the western reaches of Dade County (see Figure 2).20

Implementing the Florida Road Department’s plan had dramatic conse-quences. Shifting the downtown expressway to the west now placed the routesquarely through Miami’s large black residential district known as Overtown.The massive interchange, eventually taking up almost thirty square blocks,was slated to wipe out Overtown’s business district, the heart of black Miami,often considered by virtue of its many nightclubs and music venues to be “theHarlem of the South.” Thirty years of racially driven local politics lay behindthe Wilbur Smith expressway plan.21

Miami had a relatively small, compact CBD. It was hemmed in on the northand west by Overtown, which had a population of about 40,000 in 1960.Biscayne Bay to the east and the Miami River to the south precluded expansion


in those directions. As early as the 1930s, Miami civic and business leadersexpressed concern about geographical constraints on downtown development.As New Deal programs emerged, Miami leaders seized upon the new publichousing program as a potential solution. Federal funding permitted the Miami


Figure 2: Expressway Plan for Downtown Miami, 1956SOURCE: Wilbur S. Smith and Associates, Alternates for Expressways: Downtown Miami, DadeCounty, Florida (New Haven, CT, 1962).

Housing Authority to build the Liberty Square public housing project in anundeveloped area outside Miami’s municipal boundaries some five milesnorthwest of the CBD. Public discussions among politicians and planners atthe time made it clear that Liberty Square was expected to become the nucleusof a new black community that would siphon off Overtown’s population. Theultimate goal, one leading Miami planner stated, was “a complete slum clear-ance effectively removing every Negro family from the present city limits.”Eventually, as a consequence of persisting patterns of racial zoning, the hous-ing project did become the center of a sprawling new black district known asLiberty City, but the downtown dream of eliminating Overtown and makingMiami white remained unfulfilled by the 1950s.22

The interstate highway program provided Miami’s civic elite with a newopportunity to achieve their racial goals and recapture central city space forbusiness purposes. Florida consulting highway engineers worked with theDade County Commission, the Miami City Commission, and the Miami-DadeChamber of Commerce in developing the Miami expressway route. TheFlorida Road Department, the largest state agency, was heavily politicized, apatronage plum for the politicians. Wilbur E. Jones, the road department chair-man, was a Miamian and close to the Miami civic elite. The final routing ofMiami’s north-south expressway in 1956 emerged from these connections andfrom meetings between state highwaymen and county politicos.23

Building Interstate-95 into downtown Miami created devastating conse-quences for the densely settled, inner-city black community. Nevertheless, theexpressway initially generated strong support from many interest groups inmetropolitan Miami, who saw its completion as essential for the area’s contin-ued economic progress. Businessmen in real estate and tourism found much tolike in the new transportation plan, as did local politicians and newspapermen.Surprisingly, the Greater Miami Urban League, although concerned abouteventual relocation problems, issued an official statement in 1957 supportingthe expressway as “necessary for the continued progress of our city.” Simi-larly, the city’s black newspaper, Miami Times, worried about housing andrelocation issues but also editorialized in 1957 that “with the expansion andprogress of a city, there is little you can do about it.” Three years later, in dis-cussing a local expressway bond issue, the paper once again emphasized thetheme of progress: “We are living in a progressive state. We cannot afford totake a backward step.” Black spokesmen quietly acceded to the expresswayplan, but both the Urban League and the Miami Times urged the establishmentof a relocation agency to assist thousands of black Miamians in finding newhomes. Florida road chairman Wilbur Jones appreciated black support andagreed that relocation plans deserved “serious study,” but he affirmed that thiswas not the responsibility of the state road department. In 1957, Miami’s civilrights movement had not yet developed, and black militancy would have towait until the late 1960s. The planned Miami expressway route through


Overtown was widely known by the late 1950s, a decade before it was actuallybuilt, but this knowledge did not stimulate a black opposition movement at thetime.24

However, Miami freeway opposition did stir in some corners of the whitecommunity. At a state road department public hearing in February 1957, for-mer Miami mayor Abe Aronovitz spoke out against the expressway plan, por-traying the elevated structure planned for downtown as “a monstrositystraddling the City of Miami” that would create new slums and destroy prop-erty values. In a subsequent telegram to Governor LeRoy Collins, Aronovitzcomplained that the public hearing was a farce and that state road engineershad no interest in responding to overwhelming citizen opposition to theexpressway. Aronovitz kept up his campaign for several months, badgeringFlorida’s senators and congressmen and eventually meeting with GovernorCollins in person, all to no avail. In addition, many Miamians wrote the gover-nor, the Florida road department, and the BPR recommending changes in theroute or complaining about the expressway coming through their property.One woman from North Miami, for example, borrowed Aronovitz’s imageryin suggesting that the expressway would “be a monstrosity which would archlike the back of a huge dinosaur over an area of the city, depreciating propertyand displacing homeowners.” More important, perhaps, “it would cause dis-satisfaction and dissension between the races here, because it would necessar-ily displace many of the Negro race. They would have to move into the outerfringe of white sections, with the accompanying flaring up of hatreds.” In fact,displaced inner-city blacks did move to white transition areas, eventuallytransforming northwest Dade County into a massive second-ghettocommunity.25

Initial opposition to the Miami expressway mostly died out within a fewmonths of the February 1957 public hearing, with one exception. ElizabethVirrick, a white, middle-class housing reformer launched a one-woman cam-paign against the Miami expressway system that lasted a decade. Virrick hadbeen involved in an interracial movement for slum clearance and public hous-ing since the late 1940s, fighting mostly against Miami slumlords, rentalagents, black housing developers, and local politicians who failed to enforcehousing codes. As the Miami expressway plans became public in 1956 and1957, Virrick immediately recognized the devastating consequences for blackMiami. Influenced by the San Francisco freeway revolt and the writings ofJane Jacobs, Virrick intensified her attack on the highway builders in the1960s. In a series of hard-hitting articles in her monthly newsletter, Ink: TheJournal of Civic Affairs, Virrick painted a bleak picture of the consequences ofexpressway building in Miami. She went on to ask, “Hasn’t anyone heard ofSan Francisco where the road program was stopped and replanned because analert citizenry demanded it?” Virrick kept the expressway issue barely aliveinto the mid-1960s, when the final downtown leg through Overtown was


completed. She was the closest thing Miami had to a freeway revolt, but a one-woman crusade was not enough to stop the highwaymen in Miami.26

The Miami expressway system was completed by 1968 as originallydesigned by the highway engineers, minus the bay-shore leg of the inner-loopbeltway, dropped because of limited ramp space in the CBD. No public hear-ings were held in the black community, a source of bitter complaint in lateryears. Construction of the downtown expressway resulted in the virtualdestruction of Overtown as a viable community. The sweeping, four-leveldowntown interchange alone destroyed the housing of about 10,000 people(see Figure 3). Simultaneous urban renewal projects in the area added to hous-ing demolitions. Most of those dislocated ended up in Dade County’s expand-ing second ghetto in and north of Liberty City. Over time, CBD functionsexpanded into the Overtown area: government office buildings, parking lots,upscale apartments, shopping centers, and a sports arena. By the end of theexpressway-building era, little remained of Overtown to recall its days as athriving center of black community life. The traumatic events of the interstateera have remained vividly etched in the historic memory of black Miami.27

Comparing Miami to San Francisco helps explain the weakness of freewayopposition in the Florida city. San Francisco planned multiple freeways cut-ting through diverse neighborhoods, whereas Miami had a single expresswaythat did relatively little damage except in the heavily populated black centralcity. San Francisco had dozens of strong neighborhood organizations that builtcross-city and cross-class alliances. Miami had few community organizations,most of them property owners’ associations primarily interested in keepingblacks out of their neighborhoods. Although the city was undergoing demo-graphic change with Jewish migration from the north and Cuban migrationfrom the south, Miami was still very southern in orientation in the 1950s andearly 1960s, making interracial cooperation problematic. In the western cityon the bay, politicians on the board of supervisors, elected by district, repre-sented their constituents and spoke against freeways. Simultaneously, manyinfluential journalists were attacking freeways in daily newspaper columns,keeping a spotlight on the highway issue. In the eastern city on the bay, localpoliticians, all elected at-large, and all the newspapers, even the black paper,supported the expressway. By virtue of a quirk in California law, the San Fran-cisco Board of Supervisors had a veto over expressway building, but in Miami,the city commission and the county commission had no such power; if theydid, it is unlikely they would have used it to stop the interstate. No citizen law-suits challenged the highway builders in Miami. In addition, the entire Miamiexpressway system was either completed or under construction by 1965, whenthe first, very minimal federal curbs on interstate routing took effect. Thus,highwaymen in Miami never faced the requirements for community planning,relocation assistance, or environmental sensitivity, all of which were initiatedby Congress in the mid-1960s and after. Finally, the Miami expressway system


was virtually completed by the time Alan Boyd took the reins of the DOT inWashington. In the Miami case, the timing of highway construction, the struc-ture of local political power, and a southern cultural pattern of white domina-tion muted expressway opposition and shaped the outcome.


Figure 3: Completed in 1968, Miami’s Downtown Interchange Sprawled over ThirtyBlocks

SOURCE: Florida Department of Transportation. Reprinted with permission.

HIGHWAY POLITICS IN BALTIMORE

Building Interstate-95 into downtown Miami was simple and uncompli-cated, compared to what happened in Baltimore. The Baltimore expresswaystory is much more complex and drawn out, with many different plans andplayers, a more expansive freeway system, many more levels of review, muchmore vocal and organized citizen opposition, and ultimately, a much differentoutcome. Baltimore’s leaders and citizens wrestled with no less than twelvedifferent expressway plans between 1942 and the 1970s. Downtown businessleaders began thinking about the need for expressways in the early 1940s. Oneof the largest cities in the nation at the time, Baltimore had high levels ofthrough traffic, as well as significant local traffic generated by its own down-town, industrial, rail, and port activities. In 1942, engineers commissioned bythe Baltimore City Planning Commission proposed two major east-westexpressways. One route traversed the city just north of the CBD along the so-called Franklin-Mulberry corridor linking U.S. 1, the main highway betweenWashington and New York, with U.S. 40 entering Baltimore from the west.The second route forecast a bypass south of the Inner Harbor for through traf-fic and involved construction of a bay bridge or harbor tunnel. In 1943, the Bal-timore Association of Commerce proposed a still more ambitious freewayplan to serve anticipated traffic needs and by which the CBD might be “res-cued and redeemed.” This plan projected an east-west freeway connectingwith three north-south freeways. The business group noted approvingly that “agreat many of the freeways would pass through blighted areas” or sections“approaching blighted conditions.” In 1944, concerned about the cost of suchan elaborate freeway network, the city planning commission recommendedonly the east-west expressway, prompting the mayor to appoint a specialtraffic committee to restudy the issue.28

The traffic committee hired the peripatetic Robert Moses, a dominantnational voice on urban expressways at the time. The 1944 Moses report mini-mized the amount of through traffic and promoted the Franklin-Mulberry east-west (or midcity) expressway, primarily to serve downtown commuters. TheMoses plan projected the displacement of some 19,000 people in the centralcity, mostly slums, Moses said, and “the more of them that are wiped out thehealthier Baltimore will be in the long run.” The Moses plan drew widespreadopposition, primarily from people in the targeted neighborhoods but also fromrespected Baltimoreans; journalist H. L. Mencken, for instance, labeled theMoses plan “a completely idiotic undertaking.” Some on the mayoral commit-tee challenged the Moses plan on several grounds. The New Yorker’s report,one member of the Harbor Crossing-Freeway Committee suggested, wasnothing more than a “sales brochure” that purposely obscured the true cost ofthe highway, glossed over serious relocation problems, and drew “illusory”conclusions about the positive impact of the freeway on nearby neighbor-hoods. The Moses plan, committee member Herbert M. Brune Jr. wrote,


“poses a mountain of human misery.” On the other hand, the Downtown Com-mittee, representing Baltimore’s business elite, seemed predisposed towardthe midcity expressway idea because it would “lend a powerful force towardrestraining decentralization and rehabilitating blighted areas.” The Franklin-Mulberry highway corridor bisected one of Baltimore’s black ghetto neigh-borhoods. Like their counterparts throughout urban America, business andpolitical leaders in Baltimore believed that expressways would boost sales andproperty values, rescuing the CBD from the twin evils of blight anddecentralization.29

Reflecting disagreements among Baltimore’s civic elite, as well as con-cerns about the anticipated $40 to $50 million cost, little was done at the timeto implement the Moses expressway plan. Over the next twenty years, plan-ners and highway engineers developed variations and expansions of theexpressway concepts of the 1940s. In the mid-1950s, the city’s Department ofPublic Works began building a less controversial north-south city expresswayalong the Jones Falls corridor, with the first leg into the city from the northernsuburbs completed in 1960. The northern leg of the Jones Falls Expresswayran through the eastern edge of Druid Hill Park, a historic Olmsted-like wilder-ness park laid out in the late nineteenth century, but only later did freewayopponents recognize the aesthetic and environmental damage to the park.Interstate highway legislation in 1956 prompted still more ambitious highwayplanning in Baltimore, as did the completion of the Baltimore outer beltway(Interstate-695), a Baltimore County project with the state roads commission.Powerful downtown business groups such as the Greater Baltimore Commit-tee pushed urban redevelopment schemes to revitalize the city center, nowendangered by shopping malls and suburban growth along the outer beltway.A regional planning agency worked on one highway plan, the BaltimoreDepartment of Planning worked on another, and the state roads commissionhired Wilbur Smith and Associates to prepare still another Baltimore transpor-tation and highway study (see Figure 4). In 1961, overcoming an entrenchedpattern of factious local politics, the city’s business, political, and engineeringelite coalesced around an extensive new expressway plan—called the 10-Dplan.30

Authors of the 10-D plan, engineers from three Baltimore firms, consoli-dated several highway schemes into an ambitious expressway system: a cross-town, east-west expressway running just south of the CBD and through thewhite, working-class waterfront community of Fells Point; a “connector” tothe western suburbs traversing the Franklin-Mulberry corridor and cuttingthrough the black, middle-class Rosemont section; an extension of the JonesFalls Expressway into the city center; and a bypass expressway south of theInner Harbor carrying interstate through traffic. These plans anticipated a mas-sive downtown interchange and a colossal fourteen-lane Inner Harbor bridge.Rosemont, Fells Point, and other stable, historic neighborhoods were seen asexpendable. The 10-D plan would have demolished over 4,000 dwellings and


many small businesses and bisected urban renewal areas. Like Robert Moses,the 10-D highway engineers favored expressways that cleared out “blighted”housing.31

Baltimore’s civic elite did not anticipate the extent of community opposi-tion to 10-D. At public hearings on different sections of the system, businessand political leaders spoke in support of expressways, but large crowds turnedout to challenge, heckle, and shout down highway advocates. In 1962, some1,300 persons showed up at a public hearing on the 10-D east-west express-way, angry that the engineers and planners had declared their neighborhoodsexpendable slums. In 1965, the Baltimore Sun reported on another large publicmeeting held by the city council: “Last night’s first hearing on an East-Westexpressway bill ended in a fashion similar to the city’s entire expressway pro-gram—a shambles.” In the early going, debate raged over the exact location ofexpressways, but by the mid-1960s, support seemed to be growing in theneighborhoods for no roads at all.32


Figure 4: Most Baltimore Expressway Plans Had Major Highways Converging in theCity’s Center, as in this 1955 Route Projection

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads, General Location of NationalSystem of Interstate Highways (Washington, D.C., 1955), 36.

Complicating and slowing progress on Baltimore’s expressway systemwere two unique provisions of the city’s home-rule charter. First, the citycouncil possessed sole authority to initiate condemnation proceedings forpublic works or highway projects. Second, the city’s planning commissionhad power to reject state highway plans that did not conform to the city’s mas-ter plan, although the mayor could overrule the planning commission. Thesewere slight variations from the San Francisco situation, whereas in most citiesthe state highway departments controlled the condemnation and land-acquisi-tion process and could move more quickly toward construction without worry-ing too much about public sentiment. Essentially, the Baltimore City Councilhad a veto over any state highway plans within the city boundaries. Complicat-ing matters still further, the council initiated separate condemnation ordi-nances for small route segments, neighborhood by neighborhood, rather thanvoting on the entire expressway system at one time. Elected by district, Balti-more’s city council members generally responded to neighborhood concerns,leading to numerous condemnation hearings, delays, and postponements ascouncilmen tested the extent of popular outrage. As Thomas D’Alesandro,Baltimore’s mayor during that period, recalled in a 1974 interview, “everycondemnation ordinance was a real bloodbath.” Nevertheless, by 1967, mostof the necessary condemnations for the 10-D system had been completed. Bythat time, however, officials of the BPR, fed up with delays created by mixing“city hall politics” with highway building, refused to deal any longer with thecity on interstate issues. The BPR was concerned about Baltimore’s politicalinfighting, as well as about the looming 1972 cutoff date for federal interstatehighway funding. Consequently, the BPR orchestrated the creation of a newinterstate administrative unit, the Maryland road commission’s BaltimoreInterstate Division, described by some freeway fighters as “a unique bureau-cratic animal.” Largely funded by the BPR, the new state road agency sought towork out disputes between city and state and to coordinate the engineering andconstruction of the city’s interstates. The city still retained a veto over specificinterstate routes, but the BPR controlled highway funding allocations, a majorbargaining chip in Baltimore’s complicated highway politics. Yet ten yearsafter passage of the 1956 federal highway legislation, concrete had yet to bepoured for any of Baltimore’s interstates.33

A deep undercurrent of discontent shaped public attitudes toward Balti-more’s 10-D system by the mid-1960s. Responding to these concerns, as wellas to the highway standoff between city and state, in 1966, architects in theBaltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects took the lead inarguing for more aesthetic highways that blended with the natural environ-ment and preserved the texture of the physical city. The architects’ initiativeled to state and federal approval of an interstate restudy by an “urban designconcept team” composed of experts from several disciplines and headed byNathaniel A. Owings, founding partner of the architectural firm of Skidmore,Owings and Merrill. Owings accepted the challenge because, as he later wrote,


“the question of how to lace tubes of traffic through vital parts without undulydisturbing the living organism of the city is symptomatic of a national problemand offers a pilot-study opportunity that can be available as a example for thewhole country.” The DOT agreed to pay 90 percent of the cost of a two-yearrestudy of Baltimore’s expressways, with the proviso that the team workwithin the already designated 10-D highway corridors. “Joint development”of expressway corridors for housing, schools, parks, playgrounds, businessuses, and the like became an important part of the design team’s mission. Thegoal of the design team, all the principals agreed at the beginning, was to linkinterstates 95, 83, and 70 in downtown Baltimore but to do so in an aestheticfashion that did not destroy the urban fabric.34

Given the changing circumstances of the late 1960s, it was an impossibletask. Freeway critics jumped on the design team as “a desperation move by acity administration faced with citizen revolt and a stern dictum from Washing-ton . . . to do something about it.” James D. Dilts, a reporter who followed theexpressway story for the Baltimore Sun, scoffed at the design team’s underly-ing concept: “‘Blending’ a six or eight-lane highway into the fabric of Balti-more is about as promising an assignment as ‘blending’ a buzz saw into aPersian rug.” Infighting continued over methods and goals, pitting highwaybuilders against politicians, local engineers against outside consultants, engi-neers against architects, engineers against sociologists, and ultimately, designteam members against Baltimore’s neighborhoods groups. The design teaminherited the 10-D expressway plan but within a year began to doubt its effi-cacy, especially after team representatives began meeting with neighborhoodgroups. After considering several alternatives, and with the support ofFHWA’s Bridwell, the design team eventually scrapped the east-west express-way through the southern edge of the CBD and Fells Point and recommendedshifting Interstate-95 south of the Inner Harbor, where it ran through other his-toric neighborhoods. This decision also eliminated both the massive down-town interchange on the waterfront and the huge Inner Harbor bridge. Otherelements of the old plan remained in modified form, including the north-southI-83 expressway (originally the Jones Falls Expressway) that would now ter-minate in the CDB without connecting to I-95. The I-70 route from the westlinking with I-95 also remained. This route still cut through western parks butswung slightly to the south to avoid the black Rosemont community, already indecline because of earlier condemnations. Under this new expressway design,the Franklin-Mulberry corridor, more than a mile and a half of which hadalready been leveled, was recommended as a spur expressway into midcityBaltimore. Labeled the 3-A expressway system, the entire design-team planeventually was endorsed by the mayor and city council, as well as state andfederal highway officials, all of whom wanted to get some expressways—anyexpressways—built in Baltimore. But the 3-A plan, like the earlier 10-D plan,faced tough opposition in the neighborhoods, now fully aroused by the per-ceived continued arrogance and insensitivity of the highway engineers,


planners, and politicians who wanted downtown expressways whatever thehuman and social cost. The Baltimore Sun, however, put a positive spin on thecity’s highway stalemate: “If expressway planning is a mess in Baltimore, atleast the city has been spared the greater mess of those other cities whichalready have built their expressways.”35

BALTIMORE’S FREEWAY REVOLT

By the time the urban design team was established in 1966, Baltimore hadexperienced over twenty years of community opposition to new highways.These expressions of community outrage tended to be sporadic and poorlyorganized. They crystallized around city council condemnation proceedingsor public hearings on highway routes, but interest dropped off once decisionshad been made and condemnation ordinances enacted. Many small neighbor-hood groups participated in these early confrontations, but each was interestedin its own small piece of urban turf. However, in 1966, the appearance of theRelocation Action Movement (RAM) marked the beginning of a coordinatedand more focused freeway revolt in Baltimore, and several similar neighbor-hood coalitions soon joined the battle to Stop the Road (see Figure 5).

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Baltimore’s freeway fighters took onthe so-called highway hawks. Organized in November 1966, RAM repre-sented a coalition of middle-class black activists from Rosemont and militantworking-class blacks in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor. Given patterns of pre-vious highway and urban-renewal projects, blacks in Baltimore had good rea-son to be concerned about the interstates: between 1951 and 1964, about 90percent of all housing displacements took place in Baltimore’s low-incomeblack neighborhoods. The RAM coalition in the mid-1960s reflected outrageover the destruction of black neighborhoods to satisfy the needs of suburbancommuters. “For too long, the history of Urban Renewal and Highway Clear-ance has been marked by repeated removal of black citizens,” one RAM


Figure 5: Bumper Sticker Distributed by Movement Against Destruction (MAD),ca.1972SOURCE:MAD Collection, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore.Reprinted with permission.

position statement asserted. “We have been asked to make sacrifice after sacri-fice in the name of progress, and when that progress has been achieved we findit marked ‘White Only.’” Black homeowners in Rosemont challenged the“market value” relocation payments they received from the state highwaydepartment. Relocation assistance to black renters in the Franklin-Mulberrycorridor, required under the Highway Act of 1962, remained minimal to non-existent. Facing the removal of 10,000 blacks who lived in the path of the east-west expressway, RAM activists challenged highway engineers who viewedpeople “as just another obstacle, like a hill to be leveled or a valley to bebridged.”36

With the assistance of Stuart Wechsler, a white civil rights activist with theBaltimore Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who had contacts in Washing-ton, RAM representatives met with Alan Boyd and Lowell Bridwell of theDOT. They received guarantees of “replacement value” for condemned homesin Rosemont and promises of more substantial relocation assistance for rentersin other areas, including moving expenses and rent supplements to coverhigher-cost apartments. Subsequently, in September 1968, design-team soci-ologists reported that any expressway development through Rosemont woulddrive the neighborhood into precipitous decline. In October 1968, Bridwellwas informed by Richard R. Reed, his special assistant monitoring the Balti-more situation, that finding sufficient replacement housing in “racial zones”was problematic and that “the city is just not prepared for massive relocation.”A week later, the Baltimore Sun reported that Bridwell “was not likely to lookwith favor on any route that slashed through the Negro neighborhood ofRosemont in Northwest Baltimore.” One of the consequences of Baltimore’spolitical fractiousness and the consequent late start in pouring interstate con-crete was that highway builders ran up against the militant phase of the civilrights movement. As urban geographer Sherry Olson has noted about the Bal-timore freeway battle, “There had already been many uproarious highwayhearings, exposes, and confrontations, but the new resistance to black removalwas a more serious threat because it resonated with nationwide vibrations.”Ghetto rioting in Baltimore in 1968 following Martin Luther King’s assassina-tion intensified these issues dramatically.37

By the late 1960s, highway opponents in Baltimore established severaladditional groups aimed at stopping expressway construction. The SoutheastCouncil Against the Road (SCAR) was one such group. Formed by neighbor-hood activists in 1969, SCAR challenged the design team’s proposal to shiftthe downtown expressway to the south side of the Inner Harbor, where it tra-versed working-class ethnic neighborhoods. Thomas M. Fiorello, a Catholicpriest who played a leading role in SCAR, criticized the urban design team asthe “Concrete Team,” whose “concrete cancer will invade residential neigh-borhoods all over the city.” Similarly, the Southwest Baltimore Citizens Plan-ning Council, which served as a federation of neighborhood groups, fought the3-A expressway route, hoping to prevent panic selling before condemnation


proceedings undermined housing values. In the early 1970s, anotherantiexpressway umbrella group emerged in the area, the South-West Associa-tion of Community Organizations (SWACO). These South Baltimore organi-zations recognized that expressways would have a devastating impact not juston the highway corridors but on the entire communities through which theypassed. Members of RAM, SCAR, SWACO, and other groups vigorouslyopposed the incursions of the highway builders and the highway politicians.38

Beginning in the late 1960s, Movement Against Destruction (MAD)became the most influential antifreeway voice in Baltimore. Founded in 1968as a biracial coalition of thirty-five neighborhood groups, MAD engaged theenergies of freeway fighters from across the city who persisted well into thelate 1970s in a battle to prevent Baltimore from becoming a “motorized waste-land.” CORE activist Stuart Wechsler served as MAD’s first president, but theorganization had a dedicated leadership group that attended weekly meetingsfor many years. One of the freeway activists involved with MAD was BarbaraMikulski, a social worker from an east-side ethnic community who waselected to the Baltimore city council in 1971 on an antiexpressway platformand eventually became a U.S. senator from Maryland.39

At first, MAD leaders focused on the proposed east-west expressway,which cut through many distinct neighborhoods, but the coalition soon beganchallenging the need for any expressways inside the Baltimore beltway. AMAD position statement in 1968 posed the issue: “There is a growing realiza-tion that expressways are being built in cities not for the sake of the people wholive there, but for the sake of cement, tire, oil, automobile, and other privateinterests.” Over several years, MAD activists opposed the design team’s 3-Ahighway plan, packed public hearings, pushed mass transit, badgered officialswith letters and position statements, conducted public information campaigns,met with state and federal highway officials, served as a watchdog over theBaltimore city council, and generally challenged the highway advocates atevery turn. By necessity, MAD activists became experts on highway matters,refuted official highway statistics and data with hard evidence of their own,and confronted and confused highway engineers and local politicians withexpert rebuttals at public hearings and council meetings. As MAD activistCarol Tyson noted in the early 1970s, at every opportunity, “MAD now coun-ter-attacks.”40

MAD leaders also connected with freeway fighters in other cities. Minutesof MAD meetings reveal discussions of expressway battles in Philadelphia,Washington, D.C., and suburban Virginia. Washington freeway fighters fromthe Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC) attendedsome MAD meetings to discuss antihighway strategy. MAD members filledbuses and traveled to Washington to picket and demonstrate with ECTC.Indeed, by the early 1970s, the freeway revolt had developed a national organi-zational structure, as highway and environmental activists around the nationnetworked and exchanged information. This trend was reflected in the creation


of such groups as the National Coalition on the Transportation Crisis, whichheld antifreeway conferences and legal-action workshops in Washington. Thenational environmental movement was deeply involved in this battle as well.In 1971, the environmental lobby group Environmental Action spun off theHighway Action Coalition (HAC) to stop freeway construction, combat sub-urban sprawl, and promote rail mass transit. HAC put out its own newsletter,The Concrete Opposition, and initiated litigation using federal environmentalrequirements “as its chief weapon” in the courts. “Bulldozer Blocking,” a reg-ular column in The Concrete Opposition, kept readers informed about the lat-est developments in the national freeway revolt. Helen Leavitt, author of apopular antifreeway book, Superhighway-Superhoax (1970), followed up thebook’s success by publishing a monthly newsletter, Rational Transportation,that attacked highway building and advocated mass transit. By 1970, Balti-more groups such as RAM and MAD had become part of a nationwide net-work of freeway fighters that shared information and legal strategies.41

The emergence of a national antifreeway network coincided with shiftinglegislative and legal circumstances in Washington. During the early and mid-1960s, even after the creation of the DOT, highway builders in Baltimoreseemed to have the upper hand. Downtown businessmen, suburban commu-ters, the engineering community, and most of the city’s politicians and plan-ners supported some form of expressway system. Between 1966 and 1970,however, new federal environmental legislation, new state mandates on hous-ing relocation, and new administrative procedures dramatically altered thehighway-building environment. Taken together, these laws, mandates, andregulations posed new hurdles for the highway advocates and highway build-ers, created administrative confusion and delay at the local level, provided newaccess to information for citizen groups, and opened new opportunities for liti-gating the freeway revolt.42

The administrative structure of road building had changed dramatically by1970, but it still remained for local activists to challenge planned highway out-comes. Freeway opponents in Baltimore seized upon these new opportunities.MAD and several of its constituent organizations brought the highway battleinto the courts. In 1972, for instance, attorneys for the Society for the Preserva-tion of Fells Point, Montgomery Street, and Federal Hill, representing threehistoric districts, won an injunction against highway construction in FellsPoint. Another group, Volunteers Opposing Leakin Park Expressway Inc.(with the playful acronym VOLPE) sought to protect the largest urban park inthe United States from the east-west expressway. In 1972, VOLPE and thelocal chapter of the Sierra Club successfully challenged the highway buildersboth on the legality of a 1962 hearing and on environmental grounds. Oneresulting court case carried the title VOLPE v. Volpe, a neat bit of ridicule onthe part of the freeway fighters. The Better Air Coalition initiated litigation toprotect Baltimore’s air quality. The Locust Point Civic Association went tocourt to protect historic Fort McHenry on the southern shore of the Inner


Harbor from expressway bridges and tunnels. MAD filed a number of lawsuitschallenging the entire Baltimore expressway system on both procedural andenvironmental grounds. Leaders of Baltimore’s freeway revolt, in short, cameto rely on antihighway litigation in the 1970s, court action made possible bychanging federal policy on a range of issues affecting highway construction inthe cities.43

Baltimore’s interstate history provides a fascinating case study of how notto build expressways. The contrast with Miami is striking. Elite business andpolitical interest groups did not come together around a single expresswayplan until long after passage of the federal interstate legislation in 1956. Theengineering community was also divided about the proper routing of the high-ways. Political infighting in Baltimore, and between city and state, muddiedthe waters for years. The city council’s control over highways through its con-demnation powers actually complicated expressway planning, eventually pro-viding an opening for expressway opponents pushing for community control.Mostly ambivalent on expressway plans, the Baltimore Sun nevertheless pro-vided balanced reporting, thus publicizing the antihighway arguments ofMAD and other groups.44

Baltimore’s major expressway plans—10-D and 3-A—both anticipated acomplex highway system that bisected numerous neighborhoods, black andwhite, and demolished thousands of homes. In response, rising militancyamong highway opponents in the late 1960s set the stage for a true freewayrevolt in Baltimore, led by MAD. The cross-class and multiracial character ofMAD took the organization beyond the parochial self-interest of smallerneighborhood groups and conveyed the sense that it spoke for the peopleagainst the interests. The emergence of MAD, RAM, SCAR, SWACO,VOLPE, and other antihighway organizations also coincided with majorchanges in federal highway policy and personnel. Miami’s expressway systemwas virtually completed by the time the DOT was created and new federalguidelines on community planning, relocation housing, park protection, andenvironmental sensitivity became effective. However, in Baltimore, new laws,new rules, and new procedures made it possible for Baltimore’s freeway fight-ers to challenge, litigate, delay, and ultimately defeat Baltimore’s “road gang”on many interstate routes. Once again, timing and the shifting currents of pol-icy, power, and local culture determined the outcome of a freeway battle. InBaltimore, the result was a truncated expressway system and the preservationof many, but not all, targeted neighborhoods. Only the Jones Falls Expressway(Interstate-83) penetrated the central city from the north, while Interstate-95essentially became a bypass route south of the city. Ultimately, a two-milefreeway was built along the already cleared Franklin-Mulberry corridor (seeFigure 6). It emptied onto city streets at both ends and never became part of theinterstate system, but it sent an inner-city black community into rapid declineand still serves as a reminder of the huge social costs of the interstate era. (Inthe late 1990s, Baltimore politicians began discussing the idea of demolishing


the “highway to nowhere,” but at this writing, it remains in place.) The long-debated east-west expressway through western parks, Rosemont, Fells Point,and the CBD never got off the drawing boards, although some targeted com-munities such as Rosemont suffered decline and disinvestment after city coun-cil condemnations. The downtown expressway along the waterfront, with itsmassive interchange and harbor bridge, was never built either, frustrating theplans of the city’s civic and business elite, but its absence did not prevent theremarkable later redevelopment of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.45

CONCLUSION

The national freeway revolt, then, took place within the context of a chang-ing legislative and administrative environment. In the early years of the inter-states, highway engineers reigned supreme. They possessed the professionalexpertise, controlled access to massive federal highway funding, and had sup-port from local power elites. San Francisco was an exception, but elsewhere,when state road engineers and local politicians moved quickly after 1956, theyfaced few challenges to urban expressways. This was especially true in south-ern cities, including Miami, where state road engineers had built up a powerfulpolitical base over time through patronage and contracting. In other cities,such as Baltimore, where expressway construction was delayed into the late


Figure 6: Early 1970s Expressway Construction through Franklin-Mulberry CorridorSOURCE: University of Maryland Baltimore County, photo by David Lavine. Reprinted with per-mission.

1960s, outcomes differed dramatically. By this time, as well, thecountercultural energy of the 1960s began to change the highway-building cli-mate. As one writer noted at the time, “The highway revolt is against the tyr-anny of the machine—the highway bulldozer and the political machine thatdrives it. Being helpless before the highway lobby is just one form of the pow-erlessness that Americans increasingly resent.” As MAD president CarolynTyson put it at a 1972 expressway hearing, Baltimore citizens became “roadfighters” out of “a deep sense of futility that comes from powerlessness in gov-ernmental process[es] that bear directly on our lives.” Citizen action againsturban highway building—the effort to protect threatened homes and neighbor-hoods—represented an increasingly common response to that sense of power-lessness. Trapped in inner-city ghettos, African Americans especially felttargeted by highways that destroyed their homes, split their communities, andforced their removal to emerging second ghettos. In Baltimore and other citiesfacing the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and the concrete trucks, the sixties slo-gan “power to the people” often meant stopping “The Road.” Where freewayopponents built interracial and cross-class coalitions, as they did in Baltimore,their chances of delaying or defeating the highwaymen improved markedly.However, it is important not to romanticize the freeway fighters. They weresuccessful only to the extent that they used the tools provided by new legisla-tive mandates to challenge, confront, delay, and litigate against the road build-ers. In an ironic turn, the same federal government that financed interstateconstruction had also legitimated the activities of freeway opponents. Despiteall the talk among road engineers about simply serving traffic needs, in thehighway field, politics was always in the driver’s seat.46

1. For the “concrete monster” reference, see Statement of John F. Shelley [Mayor of San Francisco],November 29, 1967, in Transcript of Hearings before the Subcommittee on Roads, Committee on PublicWorks, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C., 1967), stenographic typescript, 276, in Federal Highway Adminis-tration Records (hereafter cited as FHWA Records), RG 406, Lowell K. Bridwell Files, box 20, U.S.National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. “Stop the Road” was the slogan used by a coalition ofantifreeway neighborhood groups in Baltimore called Movement Against Destruction, or MAD. In theBoston area, freeway fighters used a similar slogan, “Beat the Belt,” in opposing an inner beltway throughCambridge. See Gordon Fellman, “Brief History of the Inner Belt Issue in Cambridge,” in Hans B. C.Spiegel, ed., Citizen Participation in Urban Development, vol. 2, Cases and Programs (Washington, D.C.,1969), 195-211.

2. Lewis Mumford, “The Highway and the City,” Architectural Record 123 (April 1958): 179-86;Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect (New York, 1968); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great Ameri-can Cities (New York, 1961); Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (Glencoe, IL, 1962); John T. Howard, “TheImpact of the Federal Highway Program,” in Planning 1957: Selected Papers from the National PlanningConference, San Francisco, California, March 17-21, 1957 (Chicago, 1957), 35-41; John T. Howard,“Tomorrow’s Highways,” National Municipal Review 47 (September 1958): 378-83; John T. Howard, “Inte-grated Planning,” Traffic Quarterly 14 (October 1960): 419-34; and Wilfred Owen, Cities in the Motor Age(New York, 1959); Daniel P. Moynihan, “New Roads and Urban Chaos,” The Reporter 22 (April 14, 1960):13-20.


3. Among several recent books on the sixties, only Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties:Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York, 1995), 386-87, mentions the freewayrevolt as part of the sixties protest tradition. For a thoughtful analysis of the sixties that helps place the free-way revolt in its larger context, see Hugh Heclo, “The Sixties False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, andPostmodern Policy Making,” Journal of Policy History 8, no. 1 (1996): 34-63.

4. Zachary M. Schrag, e-mail communication with author, October 27, 2002. For scholarly discussionsof interstates in the cities, see Gary T. Schwartz, “Urban Freeways and the Interstate System,” Southern Cali-fornia Law Review 49 (March 1976): 406-513; Mark H. Rose and Bruce E. Seely, “Getting the InterstateSystem Built: Road Engineers and the Implementation of Public Policy,” Journal of Policy History 2, no. 1(1990): 23-55. For a sampling of extensive journalistic coverage of the freeway revolt, see “Arresting theHighwaymen,” Architectural Forum 110 (April 1959): 93-95; “The Revolt Against Big City Expressways,”U.S. News and World Report 52 (January 1, 1962): 48-51; “Hitting the Road: Fighting the Highway Move-ment,” Time, April 19, 1965, p. 48; Priscilla Dunhill, “When Highways and Cities Collide,” City 1 (July1967): 48-54; “The War Over Urban Expressways,” Business Week, March 11, 1967, pp. 4-5; “Fighting theFreeway,” Newsweek 71 (March 25, 1968): 64-65; Lyn Shepard, “Freeway Revolt,” Christian Science Moni-tor, ten-part series, June 4, 6, 11, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, July 2, 9, 1968; Lisa Hirsh and Louise Campbell,“Roads,” City 2 (September-October 1968): 27-34; David Hapgood, “The Highwaymen,” WashingtonMonthly 1 (March 1969): 2-11, 73-80; Jack Linville, “Troubled Urban Interstates,” Nation’s Cities 8(December 1970): 8-11. For a critical book literature, see A. Q. Mowbray, Road to Ruin (Philadelphia,1969); Helen Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax (New York, 1970); Ben Kelley, The Pavers and the Paved(New York, 1971); Alan Lupo, Frank Colcord, and Edmund P. Fowler, Rites of Way: The Politics of Trans-portation in Boston and the U.S. City (Boston, 1971); Kenneth R. Schneider, Autokind vs. Mankind (NewYork, 1971); John Burby, The Great American Motion Sickness: Or Why You Can’t Get There from Here(Boston, 1971); John Jerome, The Death of the Automobile: The Fatal Effect of the Golden Era, 1955-1970(New York, 1972); Richard Hebert, Highways to Nowhere (Indianapolis, 1972).

5. On “saving” the central business district (CBD), see Raymond A. Mohl, “Planned Destruction: TheInterstates and Central City Housing,” in John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin Szylvian, eds., From Ten-ements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (Univer-sity Park, PA, 2000), 232-36; Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven,CT, 2001). On freeway visions among highway and planning experts, see Clifford D. Ellis, “Visions ofUrban Freeways, 1930-1970” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1990). On Futurama,see Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940); Paul Mason Fotsch, “TheBuilding of a Superhighway Future at the New York World’s Fair,” Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001): 65-97; Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation,1900-1940 (Philadelphia, 1981), 153.

6. U.S. House of Representatives, Toll Roads and Free Roads, 76th Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 272, 1939,99; U.S. House of Representatives, Interregional Highways, 78th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Doc. 379, 1944, 55;Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989 (rev. ed.; Knoxville, 1990), 15-28; Bruce E.Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 165-91;Cliff Ellis, “Interstate Highways, Regional Planning and the Reshaping of Metropolitan America,” PlanningPractice and Research 6, nos. 3/4 (2001): 247-69; Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Govern-ment and Urban America, 1933-1965 (New York, 1975), 222-24; Richard O. Davies, The Age of Asphalt:The Automobile, the Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan America (Philadelphia, 1975), 11-15. OnHerbert S. Fairbank, see U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), America’s Highways, 1776-1976: AHistory of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, D.C., 1976), 180-84.

7. Thomas H. MacDonald, ”The Case for Urban Expressways,” American City 62 (June 1947): 92-93;Thomas H. MacDonald, “Future of the Highways,” U.S. News and World Report 29 (December 29, 1950):30-33; Thomas H. MacDonald, “The Interstate System in Urban Areas,” American Planning and CivilAnnual (1950): 114-19; Robert Moses, “Slums and City Planning,” Atlantic Monthly 175 (January 1945):63-68; Robert Moses, “Building America’s Postwar Highways,” Science Digest 19 (February 1946): 5-9;Robert Moses, “The New Super-Highways: Blessing or Blight,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1956, pp.27-31. On the Urban Land Institute, see Marc A. Weiss, “The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal,” inPierre Clavel et al., eds., Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity (New York, 1980), 53-80;James W. Follin, “Coordination of Urban Renewal with the Urban Highway Program Offers Major Econo-mies in Cost and Time,” Urban Land 15 (December 1956): 3-6; Hal Burton, The City Fights Back (NewYork, 1954).

8. Moses, “Building America’s Postwar Highways,” 8.


9. Statement of Robert Moses, Hearings, President’s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Pro-gram, October 7, 1954, pp. 47-51, in Bureau of Public Roads Records (hereafter cited as BPR Records),Record Group 30, Records Relating to National Highway and Defense Highway Program, 1940-1955, box1, U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

10. “Freeway Revolt No Passing Thing,” San Francisco Examiner, February 2, 1959, clipping, San Fran-cisco Freeway Files, folder 86, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; David W. Jones,California’s Freeway Era in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, 1989), 256-308; Seymour Mark Adler, “ThePolitical Economy of Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,Berkeley, 1980), 308-16; Joseph A. Rodriguez, City against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an AmericanMetropolis (Westport, CT, 1999), 21-46; William Issel, “‘Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservationof the City’s Treasured Appearance’: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,”Pacific Historical Review 68 (November 1999): 611-46; Frank C. Colcord, Urban Transportation Decision-Making: San Francisco Case Study (Research Report for U.S. Urban Mass Transportation Administration;Springfield, VA, 1971), 105-45; Richard M. Zettel, Urban Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area(Berkeley, 1963), 32-34.

11. Rice Odell, “To Stop Highways, Some Citizens Take to the Streets,” Smithsonian 3 (April 1972): 24-29; Bob Levey and Jane Freundel Levey, “Lost Highways,” Washington Post Magazine (November 26,2000): 10-17, 24-26; Paul Barrett and Mark H. Rose, “Street Smarts: The Politics of Transportation Statisticsin the American City, 1900-1990,” Journal of Urban History 25 (March 1999): 412-18; KathleenArmstrong, “Litigating the Freeway Revolt: Keith v. Volpe,” Ecology Law Journal 2 (Winter 1972): 761-99,esp. note 17, p. 764; Jeremiah D. O’Leary Jr., “Physical Planning for Transportation,” Urban Law Annual 3(1970): 21.

12. U.S. DOT, 1968 National Highway Needs Report (Washington, D.C., 1968), 5-7, 19-40; NormanBeckman, “Impact of the Transportation Planning Process,” Traffic Quarterly 20 (April 1966): 159-73; Wal-ter K. Johnson, “The 1962 Highway Act: Its Long Term Significance,” Urban Law Annual 3 (1970): 57-64;Thomas A. Morehouse, “The 1962 Highway Act: A Study in Artful Interpretation,” Journal of the AmericanInstitute of Planners 35 (May 1969): 160-68; George M. Smerk, Urban Mass Transportation: A Dozen Yearsof Federal Policy (Bloomington, IN, 1974), 50-52.

13. U.S. DOT, First Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1967); Herman Mertins Jr., National Transporta-tion Policy in Transition (Lexington, MA, 1972), 77-103; Grant M. Davis, The Department of Transporta-tion (Lexington, MA, 1970); Alan S. Boyd, “The United States Department of Transportation,” Journal ofAir Law and Commerce 33 (Spring 1967): 225-33; Alan S. Boyd, “The Federal Department of Transporta-tion,” Traffic Quarterly 21 (October 1967): 467-70; Harry R. Hughes, “Emerging State Departments ofTransportation,” Transportation Research Record 524 (1974): 1-3.

14. U.S. DOT, First Annual Report, 6, 11; Alan S. Boyd, “Speech before Transportation Task Force of theState of California,” Los Angeles, September 6, 1967, mimeo, FHWA Records, RG 406, General SubjectFile, 1967-1969, box 14; Alan S. Boyd, “Speech before the National Transportation Week for the State ofKentucky Dinner,” Louisville, May 14, 1968, typescript, FHWA Records, RG 406, Bridwell Files, box 16;Harry D. Wohl, “New Highway Programs Proposed by Boyd,” Transport Topics, May 27, 1968, pp. 1, 18;Lyn Shepard, “U.S. Traffic Chief Defends Roles of Railroads and Highways,” Christian Science Monitor,June 6, 1968; “Two-for-One Plan,” Baltimore Sun, October 31, 1968 [on Bridwell]; Burby, The Great Ameri-can Motion Sickness, 44-57; Priscilla Dunhill, “Reconciling the Conflict of Highways and Cities,” 21-23;Alan S. Boyd to Lowell K. Bridwell, July 5, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, BPR Files, box 2; Paul Sitton toLowell K. Bridwell, August 1, 1967, ibid., box 6; Howard A. Heffron to Lowell K. Bridwell, September 23,1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, Francis C. Turner Files, box 7; Francis C. Turner to Lowell K. Bridwell,September 23, 1968, ibid., box 7. For further background on Boyd and Bridwell, see their oral history inter-views at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas: Alan S. Boyd, interviewed by David G. McComb,November 20, December 18, 1968, January 11, May 15, 1969; Lowell K. Bridwell, interviewed by David G.McComb, October 17, 1968.

15. J. A. Swanson to Regional Federal Highway Administrators, February 7, 1969, FHWA Records, RG406, Central Correspondence, 1968-1969, box 1; John R. Jamieson to Richard F. Lally, November 6, 1968,ibid., box 1l; David R. Levin, “Displacement and Relocation Needs for Present and Future Highway Pro-grams,” Relocation: Social and Economic Aspects, Highway Research Board, Special Report 110 (Wash-ington, D.C., 1970), 13-18.

16. Angus Macbeth and Peter W. Sly, “How to Hold Up the Highwayman,” The Concrete Opposition,March 1972, six-page insert, n.p., copy in Movement Against Destruction Collection (hereafter cited asMAD Collection), series III, box A4, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland.


17. Kenneth R. Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making: Political Processes of Urban FreewayControversies (Springfield, VA, 1970), 239; Hapgood, “The Highwaymen,” 78; Kelley, The Pavers and thePaved, 84; Robert Janus, “Transportation: No Policy, No System,” Washington Monthly 1 (April 1969): 36-51; Burby, The Great American Motion Sickness, 57-59; John A. Volpe, Internal Memorandum on “TheEnvironmental Policy,” February 26, 1970, copy in MAD Collection, series VII, box B1; Martin F. Nolan,“Volpe Alarms Roads Lobby,” Boston Globe, March 21, 1971; John A. Volpe, “Trends in Transportation Pol-icy,” Traffic Quarterly 27 (April 1973): 163-71; Anthony J. Mumphrey Jr., The New Orleans RiverfrontExpressway Controversy: An Analytical Account (New Orleans, 1970); Richard O. Baumbach Jr. and Wil-liam E. Borah, The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carre Riverfront-Expressway Con-troversy (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1981), 193-206; Beverly H. Wright, “New Orleans Neighborhoods under Siege,”in Robert D. Bullard and Glenn S. Johnson, eds., Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriersto Mobility (Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada, 1997), 121-44, 188-90; Frances W. Sargent, “TransportationPlanning and Urban Areas,” in Planning 1971 (Chicago, 1971), 116-20.

18. “Cracks in the Cement,” The New Republic 167 (September 30, 1972): 10-11; “Bust the Trust? VolpeSays Yes,” The Concrete Opposition, April 1972, pp. 1, 4; “Congress Votes to Open Trust Fund,” The Con-crete Opposition, August 1973, pp. 1, 8; Brock Adams, “The Shameful State of Transport,” Reader’s Digest106 (February 1975): 65-66; James S. Sagner, “Urban Transportation Policy Conflicts: Energy, Environ-ment, Economics,” Journal of Urban Law 55, no. 2 (1978): 296-300; Smerk, Urban Mass Transportation,80-88; U.S. DOT, America’s Highways, 262, 302.

19. This article is part of a larger study of the freeway revolt. Miami and Baltimore have been selectedhere for case studies because of their contrasting outcomes and because research on those cities is moreadvanced than on others.

20. Miami City Planning and Zoning Board, The Miami Long Range Plan: Report on Tentative Plan forTrafficways (Miami, 1955), 2, 4; Wilbur Smith and Associates, A Major Highway Plan for MetropolitanDade County, Florida, Prepared for State Road Department of Florida and Dade County Commission (NewHaven, CT, 1956), 33-44; Wilbur Smith and Associates, Alternates for Expressways: Downtown Miami,Dade County, Florida (New Haven, CT, 1962), 5-6.

21. Raymond A. Mohl, “Race and Space in the Modern City: Interstate-95 and the Black Community inMiami,” in Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America(New Brunswick, NJ, 1993), 100-58.

22. George E. Merrick, Planning the Greater Miami for Tomorrow (Miami, 1937), 11; Dade CountyPlanning Board Minutes, August 27, 1936, George E. Merrick Papers, box 2, Historical Association ofSouthern Florida, Miami, Florida; Raymond A. Mohl, “Trouble in Paradise: Race and Housing in Miamiduring the New Deal Era,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 19 (Spring 1987): 7-21; RaymondA. Mohl, “Whitening Miami: Race, Housing, and Government Policy in Twentieth-Century Dade County,”Florida Historical Quarterly 79 (Winter 2001): 319-45.

23. “Transcript of Public Hearing on North-South Expressway,” February 7, 1957, Florida DOTRecords, Central Files, microfilm reel 1761, Florida DOT, Tallahassee, Florida; Statement of Miami-DadeCounty Chamber of Commerce, February 18, 1957, ibid., reel 1761; J. R. Brumby to Wilbur E. Jones, Febru-ary 28, 1957, ibid., reel 1761.

24. J. E. Preston to Wilbur Jones, April 26, 1957, Florida DOT Records, Central Files, reel 1761; GreaterMiami Urban League, “Statement on Expressway and Housing,” 1957, ibid., reel 1761; Miami Times, March2, 1957, April 30, 1960; Wilbur E. Jones to J. E. Preston, Florida DOT Records, Central Files, reel 1761.

25. “Transcript of Public Hearing,” February 7, 1957, Florida DOT Records, Central Files, reel 1761;Abe Aronovitz to State Road Department, February 6, 1957, ibid., reel 1761; Abe Aronovitz to LeRoy Col-lins, telegram, February 8, 1957, LeRoy Collins Papers, box 126, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee,Florida; Aronovitz to Collins, March 27, 1957, ibid., box 126; Wilbur E. Jones to LeRoy Collins, April 23,1957, ibid., box 126; Aronovitz to Dante B. Fascell, March 27, 1957, George A. Smathers Papers, box 11, P.K. Yonge Library, University of Florida, Gainesville; Aronovitz to Spessard Holland, March 28, 1957, ibid.,box 11; Aronovitz to George A. Smathers, March 28, 1957, ibid., box 11; Aronovitz to Bertram D. Tallamy,March 28, 1957, BPR Records, box 70; F. C. Turner to Aronovitz, April 30, 1957, ibid., box 70; WinifredNelson to Wilbur Jones, March 13, 1957, Florida DOT Records, Central Files, reel 1761; “Expressway IsFrankenstein to Strangle Us,” North Dade Journal, April 16, 1959, clipping in Smathers Papers, box 21.

26. Elizabeth Virrick to Wilbur Jones, May 9, 1957, Elizabeth Virrick Papers, Historical Association ofSouthern Florida, Miami; Wilbur Jones to Elizabeth Virrick, July 3, 1957, ibid.; Elizabeth Virrick, “Express-ways: Boon or Blight?” Ink Newsletter 16 (April 1964): n.p.; Elizabeth Virrick, “Expressways,” Ink: TheJournal of Civic Affairs 16 (November 1964): n.p.; Raymond A. Mohl, “Elizabeth Virrick and the ‘Concrete


Monsters’: Housing Reform in Postwar Miami,” Tequesta: The Journal of the Historical Association ofSouthern Florida 61 (2001): 5-37.

27. Wilbur Smith and Associates, Alternates for Expressways, 7-14; Athalie Range, “Citizen Participa-tion in the Metropolitan Planning Process,” in Metropolitan Transportation Planning Seminars: Miami,Florida (Washington, D.C., 1971), 38-41; Milan Dluhy et al., Final Report: The Historical Impacts of Trans-portation Projects on the Overtown Community (Miami, 1998); Raymond A. Mohl, “Making the SecondGhetto in Metropolitan Miami, 1940-1960,” Journal of Urban History 21 (March 1995): 395-427; Mohl,“Race and Space in the Modern City,” 139-41; Nathaniel Q. Belcher, “Miami’s Colored-over Segregation:Segregation, Interstate 95 and Miami’s African-American Legends,” in Craig Evan Barton, ed., Sites ofMemory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (New York, 2001), 37-54.

28. Jim Dilts, “A Brief History of Baltimore’s Transportation Planning,” 1977, typescript, pp. 1-2, MADCollection, series VII, box A1; W. G. Ewald to Board of Directors, Baltimore Association of Commerce,November 27, 1943, with attached “Tentative and Confidential Report,” November 12, 1943, ibid., seriesVII, box A1; Baltimore Association of Commerce, “Comparative Study of Various Suggested ExpressHighway Routes Through Baltimore, Connecting U.S. Route No. 40 Northeast with U.S. Route No. 1 South-west,” January 18, 1944, ibid., series VII, box A1; Thomas P. Abbott [Downtown Committee] to [Mayor]Theodore R. McKeldin, January 19, February 23, March 20, April 10, 1944, with accompanying documents,ibid., series VII, box A1. Expressway planning for Baltimore actually began in the late 1930s, when the BPRmapped out a highway plan for the city that included a beltway and six radial expressways converging on theCBD. See Toll Roads and Free Roads, 98-102.

29. Dilts, “A Brief History,” 1-2; Herbert M. Brune Jr., “Analysis of Freeway Proposal: Statement to Har-bor Crossing-Freeway Committee,” October 11, 1944, with supplement dated October 13, 1944, MAD Col-lection, series VII, box A1; Abbott to McKeldin, February 23, 1944, ibid., series VII, box A1; Mark Reutter,“History of Baltimore Expressways,” typescript, n.d. (ca. 1971), chap. 1, pp. 6-10, Mark Reutter File, ibid.,series VII, box A1; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 131-32.

30. City Council of Baltimore, Journal, October 30, 1944, pp. 374-411, copy in MAD Collection, seriesVII, box A1; Michael P. McCarthy, “Baltimore’s Highway Wars Revisited,” Maryland Historical Magazine93 (Summer 1998): 137-57; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 132-35; Douglas H. Haeuber,The Baltimore Expressway Controversy: A Study of the Political Decision-Making Process (Johns HopkinsUniversity, Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research; Baltimore, 1974), 8-9; Jon C. Teaford, TheRough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore, 1990), 41-42.

31. Haeuber, The Baltimore Expressway Controversy, 8; Judson Gooding, “How Baltimore Tamed theHighway Monster,” Fortune 81 (February 1970): 128; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 154-65; Reutter, “History of Baltimore Expressways,” chap. 1, 13-23.

32. Reutter, “History of Baltimore Expressways,” 24-25; Baltimore Sun, July 21, 1965.33. Mayor D’Alesandro, quoted in Haeuber, The Baltimore Expressway Controversy, 29; Louise Camp-

bell, “Transport: A Concept Team for Baltimore,” City 1 (November 1967): 25; Geiser, Urban Transporta-tion Decision Making, 132, 143; Boyce L. Kendrick, “The Bumpy Road to a Better Highway,” Journal of theAmerican Institute of Architects 51 (February 1969): 71; Lupo et al., Rites of Way, 181; Movement AgainstDestruction, Minutes, August 4, 1969, MAD Collection, series I, box 2.

34. Nathaniel Alexander Owings, The American Aesthetic (New York, 1969), 87-96, quotation on p. 91;Nathaniel Alexander Owings, The Spaces in Between: An Architect’s Journey (Boston, 1973), 246-56;Campbell, “Transport,” 15-16, 25-27; Louise Campbell, “In Baltimore, New Options Are Opened and NewAlliances Formed,” City 2 (September-October, 1968): 30-34; James Bailey, “How S.O.M. Took on the Bal-timore Road Gang,” Architectural Forum 130 (March 1969): 40-45; Kendrick, “The Bumpy Road to a BetterHighway,” 70-77; Norman Klein, “Baltimore Urban Design Concept Team,” Highway Research Record 220(1968): 11-16; Haeuber, The Baltimore Expressway Controversy, 10-14.

35. Movement Against Destruction, MAD Newsletter 1 (April 1969): 1, copy in MAD Collection, seriesIII, box 1; James D. Dilts, “Changing City: We Must Destroy You,” Baltimore Sun, August 4, 1968; RichardR. Reed to Lowell K. Bridwell, July 15, July 22, FHWA Records, RG 406, Turner Files, box 15; “Proceed-ings of Meeting on Baltimore Expressway System,” December 12, 1968, transcript, ibid., box 15; Dilts, “ABrief History,” 3-4; Bailey, “How S.O.M. Took on the Baltimore Road Gang,” 40-45; “Biggest Snarl on CityHighways,” Business Week, October 18, 1969, pp. 144-45; David Allison, “The Battle Lines of Baltimore,”Innovation Magazine, July 1969, pp. 9-21; Gooding, “How Baltimore Tamed the Highway Monster,” 128-29, 152, 157; “Elusive Expressway,” Baltimore Sun, December 14, 1968. Most of the design team membersinitially favored an expressway plan labeled 3-C but under pressure from the FHWA ultimately supported analternative plan designated 3-A. Reed to Bridwell, October 25, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, Turner Files,


box 15; Ray Abernathy to File, November 1, 1968, ibid., box 15; “Proceedings of Meeting on BaltimoreExpressway System,” ibid., box 15; “Mayors Route Choice Averts Harbor Span, Bypasses Rosemont,” Bal-timore Sun, December 24, 1968.

36. David W. Barton to Lowell K. Bridwell, October 28, 1968, MAD Collection, Correspondence File,series II, box 1; Anthony Downs, Urban Problems and Prospects (Chicago, 1970), 204-05; George W. Grier,“Social Impact Analysis of an Urban Freeway System” Highway Research Record 305 (1970): 63-74; “AHistory of the Relocation Action Movement,” typescript, ca. 1968, MAD Collection, series VII, box A1;Relocation Action Movement, “Position Statement,” January 16, 1968, ibid., series VII, box A1; BaltimoreDepartment of Housing and Community Development, “Relocation Activities in Baltimore,” typescript,January 7, 1969, ibid., series VII, box A1; Maryland State Roads Commission, Interstate Division for Balti-more City, “Interim Brochure, Relocation Assistance Section,” typescript, June 10, 1969, ibid., series VII,box A1.

37. Urban Design Concept Associates, “Preliminary Outline of Joint & Collateral Development Com-plexes for the Maryland State Roads Commission Interstate System in Baltimore City,” September 26, 1968,pp. A1-A7, copy in FHWA Records, RG 406, Turner Files, box 15; Reed to Bridwell, October 25, 1968,ibid., box 15; “Two-for-One Plan,” Baltimore Sun, October 31, 1968; Geiser, Urban Transportation Deci-sion Making, 202-07; Sherry Olson, Baltimore (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 64; Peter Bachrach and Morton S.Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York, 1970), 85-89.

38. Thomas M. Fiorello, Letter to Editor, Baltimore Sun, September 15, 1969, MAD Collection, series II,box 1; Southwest Baltimore Citizens Planning Council, “Policy Statement of the Citizens Planning Councilon the East-West Expressway,” n.d. (ca. 1969), ibid., series VII, box A1; SWACO Newsletter (August 1972,March 1973, September 1973), ibid., series VII, box A1.

39. MAD Newsletter, July 1969, August 1970, MAD Collection, series III, box 1; MAD Minutes, August26, 1968, December 29, 1969, May 4, 1970, March 13, 27, June 27, 1972, November 13, 1973, MAD Collec-tion, series I, box 2; Neil Friedman, “City Hall,” Baltimore Magazine, November 1971, pp. 18-19, 64-65;Barbara Mikulski, Response to MAD Questionnaire on Baltimore Expressways, August 2, 1971, MAD Col-lection, series III, box B3; Haeuber, The Baltimore Expressway Controversy, 60-66; “Barbara Mikulski: TheSenator as Community Activist,” in Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman, eds., The BaltimoreBook: New Views of Local History (Philadelphia, 1991), 147-49; Catherine Whitney, Nine and Counting:The Women of the Senate (New York, 2000), 26-32.

40. MAD Newsletter, August 1970, MAD Collection, series III, box 1; Carolyn Tyson, “The Road: Beat-ing a Path Through the City,” typescript, n.d. (ca. 1973), p. 6, ibid., series VII, box A1; Carolyn Tyson, “TheRoad: The Expressway War,” typescript, n.d. (ca. 1973), ibid., series VII, box A1; Carolyn Tyson, “The CaseAgainst the Expressway,” typescript (1972), ibid., series VII, box 4. For the wide-ranging activities of MAD,see MAD Newsletter, 1968-1976, ibid., series III, box 1.

41. MAD Minutes, June 9, 30, August 11, 1969, April 24, May 22, June 19, 1972, MAD Collection,series I, box 2; National Coalition on the Transportation Crisis, “A Statement of Aims,” typescript, April 12,1969, copy in MAD Minutes, June 9, 1969, ibid., series I, box 2; Tom O’Brien, et al., “Old Highways NeverDie,”Environmental Action 7 (December 6, 1975): 7-9, copy in ibid., series III, box A4; “Bulldozer Block-ing,” The Concrete Opposition (March 1973): 3; (August 1973): 4-5, copies in ibid., series III, box A4;National Coalition on the Transportation Crisis, NCTC Newsletter (August 1972): 4, copy in ibid., series III,box A4.

42. Macbeth and Sly, “How to Hold Up the Highwayman,” The Concrete Opposition, March 1972, inMAD Collection, series III, box A4; Tyson, “The Road: Beating a Path Through the City,” 7.

43. Christopher George, “The Road: Progress for What?” Fells Point Telegraphe, October 1973, pp. 23-24, copy in MAD Collection, series III, box A2; VOLPE Newsletter 3 (December 7, 1972): 1-2, copy in ibid.,series III, box A2; [Carolyn Tyson], “VOLPE: The End of the Road,” typescript, n.d. (ca. 1973), in ibid.,series VII, box A1; Tyson, “The Road: Beating a Path Through the City,” 2-4; George Tyson to Editor ofWashington Post, typescript, September 5, 1971, ibid., series II, box 1; Bulletin of the Greater BaltimoreSierra Club (October 1973): 1-2, copy in ibid., series III, box A2; Dorothy Strohecker [Better Air Coalition],“Citizens Action in the Highway Process,” typescript, June 1973, ibid., series VII, box A1.

44. Osmo Vatanen, “Light for All: The Baltimore Newspapers’ Coverage of Planning Issues,” JohnsHopkins University, Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, Metro News 3 (June 15, 1975): 1-7,copy in MAD Collection, series III, box A2.

45. Jo Anna Daemmrich and Robert G. Matthews, “Highway Idea Aims to Go Somewhere,” BaltimoreSun, March 16, 1997. On Baltimore’s downtown rejuvenation, see Michael P. McCarthy, The Living City:Baltimore’s Charles Center and Inner Harbor Development (Baltimore, 2002).


46. Hapgood, “The Highwaymen,” 80; Carolyn Tyson, “Introductory Statement,” City Council RoadReview Program, January 27, 1972, MAD Collection, series VII, Box 4. See also Charles Martin Sevilla,“Asphalt Through the Model Cities: A Study of Highways and the Urban Poor,” Journal of Urban Law 49,no. 2 (1971): 297-322.

Raymond A. Mohl is a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birming-ham. He is the author of South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Move-ment in Miami, 1945-1960 (University Press of Florida, 2004). His most recentarticles include “Ike and the Interstates: Creeping Toward Comprehensive Planning,”Journal of Planning History, vol. 2 (August 2003); and “Globalization, Latinization,and the Nuevo New South,” Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 22 (Summer2003).297-322.


Stop the Road - University of Warwick · neighborhoods were targeted by the highwaymen. In other...

Documents

Transcript of Stop the Road - University of Warwick · neighborhoods were targeted by the highwaymen. In other...