Civil Rights Research
Original release: 2002

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways,
Housing, and the Freeway Revolt
Raymond A. Mohl
Department of History, University of Alabama at Birmingham© Raymond A. Mohl

Contents:
1. Urban Expressways and the Central Cities in Postwar America . . . . . . . . . .1
2. Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37

Urban Expressways and the Central Cities
In Postwar America
Raymond A. Mohl University of Alabama at Birmingham
American cities experienced dramatic change in the decades after the Second World War.
These changes included the massive deconcentration of central city population, the shift ofeconomic activities to the suburban periphery, the deindustrialization or redistribution of
metropolitan manufacturing, and a racial turnover of population that left many of the largest
American cities with a majority black population well before the end of the twentieth century.
Various government policies contributed to these large-scale changes, such as tax andmortgage policies, public housing programs, and urban redevelopment schemes. Closely
connected to these powerful urban transformations was the construction after 1956 of thenational interstate highway system, a 42,500-mile network of high-speed, limited-accesshighways that linked cities across the country. When policy makers and highway engineers
determined that the new interstate highway system should penetrate to the heart of thecentral cities, they made a fateful decision, but also a purposeful one. Indeed, the interstatesystem's urban expressways, or freeways, not only penetrated the cities but they ripped
through residential neighborhoods and leveled wide swaths of urban territory, ostensibly toPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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facilitate automobility. In retrospect, it now seems apparent that public officials and policy
makers, especially at the state and local level, used expressway construction to destroy lowincome and especially black neighborhoods in an effort to reshape the physical and raciallandscapes of the postwar American city.
Few public policy initiatives have had as dramatic and lasting an impact on late twentiethcentury urban America as the construction of the interstate highway system. Virtuallycompleted over a fifteen year period between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the newinterstate highways had powerful and almost inevitable consequences. In metropolitan areas,
the completion of urban expressways led very quickly to a reorganization of urban andsuburban space. The interstates linked central cities with sprawling postwar suburbs,
facilitating automobile commuting while undermining what was left of inner-city mass transit.
Wide ribbons of concrete and asphalt stimulated new downtown physical development, but
soon spurred the growth of suburban shopping malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions
as well. At the same time, urban expressways tore through long-established inner-city
residential communities in their drive toward the city cores, destroying low-income housing ona vast and unprecedented scale. Huge expressway interchanges, cloverleafs, and access ramps
created enormous areas of dead and useless space in the central cities. The bulldozer and thewrecker's ball went to work on urban America, paving the way for a wide range of public andprivate schemes for urban redevelopment. The new expressways, in short, permanently alteredthe urban and suburban landscape throughout the nation. The interstate system was agigantic public works program, but it is now apparent that freeway construction had
enormous and often negative consequences for the cities. As historian Mark I. Gelfand has
noted: "No federal venture spent more funds in urban areas and returned fewer dividends tocentral cities than the national highway program."1
Highway promoters and builders envisioned the new interstate expressways as a means ofclearing slum housing and blighted urban areas. These plans actually date to the late 1930s,
but they were not fully implemented until the late 1950s and 1960s. Massive amounts ofurban housing were destroyed in the process of building the urban sections of the interstatesystem. By the 1960s, federal highway construction was demolishing 37,000 urban housing
units each year; urban renewal and redevelopment programs were destroying an equal
number of mostly-low-income housing units annually. The amount of disruption, a report of
the U.S. House Committee on Public Works conceded in 1965, was astoundingly large. As
planning scholar Alan A. Altshuler has noted, by the mid-1960s, when interstate construction
was well underway, it was generally believed that the new highway system would "displace amillion people from their homes before it [was] completed."2 A large proportion of thosedislocated were African Americans, and in most cities the expressways were routinely routed
through black neighborhoods.

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Dislocated urbanites had few advocates in the state and federal road-building agencies. The
federal Bureau of Public Roads and the state highway departments believed that their business
was to finance and build highways, and that the social consequences of highway construction
were the responsibility of other agencies.3 As one federal housing official stated with dismay in
1957: "It is my impression that regional personnel of the Bureau of Public Roads are not overly
concerned with the problems of family relocation."4 Indeed, during most of the expresswaybuilding era, little was done to link the interstate highway program with public or private
housing construction, or even with relocation assistance for displaced families, businesses, orcommunity institutions such as churches and schools.
The victims of highway building tended to be overwhelmingly poor and black. A general
pattern emerged, promoted by state and federal highway officials and by private agencies
such as the Urban Land Institute, of using highway construction to eliminate blighted
neighborhoods and redevelop valuable inner-city land. This was the position of Thomas H.
MacDonald, director of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) during the formative years of theinterstate system. Combating blight with highways was also the policy of New York's
influential builder of public works projects, Robert Moses. Highway builders were clearly
conscious of the social consequences of interstate route location. It was quite obvious thatneighborhoods and communities would be destroyed and people uprooted, but this wasthought to be an acceptable cost of creating new transportation routes, facilitating economic
development of the cities, and converting inner-city land to more acceptable or moreproductive uses. Highway builders and downtown redevelopers had a common interest in
eliminating low-income housing and, as one redeveloper put it in 1959, freeing blighted areas"for higher and better uses."5
The federal government provided most of the funding for interstate highway construction, but
state highway departments working with local officials selected the actual interstate routes.
The consequence of state and local route selection was that urban expressways could be used
specifically to carry out local race, housing, and residential segregation agendas. In most cities,
moreover, the forced relocation of people from central-city housing triggered a spatial
reorganization of residential neighborhoods. Rising black population pressure on limited innercity housing resources meant that dislocated blacks pressed into neighborhoods of transition,
generally working-class white neighborhoods on the fringes of the black ghetto where lowcost housing predominated. These newer second ghettos were already forming after WorldWar II, as whites began moving to the suburbs and as blacks migrated out of the South to theurban North. However, interstate expressway construction speeded up the process of second
ghetto formation, helping to mold the sprawling, densely populated ghettos of the modern
American city. Official housing and highway policies, taken together, have helped to produce
the much more intensely concentrated and racially segregated landscapes of contemporary
urban America.6

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Thomas H. MacDonald and Early Expressway Planning
The linkage between inner-city expressways and the destruction of low-income housing
actually originated in the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), the federal agency established in 1919.
Thomas H. MacDonald, a highway engineer from Iowa, headed the BPR from its founding until
early 1953. As the United States entered the automobile era, MacDonald relentlessly promoted
his agency's road-building agenda. However, over time MacDonald also developed asophisticated conception of the relationship between urban highways and urban housing, andthe relationship between these two elements and the needed modernization andreconstruction of the American city.7
Heading a federal agency that came to have significant power over the nation’s transportation
system, MacDonald only gradually incorporated the city into his thinking. After all, as a former
state highway engineer in Iowa, his first job had been to “get the farmer out of the mud” andbuild rural roads to connect widely dispersed farmers with nearby towns and cities. But,
increasingly an emerging American automobile culture – urban and rural — demanded hardsurfaced roads. By the 1930s, urban mass transit was on the decline almost everywhere, as
Americans seemingly preferred the convenience, flexibility, and privacy of automobile travel.
On another level, the nation’s railroads were on the decline by the 1930s, never to fully
recover. Eyeing the enormous untapped urban market, the automobile industry had a majorinterest in express highways and in federal highway legislation. In particular, the extremely
popular General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair, as historian Mark
I. Foster noted, "stimulated public thinking in favor of massive urban freeway building."
Norman Bel Geddes, the designer of the Futurama exhibit, also promoted the idea of a"national motorways system connecting all cities with populations of more than one hundred
thousand."8
By the end of the 1930s, Thomas MacDonald and the BPR pushed for an interregional
highway system linking the nation's largest metropolitan areas, an idea given initial form by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. According to Secretary of Agriculture Henry A.
Wallace, at a 1938 meeting with MacDonald the President sketched out on a map “a systemof east-west, north-south transcontinental highways," and then requested that MacDonald
make a report on the possibilities of building such a highway system. The BPR's subsequent
report, Toll Roads and Free Roads (largely written by MacDonald and his assistant H. S.
Fairbanks), completed in 1939, represented the first comprehensive effort to conceptualize
what later became the interstate highway system. Significantly, the report acknowledged theobvious link between express highways and urban reconstruction. It made a strong case thathighway planning should take place within the context of an ongoing program of slum
clearance and urban redevelopment.9
Wallace reported to Roosevelt that the BPR's plan established nothing less than the basis forthe complete physical rebuilding of American cities. The big problem, Wallace noted, was not

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

5transcontinental automobile traffic, but automobile congestion in the cities themselves. If new
express highways penetrated and traversed the cities, traffic flow to the business center would
be facilitated. More than that, careful routing of these arterial highways could cut through andclear out blighted housing areas: "There exists at present around the cores of the cities,
particularly of the older ones, a wide border of decadent and dying property which has
become, or is in fact becoming, a slum area." Land acquisition in these slum areas for highway
construction and urban redevelopment would result in "the elimination of unsightly andunsanitary districts where land values are constantly depreciating." As Wallace portrayed thesituation, the BPR's highway construction plan could become a central element in thereconstruction and revitalization of the central cities.10
A second major highway report, Interregional Highways, was completed in 1944. It was
prepared by the National Interregional Highway Committee, appointed by President Roosevelt
and headed by Thomas MacDonald. This report, which recommended an interregional
highway system of 40,000 miles, actually mapped out a highway network that looks
remarkably like the present interstate highway system. The 1944 report also made it clear thatthe new interregional or interstate highway system would penetrate the heart of metropolitan
areas. Larger cities would be encircled by inner and outer beltways and traversed by radial
expressways tying the urban system together. MacDonald believed these urban expressways
essential to the future growth and development of the American city, especially modern slum
clearance and urban reconstruction.11
Throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s, MacDonald campaigned tirelessly for innercity expressways that would clear out low-income housing and tenement districts, eliminatingthe "blighteddistrictscontiguoustotheveryheartofthecity." Dislocatedurbanresidents,MacDonald
suggested, could move to the new suburbs and commute to city jobs on new high-speed,
multifunctional expressways.12 In a 1947 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Conference on Urban Problems, MacDonald whimsically dismissed the inevitable housing
destruction that accompanied urban expressway building: "It is a happy circumstance thatliving conditions for the family can be re-established and permit the social as well as economic
decay at the heart of the cities to be converted to a public asset." New urban highways,
MacDonald and others contended, would both revitalize the central city and permit better
housing and living conditions in the suburbs.13
To his credit, MacDonald also pushed for local planning policies and Congressional legislation
requiring new housing construction for those displaced from their homes by expressway
building. In an important statement in 1947, he made the case for relocation housing: "Nomatter how urgently a highway improvement may be needed, the homes of people who have
nowhere to go should not be destroyed. Before dwellings are razed, new housing facilities
should be provided for the dispossessed occupants. This question of housing should be
accepted as one of the major planning problems when a city decides that it needs and wants
an expressway.” Like most highwaymen, MacDonald fully understood that relocation issues

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loomed large in any urban highway project. Unlike most, however, he put the issue up front in
his speeches and writings. Almost alone, he urged the necessity for highway and community
planning that accommodated the relocation of those displaced by road construction.14
Essential to MacDonald's urban interstate vision was the necessity for integrating housing andhighways in a wider program of urban and community planning to be conducted at the local
level. During the 1940s, the BPR's Urban Road Division worked with planning, housing, andrelocation agencies in New York, Chicago, and a few other cities to ease the social
consequences of pre-interstate expressway construction. In New York, as early as 1939 the
BPR's urban road people worked with the City Planning Commission in laying out "anappropriate network of express routes." Joseph Barnett, head of the Urban Roads Division,
prepared and distributed a manual on "Relocation of Tenants" to city and state highway
officials. It was clear to Barnett and MacDonald that cities paid little prior attention to the
problems of housing demolition and relocation. In Chicago in the late 1940s, city officials
estimated that several planned expressways would destroy over 8,100 housing units, but
nothing had been done to provide alternative housing for displaced families or to assist withrelocation problems. A BPR survey of state highway departments in 1947 revealed that moststates had done little or nothing to prepare for the relocation difficulties that inevitably
accompanied major urban highway construction.15
After passage of the national Housing Act of 1949, which established procedures for slum
clearance and urban redevelopment, the BPR connected with counterparts in the Housing andHome Finance Agency (HHFA), especially its relocation and redevelopment office. Bothagencies were involved in land acquisition efforts and had a common interest in working
cooperatively. The Housing Act that required local agencies find new housing for those
displaced by urban redevelopment activities, but land taking for highways had no suchrequirement. Throughout the 1940s, MacDonald promoted a linkage between highways andhousing, especially relocation housing, as well as the need for cooperative planning between
state and local agencies prior to highway construction. These proposals, as historian Mark
Gelfand has suggested, were part of a larger interagency battle, "an unsuccessful attempt by
the Federal Works Agency [which administered the BPR] to wrest administration of the
proposed urban redevelopment program away from HHFA."16
Ultimately, these efforts were unsuccessful. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman rejected thecoordination of highway and housing programs, citing anticipated high costs and difficulty ofCongressional passage. Federal involvement in comprehensive highway planning at the local
and metropolitan level would have been a tough sell in Congress at that time. It would havejeopardized passage of the slum clearance, redevelopment, and public housing proposals that
had a strong constituency among big-city mayors, downtown real estate interests, and public
housing reformers. Also in 1949, as part of a reorganization of federal agencies, the BPR was
shifted from the Federal Works Agency to the Department of Commerce. The BPR became
somewhat marginalized as the urban policy programs of the Truman administration took off in

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new directions, focusing on slum clearance and redevelopment, programs that generally
turned over condemned urban land to private redevelopers. The public housing provisions of
the Housing Act of 1949 — the authorization for 810,000 units of public housing over the
next six years — were never fully achieved. At that point, historian Gelfand writes, the BPR
seemingly "lost its interest in the broad implications of the highway in the city andconcentrated its attention exclusively on making travel by automobile and truck quicker andless expensive." MacDonald gave up his speaking and writing crusade and, after President
Dwight D. Eisenhower failed to reappoint him, he retired from the BPR in 1953 after serving ascommissioner for thirty-four years. Highway engineers with their narrowly technical concerns
were left in control of the agency. The broader conception promoted by MacDonald linking
urban expressways with housing and redevelopment were dropped from public discussion, notto reappear until the 1960s when the impact of the highway in the city had become more
powerfully apparent.17

Ike and the Interstates
Important political decision-making in the mid-1950s transformed the interstate highway idea
into reality. Plans for interregional and interstate highways dated back to the 1920s. They wererevived in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as reflected in the two major highway reports
discussed earlier — Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939) and Interregional Highways (1944).
Larger cities actually began planning and building some urban expressways in the late 1940s
and early 1950s, with some federal financial support provided under the then current 50/50
matching program administered by the Bureau of Public Roads. The Truman administration did
little to advance the national highway network, making slum clearance and redevelopment thecenterpiece of its urban policy, with some small attention to public housing as well (althoughin actual practice, public housing construction received short shrift compared to the emphasis
on urban redevelopment). And, as noted, President Truman rejected the early efforts ofThomas MacDonald, the BPR, and the Federal Works Agency to link highways and housing ina more expansive urban policy. However, half-way through President Eisenhower's first term,changing circumstances brought neglected plans for building an interstate highway network
back into the center of national policy debates.
Postwar urban and metropolitan growth stimulated new thinking about highway needs in thecities. By the mid-1950s, the full impact of postwar suburbanization had become apparent.
According to President Eisenhower's Ad Hoc Interagency Committee on Metropolitan Area
Problems and a separate Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, between 1940
and 1955 the nation's population was concentrating in urban/metropolitan areas "at anaccelerated rate." Between 1940 and 1950, metropolitan areas — that is, cities and theirsuburbs — "absorbed 81 percent of the [nation's] population growth." The pattern speeded
up between 1950 and 1955, when metropolitan areas absorbed 97 percent of the nation's
population growth — migration trends that were expected to continue into the foreseeable
future. Most of the growth took place on the urban periphery. City residents, mostly white,

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were moving to the mushrooming suburbs in unprecedented numbers, an internal migration
stimulated by massive new suburban housing developments, availability of federal mortgage
insurance, income tax deductions for mortgage interest, rapidly rising automobile ownership,
new highway links to the suburbs, and black migration into the central cities.18
The startling shift of urban population to the metropolitan fringes had several consequences.
Huge numbers of new suburbanites still worked in the central cities, and by the 1950s theirjourneys to work created enormous traffic congestion on a limited number of arterial highways
linking the cities and the suburbs, as well as inside the cities themselves. Coinciding with themass exodus to suburbia, public transportation declined as automobile ownership and use
increased. Auto sales were booming throughout the 1950s. Americans bought 7.4 million newcars in 1955, a new record for the automobile industry, and some 61 million vehicles clogged
the nation's roadways. Meanwhile, public transportation ridership declined by over 50 percent
between 1945 and 1955, dropping from 23.3 billion passenger rides to 11.5 billion. At thevery time mass transit should have been in greater demand, American suburbanites generally
preferred auto transportation, even if it meant they faced the daily commuter crush.19
As Eisenhower's Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations noted, solving the
emerging metropolitan transportation crisis was impeded by the maze of governmental
jurisdictions that cut across urbanized areas: "The local government pattern in metropolitan
areas is unbelievably complex. The number of local government units per metropolitan area
averages around 96." In at least twenty-five cases, metropolitan areas spilled across stateboundaries. The New York City metro area had 1,071 governmental units, Chicago 960, andPhiladelphia 702. Only Miami-Dade County had established a true metropolitan-areagovernmental structure by the late 1950s. Few metropolitan areas had developed effective
transportation or land-use planning agencies at the time. The urban/metropolitantransportation problem demanded a metropolitan solution, but regional transportation orplanning approaches had not yet been developed. Under the circumstances, then, the idea ofbuilding interstate highways through the cities and connecting with distant suburbs seemed tooffer a necessary solution to the mid-1950s transportation crisis. Paid for mostly by the federal
government and administered by state highway departments, such a system seemed ideal formoving automobile traffic and overcoming the complexities of metropolitan area
governmental jursdictions.20
The metropolitan transportation crisis demanded action and provided a mass base of support
for a major government role in building interstate highways. In addition, a powerful highway
lobby also promoted the interstate system — a loose coalition of interest groups that included
the auto companies and their suppliers, the oil companies, the trucking industry, construction
companies, the trucking and construction unions, numerous auto-related trade associations,and dozens of other specific groups and organizations. The interstates would be good forbusiness, provide tens of thousands of jobs, and boost the national economy. Big-city mayors,urban politicians, and their advocates in Congress pushed for the new highway program as

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

9well, hoping to solve the traffic crisis, rescue the declining central business district, andmodernize the cities, all mostly at federal expense. Finally, state highway officials, collectively
represented by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), found much tolike in the building of the interstates, not least of which was that their members — state
highway engineers and administrators — would be in control of locating, designing, andbuilding the highways. All of these interests came together in the mid-1950s in support offederal legislation on interstate highways that penetrated the cities, linked central city withsuburb, and connected cities across the nation.21
Finally, President Eisenhower came to believe in the importance of federal highway legislationand provided the political leadership that led to Congressional passage of the Federal-Aid
Highway Act of 1956 authorizing the interstates. Scholars have pointed to two sources ofEisenhower's interest in a national highway network. In a recent book, American Road: The
Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of the Motor Age (2002), writer Pete
Davies documented Eisenhower's participation in an early military caravan that traveled acrossthe country in the days before hard-surfaced roads became commonplace in rural America. In
1919, some 81 military vehicles and 300 men left Washington, D.C. on a cross-country journey
to demonstrate the need for paved roads, especially for military purposes. Two months later,
after battling heat, dust, and breakdowns, the convoy arrived in San Francisco. Assigned to the
convoy, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower was impressed by the impediments to travel
posed by inadequate or non-existent highways. According to Davies, Eisenhower later statedthat "the convoy got him thinking about the need for good two-lane highways." Other
writers, such as Stephen E. Ambrose, have noted that during World War II, Eisenhower cameto recognize the military significance of Germany's autobahns, built during Hitler's rule in the
1930s. In his memoir, Mandate for Change (1963), Eisenhower himself wrote that he "hadseen the superlative system of German Autobahnen" and later recognized the pressing needfor a similar national highway system in the United States.22
By the time he became president, Eisenhower had other reasons to support a gigantic federal
highway program, aside from the essential transportation needs of the nation. First, he
accepted the general view that such a transportation system would serve as a major impetus
to national economic development while at the same time eliminating wasteful traffic
slowdowns. Second, Eisenhower recognized that such a massive construction enterprise would
put tens of thousands of people to work and pump billions of dollars into the American
economy over a decade and a half. On this subject, he followed the thinking of Arthur F.
Burns, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), who argued in Cabinet
meetings that highway building could be used by the government as "an important economic
tool." Raymond J. Saulnier, a White House economic aide under Eisenhower and later Burns's
successor at CEA, wrote in his memoir Constructive Years (1991) that the President supported
the highway program as a countercyclical measure: "He viewed it from the beginning . . . as aprogram that could be used to help stabilize the economy." According to Saulnier, "it isdoubtful that any president has made a more systematic and sustained effort than Eisenhower

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 200210
to plan and utilize public construction for countercyclical purposes." As Ambrose hassuggested, opening or closing the federal financial spigot provided a mechanism forsmoothing over "the peaks and valleys in unemployment" and keeping the American
economy out of recessionary slowdowns or avoiding runaway inflation. Eisenhower was no
New Dealer, but he came to perceive this sort of public works spending in much the way thatPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. Finally, in the midst of one of
the more dangerous and unstable periods of the Cold War, Eisenhower was conscious of theneed to improve evacuation routes from the major cities in case the nation was attacked with
nuclear weapons. As Eisenhower noted in his memoir, "our roads ought to be avenues of
escape for persons living in big cities threatened by aerial attack." In the final analysis, thePresident recognized the enormity of the highway program, the benefits and the changes thatits completion would bring, and, as he wrote, "I wanted the job done."23
As it turned out, getting the "job done" was no easy task. Eisenhower's presidential advisorycommittee on highways, headed by General Lucius D. Clay, issued a report in early 1955
recommending that the planned interstate highway be given "top priority" by Congress.
Despite the enormous influence of the "highway lobby," it took almost two years to navigate
interstate highway legislation through Congress. The big dispute was over financing thesystem. Some favored tolls, others some sort of bond financing, still others a highway user tax
on gasoline, diesel fuel, and tires; some wanted the federal government to take charge of theconstruction project, others favored working through already well-established relationships
with the state highway departments. Highway advocates haggled over the size of the excise
taxes, or the tax differential between automobiles and trucks, or whether it would take 10 or
15 or more years to build the system. They debated whether the federal share of construction
cost should be 50 percent or 90 percent, and whether states should be reimbursed for alreadybuilt expressways that would become part of the interstate system. Within the administration,
Eisenhower's close advisors disagreed on methods, goals, and financial mechanisms. Clay's
highway report did not satisfy many in Congress. Eisenhower had initially supported highway
tolls, but later agreed to Clay's bond financing plan for the interstates, both of which reflected
his interest in a pay-as-you-build method of paying for a national highway system. Congress
rejected interstate legislation in 1955, but, after hard negotiating in the House and Senate,
Congress passed the Highway Act and a companion financing bill in June 1956. The legislation
provided for a national highway system of 41,000 miles, financed through the mechanism of a
Highway Trust Fund derived from excise taxes on fuel and tires. The federal government would
provide 90 percent of the cost, with the states contributing the remaining 10 percent. The BPR
would provide oversight and final approvals on interstate segments, but state highway
departments would be responsible for determining the interstate routes and building theroads. The interstate system was expected to cost at least $27.5 billion (estimates soon to be
increased dramatically) and be completed within thirteen years.24
Congress and the diverse elements of the highway lobby came together in support ofinterstate highway legislation after the invention of the Highway Trust Fund resolved theThe Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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financing issue that had blocked earlier legislative efforts. As Daniel P. Moynihan noted in a
critical article in The Reporter magazine in 1960, the interstate program had something foreverybody." The auto industry, the truckers, and other elements of the highway lobby, once
they accepted the compromises on highway user taxes, recognized the highly beneficial
aspects of a modern, high-speed highway system.
Politicians loved the program because of the enormous amount of federal money that would
be spread around their states and districts, and for which they could take credit in future
election campaigns. Needless to say, state highway engineers found much to like in the new
highway system and the large pot of federal money now available to build highways in theirown bailiwicks. However, many urban planners and other urban experts took a different
position. For instance, critics at a 1957 symposium on highways and cities perceived theinterstate in problematic ways. They criticized the highway builders emphasis on trafficengineering to the exclusion of other forms of planning: "At present the design and locationof highway facilities are treated as strictly engineering problems in which the only objective
considered is that of keeping vehicles in rapid motion. There is no responsibility for relating
highway construction to plans for the future of the city. The location and design of highways
are not consciously used as means of promoting other purposes than those of moving
traffic."25
Other critics were quick to find serious fault with the urban aspects of the interstate highway
program. John Howard, an urban planning professor at MIT, complained about the highway
act's failure to require any sort of comprehensive metropolitan planning, such as was required
for urban renewal and that was fully incorporated in the 1944 BPR report on Interregional
Highways. Highways, Howard wrote, "were "too important to leave to the highway
engineers." Moreover, the highway program ignored other forms of transportation, especiallymass transportation and rapid transit, which were essential for a balanced system. Equallyimportant, the consequences of residential displacement were left unresolved by the highway
act, a serious problem because displacement might "involve as much as 10 percent of the
population in some central cities." All of this, Howard suggested, refelcted "evidence of asingle-minded narrowness of vision, which may well result in the most and best highways built
the quickest but will also probably result in too much spent for the wrong things in the wrong
places." James Lister, a planner from Cleveland, echoed these views, adding that the exclusionof city planners from the highway-building process meant that "state highway engineers[would] push great motor corridors through our cities and urban counties, with little or no
regard for our best over-all future development. . . . They may solve the traffic problem — but
if they cut our cities and urban counties to shreds and tatters in the process, then we will beworse off than we were before." Louisville real estate writer Grady Clay worried that theinterstate system would turn out to be "a monstrous dragon let loose upon the American
landscape." By 1960, four years after congressional authorization for the interstate program, asizeable body of criticism had emerged, especially focusing on the lack of attention tocomprehensive planning, mass transit alternatives, and relocation issues.26

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The 1956 highway act's failure to address the question of housing demolition and family
relocation became one of the more troubling policy issues in subsequent years. Federal
housing and urban renewal legislation in 1949 and 1954 required relocation assistance andalternative housing for those living in the path of the federal bulldozer. Although they pushed
for urban expressways, knowledgeable highway men such as Thomas MacDonald and Robert
Moses recognized the importance of relocation housing, both as a matter of simple justice andto counter potential neighborhood or local political opposition to building roads throughheavily populated city centers. In his testimony to the House Committee on Public Works in
1955, Moses made a strong case for relocation payments to tenants. In the 1956 debate overthe highway bill in the House of Representatives, congressmen from New York "made a hardfight" to include relocation costs in the interstate legislation. Actually, according to the legal
scholar Gary T. Schwartz, "the bills considered by the House in 1955 and then approved by theHouse in 1956 would have rendered family relocation expenses includable within highway'construction' costs for purposes of federal funding; for the Interstate program, this would
have entailed a 90 percent federal share of payments made to relocatees." Subsequently, on
the Senate side, the Senate Public Works Committee removed the relocation provision. New
York Senator Herbert Lehman sought to restore the relocation language of the House version
during Senate debate, but this was defeated. When the bill went to a conference committee,
House conferees agreed with Senate counterparts to keep the funding for relocation out of
the final bill.27
The Eisenhower administration and Republican allies in the Senate rejected financial
compensation for relocation because of anticipated excessive costs. Congressmen, BPR
administrators, and state highway engineers knew that urban relocation problems would be
difficult, perhaps involving the displacement of up to 90,000 people a year. Highway engineers
had traditionally conceived of their job as one of building roads, while the human problems of
housing relocation were thought to be the work of some other agency. This engineering
mentality was reflected in the 1956 highway act. Urban mayors and business groups lobbied
for urban expressways, but they believed that the removal of low-income housing and"blighted" neighborhoods would be good for their cities. The advocates of urban
redevelopment and urban renewal operated on "the basic premise that slums were in essencea problem of deteriorated buildings, rather than a problem of the low income of thosebuldings' inhabitants." These conceptions carried over into considerations of how urban
expressways would benefit the central cities. In the final analysis, until the 1960s, the urban
poor whose neighborhoods were slated for expressway corridors had few lobbyists inCongress to make an effective case for relocation funding.28
It is also important to place the relocation issue and potential relocation costs into the context
of the economic environment of the 1950s. The U.S. battled inflation and recession
throughout the decade. President Eisenhower had campaigned on a platform of cutting
federal spending, reducing taxes, and eliminating the budget deficit. He was interested instabilizing government spending and in keeping federal expenditures in a steady ratio with

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

13rising national income. He wanted, he said in his memoir, to dissipate "the cloud of unwantedsocialism." Congressional Republicans during the era traditionally adhered to fiscal
conservatism. Many initially opposed the interstate highway system based on its enormous
cost, but shifted to support the road program when the Highway Trust Fund mechanism took
construction costs off the federal balance sheet. As Moynihan noted, "the device of the TrustFund satisfied the administration's wish to keep the increased level of government spending
from showing up in the budget."29
In seeking to meet his economic goals, Eisenhower was advised by his Council of Economic
Advisors (CEA), headed by the influential economist Arthur F. Burns. The CEA had "a highly
influential role" in policy issues that affected the economy and government spending. The CEA
weighed in on the highway relocation issue, especially its potential costs. For example, inAugust 1956, Burns wrote to the Bureau of the Budget about a housing bill currently being
debated in the House, a bill that would have permitted more expansive operations by theFederal National Mortgage Association (FNMA). Burns had a number of objections to the bill,
but one in particular dealt with relocation issues. The bill, Burns stated, authorized FNMA to"include in urban renewal grants the costs of relocation payments to individuals and businessconcerns displaced by an urban renewal project." Burns argued that local agencies, not thefederal government, should cover such relocation payments. Burns went on to say: "TheCouncil is also fearful that this principle of compensation may be extended in the future to thehighway program and run up costs in the process." Burns's letter reveals quite early in theinterstate process that officials at high levels in the Eisenhower administration recognized thelarge dimensions of the highway relocation problem, but callously rejected any assistance tothose displaced because it would "run up costs." The inconsistency of providing such
relocation assistance for urban renewal projects but not for the highway program did not seemto bother Burns.30
While Burns and the CEA rejected a more expansive federal role in relocation matters — and in
urban affairs generally — another federal unit was inching forward in another direction.
Robert E. Merriam, a political scientist, served as a Deputy Assistant to President Eisenhower,
and also as chair of the Ad Hoc Interagency Committee on Metropolitan Area Problems.
Established in 1957, the Ad Hoc Committee was one of several similar working committees
addressing "interlevel problems," or relations between federal agencies and state and local
governments. As the minutes of the first Ad Hoc Committee meeting in October 1957 noted,"the Federal Government has a real problem in dealing with local governments," a problem
that had created some "ill will" in the states and that concerned Eisenhower enough to serveas the subject of several presidential speeches. Discussion at the first meeting focused on
perceived problem areas such as federal-local coordination of the urban renewal and interstate
highway programs. Concerns were already being expressed in cities around the nation about
the extent of housing demolitions, especially in low-income neigbhorhoods, and the absenceof any financial suspport for relocation payments or moving assistance for those living in rental
properties. However, when one committee member discussed the need "to establish a more

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

14
formalized program for coordination, particularly with respect to the relocation problems
caused by highway construction," White House staffer Howard Pyle rejected the idea,
suggesting that state highway departments "used the Federal Government as an excuse forunpopular decisions affecting local communities."31
The Ad Hoc Committee moved slowly, holding only four meetings over four years, seemingly
not accomplishing very much. But by 1960, after examining levels of intergovernmental
coordination in such big programs as highways, housing, and urban renewal, the Committee
began to assert the need for a greater degree of long-range planning in metropolitan areas.
The multiplicity of governmental jurisdictions in urban America made planning a necessity.
Achieving acceptable and uniform policies in such fields as housing and highways was
impossible through local legislation, but it could be achieved through federally requiredcomprehensive metropolitan planning. By the end of 1960, the Ad Hoc Committee
recommended that the "workable program" comprehensive planning requirements of theurban renewal program be extended to other federal programs such as the interstate highway
program. By imposing the planning requirement as "a statutory objective," the nation's urban
communities would be forced to address "the problem of urban decay." The workableprogram for urban renewal, among other things, required plans for relocating families
displaced by redevelopment activities. Merriam's committee recommended matching federal
grants to state agencies to assist in local adoption of workable programs for federal activities
such as the interstate highway program.
Around the same time, the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) similarly argued the necessity for aconsistent federal policy on "reimbursement of relocation costs involved in all types ofprojects." Diametrically opposed to the earlier position of the CEA under Arthur F. Burns, theBOB and Ad Hoc Committee recommendations came at the very end of the Eisenhoweradministration, when there was not much time for discussion within the administration or ofCongressional action. Several earlier Congressional bills for relocation assistance had been
opposed by BPR and the Department of Commerce, and they never got very far in Congress.
The final recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on planning and relocation were
included in a "transition memorandum" sent by Merriam to his counterparts in the incoming
Kennedy administration.32
Merriam's Ad Hoc Committee did not attack the interstate highway program directly. Rather, it
moved slowly but deliberately toward more comprehensive planning and toward assumptionof some financial responsibility toward those displaced by highway demolition. However,another executive branch unit directly challenged the BPR and the basic assumptions on which
the interstate program was based. This assault on the expansive construction aims of the
highway lobby was mounted by General John S. Bragdon, a special assistant to President
Eisenhower who in 1955 was appointed as "Coordinator of Public Works Planning." An army
engineer and a close associate of Eisenhower since their West Point days, Bragdon had a broad
mandate from the President to review federal public works programs, initiate long-range

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

15planning, and identify public construction that could be accelerated in the event of a slowing
economy. From the beginning, Bragdon and his staff of 25 in the Public Works Planning Unittargeted the federal highway program for attention. Bragdon focused especially on the needfor integrating highway construction with comprehensive community planning. Indicting thedirection of Bragdon's thinking, one staff memo in December 1955 suggested: "Amendmentof existing Federal aid laws to include a provision, similar to that in the Housing Act of 1954
covering urban renewal, to the effect that granting of Federal aid for public work purposes is
contingent upon an overall comprehensive master plan." Of course, urban renewal legislation
stipulated relocation assistance, but it is not clear from the documentation that Bragdon wasinterested in this aspect of urban renewal's "workable program" requirements. Bragdon's goal
was efficiency and cost savings in government public works, which he believed could beachieved through long-range planning.33
In addition to advocating comprehensive, metropolitan-area planning, Bragdon's investigations
raised other sticky highway issues. For example, despite the fact that the financing of theinterstates had been resolved with the invention of the Highway Trust Fund, Bragdon
constantly hammered away on the need to raise highway money through interstate tolls.
Similarly, he annoyed highwaymen no end by noisily pushing mass transit alternatives for thecities. For Bragdon, tolls would provide necessary highway funding without affecting thenational budget, while adequate mass transit would take the pressure off demands for more
expensive urban expressways. On both issues, Bragdon found little support.34
Bragdon's main focus, however, was reserved for the urban interstates. Eliminating thoseenormously expensive inner-city expressways would produce potentially huge savings. The
urban segments of the interstates were costing as much as $16 million per mile in congested
city territory, as opposed to an average of $1 million per mile in intercity segments. Landacquisition costs, the relocation of utilities, a larger number of interchanges, and more
complex engineering and design problems drove up urban highway construction costs. Thesehigher costs in urban areas led Bragdon to challenge one of the interstate program's basic
assumptions — that the interstates had always been planned to cut into and through the cities
as well as circle them on interstate beltways. President Eisenhower himself, by some accounts,
was said to be surprised when he discovered that the interstates were penetrating the central
cities; supposedly, he thought they were simply linking up cities for long-distance travel but notsolving the traffic woes of urban areas. If this was true, it would fit into the perception of
Eisenhower as a rather detached president who delegated a lot of authority, who didn't want
to be bothered with details, and whose decision making focused on broad principles and goals
rather than specific elements of a plan, program, or bill.35
After one of several meetings with Eisenhower on this subject, in November 1959 Bradgon
wrote a "Memorandum for the Record." Bragdon reported that Eisenhower agreed with himon the city segments of the interstate: "On the question of routing in the cities, the President
confirmed the fact that his idea had always been that the transcontinental network forPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

16
interstate and intercity travel and the Defense significance are paramount and that routing
within cities is primarily the responsibility ofthecities.ThePresidentwasforcefulonthispoint."
Infact,BragdondidhavethePresident'sear. Bragdon's constant harping on the possibility ofeliminating the urban interstates, or a least leaving them to the cities to fund and build, hadsome impact. Earlier in 1959, in the midst of an economic recession that led to reduced tax
collections and forced a slowdown in interstate construction, Eisenhower gave Bragdon abroad, new assignment: to review the federal highway program in all its aspects, especially todetermine if it was achieving "national objectives" and to recommend methods to "minimize
the Federal cost of the highway program." Neither Eisenhower nor Bragdon ever mentioned
the need to deal with relocation issues, although earlier in the year Bragdon and his staff
discussed the possibility of urging "that the States be encouraged to take initiative in providing
for relocation costs." Both the President and his Public Works Advisor wanted to cut back on
highway expenditures They knew about relocation problems for low-income urban residents,
but they wanted nothing to do with the solution. Those displaced by demolition had few
advocates at the highest levels of the Eisenhower administration.36
Following his new mandate, Bragdon and his public works team launched even deeper
investigations, which led to conflicts with BPR people who didn't like Bragdon poking aroundin their highway business. At the Cabinet level, the Secretary of Commerce followed thePresident's lead and ordered the BPR to comply with Bragdon's requests for information,
which the BPR did reluctantly. In addition, Federal Highway Administrator Bertram Tallamy (theFederal Highway Administration administered the interstate program within the BPR) wrote
numerous memos to Bragdon and Commerce Secretary Frederick Mueller reviewing the historyof the interstate program, demonstrating that the urban segments had always been part of
the highway plan dating back to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944.37 Anotherconsequence of the Bragdon investigation stemmed from leaks that the administration wasconsidering cutting back or even eliminating the urban segments of the Interstate because of
the late 1950s recession. City advocates were alarmed, and mayors across the country deluged
President Eisenhower with letters of protest. Bragdon and his public works team stirred up
several political firestorms.38
After almost a year of internal squabbling over these matters, a showdown meeting involving
Bragdon, the highway people, and President Eisenhower took place in the White House in
April 1960. Bragdon began a lengthy presentation on the urban interstates, but he was sooninterrupted by Eisenhower who asked Tallamy for his response. Reportedly, Tallamy pulled out
a copy of the so-called "Yellow Book" — the interstate highway manual produced by the BPR
in 1955 that mapped all designted urban routes and that had been approved by Congress in
the 1956 interstate highway legislation. What happened next is a matter of dispute. According
to Tallamy's account of the meeting, after Bragdon agreed that the Yellow Book routes were
the ones approved by Congress in 1956, Eisenhower said, "The meeting's over gentlemen. I'll
let you know what I decide." According to Bragdon's account, the President noted that "theYellow Book depicting routes in cities had sold the program to Congress," and then went on

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

17
to say that "the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities
was entirely against his concept and wishes." Regardless of whose memory is correct, from the
President's perspective, the matter was seemingly settled and nothing more was done toshort-circuit urban interstate construction. A few weeks later, Bragdon was appointed to a
position on the Civil Aeronautics Board. His successor in the Public Works Planning Unit, Floyd
Peterson, submitted a truncated report in the final days of the Eisenhower administration. By
this time, the recession was over and no one wanted to talk about cutting back on the urban
interstates.39
This review of the Eisenhower administration and the interstates suggests several conclusions.
First, Eisenhower was not much interested in cities. Major urban lobby groups, such as the
National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, had trouble promoting urban
programs with Eisenhower people. One staffer with the U.S. Conference of Mayors stated that
"under Ike, there was no sense in fighting; Ike was not inclined to pay attention to cities, andinsisted he knew nothing about them."40 Second, despite his anti-urban bias, Eisenhower wasvery interested in getting the interstates built. In speeches, formal messages, and news
conferences, he consistently argued the need for the interstates. They were essential for thenation's economic development, for national defense, and even to eliminate congested auto
traffic in cities (a point that contradicted his alleged later statement that he was unaware thatthe interstates would actually penetrate the cities).41 Finally, Eisenhower and most others in his
administration had little concern for the victims of the urban interstates — those displaced bydemolition. With very few exceptions, relocation assistance and moving expenses were nonissues, despite the acknowledged inconsistencies with the urban renewal program. As thestatement by Arthur F. Burns of the President's Council of Economic Advisors suggested,people at the top knew about problem of housing demolition but rejected any relocation
assistance because it would "run up costs."42

Saving the Central Business District
Shortly after passage of the landmark 1956 interstate highway legislation, noted urbanologist
Lewis Mumford remarked, “When the American people, through their Congress, voted a little
while ago for a twenty-six billion dollar highway program, the most charitable thing to assume
about this action is that they hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were doing.” In the
narrowest sense, Mumford may have been right, but many powerful interest groups werequick to recognize the implications of interstate highway construction at the cities' core. Thoseinterested at the time in the future of the central city — urban policy makers and planners,
big-city mayors, urban real estate interests, central city business groups — all sought a generalrebuilding of the central cities during the contemplated postwar reconstruction. Urban
expressway building was considered a necessary component of such urban policy andplanning. The absence of any official interest in rebuilding inner-city housing for those
displaced meant that huge sections of central-city land could be cleared for other uses.
Expressway building was seen as a way of saving the central city from the creeping blight of anPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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older and deteriorating housing stock. Because such housing accommodated mostly poor andminority residents, expressway building often meant black removal from the central-city area.
As early as 1949, one black housing official predicted — quite correctly, as it turned out —that "the real masters of urban redevelopment will be the forces intent on recapturing Negro
living space for the right people."43
Among the interest groups seeking to save the central business district, few were more
important than the Urban Land Institute (ULI). Founded in 1936 to serve the interests ofdowntown real estate owners and developers, the ULI consistently pushed for central-city
redevelopment. From the 1930s, downtown landowners and realtors feared that
suburbanization, and especially the decentralization of retailing, would ultimately sap thevitality of central-city economic activities. The automobile was largely to blame, experts
contended, because it both facilitated suburban growth and clogged downtown trafficarteries. As the respected urban planner and architect Victor Gruen put it in the mid-1950s,"the rotting of the core has set in in most American cities, in some cases progressing to an
alarming degree." In the decade following World War II, the ULI's Central Business District
Council focused on freeways as "the salvation of the central district, the core of every city."44
In a stream of pamphlets, newsletters, and technical bulletins, the Urban Land Institute sought
to pave the way for central-city expressways. For James W. Rouse, a Baltimore real estatedeveloper involved with the Urban Land Institute in the 1950s and later well-known as abuilder of new towns and festival marketplaces, the pattern of inner-city decay threatened thefuture of the central business district. According to Rouse, the solution for downtown America
was clear: "Major expressways must be ripped through to the central core" as an integral
aspect of extensive redevelopment efforts. Another urban developer, James H. Scheuer, in a1957 ULI publication, envisioned inner belt expressways inevitably slicing through "great areasof our nation's worst slums." The ULI's monthly newsletter, Urban Land, urged urban
governments to survey the "extent to which blighted areas may provide suitable highway
routes." ULI consultant James W. Follin saw the 1956 Interstate Highway Act providing "wideopen opportunity" to eliminate blighted housing and recapture central-city land forredevelopment. For the ULI, expressways promised the salvation of the central business
district.45
Using expressways for slum clearance and urban redevelopment excited representatives ofother interest groups. The American Road Builders' Association (ARBA) served as the major
trade association for the nation's highway construction firms. Writing to President Truman in
1949, the ARBA defended the use of highway construction in slum clearance. Urban express
highways, the ARBA contended, were necessary to alleviate traffic congestion, but throughproper right-of-way planning they also could "contribute in a substantial manner to theelimination of slum and deteriorated areas." The elimination of urban slums would stimulate
downtown businesses, contribute to an appreciation of property values, and counter the threat
posed by slum housing to "the public health, safety, morals, and welfare of the nation."

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

19
Similarly, as early as 1943 the American Concrete Institute (ACI), which had an obvious interestin highway construction, championed the use of urban expressways in "the elimination ofslums and blighted areas." Build highways through the city slums, urged the ARBA and the
ACI, and solve the problems of urban America.46
The automobile lobby joined the chorus touting the role of expressways in rebuilding urban
America. Typically, in a 1956 pamphlet entitled What Freeways Mean to Your City, theAutomotive Safety Foundation assured readers that freeways were desirable, beneficial, andbeautiful; they stimulated rising land value and prevented “the spread of blight and . . .
slums." Forward-looking communities used "the transportation potential of freeways to speed
redevelopment of run-down sections along sound lines and to prevent deterioration ofdesirable sections." Similarly, in a 1962 article, the Highway Research Board contended thatinterstate highways were "eating out slums" and "reclaiming blighted areas." The inner-city
freeway, in short, represented a "positive social good," especially if it was routed throughblighted slum neighborhoods that might be reclaimed for more productive civic uses.47
The downtown developers, the automobile lobby, highway officials and experts, and planners
and politicians at every level shared the urban expressway dream. Echoing his boss Thomas
MacDonald, BPR urban road division chief Joseph Barnett suggested as early as 1946 thatproperly located urban expressways would help immeasurably in "the stabilization of tradeand values in the principal or central business district." New York's Robert Moses pushed suchideas vigorously. In a 1954 statement to the President's Advisory Committee on a National
Highway Program (generally known as the Clay Committee), Moses argued that new urban
expressways "must go right through cities and not around them" if they were to accomplish
their purpose. As Moses once put it, “When you’re operating in an overbuilt metropolis you
have to hack your way with a meat axe.” Expressways not only addressed urban traffic
problems, but through proper coordination they could advance slum clearance plans and otheraspects of urban redevelopment. Moses concluded somewhat prophetically that city
expressway mileage would be "the hardest to locate, the most difficult to clear, the mostexpensive to acquire and build, and the most controversial from the point of view of selfish
and shortsighted opposition." In other words, people whose homes would be taken for
expressways represented a highway problem, not a housing problem.48
Like New York, Detroit in the 1940s found expressways an "essential step in slum clearance"that would "open up blighted areas and fit them for more productive uses." Detroit's
depressed inner-city expressways, Mayor Albert E. Cobo told the Clay Committee in 1954, notonly enhanced property values along their right-of-way, but they were positively "a picture ofbeauty." A writer in the Western Construction News in 1943 contended that urban
expressways, "usually and best built through blighted areas," would solve traffic congestion,
provide postwar employment, and revitalize city centers through slum clearance. A 1950 planfor expressways in Cleveland predicated revitalization of the central business district on
redevelopment of blighted central residential areas. In the early 1950s, Kansas City's city

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manager, L. P. Cookingham, stated that "no large city can hope for a real future" without
expressways that cleared slums and preserved the central business district.49
Working within federal traffic engineering guidelines, but with few other constraints, highway
builders at the state and local levels routed the new urban expressways in directions of theirown choosing. Local agendas often dictated such decisions. In most cities, the result was todrive the interstatesthroughblackandpoorneighborhoods. Urban blacks were heavily
concentrated in areas with the oldest and most dilapidated housing, where land acquisition
costs were relatively low, and where organized political opposition was weakest. Displaying a“two-birds-with-one stone" mentality, cities and states sought to route interstate expressways
through slum neighborhoods, using federal highway money to reclaim downtown urban realestate. Inner-city slums could be cleared, blacks removed to more distant second-ghetto areas,
central business districts redeveloped, and transportation woes solved all at the same time —and mostly at federal expense.50
Thus, urban expressways were conceived of by many as more than just traffic arteries. To be
sure, the highway engineers in the BPR and at the state level were interested in building
highways that would move traffic efficiently, although most of them also shared the two-birds
theory. But business interests and government officials in the cities conceived of expressways as
part of a larger redevelopment plan for the city centers. This rebuilding of the central city inmany cases came at the expense of African American communities in the inner cities, whose
neighborhoods — not just housing but churches, business districts, even entire urban renewal
areas — were destroyed in the process of expressway construction. In other instances, thehighway builders routed urban interstates through white working-class ethnic neighborhoods,
historic districts, and parks, but building an expressway through a black community was themost common choice, the ubiquitous experience of urban America in the expressway era of1956 to the early 1970s.
The expressway era coincided with a massive migration of rural southern blacks to urban
America. More than five million African Americans made that pilgrimage in the three decades
after 1940. Many northern and midwestern cities already had sizable black populations, but
those numbers rose rapidly during the war years and after. Between 1940 and 1960, forinstance, the black population of New York increased by 137 percent, Philadelphia by 111
percent, Washington by 120 percent, Chicago by 193 percent, Cleveland by 197 percent,Newark by 200 percent, Detroit by 223 percent, Denver by 286 percent, Los Angeles by 425
percent, Oakland by 882 percent. The black populations of southern cities also rose
substantially between 1940 and 1960. At a time when strict residential segregation prevailed
everywhere, rising black population meant more intense overcrowding and consequentphysical deterioration in the contained inner-city black ghettos. In many cities, neighborhood
racial violence took place, as blacks began pushing out the boundaries of their restrictedcommunities and into nearby white areas. Thus, plans for building expressways into the central

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

21
cities took place at a time when the great black migrations had begun to reshape the raciallandscapes of the postwar American city.51
Highway builders rarely mentioned African Americans specifically in their discussions aboutclearing out blight and slums. In fact, when these ideas first began to receive currency in thelate 1930s the nation's largest cities had not yet received the full force of the massive wartime
and postwar migration of southern blacks. But that changed dramatically in the 1940s andafter. By that time, when the highwaymen talked about clearing out central-city blight,
everyone knew what they meant. The intent, the goal, was clear to most, even if it was rarely
stated directly. Their intentions were clear from their statements, actions, and policies — andthe visible consequences of the highways they built are the best evidence of their intended
goals. As one former federal highway official conceded in a 1972 interview, the urban
interstates gave city officials "a good opportunity to get rid of the local niggertown."52

Expressways and the Demolition of Inner-City Neighborhoods
From the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, urban expressway construction meant massive
family dislocation and housing destruction. State highway engineers and consultants, usuallyworking with local civic elites, determined the interstate routes into the central cities. The
routes they chose were consistent with perceptions and policies of the past. Highway builders
had traditionally made clearing out housing blight at the center of the cities one of their goals.
By the mid-1950s, after a decade and a half of heavy black migration into urban areas, mostof those inner-city areas targeted by the highway planners' maps were predominantly African
American. Consequently, most American cities faced serious community disruption and racial
strife as the interstate expressways ripped through urban neighborhoods and leveled wideswaths of inner-city housing. A few examples should serve to demonstrate the destructive
impact of urban expressways.
In Miami, Florida, state highway planners and local officials deliberately routed Interstate-95
directly through the inner-city black community of Overtown. An alternative route utilizing anabandoned railroad corridor was rejected, as the highway planners noted, to provide "ample
room for the future expansion of the central business district in a westerly direction," a goal of
the local business elite since the 1930s. Even before the expressway was built, and in theabsence of any relocation planning, some in Miami's white and black press asked: "Whatabout the Negroes Uprooted by Expressway?" The question remained unanswered, and when
the downtown leg of the expressway was completed in the mid-1960s, it tore through thecenter of Overtown, wiping out massive amounts of housing as well as Overtown's main
business district, the commercial and cultural heart of black Miami. One massive expressway
interchange took up twenty square blocks of densely settled land and destroyed the housingof about 10,000 people. By the end of the 1960s, Overtown had become an urban wasteland
dominated by the physical presence of the expressway. Little remained of the neighborhood toPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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recall its days as a thriving center of black community life, when it was known as the Harlem of
the South.53
In Nashville, Tennessee, highway planners went out of their way to put a kink in the urban linkof Interstate-40 as it passed through the city. The expressway route gouged a concrete swath
through the North Nashville black community, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses
and dividing what was left of the neighborhood. The decision for the I-40 route had been
made quietly in 1957 at a nonpublic meeting of white business leaders and state highway
officials. By 1967, after years of denying that the expressway would adversely affect thecommunity, the state highway department began acquiring right-of-way, displacing residents,
and bulldozing the route. Outraged blacks in Nashville organized the Nashville I-40 Steering
Committee to mount an opposition campaign, charging that routing an interstate expressway
through a black community could be legally classified as racial discrimination.54
The I-40 Steering Committee won a temporary restraining order in 1967, the first time ahighway project had been halted by claims of racial discrimination. The Steering Committee's
attorney alleged that "the highway was arbitrarily routed through the North Nashville ghetto
solely because of the racial and low socio-economic character of the ghetto and its occupants
without regard to the widespread adverse effects on the land uses adjoining the route."
Ultimately, the I-40 Steering Committee lost its case in federal court, and the I-40 expressway
was completed through Nashville's black community. However, the legal controversy in
Nashville starkly revealed, if not a racial purpose, at least a racial outcome common to manyurban interstate route locations. Ironically, in May 1968, U.S. Department of Transportation(DOT) secretary Alan S. Boyd conceded in a letter to I-40 Steering Committee chairman
Flournoy A. Coles that "In retrospect, it may well have been more desirable to locate thehighway on a different line."55 By that time, however, it was too late to save North Nashvillefrom the highwaymen.
In New Orleans, enraged freeway opponents successfully waged a long battle against an eightlane elevated expressway along the Mississippi River and through the edges of the city's
historic French Quarter. The Riverfront Expressway originated in a 1946 plan proposed for New
Orleans by New York highway builder Robert Moses. The planned expressway was part of an
inner-city beltway of the type that Moses favored and that the BPR had incorporated into its
interstate planning. After several years of hot debate and controversy, historic preservationists
succeeded in fighting off the Riverfront Expressway plan. In 1969, DOT secretary John A. Volpeterminated the I-10 loop through the Vieux Carre.56
However, while white New Orleans residents with vested interests were fending off the
highway builders, nearby mid-city black communities were not nearly as successful. Highway
builders there leveled a wide swath along North Claiborne Avenue in central New Orleans forInterstate-10. At the center of an old and stable black Creole community, boasting a long
stretch of magnificent old oak trees, North Claiborne served a variety of community functions

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

23such as picnics, festivals, and parades. The highway builders rammed an elevated expressway
through the neighborhood before anyone could organize or protest. Some of thepreservationists who fought the Riverfront Expressway gladly suggested North Claiborne as analternative. Stay off the riverfront, the Vieux Carre Courier urged in 1965, but Claiborne could"be developed to the limit, with at least two upper levels." By the 1970s, Interstate-10 in New
Orleans rolled through a devastated black community, a concrete jungle left in the shadows by
a massive elevated highway.57
Interstate construction in Montgomery, Alabama, also devastated a black community. In 1961,
state highway officials recommended a route for Interstate-85 that traversed the city's major
African American community. George W. Curry, a black minister and head of a Property
Owners Committee, sent a petition with 1,150 signatures to local, state, and federal highway
officials protesting that the expressway route would destroy an estimated 300 homes in black
Montgomery and proposing an alternative route through mostly vacant land. At a public
hearing, 650 people stood up to signify their opposition to the expressway. Curry argued thatthe route "was racially motivated to uproot a neighborhood of Negro leaders." A BPR internal
memorandum spelled out the details:
Rev. Curry alleges that the routing of this highway will uproot a Negro
community, which has no place to relocate, and two Negro churches. It isclaimed that there is a nearby alternate route which would cost $30,000 less.
Rev. Curry charges that the proposed routing of the highway is designed by
State and local officials to purposely dislodge this Negro community where
many of the leaders of the fight for desegregation in Montgomery reside.
Rev. Curry said that in a recent conversation with a Mr. Sam Englehardt,
Alabama's Highway Director, Mr. Englehardt stated that it was his intention
to get Rev. Abernathy's church.
Ralph Abernathy, a close advisor of Martin Luther King in the Montgomery bus boycott of1956 and in other desegregation struggles, also complained about the Interstate-85 route in atelegram to President John F. Kennedy in October 1961. Abernathy's home stood in the pathof the highway project, obviously targeted by Alabama highway officials. A notorious racist,
Alabama's state highway director Samuel Englehardt served simultaneously as a high level
officer of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and of the White Citizen's Council, which organizedagainst school integration. Black opposition to the designated Interstate-85 route did slow
construction, but only temporarily. Federal Highway Administrator Rex M. Whitton told
Englehardt to "let the dust settle for about six months and then proceed with construction of
the project."58
In Birmingham, Alabama, where three interstates intersected, a black citizen's committee
complained to the Alabama state highway department and the BPR in 1960 that proposedinterstate freeways "would almost completely wipe out two old Negro communities [in]

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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eastern Birmingham with their 13 churches and three schools." Moreover, the public hearing
held on the highway proposal had been segregated, and blacks were unable to present theirgrievances.59 In 1963, as the start of expressway construction neared in Birmingham,
opposition flared again in the city's black community. A resident, James Hutchinson, protested
to Alabama Senator John Sparkman that the expressway (I-59) "bisects an exclusive coloredresidential area. In addition, it has a large interchange in the heart of this area." In the earlydays of the interstates, the racial routing of the Birmingham expressway noted by Hutchinson
was rather typical. So was the response of Federal Highway Administrator Whitton to Senator
Sparkman. The route had been chosen by the Alabama state highway department andapproved by the Bureau of Public Roads, Whitton wrote, "based on a thorough evaluation of
all engineering, economic, and sociological factors involved." If that was the case, then it
would seem that the destruction of the Birmingham black community was indeed a planned
event.60
The expressway story was much the same in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1968, the South
Carolina NAACP organized the Columbia black community in protest over the route of the Bull
Street Expressway, an Interstate-20 link that penetrated the central city. Franchot Brown, ablack community leader in Columbia, charged the South Carolina Highway Department with"a general pattern of racial discrimination" in attempting "to restrict the Negroes to theghettos." Brown contended that expressway plans had not received a proper public hearing
and that undeveloped land nearby provided an alternative route location. Brown appealed tofederal highway officials to halt the Bull Street Expressway: "Your swift action may save ourneighborhood and stop the age old practice of sparing a few white occupied homes at theexpense of hundreds of Negro families and affecting thousands of Negro citizens."
Nevertheless, the Bull Street Expressway was built as planned.61
A similar pattern of planned destruction took place in Camden, New Jersey, bisected in the
1960s by Interstate-95, with the usual consequences for low-income neighborhoods. In 1968,
the Department of Housing and Urban Development sent a task force to Camden to study the
impact of highway building and urban renewal. It found that minorities made up 85 percent of
the families displaced by the North-South Freeway — some 1,093 families of a total of 1,289
displaced families. For the five year period 1963 to 1967, about 3,000 low-income housing
units were destroyed in Camden, but only about 100 new low-income housing units werebuilt during that period.62
The Civil Rights Division of the New Jersey State Attorney General's Office prepared a second
report on Camden. Entitled Camden, New Jersey: A City in Crisis, the report made a similarcase for the racial implications of expressway construction in Camden. As the report stated: "Itis obvious from a glance at the renewal and transit plans that an attempt is being made toeliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by two different methods. The first isbuilding highways that benefit white suburbanites, facilitating their movement from thesuburbs to work and back; the second is by means of urban renewal projects which produce

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

25
middle and upper income housing and civic centers without providing adequate, decent, safe,
and sanitary housing, as the law provides, at prices which the relocatee can afford." Like manyother cities, Camden experienced the devastating social consequences of highway construction
through low-income neighborhoods. The central argument of the New Jersey civil rights report
was that this outcome was purposely planned and carried out.63
The experience of Camden during the expressway-building era of the late 1950s and 1960s
was duplicated in cities throughout the nation. A Kansas City, Missouri, midtown freeway
originally slated to pass through an affluent neighborhood was re-routed through a Model City
area and a nearby integrated community, destroying 1,800 buildings and displacing several
thousand people.64 In Charlotte, North Carolina, Interstate-77 leveled an African American
community, including four black schools that just happened to be in the path of the onrushingexpressway.65 Highway officials pushed ahead with a three-and-one-half mile inner-city
expressway in Pittsburgh, even though it was expected to dislocate 5,800 people.66 In St. Paul,
Minnesota, Interstate-94 cut directly through the city's black community, displacing oneseventh of St. Paul's black population. As one critic put it, "very few blacks lived in Minnesota,
but the road builders found them."67 When Interstate-65 was built through Indianapolis,
Indiana, state and federal highway officials worried about civil rights unrest as a consequenceof massive "displacement of low income families, particularly Negroes."68 Despite the fact thatthe planned Century Freeway in Los Angeles would dislocate 3,550 families, 117 businesses,
and numerous parks, schools, and churches, mainly in black Watts and Willowbrook, the DOT
approved the new expressway in 1968.69 Freeway construction in Pasadena, California
displaced over 4,000 black and Mexican-American residents, most of whom were forced backinto inner-city Los Angeles ghettos. As one black Pasadena resident put it: "They put the
freeways where the resistance and the power was the weakest, and now we have the biggest
intersection in the world where a lot of black families used to live."70
The story was much the same in other cities. In Florida, interstates in Tampa, St. Petersburg,
Jacksonville, Orlando, and Pensacola routinely ripped through, divided, and dislocated black
communities, or permanently walled them off from white neighborhoods.71 In Columbus,
Ohio, an inner-city expressway leveled an entire black community.72 In Milwaukee, the NorthSouth Expressway cleared a path through sixteen blocks in the city's black community,
uprooting 600 families and ultimately intensifying patterns of racial segregation.73 A networkof expressways in Cleveland displaced some 19,000 people by the early 1970s.74 In Chicago,
the Dan Ryan Expressway effectively separated the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive black public
housing project, from white ethnic neighborhoods to the west.75 In Atlanta, according tohistorian Ronald H. Bayor, some highways were purposely planned and built "to sustain racial
ghettos and control black migration" within the metropolitan area; others, according to social
scientist Larry Keating, were designed to clear blacks out of the central city area to make way
for business-related development.76

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Far-reaching plans for inner-city expressways and consequent neighborhood destruction
were not always fully carried out. A planned inner-loop beltway and six other expressways in
the Washington, D.C. fell victim to freeway opposition, but if completed they would havedestroyed, according to a recent article, an incredible 200,000 housing units, most of themin black areas.77 In Baltimore, a city-wide interracial coalition against inner-city expressways
called Movement Against Destruction (MAD) prevented the demolition of 28,000 housing
units, saving numerous stable and historic neighborhoods from the federal bulldozer. MAD's
actions also preserved for later development the city's waterfront and harbor district,originally slated for a massive downtown expressway interchange.78 In Philadelphia, planners
and politicians promoted a crosstown expressway to complete an inner-city highway loop
around the central business district. More than 6,000 housing units, more than 90 percentof them in several different black communities, were targeted for destruction, but a citizens'movement in the late 1960s ultimately won enough political support to kill the crosstown
idea in 1970.79
African Americans were not alone in suffering the destructive consequences of urban
expressway construction. In Chicago, a whole range of ethnic neighborhoods gave way toexpressways as they headed south, southwest, west, and northwest out of the downtown
Loop area.80 In Boston, inner-city expressways and access ramps dislocated hundreds ofdowntown businesses and destroyed residential areas, including the Chinatown district andpart of the city's Italian North End.81 In Providence, Rhode Island, Interstate-95 cut through a
low-income rooming house district where aged residents and small businesses were
especially hard hit.82 In New York City, the Cross Bronx Expressway ripped through a massive
wall of apartment houses that stretched for miles, gouging a huge trench across a primarily
working-class Jewish community. The Cross Bronx Expressway fulfilled a two-decade-old
dream of New York highway builder Robert Moses, but it also triggered the rapid decline of
the South Bronx, now a notorious urban wasteland of rubble-strewn lots and abandonedbuildings.83 As one transportation specialist has suggested:"Almost every major U.S. city
bears the scars of communities split apart by the nearly impenetrable barrier of concrete."84
The devastating human and social consequences of urban expressway construction ultimately
produced widespread opposition and citizen activism. Beginning in San Francisco in 1959,
freeway revolts gradually spread throughout the country by the late 1960s.85 Although stateand federal highwaymen coldly accepted citizen opposition as one of the costs of building
roads, by the mid-1960s Congress became more sensitive to the political backlash created bymassive housing destruction and the difficulties of relocating displaced families. Politicalpressure on top staffers in the Federal Highway Administration and the new U.S. Departmentof Transportation (created in 1966) gradually led to a softening of the narrowly technocraticengineering mentality that had previously dominated the Bureau of Public Roads. As a result,some routes were altered to avoid neighborhood destruction, while other expressway projects
were cancelled altogether. In addition, new Congressional legislation required that for highway

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

27
projects after 1965, relocation housing had to be provided in advance of construction. By thattime, however, most of the urban expressways had already been put into place; most of thedamage had already been done.86

Conclusion
The historical record has demonstrated that highways, slum clearance, and urban
redevelopment were closely linked in postwar urban policy making. Early interstate advocatesconceived of the new urban expressways as a means of rebuilding the central city by clearing
away blighted housing. The Bureau of Public Roads advocated such ideas as early as the
1930s, and many of the pre-1956 urban expressways put those ideas into practice. After thelandmark 1956 interstate highway legislation, highway officials implemented expressway plansthat destroyed enormous amounts of low-income, inner-city housing, especially in black
neighborhoods, where land acquisition costs were generally cheaper and where political
opposition was minimal, particularly in southern cities. State highway officials and local elites
often seized opportunities to carry out racial agendas. In every region of the nation, theexpressways that penetrated the central cities and the inner beltways common in interstateplanning found their easiest route through black communities.
Thus, postwar urban expressway building brought massive housing destruction and asubsequent racial restructuring of the central cities, as those displaced sought relocation
housing. Some large-scale, high-rise public housing projects of the 1950s, such as the Robert
Taylor Homes in Chicago or the Pruitt-Igoe Project in St. Louis, absorbed some dislocatedfamilies, but highways and urban renewal were destroying a great deal more housing than
was being built. In some places, public housing construction slowed or ground to a halt in thepolitically reactionary 1950s, when such projects were considered by some a dangerous formof socialism. The new, lily-white suburbs that sprouted in the postwar automobile era wereunwelcoming to blacks. Essentially, most uprooted African American families found new
housing in nearby low- and middle-income white residential areas, which themselves wereexperiencing the transition from white to black. The forced relocation of blacks from centralcity areas triggered a massive spatial reorganization of urban residential space. The expressway
building of the 1950s and 1960s, then, ultimately helped produce the much larger, more
spatially isolated, and more intensely segregated second ghettos characteristic of the latetwentieth century.

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Notes
1.

Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-196(New York, 1975), 222. For general background on the interstate system, see Mark H. Rose,
Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941-1956 (Lawrence, Kan., 1979; Bruce E. Seely, Building
the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987); Richard O.
Davies, The Age of Asphalt: The Automobile, The Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan
America (Philadelphia, 1975); Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways,
Transforming American Life (New York, 1997).

2.

National Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American City (Washington, D.C.,
1969), 81; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Public Works, Study of Compensation
and Assistance for Persons Affected by Real Property Acquisition in Federal and Federally
Assisted Programs (Washington, D.C., 1965), 24, 26, 105; Michael Sumichrast and Norman
Farquar, Demolition and Other Factors in Housing Replacement Demand (Washington, D.C.,
1967), 47-48, 76; Alan A. Altshuler, The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1965), 339.

3.

National Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American City, 91.

4.

John P. McCollum to Albert M. Cole, May 23, 1957, Housing and Home Finance Agency
Records (hereafter cited as HHFA Records), RG 207, Subject Correspondence Files, Albert Cole,
Administrator, 1953-58, Box 18, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

5.

William H. Claire, "Urban Renewal and Transportation," Traffic Quarterly, 13 (July 1959), 417;
Thomas H. MacDonald, "The Case for Urban Expressways," American City, 62 (June 1947), 9293; Robert Moses, "Slums and City Planning," Atlantic Monthly, 175 (January 1945), 63-68;
James W. Follin, “Coordination of Urban Renewal with the Urban Highway Program Offers
Major Economies in Cost and Time,” Urban Land, 15 (December 1956), 3-6; James W. Rouse,“Transportation and the Future of Our Cities,” Urban Land, 22 (July-August 1963), 7-10.

6.

On the second ghetto, see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in
Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), especially 1-39; Raymond A. Mohl, "Making theSecond Ghetto in Metropolitan Miami, 1940-1960," Journal of Urban History, 21 (March
1995), 395-427; Charles Casey-Leininger, “Making the Second Ghetto in Cincinnati: Avondale,
1925-70, in Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., ed., Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in
Cincinnati, 1820-1970 (Urbana, Ill., 1993), 232-257.

7.

W. Stull Holt, The Bureau of Public Roads: Its History, Activities, and Organization (Baltimore,
1923); Seely, Building the American Highway System; Richard Weingraff, “Broader Ribbons
Across the Land,” Public Roads (June 1996), 1-8

8.

Paul Barrett, “Public Policy and Private Choice: Mass Transit and the Automobile in
Chicago between the Wars,” Business History Review, 49 (Winter 1975), 473-497; Mark I.
Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation,
1900-1940 (Philadelphia, 1981), 153; Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York,1940); David St. Clair, “The Automobile Industry’s Interests in Interstate Highway Legislation,
1930-1956,” Essays in Economic and Business History, 3 (1984), 160-173.

9.

Henry A. Wallace to Franklin D. Roosevelt, February 13, 1939, copy in Bureau of Public Roads
Records (hereafter cited as BPR Records), RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box 4107, National
Archives II, College Park, Maryland; "Report of the Chief of BPR on the Feasibility of a System ofSuperhighways," undated typescript [1939], BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box
1949; “Roads Report Does Not Favor Toll Supported Superhighway,” U.S. Department of

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

29
Agriculture, News Release, April 27, 1939, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box4108; U.S., Bureau of Public Roads, Toll Roads and Free Roads, U.S. House of Representatives,
76th Congress, 1st Session, 1939, House Document No. 272. The Department of Agriculture
initially administered the Bureau of Public Roads, but in 1939 the BPR was transferred to the
newly established Federal Works Agency. During the Truman administration, BPR was shiftedagain, this time to the Department of Commerce.
10.

Wallace to Roosevelt, February 13, 1939, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box
4107.

11.

United States, National Interregional Highway Committee, Interregional Highways (Washington,
D.C., 1944); Thomas H. MacDonald to Albert B. Chandler, with accompanying notes,
November 18, 1943, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box 1892; Report onLegislative Intent with Respect to the Location of Interstate Routes in Urban Areas, U.S. Bureauof the Budget and Department of Commerce, September 1959, mimeo, in Lee Mertz
Collection, Virginia Highway and Transportation Research Council, Box G, File 62, University ofVirginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

12.

Thomas H. MacDonald, "Proposed Interregional Highway System as It Affects Cities," January
21, 1943, in Thomas H. MacDonald Speeches, U.S. Department of Transportation Library,
Washington, D.C. See also Thomas H. MacDonald, “The Urban Traffic Problem,” Annual
Meeting of the Councillors of the American Automobile Association (Washington, D.C., 1939),
100-106; Thomas H. MacDonald, "The Case for Urban Expressways," American City, 62 (June1947), 92-93; Thomas H. MacDonald, “Improved Methods of Transport and Their
Significance,” Scientific Monthly, 66 (January 1948), 57-61; Thomas H. MacDonald, "Future of
the Highways," U.S. News and World Report, 29 (December 29, 1950), 30-33.

13.

Thomas H. MacDonald, "The Federal-Aid Highway Program and Its Relation to Cities,"
September 11, 1947, speech typescript, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, 19121959, Box 1942.

14.

Thomas H. MacDonald, "The Case for Urban Expressways," American City, 62 (June 1947), 9293, quotation on p. 92.

15.

R. G. Tugwell to Thomas H. MacDonald, December 19, 1939, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified
Central Files, Box 4104; Joseph Barnett to H. E. Hilts, July 24, 1947, with attached "Minutes of
Meeting on Rehousing," July 2, 1947, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box 2223;
Helen Combes to Joseph Barnett, October 16, 1947, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central
Files, Federal Aid System, Box 1942; "Resume of the First Meeting of the Board of Urban
Consultants to the Public Roads Administration," June 10 and 11, 1947, with attached "Surveyof the Methods of Operation for Urban Federal-Aid Highway Projects," June 1, 1947, BPR
Records, RG 30, Reports of Highway Studies, Box 19.

16.

Joseph Barnett to H. E. Hilts, January 4, 1950, BPR Records, RG 30, Records of Master Plans
Branch, Box 1; C. N. Connor to H. E. Hilts, February 7, 1950, BPR Records, RG 30, Records ofMaster Plans Branch, Box 1; Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, 226.

17.

Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, 226; Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941-1956(Lawrence, Kan., 1979), 60-62; Highway Needs of the National Defense: Message from the
President of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1949); and, on the postwar housing
legislation, Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform During the Truman Administration (Columbia,
Mo., 1966).

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18.

Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, "Briefing Paper: Metropolitan Areas,"
April 25, 1960, mimeo, pp. 3-5, in Robert E. Merriam Papers, Box 1, Dwight D. Eisenhower
Presidential Library (hereafter cited as DDE Library), Abilene, Kansas. On the postwar suburban
phenomenon, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the UnitedStates (New York, 1985), 231-271.

19.

Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, "Briefing Paper: Metropolitan Areas,"
pp. 6-7, 16-17; Gary T. Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and the Interstate System," Southern
California Law Review, 49 (March 1976), 493-495.

20.

Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Problems, "Briefing Paper: Metropolitan
Problems," pp. 7-12.

21.

Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways,1776-1976: A History of the Federal-Aid
Program (Washington, D.C., 1976), 466-485; Rose Interstate, 41-54, 69-94; Louis M.
Kohlmeier, Jr., The Regulators: Watchdog Agencies and the Public Interest (New York, 1969),
152-159. For a sampling of advocacy positions on a new highway program, see John V.
Lawrence (American Trucking Associations, Inc.) to Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 5, 1955,
Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers (hereafter cited as DDE papers), General Files, Box 1233, Dwight
D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas; Andrew J. Sordoni (American Automobile Association)
to Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 5, 1955, DDE Papers, General Files, Box 1233; Patrick Healy,Jr. (American Municipal Association) to Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 12, 1955, DDE
Papers, General Files, Box 1233; George W. Anderson (American Transit Association) to
President's Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, October 25, 1954, DDE
Papers, Clay Committee, Box 1; James Cope, Wasted, $3 Billions Yearly — We Can't Afford It:
A Positive Program of Highway Building (Detroit: Automotive Manufacturers Association, 1953),
pamphlet, copy sent to President Eisenhower, in DDE Papers, White House Central Files, Box
727.

22.

Pete Davies, American Road: The Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of theMotor Age (New York, 2002), 214; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (New York,1984), 250; Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956(New York, 1963), 548; Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road
and Rail in the American Century (New York, 1994), 181. Even before Eisenhower discovered
the autobahns, in the mid-1930s Thomas H. MacDonald of the BPR traveled to Germany,studied the newly constructed German highways, and wrote glowingly of Germany's roadachievement. See Thomas H. MacDonald, "Looking Toward the Highway Future," American
Highways, 16 (January 1937), 4-7.

23.

Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 501-502, 548; Arthur F. Burns, Prosperity without Inflation(New York, 1957), 69-70; Raymond J. Saulnier, Constructive Years: The U.S. Economy Under
Eisenhower (Lanham, Md., 1991), 74, 127, 137, 233; Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President,
250.

24.

For the Clay Committee Report, see National Highway Program: Message from the President of
the United States Relative to a National Highway Program (Washington, D.C., 1955). On thepolitics of the highway act, see Rose, Interstate, 69-94; Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building
the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York, 1997), 95-123; and, for acontemporary discussion, Theodore H. White, "Where Are Those New Roads?" Collier's, 137(January 6, 1956), 45-51.

25.

Daniel P. Moynihan, "New Roads And Urban Chaos," The Reporter, 22 (April 14, 1960), 13-20,
quotation on p. 14; Wilfred Owen, Cities in the Motor Age (New York, 1959), 31-33.

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

31
26.

John T. Howard, "The Impact of the Federal Highway Program," Planning 1957: Selected
Papers from the National Planning Conference, San Francisco, California, March 17-21, 1957
(Chicago, 1957), 35-41, quotations on pp. 39, 40; James M. Lister, "The Impact of the Federal
Highway Program," ibid., 41-45, quotation on p. 42; Grady Clay, "The Impact of the Federal
Highway Program," ibid., 49-56, quotation on p. 49.

27.

"Statement of Robert Moses," May 9, 1955, National Highway Program: Hearings before theCommittee on Public Works, House of Representatives, 84th Congress, 1st session(Washington, D.C., 1955), 402-409; C. W. Phillips to Engineering Files, December 9, 1959, BPR
Records, RG 30, Bragdon Committee Files, Box 1614; Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and theInterstate System," 483.

28.

Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and the Interstate System," 485.

29.

Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 127-128; Moynihan, "New Roads and Urban Chaos," 16;
Saulnier, Constructive Years, 8-9, 23-24, 231-232.

30.

Arthur F. Burns to Roger W. Jones, August 2, 1956, with copy to Gerald D. Morgan, DDE
Papers, Gerald D. Morgan Files, Box 14, File: Housing and Home Finance, DDE Library; Saulnier,Constructive Years, 26-35. Gerald D. Morgan worked in President Eisenhower's Congressional
liaison office.

31.

"Minutes of the First Meeting of the Ad Hoc Interagency Committee on Metropolitan Area
Problems," October 30, 1957, Merriam Papers, Box 1, DDE Library.

32.

"Minutes of the Third Meeting of the Ad Hoc Interagency Committee on Metropolitan Area
Problems," June 16, 1960, Merriam Papers, Box 1, DDE Library; "Minutes of the Fourth
Meeting of the Ad Hoc Interagency Committee on Metropolitan Area Problems," November
18, 1960, Merriam Papers, Box 1, DDE Library; Staff Paper, "Coordination of Federal
Metropolitan Area Development Activities," December 19, 1960, with attached undated
statement, "Extension of Workable Program Requirement," Merriam Papers, Box 1, DDE
Library; Robert E. Merriam to David Bell and Frederick Dutton, January 17, 1961, Merriam
Papers, Box 1, DDE Library; Bart Hague to John D. Bragdon, April 30, 1959, John S. Bragdon
Papers, Box 36, DDE Library.

33.

Dwight D. Eisenhower to John S. Bragdon, August 12, 1955, John S. Bragdon Papers, Box 2,
DDE Library; Deming to Bragdon and Meek, December 16, 1955, Bragdon Papers, Box 2, DDE
Library; John S. Bragdon to Staff, July 25, 1956, Bragdon Papers, Box 2, DDE Library; Ernest
Mickel, "Taking Stock: The President's Public Works Coordinator," Architectural Record (April
1956), 32, 366.

34.

John S. Bragdon to Council of Economic Advisors, "The National Highway Program and Tolls,"
March 31, 1955, Bragdon Papers, Box 37, DDE Library; John S. Bragdon to Council of Economic
Advisors, "Toll Roads," April 22, 1955, Bragdon Papers, Box 37, DDE Library; John S. Bragdon
to Arthur F. Burns, "Modernizing the Nation's Highways," November 30, 1955, Bragdon
Papers, Box 37, DDE Library; A. K. Branham to John S. Bragdon, "Mass Transportation,'
February 9, 1960, Bragdon Papers, Box 39, DDE Library; William K. Brussat to John S. Bragdon,"Use of Interstate System as State Toll Roads," April 30, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box 36, DDE
Library; William K. Brussat to John S. Bragdon and Floyd D. Peterson, May 18, 1960, Bragdon
Papers, Box 30, DDE Library.

35.

Bragdon to Eisenhower, June 17, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box 36, DDE Library; Lewis, Divided
Highways, 145-153. On Eisenhower's presidential style, see Fred I. Greenstein, The HiddenHand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York, 1982).

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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36.

John S. Bragdon, "Memorandum for the Record," November 30, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box
40, DDE Library; Dwight D. Eisenhower to John S. Bragdon, July 2, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box
41, DDE Library; Bart Hague to John S. Bragdon, April 30, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box 36, DDE
Library.

37.

John D. Bragdon to Bertram D. Tallamy, February 9, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box 36, DDE Library;
Bertram D. Tallamy to John S. Bragdon, February 18, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box 36, DDE
Library; Frederick H. Mueller to John S. Bragdon, October 28, 1959, Bragdon Papers, Box 40,
DDE Library.

38.

For a sampling of mayoral letters protesting possible elimination of urban interstate routes, see
Ben West (Nashville) to Dwight D. Eisenhower, August 10, 1959, DDE Papers, General Files, Box1232, DDE Library; Charles C. Dail (San Diego) to Eisenhower, August 11, 1959, ibid.; William
B. Hartsfield (Atlanta) to Eisenhower, August 17, 1959, ibid.; Clifford E. Rishell (Oakland) toEisenhower, August 14, 1959, ibid.; Richard Y. Batterton (Denver) to Eisenhower, August 17,
1959, ibid.; John W. Yager (Toledo) to Eisenhower, August 17, 1959, ibid. For contemporarycommentary on the issue in the engineering world, see "Too Many Frills on Interstate?"
Engineering News Record, (October 1, 1959), 21.

39.

For the Yellow Book, see U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads, General
Location of National System of Interstate Highways, Including All Additional Routes at Urban
Areas Designated in September 1955 (Washington, D.C., 1955), copy in Merriam Papers, Box 7,
DDE Library. For two different accounts of the April 1960 meeting, see Lewis, Divided
Highways, 151-152; Lee Mertz, "The Bragdon Committee," unpublished manuscript, 33-37.

40.

Suzanne Farkas, Urban Lobbying: Mayors in the Federal Arena (New York, 1971), 62.

41.

Emmett Welch to Floyd D. Peterson, "President Eisenhower's Statements Regarding theInterstate Highway Program," July 12, 1960, Bragdon Papers, Box 39, DDE Library.

42.

Burns to Jones, August 2, 1956, DDE Papers, Gerald D. Morgan Files, Box 14, DDE Library.

43.

Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (New York, 1964), 244; George B. Nesbitt,"Relocating Negroes from Urban Slum Clearance Sites," Land Economics, 25 (August 1949),
285; George B. Nesbitt, "Break Up the Black Ghetto?" The Crisis, 56 (February 1949), 48-52.

44.

Victor Gruen, "The City in the Automobile Age," Perspectives, 16 (Summer 1956), 48; Hal
Burton, The City Fights Back (New York, 1954), 78.

45.

James W. Rouse, "Will Downtown Face Up to Its Future?" Urban Land, 16 (February 1957), 4;
James H. Scheuer, "Highways and People: The Housing Impact of the Highway Program," inThe New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region, Technical Bulletin no. 31(Washington, D.C., 1957); James W. Follin, "Coordination of Urban Renewal with the Urban
Highway Program Offers Major Economies in Cost and Time," Urban Land, 15 (December
1956), 3. 5.

46.

Charles M. Upham to President Truman, February 16, 1949, and accompanying "Resolution of
the American Road Builders' Association," BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, 19121950, Box 183; "Planning for the Postwar Period: A Report of the Committee on Postwar
Planning of the American Concrete Institute," n.d. (c. 1943), BPR Records, RG 30, Classified
Central Files, Box 1892.

47.

Automotive Safety Foundation, What Freeways Mean to Your City (Washington, D.C., 1956),
32; Floyd I. Theil, "Social Effects of Modern Highway Transportation," Highway Research Board

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

33
Bulletin, No. 327 (1962), 6-7; Gary T. Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and the Interstate System,"Southern California Law Review, 49 (March 1976), 484-485.
48.

Joseph Barnett, "Express Highway Planning in Metropolitan Areas," Transactions of theAmerican Society of Civil Engineers, 112 (1947), 650; Robert Moses to Thomas H. MacDonald,
June 11, 1946, BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box 2662; Statement of Robert
Moses, Hearings, President's Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, October 7,
1954, pp. 47-51, in BPR Records, RG 30, Records Relating to National Highway and Defense
Highway Programs, 1940-1955, Box 1; Goddard, GettingThere, 182.

49.

G. Donald Kennedy, A Comprehensive Plan of Motorways for Detroit (Lansing, Mich., 1941),
14-15, copy in BPR Records, RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box 2448; Statement of Albert E.
Cobo, Hearings, President's Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, October 8,
1954, pp. 249-275, in BPR Records, RG 30, Records Relating to National Highway and Defense
Highway Programs, 1940-1955, Box 1; Lynn Atkinson, "Freeways Solve Two Problems,"
Western Construction News (January 1943), 20-25, quotation on p. 22, reprint in BPR Records,
RG 30, Classified Central Files, Box 1944; William B. Blaser, "Right-of-Way and Its Effect on
Design," Proceedings of the Urban Highway Design Conference, February 13-17, 1950, mimeo,
in BPR Records, RG 30, Reports of Highway Studies, Box 19; L. P. Cookingham, "Expressways
and the Central Business District," American Planning and Civic Annual (1954), 140-146. For
similar views, see “Build Expressways Through Slum Areas,” American City, 66 (November
1951), 125; John Clarkeson, “Urban Expressway Location,” Traffic Quarterly, 7 (April 1953),
252-260; Harry W. Lochner, “Integration of Expressways with Other Urban Elements,” Traffic
Quarterly, 7 (July 1953), 346-352.

50.

An extensive literature substantiates these generalizations. See, for example, Jon C. Teaford,
The Rough Road to Urban Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore,1990); Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities(Cambridge, Mass, 1989), 15-37; Joe R. Feagin, The Urban Real Estate Game: Playing
Monopoly with Real Money (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1983), 103-121; A. Q. Mowbray, Road to
Ruin (Philadelphia, 1969); Lawrence M. Friedman, Government and Slum Housing: A Century
of Frustration (Chicago, 1968), 147-172.

51.

U.S. Census of Population, 1940, Tables 35 and 36; U.S. Census of population, 1960, Tables 44
and 45; Raymond A. Mohl, "Race and Housing in the Postwar City: An Explosive History,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 94 (Spring 2001), 8-30; Karl E. Taeuber and Alma
F. Taeuber, Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change (Chicago,1965).

52.

Schwartz, “Urban Freeways and the Interstate System,” 485.

53.

Wilbur Smith and Associates, Major Highway Plan for Metropolitan Dade County, Florida,
Prepared for State Road Department of Florida and dade County Commission (New Haven,1956), 33-44; “What About the Negroes Uprooted by Expressway?” Miami Herald, March 5,
1957; Miami Times, March 16, 1957; Paul C. Watt, “Relocation of Persons Displaced by
Highway Construction,” Administrative Report, Dade County Manager’s Office, February 13,
1959; Raymond A. Mohl, “Race and Space in the Modern City: Interstate-95 and the Black
Community in Miami,” in Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy inTwentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993), 100-158.

54.

Richard J. Whalen, "The American Highway: Do We Know Where We're Going?" Saturday
Evening Post (December 14, 1968), 22-27, 54-64; Lisa Hirsch, “Roads,” City, 2 (SeptemberOctober 1968), 27-34; John E. Seley, "The Kink in Nashville's Interstate-40," in John E. Seley,Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

34
The Politics of Public-Facility Planning (Lexington, Mass, 1983), 57-66; Ben Kelley, The Pavers
and the Paved (New York, 1971), 97-107; Helen Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax (Garden City,
N.Y., 1970), 177-180.
55.

"Bias Is Charged in Highway Suit," New York Times, November 27, 1967; Alan S. Boyd toFlournoy A. Coles, Jr., April 8, 1968, Federal Highway Administration Records (hereafter cited as
FHWA Records), RG 406, Central Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 131.

56.

Priscilla Dunhill, "An Expressway Named Destruction," Architectural Forum, 126 (March 1967),
54-59; Richard O. Baumbach, Jr., and William E. Borah, The Second Battle of New Orleans: A
History of the Vieux Carre Riverfront-Expressway Controversy (Tusacaloosa, Ala., 1981); Lewis,
Divided Highways, 179-210.

57.

Vieux Carre Courier, January 22, 1965; Claiborne Avenue Design Team, I-10 Multi-Use Study(New Orleans, 1976).

58.

George W. Curry and the Property Owners Committee, A Petition Appeal, April 28, 1960, BPR
Records, RG 30, General Correspondence, 1912-1965, Box 1665; Berl I. Bernhard to Hyman
Bookbinder, June 29, 1961, BPR Records, RG 30, General Correspondence, 1912-1965, Box
1664; John W. Roxborough, Memorandum for Record, June 23, 1961, BPR Records, RG 30,
General Correspondence, 1912-1965, Box 1664; Ralph D. Abernathy to John F. Kennedy,
October 3, 1961, telegram, BPR Records, RG 30, General Correspondence, Box 1664; SamuelEnglehardt to [Alabama Governor] John Patterson, October 19, 1961, Samuel Englehardt
Papers, Box 13, File 6, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.

59.

Lala Palmer to Alabama State Highway Department, April 11, 1960, telegram, BPR Records, RG
30, General Correspondence, 1912-1965, Box 1665; Joe Davis to Luther Hodges, February 17,
1961, BPR Records, RG 30, General Correspondence, 1912-1965, Box 1664.

60.

James Hutchinson to John Sparkman, November 3, 1963, FHWA Records, RG 406, Federal-Aid
System Correspondence, Box 3; Rex M. Whitton to John Sparkman, November 20, 1963,
FHWA Records, RG 406, Federal-Aid System Correspondence, Box 3.

61.

Franchot Brown to Alan S. Boyd, April 2, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, General Subject Files,
1967-1968, Box 13; “Bull St. Extension Protested,” Columbia State, February 6, 1968, and“Bias Is Charged Highway Chiefs,” Columbia State, April 4, 1968, clippings in FHWA Records,
RG 406, General Subject Files, 1967-1968, Box 13.

62.

Steven H. Leleiko to Lowell K. Bridwell, December 4, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, F. C. Turner
Files, Box 7.

63.

Ibid.

64.

Richard Leverone to Lowell K. Bridwell, May 16, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, L. K. Bridwell
Files, Box 11.

65.

Charlotte Observer, May 14, May 15, 1968, clippings, in FHWA Records, RG 406, L. K. Bridwell
Files, Box 7.

66.

Richard Leverone to Lowell K. Bridwell, May 21, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, L. K. Bridwell
Files, Box 11.

67.

Aultshuler, The City Planning Process, 17-83; F. James Davis, "The Effects of a Freeway
Displacement on Racial Housing Segregation in a Northern City," Phylon, 26 (Fall 1965), 209215; Frieden and Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc., 28-29.

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

35
68.

Lowell K. Bridwell to Alan S. Boyd, February 5, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, Central
Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 129.

69.

F. C. Turner to Lowell K. Bridwell, July 19, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, Central
Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 140; Lowell K. Bridwell to Gordon C. Luce, March 20, 1968,
FHWA Records, RG 406, Central Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 140; Kathleen Armstrong,"Litigating the Freeway Revolt: Keith v. Volpe,'" Ecology Law Journal, 2 (Winter 1972), 761799.

70.

Samuel Kaplan, The Dream Deferred: People, Politics, and Planning in Suburbia (New York,
1976), 92.

71.

Mohl, "Race and Space in the Modern City," 135.

72.

Mark H. Rose and Bruce E. Seely, "Getting the Interstate Built: Road Engineers and the
Implementation of Public Policy, 1955-1985," Journal of Policy History, 2 (1990), 37.

73.

Patricia A. House, "Relocation of Families Displaced by Expressway Development: Milwaukee
Case Study," Land Economics, 46 (February 1970), 75-78.

74.

"Toward the Postindustrial City: 1930-1980," in David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski,
eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington, 1987), xlix-li.

75.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge,
Mass., 2000), 23; Loic J. D. Wacquant, “The Ghetto, the State, ands the New Capitalist
Economy,” Dissent, 36 (Fall 1989), 513.

76.

Ronald H. Bayor, "Roads to Racial Segregation: Atlanta in the Twentieth Century," Journal of
Urban History, 15 (November 1988), 3-21; Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban
Expansion (Philadelphia, 2001), 91-93.

77.

Washington Post, November 26, 1967, Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race,
Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore, 1995), 165-169; B.
Levey and J. Levey, “Lost Highways: The Plan to Pave Washington and the People Who Stopped
It,” Washington Post Magazine (November 26, 2000), 10-17, 24-26.

78.

Louise Campbell, “Roads: In Baltimore, New Options Are Opened and New Alliances Formed,”
City, 2 (September-October 1968), 30-34; David Allison, “The Battle Lines of Baltimore,”Innovation Magazine (July 1969), 9-21; Judson Gooding, “How Baltimore Tamed the Highway
Monster,” Fortune, 81 (February 1970), 128-129, 152, 157; Michael P. McCarthy, “Baltimore’s
Highway Wars Revisited,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 93 (Summer 1998), 137-157.

79.

Michelle Osborne, “The Crosstown Is Dead: Long Live the Crosstown?” Architectural Forum,
135 (October 1971), 38-41; David Clow, “House Divided: Philadelphia’s Controversial
Crosstown Expressway,” Working Papers Series, Society for American City and Regional
Planning History, 1990.

80.

Elliott Arthur Pavlos, "Chicago's Crosstown: A Case Study in Urban Expressways," in Stephen
Gale and Eric G. Moore, eds., The Manipulated City (Chicago, 1975), 255-261; Milton Pikarsky,“Joint Development Concept: Chicago Crosstown Expressway,” Highway Research Record, 220(1968), 17-19; Glen Holt and Dominic Pacyga, Chicago, A Historical Guide to the
Neighborhoods: The Loop and the South Side (Chicago, 1979), 10, 117, 119.

81.

R. Miller, “Expressway Blight,” Architectural Forum, 111 (October 1959), 159-163; Kenneth R.
Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making: Political Processes of Urban Freeway

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

36
Controversies (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 258-264; Alan Lupo, et al., Rites of Way: The Politics
of Transportation in Boston and the U.S. City (Boston, 1971); A. Sloan, Citizen Participation inTransportation Planning: The Boston Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).
82.

Sidney Goldstein and Basil Zimmer, Residential Displacement and Resettlement of the Aged
(Providence, 1960); Basil Zimmer, Rebuilding Cities: The Effects of Displacement and Relocation
on Small Business (Chicago, 1964).

83.

Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, 1974),
839-894; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (NewYork, 1982), 290-312; Jill Jonnes, We're Still Here: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the SouthBronx (Boston, 1986), 117-126.

84.

David Hodge, "Social Impacts of Urban Transportation Decisions: Equity Issues," in Susan
Hanson, ed., The Geography of Urban Transportation (New York, 1986), 303.

85.

On San Francisco, see Joseph Rodriguez, City Against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an American
Metropolis (Westport, Conn., 1999), 21-46; William H. Lathrop, Jr., "The San Francisco Freeway
Revolt," Transportation Engineering Journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 97(February 1971), 133-143. On the freeway revolt generally, see "The Revolt Against Big City
Expressways," U.S. News and World Report, 52 (January 1, 1962), 48-51; James Nathan Miller,"We Must Stop Choking Our Cities," Reader's Digest, 89 (August 1966), 37-41; PriscillaDunhill, "When Highways and Cities Collide," City, 1 (July 1967), 48-54; "The War Over Urban
Expressways," Business Week (March 11, 1967), 4-5; Jack Linville, "Troubled Urban
Interstates," Nation's Cities, 8 (December 1970), 8-11; Juan Cameron, "How the Interstate
Changed the Face of the Nation," Fortune, 84 (July 1971), 78-81, 124-125; William Shannon,“The Untrustworthy Highway Fund,” New York Times Magazine (October 15, 1972), 31, 120132; and, for a general critique of the automobile culture, Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How
the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York, 1997).

86.

Raymond A. Mohl, "Federal Highway Policy and Housing Impacts, 1930s to the 1960s"(unpublished research report for Poverty and Race Research Action Council, December 31,
1996), 60-69.

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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Stop the Road:
Freeway Revolts in American Cities
Raymond A. Mohl
University of Alabama at Birmingham
In the 1960s, the United States seemed to be a nation locked in turmoil. Political, social, andcultural conflict rocked the country year after year. The Vietnam War deeply divided the nation.
College students in large numbers protested the draft and marched against the war. New leftpolitical action dominated university campuses and city streets. Racial conflict stirred passions,first in the civil rights movement, then followed by race riots in the urban ghettos anddemands for black power. The divisive identity politics and alternative movements of the era
shattered the seeming political and cultural consensus of the 1950s. The period was marked
by the emergence of the women's movement, gay liberation, environmental protection,"brown power" and the farmworker movement, the Native American movement, calls forwhite ethnic power, and various other splinter or special-interest group activities. Drugs, sex,
and rock and roll music absorbed the attention of young people and took on political
overtones. The popular slogan of the day, "Power to the People," meant different things todifferent people and groups. Only in the early 1970s, after Watergate and the U.S. pullout
from Vietnam, did the passionate movements of the Sixties seem to dissipate and run out ofsteam. However, most analyses of this turbulent period have ignored one powerful movementof the era that generated considerable heat and that spread from city to city — the so-called
Freeway Revolt.1
Beginning in the late 1950s, a nascent Freeway Revolt emerged in San Francisco. The
movement accelerated nationally in the 1960s, as interstate highway construction began
penetrating urban America and knocking down neighborhoods. Pushing expressways throughthe social and physical fabric of American cities inevitably resulted in housing demolition on alarge scale, the destruction of entire communities, severe relocation problems, and various
negative environmental consequences. Once homeowners, business people, and community
groups became aware of the "concrete monsters" rolling through the cities, demolishing
everything in their paths, opposition movements sprang up to defend specific pieces of urban
turf. The struggle pitted grass-roots citizen organizations against the state and federal highway
engineers and administrators who made the final decisions on interstate routes. In some cities,
freeway construction coincided with black political empowerment and the rising civil rights
movement, developments that took on added significance when black neighborhoods weretargeted for destruction by the highwaymen. In Washington, D.C., for instance, expressway
issues became racialized by 1967, when a black militant group distributed flyers demanding"No more white highways through black bedrooms." In other cities, protecting parklands,
schools and churches, historic districts, and sensitive environmental areas stimulated citizen

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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movements to "Stop the Road. At some point in the 1960s, then, many Americans came tofocus on the negative consequences of highway building, as opposed to the demonstrable
advantages of modern, high-speed, express highways serving a nation addicted toautomobiles and to mobility."2
The timing, progress, and outcome of the emerging Freeway Revolt differed from city to city.
With the exception of San Francisco, in cities where the highway builders moved quickly in thelate 1950s to build the urban interstates, the inner beltways and radials, opposition nevermaterialized or was weakly expressed.3 In southern cities, where blacks had little politicalleverage at the time, building a freeway through the black community was not only the mostcommon choice, but the choice that generally had the support of the dominant white
community. Where freeway construction was delayed into the 1960s, affected neighborhoods,
institutions, and businesses had time to organize against the highwaymen. In some cases, theysuccessfully forced the adoption of alternative routes, and they even shut down some specificinterstate projects permanently. In many cities, freeway opponents targeted urban renewal
programs as well: highway builders and urban redevelopers often worked together anddivided up new city spaces acquired by eminent domain, allocating some land for highways
and the rest for redevelopment (usually not for housing, however). In their writings, influential
urbanists such as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and others provided an intellectual critique ofsuch urban redevelopment schemes. Their appeals for preservation of small-scaleneighborhood life in the modern city resonated with the freeway fighters, buttressing the
Freeway Revolt. Some early academic critics of the interstate system also surfaced by 1960,
including urbanist Daniel P. Moynihan, who in an influential article in The Reporter criticizedurban interstates for their lack of comprehensive planning and potentially damaging impact onurban life and metropolitan structure.4
As a collection of discrete, bottom-up movements beginning at the neighborhood level, theFreeway Revolt shares many aspects of Sixties counter-cultural and change-inducing activity.
Typical of the time was rejection of top-down decision making, the normal practice of the
highway establishment in routing and building highways. In a sense, the federal government
itself had partially contributed to rejection of elite policy-making by promoting "community
action" as an essential ingredient in the so-called War on Poverty, a contemporaneous Sixties
undertaking of major proportions. Anti-freeway groups mirrored this sort of Sixties-stylepolitical action, but they also provided a model for the subsequent "backyard revolution" that
increasingly came to shape urban politics and policy-making in the final decades of thetwentieth century. In retrospect, the Freeway Revolt should be interpreted as an integral aspectof Sixties-era protest politics. "Power to the People" in this case meant citizen participation in
important decision-making on expressway routes and urban policy. However, the citizen armyof homeowners and neighborhood groups came up against an inflexible bureaucratic force ofstate and federal highway engineers and administrators reluctant to yield professional
authority to popular protesters. Only when decision-making on controversial interstate routes

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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became politicized and subject to litigation in the late 1960s and after did freeway revolters
achieve a measure of success and satisfaction.5
When city people discovered that new expressways were bearing down on their homes and 53
neighborhoods, they had few alternatives. One such choice, increasingly common in big cities
in the Sixties, was organization, opposition, and political coalition-building. But each city was
unique in many respects, and the outcomes were not always the same. In Miami, despiteenormous neighborhood destruction in the central city black community, expressway
opposition initially remained muted, pushed only by a few housing reformers. In Baltimore, amajor interracial, cross-class movement representing over thirty community groups successfully
challenged multiple freeways that would have bisected dozens of neighborhoods. In New
Orleans, white preservationists ultimately staved off a planned riverfront expressway thatwould have damaged the historic French Quarter, but they cared little about an alternate
expressway a mile away that pushed a stable and long-established black neighborhood intoquick decline. In other cities, the Freeway Revolt had still other outcomes.6
There were good reasons for such diverse outcomes. Successful Freeway Revolts generally had
at least four commonalities. First, persistent neighborhood activism and extensive cross-city,
cross-class, and interracial alliances were needed to bring a high level of attention to thefreeway problem over a sustained period of time. Second, such movements needed strong
support from at least some local politicians and from influential newspapers and journalists.
Third, legal action over highway routing was a necessary ingredient; litigation sometimes
delayed land acquisition and construction for years, but without such legal action state
highway departments could move ahead with dispatch. And, in the final analysis, the freeway
revolters often needed a final shut-down decision from the courts or from highest levels of the
highway bureaucracy or, after the early 1970s, from state governors. Grass-roots, populist
struggle against the urban interstates was crucial, of course, but without these otheringredients in the story there was a very good chance that the freeway would get built anyway.

The Freeway and the City
Passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956 set the stage for dramatic change in urban
America. During the previous two decades or so, big-city mayors, civil engineers, urban
planners, public works officials, and downtown business and real estate interests all envisioned
new urban expressways that would revive the declining urban core. "Saving" the central
business district became a primary goal of the urban elites by the 1940s. Similarly, over many
years, state and federal highway engineers developed their own visions of technologicallyefficient freeways that would speed autos and trucks to their destinations, by-passing themonster traffic jams that increasingly clogged downtown streets. In the late 1930s, theseconceptions of an urban freeway future coincided with new urban imagery inspired by thestunningly popular "Futurama" exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939 New YorkWorld's Fair. Futurama portrayed the "Cities of Tomorrow" and featured modernizedPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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expressways speeding traffic through great skyscraper cities at one hundred miles per hour —all part of a contemplated free-flowing "National Motorway System" connecting all cities withpopulations of more than one hundred thousand. Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes used
the Futurama exhibit and his subsequent book, Magic Motorways (1940), to promote theadvance of technology and link the nation's urban future to the automobile and the freeway.
Futurama seemingly had the desired effect. The GM exhibit, one scholar has suggested,"stimulated public thinking in favor of massive urban freeway building." Even Thomas H.
MacDonald, director of the federal Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) adopted Futurama imagery inlater years, often suggesting that "the future of America lies on the roadways of to-morrow."7
These varied freeway visions, and many others as well, anticipated that central cities would
have to be at least partially restructured to accommodate the automobile and the now
thought essential high-speed traffic arteries. Some suggested that cutting boldly through theurban fabric, as Baron Haussmann had done in late nineteenth-century Paris, was the only way
to reorganize urban space for the modern era. Arguing this approach, the influential Swiss art
historian Sigfred Giedion, in his classic book, Space, Time and Architecture (1941) contended
that "the anarchy of the motorcar" had led to "the unworkable disorder of today's giant
cities." Giedion found inspiration in the work of Haussmann, who in transforming Paris"slashed into the body of the city . . . with saber strokes. Cleanly he drew the blade, cutting
keen, straight thoroughfares through the congested districts, solving his traffic problem bysingle daring thrusts." In Giedion's admittedly romanticized vision, these new automobile
arteries would help to rationally and efficiently restructure the modern city into its component
parts, such as residential, business, industrial, and so on. It is not clear how much influence theidiosyncratic Giedion had on highway engineers at the time, but some of his ideas graduallyfiltered into the urban planning profession. In a 1950 speech, for instance, San Francisco
planning director Paul Oppermann noted the importance of expressways to the city: they
provided an essential urban "backbone" separating the city into "logical areas" such as
residential neighborhoods and business districts, but they also linked more closely the different
sections of the city. These views were not at all unusual at the time. By the early 1940s,
professional dialogues in planning and highway circles routinely incorporated urban
expressways into discussions about the shape and structure of the postwar city.8
The urban expressway idea was given concrete bureaucratic form in the 1944 report of the
National Interregional Highway Committee, appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt andheaded by MacDonald of the BPR. Entitled Interregional Highways, the report built on earlier
studies and mapped out a 40,000-mile interregional highway network not too different fromthe system that was actually built in the late 1950s and 1960s. Most significantly, perhaps, the1944 report recommended that the new limited-access highways penetrate the heart of thenation's metropolitan areas. The plan also called for inner and outer beltways encircling thelargest cities and radial expressways tying the urban system together and linking to the larger
interregional system. Pushed by state highway officials, road builders, truckers, and other

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

41
elements of the emerging highway lobby, Congress passed the Highway Act of 1944,
incorporating much of the Interregional Highways report.9
Wartime financial exigencies prevented any immediate efforts to fund and build the system.
Meanwhile, MacDonald of the BPR and others, such as public works builder Robert Moses of
New York, embarked on a long campaign promoting urban expressways. They also argued
that building these new traffic arteries provided an opportunity to clear out central-city slum
housing and rebuild the urban core according to modern standards. Big-city mayors and citymanagers, along with downtown developers and their advocacy organization, the Urban Land
Institute (ULI), also championed the postwar dream of new downtowns and new high-speed
traffic arteries criss-crossing the cities. Virtually all of the powerful interests involved in urban
America shared these widely held views about the "reconstruction" of the postwar city.10
The visions and plans of urban expressway advocates often faltered at the implementation
stage. As it turned out, rather than resuscitating the central cities, the new freeway systems
ultimately speeded suburbanization, promoted the decentralization of manufacturing andretailing, and deepened postwar urban decline.11 The concrete jungle of elevated anddepressed expressways rammed through city neighborhoods never came close to matching theartistic designs of the futuristic and technological city beautiful, as depicted for instance in Bel
Geddes's "Futurama" exhibit. Interestingly, the ever-practical Robert Moses dismissed Bel
Geddes as a melodramatic dreamer: "The Futurama sold cars, but solved no highway problems
and, if anything, made the task of the road builder tougher because the public was taught toexpect magic." But even the more practical, nuts-and-bolts approach of public builders like
Moses and highway engineers like MacDonald eventually ran into tough public opposition in
many cities. The problem was that the freeway visions of the highway technocrats and urban
elites never fully accommodated the widespread negative popular reaction to the massive
demolition of the physical city. The destruction of densely populated residential neighborhoods
to make way for freeways was a tough sell in the affected communities.12

The Highwaymen
Experienced highway builders expected public opposition when they began knocking downneighborhoods. In a 1954 statement to the President's Committee on a National Highway
Program, generally known as the Clay Committee, Moses noted that the urban expressway
segments of the interstate system would be "the hardest to locate, the most difficult to clear,
the most expensive to acquire and build, and the most controversial from the point of view of
selfish and shortsighted opposition." Moses was prophetic on this point. By the mid-1960s,
citizen-led freeway revolts stalled urban interstate construction in a dozen or more major cities.
Rather than negotiate or compromise on route location, most state and federal highway men
initially sought to tough it out and aggressively forge ahead, the operative theory seemingly
being to build the expressways quickly before the opposition coalesced and the politicians
caved in to an outraged public.13

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The nascent Freeway Revolt first found expression in San Francisco in 1959, when the city's
Board of Supervisors withdrew support for any new freeway construction and then maintainedthat position into the 1960s. But trouble had been brewing since 1956, when public outrage
mounted over construction of the massive double-decked Embarcadero Freeway, a preinterstate freeway that ran along the city's historic waterfront, cut off the city from thebayfront harbor, and damaged aesthetic sensibilities. Plans to extend the Embarcadero andpush additional freeways through the city's Golden Gate Park, upscale residential
neighborhoods, and some outlying business districts, primarily for the benefit of central-citybusiness interests and suburban commuters, stirred opposition at the neighborhood level. The
multiple freeways planned by California state highway engineers and San Francisco city
planners were sidetracked by a powerful coalition of neighborhood associations, by the locallyoriented Board of Supervisors, and by the eventual commitment of the city's business andpolitical elite to alternative forms of urban transit. Providing important support for the freeway
fighters, the city's major newspapers conducted a long campaign against the planned highway
system. However, one additional element, unique to California, contributed essentially to theearly success of San Francisco's Freeway Revolt. Under state law, no street or road could beclosed until approved by local government authorities. Since freeway building involved multiple
road closures, this provision gave the San Francisco Board of Supervisors veto power over theentire freeway system for the city.14
As it turned out, housing destruction was only one of several important issues underlying San
Francisco's Freeway Revolt. However, housing and neighborhoods — especially black housing
and black neighborhoods — assumed a more dominant role in most big-city freeway
controversies. Highway engineers knew that housing and relocation issues might cause delays
and bring political pressures, but the social costs were thought to be acceptable and evennecessary if expressways were to be put where needed to accommodate growing traffic
demands. Initially, the state highway departments and federal highway administrators in BPR
adopted a uniform, hard-nosed, technocratic stance: their job was building highways; housing
and relocation problems were the responsibility of other agencies. But it became increasingly
more and more difficult for highway agencies to rigorously sustain this position as the reality ofmassive urban housing demolition began to hit the public consciousness. By the early 1960s,
federal highway construction was forcing about 33,000 mostly urban families from theirhomes each year. Demolitions for urban renewal and new public housing displaced another
38,000 families annually. By 1967, the new U.S. Department of Transportation reported thatover 56,000 families and businesses would be displaced annually as urban interstate
construction pushed toward completion in the early 1970s. By 1969, federal highway
construction was demolishing over 62,000 housing units annually – possibly as many as
200,000 people each year. The amount of housing destruction and family disruption, a reportof the U.S. House Committee on Public Works conceded in 1965, was astoundingly large.
And, as one urban planner noted: "Displacement will be particularly serious in the big city
black ghettos where the supply of housing is inadequate and relocation beyond the confinesof the ghetto is severely limited by racial segregation."15

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

43
By the early 1960s, state and federal highway engineers confronted a changing politicalenvironment. In the past, the highway builders were mostly responsible only to themselves.
The Federal government put up 90 percent of the money for interstate highways, with thestates contributing the remaining 10 percent. State highway departments were responsible forselecting the interstate routes and building the roads. A public hearing was required by law inevery interstate locale, but the highway people considered these hearings information
meetings only. One analyst suggested in 1973 that these public hearings primarily provided
state highway officials with a "means for taking the political temperature of the locality andfor selling the department's viewpoint." Many such hearings were packed with citizens
outraged by interstate highway routings, but in reality the highwaymen had no obligation toact on citizen demands. As Federal Highway Administrator Rex M. Whitton wrote in 1965 toLowell K. Bridwell, Deputy Undersecretary of Transportation in the Department of Commerce:"The objective of the public hearing is to provide a method whereby the State can furnish
information to the pubic concerning the State's highway construction proposals . . . . The
hearings are not intended to be popular referendums for determining the location or design ofa proposed project by a majority vote of those present." As the new urban traffic arteries cut
through neighborhoods and displaced families in large numbers in the early 1960s, rising
citizen discontent eventually found many sympathetic ears in Congress.16
Passage of the federal Highway Act of 1962 represented a first tentative effort to curb theauthority of state highway departments and bring other voices to the decision-making process
on interstate routing. As interstate construction pushed into the cities, Congress responded to
growing criticism of the invasive impact of urban expressways on neighborhoods andcommunities. Two provisions of the law were especially important. First, it required state
highway departments to develop "a cooperative, comprehensive, and continuing urban
transportation planning process, including coordination with plans for other modes oftransportation and for local land development, with greater participation in planning by local
government." This type of comprehensive planning made its first appearance in the Housing
Act of 1954, when it became a requirement for urban renewal projects. Applying the planning
concept to transportation, however, was a new departure, especially the mandate to broaden
the decision-making process to the local level and to consider mass transit alternatives. These
mandates had the potential to challenge the power of state highway engineers. So also did asecond important provision of the Highway Act of 1962 that for the first time required state
highway departments to provide location assistance to displaced families and businesses.
However, the new requirements for transportation planning and housing relocation did nottake effect until July 1, 1965, undercutting the intent to protect urban communities fromarbitrary highway decisions. Essentially, state highway departments had another three years topush ahead with their interstate projects, while they worked out methods of implementing
planning and relocation requirements. Even after 1965, one Boston redevelopment official
admitted, “there were little or no services or payments to thousands of households displaced”
until passage of additional relocation legislation in 1968. Subsequent study also demonstrated
that the Bureau of Public Roads, which worked with the state highway departments inPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

44
building the interstates, developed a series of policies and procedures that for all practical
purposes undermined and frustrated Congressional intentions as expressed in the 1962
Highway Act.17
Highwaymen stonewalled initial Congressional efforts to open up the interstate planning
process to other voices. But the tide was turning for the BPR and the state highway
departments, as reflected in several new initiatives in President Lyndon B. Johnson's "GreatSociety" years. For example, the 1964 Urban Mass Transportation Act, and subsequent
amendments and acts, signaled a coming shift of funding from urban highways to mass transit
alternatives. In the late 1960s, the Highway Trust Fund provided about five billion dollars
annually for the interstates, while in 1968 Congress appropriated 148 million dollars for masstransit. The huge differential between financial support for mass transit and the interstatesreflected the massive political power of the highway lobby in Washington. However, in theearly 1970s, the Highway Trust Fund was opened up for such transit solutions as subways,
fixed rail, bus systems, even bicycle pathways, although highways still claimed the lion's shareof Trust Fund dollars. The crucial breakthrough came with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of1973, which for the first time permitted diversion of Highway Trust Fund dollars to masstransit.18
In another important move, in 1966 President Johnson, by executive order, authorized thesecretary of the new Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to work withother agencies, including the Federal Highway Administration, in coordinating solutions tourban problems such as housing. In seizing this initiative, HUD secretary Robert C. Weaver
further complicated the process of urban highway building in areas involving housing
demolition. Early efforts in the 1940s by BPR director Thomas MacDonald to tie highway
construction to housing replacement had been rejected at high levels of the Truman
administration, primarily because of cost considerations and potential Congressional
opposition. However, in the turbulent Sixties the two issues — housing and highways —increasingly came to be linked, creating a bureaucratic tangle that slowed some highway
construction.19
One other Great Society initiative in the mid-1960s altered the politics of highway building indramatic fashion. The massive reorganization of federal highway agencies into a new cabinetlevel agency shifted the lines of power, authority, and decision-making for federal highway
officials. After considerable debate, Congress in 1966 established the U.S. Department ofTransportation (DOT), bringing together a number of formerly separate agencies involved intransportation, now reorganized as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Railroad
Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Highway Administration(FHWA), and later the Urban Mass Transit Administration, among others. The Bureau of Public
Roads (BPR), formerly within the Department of Commerce, now became a sub-agency within
the DOT's Federal Highway Administration. Under this altered structural arrangement, the BPR
reported to the Federal Highway Administrator and lost the final decision-making authority on

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

45interstate highway location to the DOT Secretary. Within the Department of Commerce, theBPR essentially had a free hand, but now, under the DOT, the BPR was subjected to a level ofadministrative supervision and control it had never before experienced. A similar process wasunderway in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the state level, where state DOTs were replacing
highway departments and where governors were taking control of state highway policy
through appointment and funding powers.20
The DOT provided the start of something in new in federal highway policy — an effort toprovide a balanced, or "multimodal" transportation system. Moreover, the first DOT Secretary,
Alan S. Boyd, was sympathetic to the public clamor over the damaging impact of theinterstates in urban neighborhoods. Boyd had a varied career in several different state andfederal transportation agencies, but he was not trained as professional highway engineer likemost of those in BPR and the state highway departments. A native of Florida and a lawyer,
Boyd served as counsel for the Florida Turnpike Authority and chaired Florida's Railroad andPublic Utilities Commission. In 1959 he accepted appointment to the federal Civil Aeronautics
Board, where he developed expertise on aviation policy issues. In 1965, President Johnson
appointed Boyd as Undersecretary of Transportation in the Commerce Department. By reasonof his diverse background, Boyd seemed willing to challenge basic BPR highway engineering
strategy — that is, that transportation policy simply meant more highways, which in turnmeant pouring more concrete and worrying about the consequences later. In one of his early
public statements as DOT secretary, Boyd asserted his belief that expressways must be "anintegral part of the community, not a cement barrier or concrete river which threatens toinundate an urban area." BPR officials sometimes made similar statements in public hearings
and annual reports, seemingly to save off public criticism of BPR policies, but it was always
clear that the agency was mostly interested in building big highways regardless of opposition.
However, Boyd appeared committed to changing highway policy, which ultimately led tointerstate route decisions based on Boyd's often expressed concerns about community
destruction and environmental damage.21
Within a year of taking office at the DOT, Boyd had seemingly become the most effective
national spokesman for the Freeway Revolt. In a television interview in early 1968, Boydsympathized with critics of the routing of Washington, D.C.’s North Central Freeway, which
had been shifted from an upscale white residential corridor to a low-income black community.
As Boyd stated at the time, “We’re going to have to find a better way to do it than to say
we’re going to take the property of poor people and leave everybody else alone.” Highway
advocates soon began blaming Boyd for “inciting” Washington’s freeway revolt. Similarly, in aspeech in Louisville in May 1968, Boyd noted that the construction of urban interstates had
slowed dramatically in many big cities. He went on to say: "The fact is that these city highways
are not being built because in most American metropolitan areas the people have asked for asecond look at the way we build urban highways. They have not been built because too many
people question whether the merit of a transportation system can be judged solely by the
speed of the journey it provides. They insist we take into account the noise it generates; thePoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

46
pollution it puts into the air; the number of neighborhoods it shakes up; the impact it has on
the appearance of the city." The same month, BPR Director Francis C. Turner presented adefense of urban freeway construction at a highway safety seminar in Illinois. The highway
builder, Turner insisted, was "no bull-dozing maniac in a black hat tearing everything apart justfor the sport of it — or out of sadism or just plain cussedness." Rather, urban highways werebeing built to satisfy "the demand for mobility which becomes greater every year." He went
on to defend the automobile as the ideal form of transportation, attack the "new breed ofamateur instant experts" opposed to highways, reject the idea of subways in Washington,
D.C. as a "magic carpet" substitute for expressways, and complain about misguided inner-city
black opposition to BPR highway plans. The disconnect between Boyd and Turner, andbetween DOT and BPR, was obvious to most highway insiders at the time.22
In a recent interview with urban historian Zachary Schrag, Boyd confirmed his basic
disagreement with the technocratic thinking of the highway engineers. The highwaymen werehighly competent professionals, Boyd noted, but "their view of life was that God's greatest gift
to America was concrete. They really believed that paving America was the greatest thing that
could be done for America." Boyd was committed to completing the interstate system, but healso wanted highways that had community support and took into consideration the full rangeof urban political and social conditions. To achieve these goals, the new DOT secretary had toreign in the highway engineers, modify FHWA policies and procedures, mollify the freeway
revolters, work persuasively with Congress, especially its Public Works committees, and maketough decisions on highway trouble spots.23

Trouble Spots and Policy Shifts
The DOT became operational in April 1967. By that time some 24,000 miles of interstate
highway had been completed, a little more than half of the system's total projected mileage of
41,000 (later increased to 42,500 miles). Uncontroversial rural segments of the systemcomprised much of the remaining mileage. However, some of the toughest mileage thatremained unbuilt — probably less than 1,000 miles in all — was slated to traverse heavily built
up urban areas now rife with popular discontent and protest movements. By the fall of 1967,
articles in major urban newspapers and popular magazines highlighted these unresolved
interstate controversies. As the New York Times noted, "The storms that are currently raging in
Cleveland, in New Orleans, in Nashville, in Cambridge, are only typical of a great many other
cities, where highway construction has caused tremendous social and economic dislocations."
In those and other cities, highway engineers planned interstates for dense urbanneighborhoods, parks, historic districts, environmentally sensitive areas, even upper-crust whitesuburbs. The multiplying expressway controversies stimulated the U.S. Senate Public Works
Committee to begin hearings on the issue, suggesting a new level of political concern over the
highway builders' vision. Most often, the New York Times went on, "it is in the ghettos where
the impact hits hardest," as the highway builders "have driven slum dwellers out of the only
habitations they had, with little or no effort to relocate them."24

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47
Federal highway administrators in DOT worried about the hardline approach of the state
highway departments in local expressway disputes. At a high-leve lmeeting in July 1967,
Cabinetmembers Boyd of DOT, Weaver of HUD, and Udall of the Department of the Interior
discussed the advisability of a "review board" that might resolve these local expressway
controversies. As it turned out, no decisions wee made on the review board proposal,"because they thought that the action should be taken at the local level rather than theFederal level." However, Federal Highway Administrator Lowell K. Bridwell subsequently notedthat relying on local action would not work "because the main problem is to get the State
highway departments to work closely with the cities and communities. . . . Unless there is realcooperation on the part of the State highway officials the effort never gets going enough toprovide alternatives." Moreover, the BPR was considered "inflexible" on interstate routing,usually backing up the state highway departments and trying to ride out controversies whileconstruction moved forward. But it was becoming more difficult to hold the line, as Turnerconfided to Bridwell in June 1967: "In the past, we expected opposition to disappear when a
final location decision was made. This no longer is the case. Opponents to routings press for
new decisions even after contracts are let."25
In mid-1967, faced with mounting local opposition to urban route locations, Boyd directed
Bridwell to keep him informed of disputed highway situations as they developed and before
any decisions were made. Boyd wanted "a continuing flow of information . . . on the status ofcontroversial projects, whether or not a decision is imminent." Interestingly, Boyd directed thatsuch reports include the "political implications" of the highway route and of any alternatives.
Paul Sitton, the DOT deputy undersecretary who shared Boyd's views on freeways, coordinatedthe reporting process and developed systematic files for Boyd on the troubled interstate
locations. The idea was that these files could be updated regularly, thus permitting Boyd andthe DOT generally to react in a timely fashion and make effective, informed decisions before
local controversies reached "crisis stage."26
By October 1967, the BPR had set up such a file. According to BPR staffer Ben Kelley, "thisturns out to be quite a project. There are at least 20 of these spots on the Interstate System
involving location disputes." The first summary report from the BPR on controversial locations,based on data as of September 15, 1967, identified these unresolved disputes. Almost all ofthem involved local opposition to residential displacement and community destruction. For
example, in Washington, D.C. expressway routing had stimulated "strong opposition becauseof displacements of people." In Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, there was "strong
local opposition due to displacements." In New York City, it was "local opposition caused bydisplacements and neighborhood disruption." Similar local opposition was listed forPhiladelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, andElizabeth, New Jersey.27
By the end of 1967, FHWA regional administrators were sending in monthly reports on
interstate "trouble spots" and "problem areas." Over the next year or so, these "troublePoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

48
reports" revealed the extent of the problem and the almost uniform nature of thecontroversies surrounding urban interstate location. As requested, the trouble reports
especially noted freeway projects that were to "pass through or are in proximity to minority
group neighborhoods" and the representation, if any, of minority groups at the required public
hearings. These reports were to be considered confidential and state highway departments
were not to be informed that such studies were being conducted. Taken together, the trouble
reports provide a remarkable account of an urban highway program in deep trouble, as thefollowing excerpts suggest.28
November 1967: In the District of Columbia, the problems of the Three Sisters Bridge and theInner Loop "are well known to you." In Baltimore, "the location of I-95 in the western city
limits is currently being reviewed." In Cleveland, "the location of I-290 Shaker Heights throughCleveland has been with us for some time." In Philadelphia, the Crosstown Expressway "isplagued by many problems which involves many residents, a cemetery, and several school
districts." In Pittsburgh, "the construction of I-79 on the north side of the city will involve thedisplacement of all of the residents and businesses in a valley and could cause severe relocation
problems." In the Midwest, in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan, "major Interstate segments
in urban areas continue to present problems."29
In the South, relocation and opposition problems cropped up in Georgia, Mississippi, andTennessee. In Georgia, "I-485, which traverses a residential section in Atlanta is quiet at the
moment. . . . However, there is still opposition, and this may very well erupt in court action
when the State begins right-of-way acquisition along controversial sections." In Mississippi,"the Mississippi Branch of the NAACP has directed charges of discrimination against the State
Highway Department. Apparently, Mr. Charles Evers, State NAACP Executive Secretary, isdetermined to have a showdown with State Agencies receiving Federal funds." In Tennessee,
the highway problem centered on Interstate-40 in Nashville: "You are most familiar with this,and I need not elaborate on it." In Memphis, opponents of the I-40 route through Overton
Park were waging "a vigorous campaign against the location."30
December 1967: In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Maple Ridge community was "protesting location ofRiverside Route, an urban freeway which has been in the approved master plan since 1961.
Citizens complain it will split a neighborhood." In San Antonio, Texas, citizens filed suit against
continued work on the North Expressway (I-281). In Mississippi, the regional FHWA
administrator had discussed the NAACP complaints with state highway officials: "This is amost delicate matter, as you can imagine, and I shall handle it with all discretion." In
Milwaukee, the state highway department was not handling relocation problems effectively,
although the HUD regional office was giving "intensive attention" to the relocation situation in
the city.31
January 1968: In Georgia, the State highway department's unwillingness to "stick to theirguns" under public pressure was "causing considerable trouble." Also, "resistance of theThe Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

49
Morningside group to the location of I-485, Atlanta, is flaring up again." Many families andbusinesses were being displaced in Atlanta's minority areas, although there were no organizedprotests yet. In Macon, "the main concern here is the large number of Negro families who will
be displaced and in need of replacement housing." In Memphis, Interstate-40 cut throughminority group neighborhoods, but there was "no evidence of minority group opposition" yet.
In Nashville, "the Negro communities, because of experiences with other public programs,
seem particularly sensitive to being displaced." In Ft. Lauderdale and Pompano Beach, Florida,
Interstate-95 was routed alongside black neighborhoods, stimulating "considerable opposition
to the proposed location. . . . The opposition is alleging discrimination." In St. Petersburg,
Florida, "I-4 will pass through a minority group community of very low class development andit is expected that there will be serious problems involving satisfactory replacement housing."
In Alabama, interstates in Montgomery and Birmingham passed through black communities,
causing significant dislocation, but "to date there have been no significant protests fromorganized minority groups."32
February 1968: In Columbia, South Carolina, "some organized minority group opposition to
the proposed Bull Street extension may be developing." The South Carolina NAACP wasorganizing the black community in protest about this Interstate-20 spur that penetrated thecentral part of the city. In Florida, "the NAACP has published claims that a large number of
Negroes will be displaced, without adequate available replacement housing, by I-4 in St.
Petersburg." In Tennessee, "the racial situation in Nashville is potentially explosive. A
movement is now being organized for minority groups to boycott downtown businesses."33
March 1968: Problems were developing in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where I-20 "will displace 75
minority families and a few small commercial establishments." In New York City, "strong local
opposition groups" challenged the proposed Clearview Extension (I-78). The Lower Manhattan
Expressway (I-78 and I-478) would soon become a problem, it was reported, since "it isexpected that the displacement of people and businesses will be the major objection voiced
against the project." In Seattle, the mayor requested some design changes to Interstate-90,
eliminating a major interchange, "because of the extensive right-of-way takings from aminority group residential area."34
May 1968: In Baltimore, "minority group activity in the highway location continue overly
strong." In Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, serious relocation problems hampered interstate
progress. As the FHWA regional administrator noted, "All of these are essentially 'people'
problems. All involve densely occupied areas and the social, as well as economic factors
warrant serious consideration." Minority group protests also continued in Columbia, South
Carolina, but also developed in Charlotte, North Carolina.35
In Columbia, the leader of a black freeway opposition group charged the South Carolina
Highway Department with "a general pattern of racial discrimination" in attempting "torestrict the Negroes to the ghettoes." Franchot Brown, the black community leader inPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

50
Columbia, wrote to DOT secretary Boyd and FHWA officials to present the position of
Columbia's African American community. The Bull Street expressway was planned without aproper public hearing and if constructed would slice through the black community and"seriously uproot many Negro families." Brown contended that there was a better alternativeroute through undeveloped land nearby and where little housing relocation would benecessary. However, "the local officials are aware of our proposed alternative route and haverecently bought land along that route to use for housing units." Brown appealed for quick
action: "Your swift action may save our neighborhood and stop the age old practice of sparing
a few white occupied homes at the expense of hundreds of Negro families and affecting
thousands of Negro citizens."36
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the North-South Expressway (I-77) tore through a black
community, leveling several neighborhood schools in the process. As the Charlotte Observer
noted in a 1968 editorial, "Oops, There Goes Another School": "Charlotte needs an
expressway network, to be sure. But whether it needs it at the price of running over schoolsites, chopping out garden spots of beauty and tearing down homes occupied largely by
Negroes is worth more than casual attention." The public hearing on Charlotte's expressway,held in 1962, six years before any construction began, was labeled by the newspaper as "anabsolute farce" that never accurately revealed the actual route of the highway. By 1968,
however, the community learned that four black schools were in the path of the onrushingexpressway, which would also "fragment neighborhoods surrounding the schools."37
In the spring of 1968, a new system of reporting for problem or troubled interstate segments
was instituted, as "flash reports" replaced the earlier "trouble reports." These reports were to
be prepared "within 48 hours of the manifestation of a problem" and sent directly to the
FHWA administrator. Some examples of flash reports from May 1968 suggest the on-goingnature of the Freeway Revolt around the nation.
Kansas City South Midtown Freeway: "Original proposed location was through affluent
neighborhoods. Current proposed location for 10.2 mile freeway is through Model City area
and integrated neighborhood. It is estimated that freeway will displace 1,800 buildings andseveral thousand people. There is fear that relocation will cause integrated area to become 100
percent Negro. Current proposed location approved by Missouri State Highway Department,
City of Kansas, Missouri, and Metropolitan Planning Commission. It is opposed by major Negro
political force."
Pittsburgh, I-79: "Construction of this 3.4 mile segment will affect 2,800 residents dislocating
5,800 people. There is mass resistance by the residents who want replacement housing, bonus
payments for forced relocation. . . . Acquisition of right-or-way has reached an impasse. Steps
are being taken to meet demands of complainants."

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51
Philadelphia Crosstown Expressway: "Action on the Crosstown Expressway is being held up
pending the development for the orderly relocation of affected residents."
Baltimore, I-70: "A citizen group in West Baltimore has threatened to block residential
acquisition" By June 1968, one month after institution of the new reporting system, some 123
flash report problems had been reported to the FHWA administrator, Lowell K. Bridwell. Most
such problems involved land acquisition difficulties and citizen opposition in urban areas; only
seven problems were reported resolved. These flash reports continued until June 1969, when
they were discontinued by the Nixon administration's new DOT secretary John A. Volpe infavor of "a more orderly submission of narrative reports by field offices."38
The creation of the DOT coincided with the Freeway Revolt's high tide. Interstate location
problems in the cities had reached crescendo stage. Boyd came to the DOT with an interest inpromoting multiple transportation methods and a sympathetic attitude toward freeway
opponents. Symptomatic of these positions, he hired a leading Washington, D.C. anti-freeway
activist, Peter Craig, as a DOT litigation attorney. Lowell K. Bridwell, Boyd's choice to head theFHWA, was a former newspaperman who had worked with Boyd in the Department ofCommerce and who could stand firm against the highway engineers in BPR. Bridwell was
instrumental in pushing state road departments to move beyond sole reliance on engineeringstudies and traffic counts and to consider social and environmental impacts in the planning of
new highways. As a Cabinet appointee, Boyd was also sensitive to shifting political currents
and the need to work with congressmen of various persuasions. He was especially conscious of
the racial and civil rights implications of pushing expressways through inner-city black
neighborhoods. Following the mandate of the 1966 law creating DOT, he was also paying
close attention to the environmental impacts of various disputed highway locations. At thesame time, Boyd sought to carry out President's Johnson's commitment to getting theinterstate system completed. Instituting the reporting system on trouble spots was one way ofgetting a handle on problematic projects and locations. But when the time came to cancel atroubled highway route, Boyd made the tough decision. One such instance involved the longsimmering controversy over the Three Sisters Bridge linking expressways across the Potomac
River in Washington, D.C. In January 1969, in the final days of the Johnson administration,
Boyd removed the bridge and another D.C. freeway from the approved interstate list,
effectively killing the project (although Boyd's successor and pro-highway congressmen triedalmost immediately to revive it). The decision to cancel the Three Sisters Bridge was hailed
nationally as a great victory for the Freeway Revolt.39
Boyd took other steps, as well, to manage the interstate crisis. Relocation issues dominatedjust about all the troubled urban sites. Consequently, Boyd pushed for important changes inhighway policy. In 1968, the Federal Highway Administration issued a new policy andprocedure manual requiring two public hearings on interstate routes — one on highway
corridor location and a second on more specific design issues. State highway officials, andmany in the BPR, almost uniformly opposed the two-hearing regulation, but newspaper
editorials around the nation praised the new policy. Local appeals to the FHWA challenging

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route decisions now delayed land acquisition or construction until final administrative review.
Subsequent legal action could delay highway construction even further.40
The big problem was the mismatch of relocation housing demand and housing availability.
Boyd continued to work with Weaver of HUD in adjusting highway route alignments throughModel City areas, thus saving some housing from demolition. State highway plans favored bigcity ghetto areas, with the result that public housing projects, urban renewal sites, and Model
City neighborhoods often lay in the path of projected expressways. Boyd also pushed forhigher levels of relocation assistance to families and businesses. The FHWA worked with theAmerican Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in training relocation assistanceofficers in every state. In general, DOT encouraged state and local officials to work out
agreements over the trouble spots and deal more sensitively with relocation issues.41
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 reflected changing political attitudes, as well as
Congressional efforts to reconcile conflicts in highway and housing programs. The new law
required that states provide decent, safe, and sanitary relocation housing prior to property
acquisition for highway routes. Under this legislation, considerable federal funding was madeavailable to states for moving expenses, housing relocation, and housing and rent
supplements. Each state was required to enact enabling legislation by July 1970 in order toqualify for additional federal highway funding. Thus, the Highway Act of 1968 andsubsequent legislation, the Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1970, required more carefulattention to relocation than ever before. This included complying with provisions of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. However, by 1972 government highway
relocation programs were coming under criticism as ineffective. Full implementation of therelocation acts, an article in the Yale Law Journal suggested, required that "the FHWA
minimize the dislocating effects of highway displacement on the housing market byconstructing new housing units to replace those demolished for highways." Needless to say,this was not a program the federal government was interested in pursuing on a large scale.42
Congressional initiatives on relocation coincided with a DOT administrative shakeup that
accompanied the incoming Nixon administration. The new DOT secretary was John A. Volpe, abuilding contractor, former public works director and governor of Massachusetts, and a former
Federal Highway administrator during the Eisenhower administration. Francis C. Turner, aprofessional highway engineer and former BPR director, became head of the Federal Highway
Administration. UnlikeBoydandBridwell,whomtheyreplaced,onecontemporaryanalystwrote that"both men carried reputations as hard-line road builders." Typically, perhaps, while governor of
Massachusetts Volpe urged Congress to increase interstate highway mileage by another
41,000 miles, effectively doubling the size of the interstate system by 1985 to accommodate
anticipated traffic increased. Many critics expected that as DOT secretary Volpe would “pavethe country” or drop a “concrete curtain” on urban America.43

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Changing circumstances forced both men to moderate their positions. For example, in a March
1969 speech to midwestern state highway officials, Turner sounded a lot like Alan Boyd on
relocation issues. The nationwide urban freeway revolt made housing relocation "a subject ofincreasing concern in Congress." Turner committed the resources of the FHWA to assisting thestates in complying with relocation provisions of the 1968 highway act. He suggested the need
to work with HUD to annually determine housing demand. If demand exceeded supply, HUD
would seek authority and funding to "bridge the gap." Turner also urged the states to develop
their own plans for replacement housing. He ended his speech with a warning to state highway
officials: "We have a problem here to solve, one of first-rate importance. Unless we solve it anddo so quickly and adequately, we run the risk of having our highway program come to a halt,
and I'm sure nobody wants that to happen." Turner, who had spent forty years in the BPR,
wanted to keep the interstate program on track at all costs, even if it meant moderating
somewhat the tough engineering approach that had always prevailed in the past.44
Volpe, too, soon adapted to shifting political winds, eventually recognizing the need for masstransit and a more environmentally sensitive highway program. In one his first speeches, Volpe
uncharacteristically followed Alan Boyd’s line of analysis by questioning “the survival of theautomobile in the centers of our largest cities.” The car and the highway, Volpe suggested,needed to be “tallied against other community and individual values – the need for elbow
room, clean air, stable neighborhoods, more park land, and many others. So far, we havesought sheer mobility above every other consideration; other needs have been neglected, andthe social equation is clearly out of balance.” To advise on these now more compelling issues,
Volpe appointed former Seattle mayor J. D. Braman as Assistant DOT Secretary for Urban
Systems and Environment. A veteran of a big freeway fight in Seattle and an advocate of rapid
rail transit, Braman was perceived as “a friend in court for the mayors who are fussy aboutroads cutting through their cities.” Soon after taking office, Volpe confronted two highly
publicized urban "trouble spots" on the interstate map, ending long-running disputes in 1969
by cancelling the New Orleans riverfront expressway and approving a costly restudy acontentious inner-loop highway in Boston. Braman was said to be influential in persuading
Volpe to cancel the New Orleans expressway.45
By the end of the 1960s, interstate troubles had become political troubles, both locally andnationally. Freeway revolters took to the streets, noisily packed hearings and meetings, andforced highway issues onto the front pages of metropolitan newspapers and into House and
Senate committee hearings. During the Johnson years, the appointment of a new breed ofadministrator in the transportation and highway agencies signaled greater receptivity to local
concerns about housing demolition, relocation problems, environmental damage, and civilrights issues. The Freeway Revolt had a major impact in raising these issues to the national
level. But the urban outcomes of the Freeway Revolt varied from city to city.
The Freeway Revolt grew out of local conditions. State highway departments determined therouting of interstates through the cities, routes often based on earlier local planning reports.

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State highwaymen brought city or county officials into the route-making process. Behind thescenes, local urban elites often were involved in early discussions on interstate routing in thecities. Concerned about the economic vitality of the central city, local officials and urban
business elites generally accepted mid-century thinking about the necessity for new highways
and their presumed economic benefits. In many cities, they also came to recognize that
expressways might serve other purposes, such as restructuring the central business district,eliminating slum housing, or carrying out racial agendas.46 However, until 1968 citizen
involvement in highway decision-making was limited to a single public hearing, required bylaw but for information purposes only. In most cities, these public hearings on urban
expressways came very early in the process. They generally attracted little notice and lightattendance. Years later, when right-of-way acquisition and then construction began, people
became outraged that such crucial decisions about their cities and neighborhoods had been
made by outsiders with minimum community involvement. They protested the demolition of
stable neighborhoods, the destruction of parks and historic districts, damage to sensitiveenvironmental areas, and the use of riverfronts and waterfronts for automobiles rather thanfor people. The specific circumstances differed from city to city, but local Freeway Revolts had
many common elements. But there were also major differences, which often explained thevaried outcomes of freeway protest campaigns. Case studies of freeways and protest
movements illustrate how these differences played out in Miami and Baltimore.

Miami
Initial interstate planning for Miami called for a single north-south expressway that penetrated
the central city. Given South Florida's unique geography, with the Atlantic Ocean to the east,
the Everglades to the west, and no other major cities to the south, the Interstate-95 route
simply terminated in downtown Miami. As in many other large cities, Miami city planners
began mapping an urban expressway system even before the federal interstate highway
legislation in 1956. A 1955 Miami expressway plan sliced into downtown Miami on the edgesof residential neighborhoods, along an abandoned rail corridor, and through warehouse and"low-value" industrial areas. As the planners noted, these locations had been chosen "in orderto preserve and help protect existing residential neighborhoods and promote an economicallydesirable use of land." A year later, after Congress created the Interstate System, Miami's
professional city planners lost control of highway planning to the Florida State Road
Department. State highwaymen hired their own consulting highway engineers, who in shortorder scrapped the 1955 expressway plan and quickly advanced a new route with substantialchanges. Prepared by the consulting firm of Wilbur Smith and Associates, which designed
interstate plans for many states and cities, the state's expressway plan shifted the downtown
portion of the highway several blocks to the west in order, as the report noted, to provide"ample room for the future expansion of the central business district in a westerly direction." Italso anticipated a massive midtown interchange with a planned east-west expressway
stretching from Miami Beach to the western reaches of Dade County.47

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Implementing the Florida Road Department's plan had dramatic consequences. Shifting thedowntown expressway to the west now placed the route squarely 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 "the Harlemof the South." Thirty years of racially driven local politics lay behind the Wilbur Smith
expressway plan.48
Miami had a relatively small, compact central business district. It was hemmed in on the northand west by Overtown, which had a population of about 40,000 in 1960. Biscayne Bay to theeast and the Miami River to the south precluded expansion in those directions. As early as the
1930s, Miami civil and business leaders expressed concern about geographical constraints on
downtown development. As New Deal programs emerged, Miami leaders seized upon the
new public housing program as a potential solution. Federal funding permitted the Miami
Housing Authority to build the Liberty Square public housing project in an undeveloped area
outside Miami's municipal boundaries some five miles northwest of the CBD. Public discussions
among politicians and planners at the time made it clear that Liberty Square was expected to
become the nucleus of a new black community that would siphon off Overtown's population.
The ultimate goal, one leading Miami planner stated, was "a complete slum clearance
effectively removing every Negro family from the present city limits." Eventually, as aconsequence of persisting patterns of racial zoning, the housing project did become the centerof a sprawling new black district known as Liberty City, but the downtown dream ofeliminating Overtown and making Miami white remained unfulfilled the 1950s.49
The interstate highway program provided Miami's civic elite with a new opportunity to achieve
their racial goals and recapture central city space for business purposes. Florida consulting
highway engineers worked with the Dade County Commission, the Miami City Commission,and the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce in developing the Miami expressway route. The
Florida Road Department, the largest state agency, was heavily politicized, a patronage plumfor the politicians. Wilbur E. Jones, the road department chairman, was a Miamian and close
to the Miami civic elite. The final routing of Miami's north-south expressway emerged fromthese connections and from meetings between state highwaymen and county politicos.50
No public hearings were held in the black community, a source of bitter complaint in later
years. Construction of the downtown expressway was completed in 1968, resulting in thevirtual destruction of Overtown as a viable community. The sweeping, four-level downtown
interchange alone destroyed the housing of about 10,000 people. Simultaneous urban
renewal projects in the area added to housing demolitions. Most of those dislocated ended up
in Dade County's expanding second ghetto in and north of Liberty City. Over time, CBD
functions expanded into the Overtown area: government office buildings, parking lots, upscale
apartments, shopping centers, and a sports arena. By the end of the expressway-building era,
little remained of Overtown to recall its days as a thriving center of black community life.

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Consequently, the traumatic evens of the interstate era have remained vividly etched in thehistoric memory of black Miami.51
Building Interstate-95 into downtown Miami created devastating consequences for the densely
settled, inner-city black community. Nevertheless, the expressway generated strong support
from many interest groups in metropolitan Miami, who saw its completion as essential for the
area's continued economic progress. Businessmen in real estate and tourism found much tolike in the new transportation plan, as did local politicians and newspapermen. Surprisingly, theGreater Miami Urban League, although concerned about coming relocation problems, issued
an official statement in 1957 supporting the expressway as "necessary for the continued
progress of our city." Similarly, the city's black newspaper, the Miami Times, worried abouthousing and relocation problems, 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 discussing a local
expressway bond issue, the paper once again emphasized the theme of progress: "We areliving in a progressive state. We cannot afford to take a backward step." Black spokesmen
quietly acceded to the expressway plan, but both the Urban League and the Miami Times
urged the establishment of a relocation agency to assist thousands of black Miamians infinding new homes. Florida road chairman Wilbur Jones appreciated black support and agreed
that relocation plans deserved "serious study," but he affirmed that this was not the
responsibility of the state road department. In 1957, Miami's civil rights movement had not yet
developed, and black militancy would have to wait until the late 1960s. The Miami expressway
route through Overtown was known long before it was actually built, but this knowledge did
not stimulate a black opposition movement in the late 1950s.52
However, Miami freeway opposition did stir in some corners of the white community. At thestate road department's public hearing in February 1957, former Miami mayor Abe Aronovitz
spoke out against the expressway plan, portraying the elevated structure planned for
downtown as "a monstrosity straddling the City of Miami" that would create new slums anddestroy property values. In a telegram to Governor LeRoy Collins, Aronovitz stated that 500
citizens who attended the state road department's public hearing opposed an elevatedexpressway, but only ten approved. Aronovitz kept up his campaign for several months,
eventually meeting with Governor Collins in person, but to no avail. Miamians sent numerous
letters to the governor and the road department recommending small changes in the route orcomplaining about the expressway coming through their property. One woman from North
Miami, for example, borrowed Aronovitz's imagery in suggesting that the expressway would"be a monstrosity which would arch like the back of a huge dinosaur over an area of the city,
depreciating property and displacing homeowners." More importantly, perhaps, "it would
cause dissatisfaction and dissension between the races here, because it would necessarily
displace many of the Negro race. They would have to move into the outer fringe of white
sections, with the accompanying flaring up of hatreds." In fact, displaced inner-city blacks did
move to white transition areas, eventually transforming northwest Dade County into a massive
second ghetto community.53

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Initial opposition to the Miami expressway mostly died out within a few months of the
February 1957 public hearing, with one exception. Elizabeth Virrick, a white, middle-classhousing reformer launched a one-woman campaign against the Miami expressway system thatlasted a decade. Virrick had been involved in an interracial movement for slum clearance andpublic housing since the late 1940s, fighting mostly against Miami slumlords, rental agents,
builders of black housing, and local politicians who failed to enforce housing codes. As the
Miami expressway plans became public in 1956 and 1957, Virrick immediately recognized thedevastating consequences for black Miami. Influenced by the San Francisco Freeway Revolt
and the writings of Jane Jacobs, Virrick intensified her attack on the highway builders in the
1960s. In a series of hard-hitting articles in her monthly newsletter Ink: The Journal of Civic
Affairs, Virrick painted a bleak picture of the consequences of expressway building in Miami.
She went on to ask: "Hasn't anyone heard of San Francisco where the road program wasstopped and replanned because an alert citizenry demanded it?" Virrick kept the expressway
issue barely alive into the mid-1960s, when the final downtown leg through Overtown wascompleted. 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. The expressway system wascompleted by 1968 pretty much as originally designed by the highway engineers.54
Comparing Miami to San Francisco helps explain the weakness and failure of freeway oppositionin the Florida city. San Francisco planned multiple freeways cutting through diverse
neighborhoods and business areas, whereas Miami had a single expressway that did relatively
little damage except in the heavily populated black central city. San Francisco had dozens ofstrong neighborhood organizations that built cross-city and cross-class alliances. Miami had few
community organizations, most of them property owners' associations primarily interested in
keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods. Although the city was undergoing demographic
change with Jewish migration from the North and Cuban migration from the South, the city was
still very southern in orientation in the 1950s and early 1960s, making interracial cooperation
problematic. In the western city on the bay, politicians on the Board of Supervisors represented
their constituents and spoke against freeways; simultaneously many influential journalists wereattacking freeways in daily newspaper columns, keeping a spotlight on the highway issue. In theeastern city on the bay, virtually all the local politicians and all the newspapers, even the black
paper, supported the expressway. By virtue of a quirk in California law, San Francisco's Board ofSupervisors had a virtual veto over expressway building, but in Miami the city council and thecounty commission had no such power; if they did, it is unlikely they would have used it to stop
the interstate. Moreover, no citizen lawsuits challenged the highway builders in Miami. In
addition, the entire Miami expressway system was either completed or under construction by
1965, when the 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 initiated by 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 in Washington. In expressway building, it appears, timing, power, andpolitical culture usually determined outcomes.

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Baltimore
Building Interstate-95 into downtown Miami was rather simple and uncomplicated, compared
to what happened in Baltimore. The Baltimore expressway story is much more complex anddrawn-out, with many different plans and players, a more expansive freeway system, many
more levels of review, much more vocal and organized citizen opposition, and, ultimately, amuch different outcome. Baltimore’s leaders and citizens wrestled with no less than twelve
different expressway plans between 1942 and the 1970s. The city’s downtown businessleaders began thinking about the need for expressways in the early 1940s. One of the largest
cities in the nation at the time, Baltimore had high levels of automobile and truck throughtraffic, as well as significant local traffic generated by its own downtown, industrial, rail, andport activities. In 1942, engineers commissioned by the Baltimore City Planning Commission
proposed two major east-west expressways. One route traversed the city just north of the CBDalong the so-called Franklin-Mulberry corridor linking U.S. 1, the main Washington to New
York highway, with U.S. 40 entering Baltimore from the west. The second route wasanticipated as a southern by-pass designed for through traffic and involved construction of abay bridge or harbor tunnel. In 1943, the Baltimore Association of Commerce proposed a still
more ambitious freeway plan to serve anticipated traffic needs and by which the central
business district might be “rescued and redeemed.” This plan projected an east-west freeway
connecting with three north-south freeways. The business group noted approvingly that “agreat many of the freeways would pass through blighted areas” or sections “approachingblighted conditions.” Moreover, if the highway corridor was wide enough to provide space forlinear parks and green spaces, “the freeway can be a thing of beauty and a real asset tonearby residences.” In 1944, concerned about the cost of such an elaborate freeway network,
the City Planning Commission recommended only the east-west expressway, prompting themayor to appoint a special traffic committee to study the issue.55
The traffic committee hired the ubiquitous Robert Moses, a dominant national voice on urban
expressways at the time. The 1944 Moses report minimized the amount of through traffic andpromoted the Franklin-Mulberry east-west (or mid-city) expressway, primarily to serve
downtown commuters. The Moses plan projected the displacement of some 19,000 people inthe central city, 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 widespread opposition,
primarily from people in the targeted neighborhoods, but also from respected Baltimoreans;
journalist H.L. Mencken, for instance, labeled the Moses plan "a completely idiotic
undertaking." Several members of the mayoral committee challenged the Moses plan on
several grounds. The Moses report, one member of the Harbor Crossing-Freeway Committee
suggested, was nothing more than a “sales brochure” that purposely obscured the true cost of
the highways, glossed over serious relocation problems, and drew “illusory” conclusions about
the positive impact of freeway on nearby neighborhoods. The Moses plan, committee member
Herbert M. Brune, Jr. wrote, “poses a mountain of human misery.” On the other hand, theDowntown Committee, representing Baltimore's business elite, was predisposed toward theThe Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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mid-city expressway idea because it would "lend a powerful force toward restraining
decentralization and rehabilitating blighted areas." The Franklin-Mulberry highway corridor
bisected one of Baltimore's black ghetto neighborhoods. Many urban leaders at the time
generally believed that expressways could save the central business district from the twin evilsof blight and decentralization.56
Reflecting the disagreements among Baltimore’s civic elite, as well as concerns about the
anticipated 40 to 50 million dollar cost, little was done at the time to implement the Moses
expressway plan. Over the next twenty years, planners and highway engineers developed
variations and expansions of the expressway concepts of the 1940s. In the mid-1950s, thecity's Department of Public Works began work on a north-south city expressway along theJones Falls corridor, the first leg into the city from the northern suburbs completed in 1960.
The northern leg of the Jones Falls Expressway ran through a historic wilderness park laid out
by Frederick Law Olmsted, but only later did freeway opponents recognize the aesthetic andenvironmental damage to the park. Interstate highway legislation in 1956 prompted still more
ambitious highway planning in Baltimore, as did the completion of the Baltimore outerbeltway (Interstate-695), a Baltimore County project with the state roads commission. Powerful
downtown business groups such as the Greater Baltimore Committee pushed urban
redevelopment schemes to revitalize the city center, now endangered by shopping malls andsuburban growth along the outer beltway. A regional planning agency worked on one
highway plan, the Baltimore Department of Planning worked on another, and the state roads
commission hired Wilbur Smith and Associates to prepare still another Baltimore transportationand highway study. Among the city's political, business, and engineering elite, a newconsensus expressway plan — called the 10-D plan — emerged from these varied engineering
reports in the early 1960s.57
The 10-D plan consolidated several highway schemes into an ambitious expressway system: across-town, east-west expressway running just south of the CBD and through the white,
working-class waterfront community of Fells Point; a "connector" to the western suburbs
traversing the Franklin-Mulberry corridor and cutting through the black, middle-class
Rosemont section; an extension of the Jones Falls Expressway into the city center; and a bypass expressway south of the Inner Harbor carrying interstate through traffic. These plans
anticipated a massive downtown interchange and a colossal fourteen-lane Inner Harbor
bridge. Rosemont, Fells Point, and other stable, historic neighborhoods were seen as
expendable, as the 10-D expressway plan would have demolished over 4,000 dwellings andmany small businesses and bisected urban renewal areas. Like Robert Moses, the 10-D
highway engineers suggested the advantages of expressways in clearing out blighted
housing.58
Each new expressway plan produced angry opposition from the neighborhoods and fromvarious interest groups. At public hearings on different sections of the system, business andpolitical leaders spoke in support of expressways, but large crowds turned out to challenge,

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heckle, and shout down highway advocates. In 1962, some 1,300 people showed up at a
public hearing on the 10-D east-west expressway, angry that the engineers and planners had
declared their neighborhoods to be expendable slums. In 1965, the Baltimore Sun reported onanother large public meeting held by the city council: "Last night's first hearing on an EastWest expressway bill ended in a fashion similar to the city's entire expressway program — ashambles." In the past, debate had raged over the exact location of expressways, but by themid-1960s support seemed to be growing in the neighborhoods for no roads at all.59
Complicating and slowing progress on Baltimore's expressway system were two uniqueprovisions of the city's home-rule charter. First, the city council possessed sole authority toinitiate condemnation proceedings for public works or highway projects. Second, the city'splanning commission had power to reject state highway plans that did not conform to thecity's master plan, although the mayor could over-rule the planning commission. These wereslight variations from the San Francisco situation, whereas in most cities the state highway
departments controlled the condemnation and land acquisition process and could move more
quickly toward construction without worrying too much about public sentiment. Essentially,
the Baltimore city council had a veto over any state highway plans within the city boundaries.
Most of the nineteen members of Baltimore's city council were elected by district, thus
sensitivity to neighborhood concerns led to numerous hearings and postponements ascouncilmen tested the extent of popular outrage. Nevertheless, by 1967 most of the necessarycondemnations for the 10-D system had been completed. By that time, however, the U.S.
Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), fed up with delays created by mixing "city hall politics" withhighway building, refused to deal any longer with the city on interstate issues. The BPR wasconcerned about Baltimore’s political in-fighting, as well as about the looming 1972 cut-off
date for federal interstate highway funding. Consequently, the BPR orchestrated the creationof a new interstate administrative unit, the Maryland road commission’s Baltimore Interstate
Division, described by some freeway fighters as “a unique bureaucratic animal.” Largely
funded by the BPR, the new road department agency sought to work out disputes between
city and state and to coordinate the engineering and construction of the city’s interstates. The
city still retained a veto over specific interstate routes, but the BPR controlled highway funding
allocations, a major bargaining chip in Baltimore’s complicated highway politics. Yet, ten years
after passage of the 1956 federal highway legislation, concrete had yet to be poured for anyof Baltimore's interstates.60
A deep undercurrent of discontent shaped public attitudes toward the 10-D system by the mid
to late 1960s. As journalist Judson Gooding described the situation at the time, the "interstate
highway network had hurtled up to Baltimore's borders at top speed: I-95 barreled up fromthe south and down from the northeast; I-83 bored downward from the north; and I-70N
drilled in toward the city's center through the expanding western suburbs. The engineers werepressing to go ahead. The cars were already there, honking and teeming. But many influential
Baltimoreans saw the confluence of interstate highways as a massive, multipronged concrete
shaft aimed straight as the city's heart." Average citizens increasingly recognized the interstateThe Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

61
threat to the city and its neighborhoods — attitudes that underlay an emerging Freeway
Revolt.61
Responding to these concerns, as well as to the highway standoff between city and state, in
1966 architects in the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects took the leadin arguing for more aesthetic highways that blended with the natural environment andpreserved the urban fabric. In particular, a respected Baltimore architect, Archibald Rogers,
made the case to city and state officials for a restudy of the expressway network by an "urban
design concept team" (UDCT) that would include not just highway and traffic engineers but
also architects, design specialists, landscape architects, urban planners, environmental
scientists, housing experts, economists, and sociologists. Rogers's ideas resonated with key
Baltimore planning officials and council members looking for a way out of the expressway
morass. Rogers then lobbied for the UDCT with friends in state and federal highway agencies.
His suggestion that Nathaniel A. Owings, founding partner of the nationally famous
architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), head up the UDCT met approval all
around. Owings accepted the challenge because, as he later wrote, "the question of how tolace tubes of traffic through vital parts without unduly disturbing the living organism of the city
is symptomatic of a national problem and offers a pilot-study opportunity than can be available
as a example for the whole country." Boyd and Bridwell of the DOT agreed to pay 90 percentof the cost of a two-year restudy of Baltimore's expressways, with the proviso that the teamwork within the already designated 10-D highway corridors. "Joint development" of
expressway corridors for housing, parks, playgrounds, business uses, and the like became an
important part of the design team's mission. The goal of UDCT, all the principals agreed at the
beginning, was to link interstates 95, 83, and 70 in downtown Baltimore, but to do so in an
aesthetic fashion that did not destroy the urban fabric.62
Given the changing circumstances of the late 1960s, it was an impossible task. Freeway critics
jumped on the UDCT as “a desperation move by a city administration faced with citizen revolt
and a stern dictum from Washington . . . to do something about it.” Infighting continued overmethods and goals, pitting highway builders against politicians, local engineers against outside
consultants, engineers against architects, engineers against sociologists, and ultimately the
UDCT against Baltimore's neighborhoods groups. UDCT inherited the 10-D expressway plan,
but within a year began to doubt its efficacy. The Owings team eventually scrapped the eastwest expressway along the southern edge of the CBD and Fells Point, recommending a shift ofInterstate-95 to the south, where it ran through other historic neighborhoods. This decisionalso eliminated both the massive downtown interchange on the waterfront and the huge Inner
Harbor bridge. Other elements of the old plan remained in modified form, including the northsouth I-83 expressway (originally the Jones Falls Expressway) that would now terminate in the
CDB without connecting to I-95. The I-70 route from the west linking with I-95 also remained.
The route still cut through western parks, but swung slightly to the south to avoid the black
Rosemont community, already in decline because of earlier condemnations. Under this new
expressway design, the Franklin-Mulberry corridor, more than a mile and a half of which had

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already been leveled, was recommended for a spur expressway into mid-city Baltimore.
Labeled the 3-A expressway system, the entire UDCT plan eventually was endorsed by thecity's mayor and city council, as well as state and federal highway officials, all of whom wanted
to get some expressways— any expressways — built in Baltimore. But the 3-A plan, like theearlier 10-D plan, faced tough opposition in the neighborhoods, now aroused by thecontinued arrogance and insensitivity of the highway engineers, planners, and politicians whowanted downtown expressways whatever the human and social cost.63
By the time the UDCT was established in 1966, Baltimore had experienced over twenty yearsof community opposition to new highways. These expressions of community outrage tended
to be sporadic and poorly organized. They tended to crystalize around city council
condemnation proceedings or public hearings on highway routes, but interest dropped off
once decisions had been made and condemnation ordinances enacted. Many smallneighborhood groups participated in these early confrontations, but each was interested in its
own small piece of urban turf. However, in 1966, the appearance of the Relocation Action
Movement marked the beginning of a coordinated and more focused Freeway Revolt in
Baltimore, and several similar neighborhood coalitions soon joined the battle to "Stop theRoad."In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Baltimore's freeway fighters took on the so-called"highway hawks." Organized in November 1966, Relocation Action Movement (RAM)represented a coalition of middle-class black activists from Rosemont and militant workingclass blacks in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor. Given patterns of previous highway and urban
renewal projects, blacks in Baltimore had good reason to be concerned about the interstates:
between 1951 and 1964, about 90 percent of all housing displacements took place inBaltimore’s black neighborhoods. The RAM coalition in the mid-1960s reflected black outrageover the destruction of their neighborhoods to satisfy the needs of suburban commuters. “Fortoo long, the history of Urban Renewal and Highway Clearance has been marked by repeatedremoval of black citizens,” one RAM position statement asserted. “We have been asked tomake sacrifice after sacrifice in the name of progress, and when that progress has beenachieved we find it marked ‘White Only.’” Black homeowners in Rosemont challenged the"market value" relocation payments they received from the state highway department.
Because of prior condemnation of the highway corridor by the Baltimore city council, housing
values had plummeted, leaving those displaced with minimal compensation payments
insufficient to cover equivalent housing elsewhere. Relocation assistance to black renters in the
Franklin-Mulberry corridor, required under the Highway Act of 1962, remained minimal tonon- existent. With the assistance of Stuart Wechsler, a white civil rights activist with theBaltimore Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who had contacts in Washington, RAM leaders
met in Baltimore with Alan Boyd and Lowell Bridwell of the DOT. They received guarantees of"replacement value" for condemned homes in Rosemont and promises of more substantial
relocation assistance for renters in other areas, including moving expenses and rent
supplements to cover higher cost apartments. Over the next few years, RAM continued toThe Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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protest the "victimization" of black communities in the path of the interstate, which
purposefully seemed designed to take "the heart out of one of the most stable communities in
Baltimore." Facing the removal of 10,000 blacks who lived in the path of the east-west
expressway, RAM activists challenged the highway engineers who “view people as just anotherobstacle, like a hill to be leveled or a valley to be bridged.” One of the consequences of
Baltimore's late start in pouring interstate concrete was that the highway builders ran up
against the militant phase of the civil rights movement. Ghetto rioting in Baltimore in the wakeof Martin Luther King's assassination intensified these issues dramatically.64
The Southeast Council Against the Road (SCAR) formed a another important component of
Baltimore's Freeway Revolt. Formed in 1969, SCAR emerged to challenge the UDCT's proposal
to shift the 10-D downtown expressway to the south side of the Inner Harbor, where it
traversed working-class ethnic neighborhoods. Thomas M. Fiorello, a Catholic priest who
played a leading role in SCAR, criticized the UDCT as the "Concrete Team," whose "concrete
cancer will invade residential neighborhoods all over the city." Similarly, the Southwest
Baltimore Citizens Planning Council, which served as a federation of neighborhood groups,
fought the 3-A expressway route, hoping to prevent panic selling before condemnation
proceedings undermined housing values. In the early 1970s, another anti-expressway umbrellagroup emerged in the area, the South-West Association of Community Organizations(SWACO). These South Baltimore organizations recognized that expressways would have adevastating impact not just on the highway corridor but on the entire community throughwhich they passed.65
RAM, SCAR, SWACO, and other groups vigorously defended their neighborhoods against theincursions of the highway builders and the highway politicians, but beginning in the late 1960s
Movement Against Destruction (MAD) became the most influential anti-freeway voice inBaltimore. Founded in 1968 as a biracial coalition of 35 neighborhood groups, MAD engaged
the energies of freeway fighters from across the city who persisted well into the late 1970s in abattle to prevent Baltimore from becoming a “motorized wasteland.” CORE activist Stuart
Wechsler served as MAD’s first president, but the organization had a dedicated leadershipgroup that attended weekly meetings for many years. One of the freeway activists involved
with MAD was Barbara Mikulski, a social worker from a west side ethnic community who waselected to the Baltimore city council in 1971 and eventually became a U.S. senator from
Maryland.66
At first MAD focused on the proposed east-west expressway, which cut through many distinct
neighborhoods, but the coalition soon began challenging the need for any expressways inside
the Baltimore beltway. A MAD position statement in 1968 posed the issue: “There is a
growing realization that expressways are being built in cities not for the sake of the people
who live there, but for the sake of cement, tire, oil, automobile, and other private interests.”
Over several years, MAD activists opposed the UDCT highway plan, packed public hearings,
pushed mass transit, badgered officials with letters and position statements, conducted publicPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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information campaigns, met with state and federal highway officials, served as a watchdog
over the Baltimore city council, and generally challenged the highway advocates at every 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 with expert rebuttals at public hearings and council meetings.
As MAD activist Carol Tyson noted in the early 1970s, at every opportunity, “MAD now
counter-attacks.”67
MAD activists also connected with freeway fighters in other cities. Minutes of MAD meetings
reveal discussions of expressway battles in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and suburban
Virginia. Washington freeway fighters from the Emergency Committee on the Transportation
Crisis (ECTC) attended some MAD meetings to discuss anti-highway strategy. ECTC circulated
a mimeographed “Freeway Fighter’s Primer” in 1971, suggesting various methods to stop
freeway construction: “mainly it is a guerrilla war where you must work out your own strategy
and tactics.” MAD activists filled buses and traveled to Washington to picket and demonstratewith ECTC. In fact, by the early 1970s, the Freeway Revolt had become a national
phenomenon, as highway and environmental activists around the nation networked andexchanged information. This trend was reflected in the creation of such groups as the National
Coalition on the Transportation Crisis (NCTC), which held anti-freeway conferences and legal
action workshops in Washington. The national environmental movement was deeply involvedin this battle, as well. The national environmental lobby group Environmental Action spun off
the Highway Action Coalition (HAC) in 1971 to stop freeway construction, combat suburban
sprawl, and promote rail mass transit. HAC put out its own newsletter, The Concrete
Opposition, and initiated litigation using federal environmental requirements “as its chief
weapon” in the courts. “Bulldozer Blocking,” a regular column in The Concrete Opposition,
kept readers informed about the latest developments in the national Freeway Revolt. Helen
Leavitt, author of a popular anti-freeway book, Superhighway–Superhoax (1970), followed up
the book’s success by publishing a monthly newsletter, Rational Transportation, that attacked
highway building and advocated mass transit. By 1970, Baltimore groups such as RAM andMAD had become part of an informal nationwide network of freeway fighters that shared
information and legal strategies.68
The emergence of a national anti-freeway network coincided with shifting legislative and legal
circumstances in Washington. During the 1960s, even after the creation of the DOT, highway
builders in Baltimore seemed to have the upper hand. Downtown businessmen, suburban
commuters, the engineering community, and most of the city’s politicians and planners
supported some form of expressway system. Changes began, of course, with the DOT and theshifting positions of top DOT people such as Alan Boyd and Lowell Bridwell. However, newfederal legislation, new state mandates, and new administrative procedures between 1966
and 1970 dramatically altered the highway-building environment at the local level. These
included the original DOT legislation (1966) that required the protection of park land andhistoric sites, the relocation requirements of the Federal-Aid Highway Act (1968) and theThe Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

65
Uniform Relocation Assistance Act (1970), the FHWA’s “two-hearing” regulation (1969), theNational Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Freedom ofInformation Act (1966). Taken together, these laws, mandates, and regulations posed new
hurdles for the highway builders, created administrative confusion and delay at the local level,
provided new access to information for citizen groups, and opened new opportunities forlitigating the Freeway Revolt.69
In Baltimore, MAD and several of its constituent organizations brought the highway battle into
the courts. For instance, the Society for the Preservation of Fells Point, Montgomery Street, andFederal Hill, representing these three historic districts, won an injunction against highway
construction in Fells Point. Another group, Volunteers Opposing Leakin Park Expressway, Inc.
(with the playful acronym VOLPE), sought to protect the largest urban park in the U.S. fromthe east-westexpresswayand,alongwiththelocalchapteroftheSierraClub, successfullychallenged
the highway builders on the legality of a 1962 hearing and on environmental grounds. One
resulting court case carried the title VOLPE v. Volpe, a neat bit of ridicule on the part of thefreeway fighters. The Better Air Coalition initiated litigation to protect Baltimore’s air quality.
The Locust Point Civic Association went to court to protect historic Fort McHenry on thesouthern shore of the Inner Harbor from expressway bridges and tunnels. MAD filed a numberof law suits challenging the entire Baltimore expressway system on both procedural andenvironmental grounds. Baltimore’s Freeway Revolt, in short, came to rely on anti-highway
litigation in the 1970s, court action made possible by changing federal policy on a range ofissues affecting highway construction in the cities.70
Baltimore's interstate history provides a fascinating case study of how not to build
expressways. The contrast with Miami is striking. Elite business and political interests groups
did not come together around a single expressway plan until long after passage of the federal
interstate legislation in 1956. The engineering community was also divided about the proper
routing of the highways. Political infighting in Baltimore, and between the city and the state
muddied the waters for years. The City Council's control over highways through its
condemnation powers actually complicated expressway planning, eventually providing an
opening for expressway opponents pushing for community control. Mostly ambivalent on
expressway plans, the Baltimore Sun nevertheless provided balanced reporting, thus publicizing
the anti-highway arguments of MAD and other groups.71
Baltimore’s major expressway plans — 10-D and 3-A — both anticipated a complex highway
system that bisected numerous neighborhoods, black and white, and demolished thousands ofhomes. In response, rising militancy among highway opponents in the late 1960s set the stage
for a true Freeway Revolt in Baltimore, led by the Movement Against Destruction. The crossclass and multiracial character of MAD took the organization beyond the parochial self-interestof smaller neighborhood groups and conveyed the sense that it spoke for the people against
the interests. The emergence of MAD, RAM, SCAR, SWACO, VOLPE, and the other antihighway organizations also coincided with major changes in federal highway policy andPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

66
personnel. Miami's expressway system was virtually completed by the time Boyd and Bridwellcame to the DOT and new federal guidelines on community planning, relocation housing, parkprotection, and environmental sensitivity became effective. However, in Baltimore, new laws,
new rules, and new procedures made it possible for Baltimore's freeway fighters to challenge,
litigate, delay, and ultimately defeat Baltimore's "road gang" on many interstate routes. Onceagain, timing and the shifting currents of policy, power, and culture determined the outcomeof a freeway battle. In Baltimore, the result was a truncated expressway system and thepreservation of many targeted neighborhoods. Only the Jones Falls Expressway (Interstate-83)
penetrated the central city, while Interstate-95 was shifted south of the city. Ultimately, a twomile freeway was built along the already cleared Franklin-Mulberry corridor, but it emptied
onto city streets at both ends. The long-debated east-west expressway through western parks,
Rosemont, Fells Point, and the central city never got off the drawing boards. The remarkable
later redevelopment of downtown Baltimore and the Inner Harbor area was made possible
because the downtown expressways and the planned interchange and harbor bridge wasnever built.
The national Freeway Revolt, then, took place within the context of a changing legislative andadministrative environment. In the early years of the interstates, the highway engineers reigned
supreme. They possessed the professional expertise, controlled access to massive federal
highway funding, and had support from local power elites who benefitted from inner-city
expressways. San Francisco was an exception, but elsewhere when state road engineers andlocal politicians moved quickly after 1956, they faced few challenges to urban expressways.
This was especially true in southern cities, including Miami, where state road builders had built
up a powerful political base over time through patronage and contracting. In other cities, suchas Baltimore, where expressway construction was delayed into the late 1960s, outcomesdiffered dramatically, as outlined above. By this time, as well, the counter-cultural energy of the
1960s began to change the highway-building climate. As one writer noted at the time, “thehighway revolt is against the tyranny of the machine – the highway bulldozer and the politicalmachine that drives it. Being helpless before the highway lobby is just one form of thepowerlessness that Americans increasingly resent.”72 Citizen action against urban highway
building – the effort to protect threatened homes and neighborhoods — represented anincreasingly common response to that sense of powerlessness. In Baltimore and several other
cities facing the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and the concrete trucks, “power to the people”
meant stopping “The Road.” However, it is important not to romanticize the freeway fighters.
They were successful only to the extent that they used the tools provided by new legislative
mandates and guidelines to challenge, confront, and litigate against the road builders.

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

67

Notes
1.

For recent work on the 1960s, see Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in
America from Greesboro to Wounded Knee (New York, 1995); Maurice Isserman and Michael
Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York, 2000); Stewart Burns, Social
Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (New York, 1990); Howard Brick, Age ofContradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, 1998). Of these works, only
the Anderson book mentioned the Freeway Revolt as part of the Sixties protest tradition. See
Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 386-387. For a detailed and fully documented
account of interstates in the cities, see Gary T. Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and the Interstate
System," Southern California Law Review, 49 (March 1976), 406-513.

2.

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 Public Works, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C., 1967), stenographic typescript,
276, in Federal Highway Administration Records (hereafter cited as FHWA Records), RG 406,
Lowell K. Bridwell Files, Box 20, U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. On
Washington, D.C. highways, see B. Drumond Ayers, Jr., "Washington: White Roads ThroughBlack Bedrooms," New York Times, December 31, 1967. "Stop the Road" was the slogan usedby a coalition of anti-freeway neighborhood groups in Baltimore called Movement Against
Destruction, or MAD.

3.

On the San Francisco Freeway Revolt, see William Issel, "'Land Values, Human Values, and the
Preservation of the City's Treasured Appearance': Environmentalism, Politics, and the San
Francisco Freeway Revolt," Pacific Historical Review, (1999), 611-646; Joseph A. Rodriguez, City
Against Suburb: The Culture Wars in an American Metropolis (Westport, Conn., 1999), 21-46;
William H. Lathrop, Jr., "The San Francisco Freeway Revolt," Transportation Engineering Journal:
Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 97 (February 1971), 133-143; Seymour
Mark Adler, "The Political Economy of Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1963" (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980), 308-326; David W. Jones, California's
Freeway Era in Historical Perspective, Research Report, Institute of Transportation Studies,
University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, 1989), 256-308.

4.

Lewis Mumford, "The Highway and the City," Architectural Record, 123 (April 1958), 179-186;
Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect (New York, 1968); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life ofGreat American Cities (New York, 1961); Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (Glencoe, Ill.,
1962); Scott Greer, Urban Renewal and American Cities: The Dilemma of Democratic
Intervention (Indianapolis, 1965); Daniel P. Moynihan, "New Roads and Urban Chaos," The
Reporter, 22 (April 14, 1960), 13-20. See also Joseph C. Hazen, "Highways and the City,"
American Highways, 36 (July 1957), 11-12.

5.

Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on
Poverty (New York, 1969); David Zarefsky, President Johnson's War on Poverty: Rhetoric andHistory (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1986); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black
Migration and How It Changed America (New York, 1991), 109-221; Harry C. Boyte, The
Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia, 1980); Harry C.
Boyte, Community Is Possible: Repairing America's Roots (New York, 1984).

6.

For contemporary and often critical journalistic coverage of the Freeway Revolt, see "Arresting
the Highwaymen," 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 Movement," Time (April 19, 1965), 48; James Nathan Miller, "We Must
Stop Choking Our Cities," Reader's Digest, 89 (August 1966), 37-41; Priscilla Dunhill, "WhenPoverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

68
Highways and Cities Collide," City, 1 (July 1967), 48-54; "The War Over Urban Expressways,"
Business Week (March 11, 1967), 4-5; "Hard-nosed Highwaymen Ride Again: Interstate
Highway Program and Route Planning," Life (April 4, 1967), 4; Priscilla Dunhill, “Reconciling theConflict of Highways and Cities,” The Reporter, 38 (February 8, 1968), 21-23; "Fighting the
Freeway," Newsweek, 71 (March 25, 1968), 64-65; Lyn Shepard, “Freeway Revolt,” Christian
Science Monitor, ten-part series, June 4, 6, 11, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, July 2, 9, 1968; Lisa Hirshand Louise Campbell, "Roads," City, 2 (September-October 1968), 27-34; Richard J. Whalen,"The American Highway: Do We Know Where We're Going," Saturday Evening Post
(December 14, 1968), 22-27, 54-64; David Hapgood, “The Highwaymen,” Washington
Monthly, 1 (March 1969), 2-11, 73-80; George Denison and Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, "Let's Put
the Brakes on the Highway Lobby," Reader's Digest, 94 (May 1969), 97-102; Murial Campaglia,"In the Path of the Interstates," City: Magazine of Urban Life and Environment, 4 (June/July1970), 25-31; Jack Linville, "Troubled Urban Interstates," Nation's Cities, 8 (December 1970), 811; Juan Cameron, "How the Interstate Changed the Face of the Nation," Fortune, 84 (July
1971), 78-81, 124-125.
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, et al., Rites of Way: The Politics of Transportation in Boston andthe U.S. City (Boston, 1971); Kenneth R. Schneider, Autokind vs. Mankind (New York, 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). For a
supportive position, see B. Bruce-Briggs, The War Against the Automobile (New York, 1975).
7.

On "saving" the CBD, see Raymond A. Mohl, "Urban Expressways and the Racial Restructuringof Postwar American Cities," Jahrbuch fur Wirtschafts Geschichte, No. 2 (2001), 93-97; Robert
M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 2001), 249-316. On
freeway visions among highway and planning experts, see Clifford D. Ellis, "Visions of Urban
Freeways, 1930-1970," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1990; Cliff Ellis,"Professional Conflict over Urban Form: The Case of Urban Freeways, 1930 to 1970," in Mary
Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-Century American City
(Baltimore, 1996), 262-279. On Futurama, see Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (NewYork: Random House, 1940); "Highways on the Horizon: Norman Bel Geddes Looks Ahead 20
Years," Road Builders News (July 1939), 10-12; Paul Mason Fotsch, "The Building of aSuperhighway 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; Thomas H. MacDonald, "Paving
America," State Government, 18 (May 1945), 80.

8.

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (4th Ed.; Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 721, 725;
Arthur P. Molella, "Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture andMechanization Takes Command," Technology and Culture, 43 (April 2002), 374-389; Paul
Oppermann, "New Frontiers for Planning Our Highways, "Speech before California State
Chamber of Commerce, Highway Section, December 4, 1950, pp. 8-9, in San Francisco
Freeway Files, Folder 71, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, San
Francisco, California. On Haussmann, see David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of
Paris (Princeton, 1958); David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron
Haussmann (Chicago, 1995); Michael Carmona, Haussmann: His Life and Times, and theMaking of Modern Paris (Chicago, 2002).

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

69
9.

U.S. National Interregional Highway Committee, Interregional Highways (Washington, D.C.,
1944); 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), 165-191; Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government
and Urban America, 1933-1965 (New York, 1975), 222-224; Richard O. Davies, The Age of
Asphalt: The Automobile, the Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan America(Philadlephia, 1975), 11-15.

10.

On MacDonald, see Thomas H. MacDonald, "Proposed Interregional Highway System as It
Affects Cities," January 21, 1943, in Thomas H. MacDonald Speeches, U.S. Department ofTransportation Library, Washington, D.C.; Thomas H. MacDonald,"The Case for Urban
Expressways," American City, 62 (June 1947), 92-93; Thomas H. MacDonald, "Improved
Methods of Transport and Their Significance," Scientific Monthly, 66 (January 1948), 57-61;
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 Civic Annual (1950), 114-119. For Moses, see Robert Moses, "Parks, Parkways,
Express Arteries, and Related Plans for New York City after the War," American City, 58(December 1943), 53-58; Robert Moses, "Slums and City Planning," Atlantic Monthly, 175(January 1945), 63-68; Robert Moses, "New Highways for a Better New York," New York Times
Magazine (November 11, 1945), 10-11, 42-43; 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), 27-31. On the Urban Land Institute,see Marc A. Weiss, "The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal," in Pierre Clavel et al., eds.,
Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity (New York, 1980), 53-80; "Urban
Freeways," Urban Land, 6 (December 1947), 3; James W. Follin, "Coordination of Urban
Renewal with the Urban Highway Program Offers Major Economies in Cost and Time," Urban
Land, 15 (December 1956), 3-6; Urban Land Institute, The New Highways: Challenge to theMetropolitan Region, Technical Bulletin No. 31 (Washington, D.C., 1957); Hal Burton, The City
Fights Back (New York, 1954). On the expectation of urban "reconstruction" among planners,
see Jose Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their
Solutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1942); L. Hilberseimer, The New City: Principles of Planning(Chicago, 1944); S.E. Sanders and A. J. Rabuck, New City Patterns: The Analysis of and a
Technique for Urban Reintegration (New York, 1946); Louis Justement, New Cities for Old: City
Building in Terms of Space, Time, and Money (New York, 1946); Robert Lasch, Breaking the
Building Blockade (Chicago, 1946).

11.

For overviews of the postwar American city, see Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The
Postwar Fate of US Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to
Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Baltimore, 1990); Raymond A. Mohl,"The Transformation of Urban America since the Second World War," in Robert B. Fairbanks
and Kathleen Underwood, eds., Essays on Sunbelt Cities and Recent Urban America (College
Station, Tex., 1990), 8-32.

12.

Moses, "Building America's Postwar Highways," 8. By the 1960s, as freeway opposition
mounted, highway interests advanced a highways-are-beautiful campaign. See Donald
Appleyard, et al., The View from the Road (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Lawrence Halprin,
Freeways (New York, 1966).

13.

Statement of Robert Moses, Hearings, President's Advisory Committee on a National Highway
Program, 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, Box 1, U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland.

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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14.

Jones, California's Freeway Era, 256-308; Adler, "The Political Economy of Transit in the San
Francisco Bay Area," 308-316; Rodriguez, City Against Suburb, 21-46; Issel, "'Land Values,
Human Values,'" 611-646; Richard M. Zettel, Urban Transportation in the San Francisco Bay
Area (Berkeley, 1963), 32-34.

15.

Michael Sumichrast and Norman Farquhar, Demolition and Other Factors in Housing
Replacement Demand (Washington, D.C., 1967), 47-48, 76; U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Public Works, Study of Compensation and Assistance for Persons Affected by
Real Property Acquisition in Federal and Federally Assisted Programs (Washington, D.C., 1965),
24, 26, 105; Kathleen Armstrong, "Litigating the Freeway Revolt: Keith v. Volpe," Ecology Law
Journal 2 (Winter 1972), 761-799, note 17, p. 764; Jeremiah D. O'Leary, Jr., "Physical Planning
for Transportation," Urban Law Annual, 3 (1970), 21.

16.

Jerry L. Mashaw, "The Legal Structure of Frustration: Alternative Strategies for Public ChoiceConcerning Federally Aided Highways," University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 122 (November1973), 1-96, quotation on p. 21; Rex M. Whitton to Lowell K. Bridwell, December 10, 1965,
FHWA Records, RG 406, Bridwell Files, Box 12.

17.

U.S. Department of Transportation, 1968 National Highway Needs Report [Printed for U.S.
Senate, Committee on Public Works] (Washington, D.C., 1968), 5-7, 19-40, quotation on p. 7;
Walter K. Johnson, "The 1962 Highway Act: Its Long Term Significance," Urban Law Annual, 3(1970), 57-64; Walter L. Smart, “Relocation Problems Viewed from the Affected Citizens’ Pointof View,” in Highway Research Board, Relocation: Social and Economic Aspects (Special Report
No. 110; Washington, D.C., 1970), 30-32, quotation on p. 30; Thomas A. Morehouse, "The1962 Highway Act: A Study in Artful Interpretation," Journal of the American Institute ofPlanners, 35 (May 1969), 160-168; George M. Smerk, Urban Mass Transportation: A Dozen
Years of Federal Policy (Bloomington, Ind., 1974), 50-52. In response to criticism aboutlackluster interest among highwaymen in the "3C" planning mandate (cooperative,
comprehensive, and continuing), BPR and other highway administrators trumpeted theirachievements in this area. See, for example, U.S. Department of Commerce, Highway Progress
1965: Annual Report of the Bureau of Public Roads, Fiscal Year 1965 (Washington, D.C., 1965),
5-7; U.S. Department of Commerce, Highways and Human Values: The Bureau of Public Roads
Report for Fiscal Year 1966 (Washington, D.C., 1966), 21-23; Francis C. Turner, "The Case forHighway Planning," Transportation Law Journal, 4 (July 1972), 167-175.

18.

Smerk, Urban Mass Transportation, 52-89; Delbert A. Taebel and James V. Cornehls, The
Political Economy of Urban Transportation (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977), 50-57; Hapgood,“The Highwaymen,” 76; “Volpe Snarls Highway Trust Traffic,” Environmental Action (April 1,
1972), 7; Carl Lock, “Breaking Trust: Assault on an Industry,” Owner Operator (March/April
1972), copy in MAD Collection, Series VII, Box B1; "Cracks in the Cement," The New Republic,
167 (September 30, 1972), 10-11; "Bust the Trust? Volpe Says Yes," The Concrete Opposition(April 1972), 1, 4; "Congress Votes to Open Trust Fund," The Concrete Opposition (August1973), 1, 8; Brock Adams, "The Shameful State of Transport," Reader's Digest, 106 (February1975), 66; James S. Sagner, "Urban Transportation Policy Conflicts: Energy, Environment,
Economics," Journal of Urban Law, 55, No. 2 (1978), 296-300.

19.

New Orleans Bureau of Governmental Research, A Review of the Interstate Highway Planning
Experience in Urban Areas (Washington, D.C., 1966), 7-8, mimeo report, in Papers of the New
Orleans Bureau of Governmental Research, University of New Orleans Library, Box 73. On
MacDonald's efforts to link highways and housing, see Rose, Interstate, 61-62; Gelfand, A
Nation of Cities, 225-226; Raymond A. Mohl, "Federal Highway Policy and Housing Impacts,
1930s to 1960s," unpublished research report for Poverty and Race Research Action Council,
December 31, 1996, pp. 10-22.

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

71
20.

U.S. Department of Transportation, First Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1967); Herman
Mertins, Jr., National Transportation Policy in Transition (Lexington, Mass., 1972), 77-103; Grant
M. Davis, The Department of Transportation (Lexington, Mass., 1970); Alan S. Boyd, “TheUnited States Department of Transportation,” Journal of Air Law and Commerce, 33 (Spring1967), 225- 233; Alan S. Boyd, "The Federal Department of Transportation," Traffic Quarterly,
21 (October 1967), 467-469.

21.

U.S. DOT, First Annual Report, 6, 11. For one BRP public relations effort, see Bureau of Public
Roads, Highways and Economic and Social Changes (Washington, D.C., 1964).

22.

Lyn Shepard, “U.S. Traffic Chief Defends Roles of Railroads and Highways,” Christian Science
Monitor, June 6, 1968; Alan S. Boyd, "Speech before the National Transportation Week for theState of Kentucky Dinner," Louisville, May 14, 1968, typescript, FHWA Records, RG 406,
Bridwell Files, Box 16; Francis C. Turner, "The Highway Program Faces New Challenges,"
Speech at Illinois Editors' Highway Safety Seminar, Rocton, Illinois, May 3, 1968, typescript,
ibid.; Robert Janus, “Transportation: No Policy, No System,” Washington Monthly, 1 (April1969), 49.

23.

Alan S. Boyd, transcript of telephone interview with Zachary Schrag, October 2, 2001, p. 2,
copy kindly sent to me by Professor Schrag. See also Alan S. Boyd, "Statement on Urban
Highways before Subcommittee on Roads, Senate Committee on Public Works," May 27,
1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, Bridwell Files, Box 22; Alan S. Boyd, "Testimony before House
Roads Subcommittee on District Highway Program," n.d. [c. 1968], ibid., Box 23; Alan S. Boyd,"Statement before Subcommittee on Roads, House Public Works Committee, on the FederalAid Highway Act of 1968," May 23, 1968, ibid., Box 22. On Boyd, see also John Burby, The
Great American Motion Sickness: Or Why You Can’t Get There from Here (Boston, 1971), 4457.

24.

U.S. DOT, First Annual Report, 14; "Wall-to Wall Concrete—I," New York Times, November 17,
1967; "Urban Expressway Projects May be Delayed by Opposition," St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
November 26, 1967

25.

J. R. Abernathy to File, July 19, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, BPR Files, Box 6; Francis C.
Turner to Lowell K. Bridwell, June 8, 1967, ibid., Box 2. On later high-level cooperation
between DOT and HUD, see Robert C. Weaver and Alan S. Boyd, "Report to the President on
Urban Transportation Organization," February 19, 1968, mimeo, FHWA Records, RG 406,
Bridwell Files, Box 7.

26.

Alan S. Boyd to Lowell K. Bridwell, July 5, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, BPR Files, Box 2; Paul
Sitton to Lowell K. Bridwell, August 1, 1967, ibid., Box 6.

27.

Albert B. Kelley to Lowell K. Bridwell, October 20, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, BPR Files, Box
2; "Major Unresolved Interstate Route Locations in Urban Areas," September 15, 1967, ibid.,Box 2.

28.

Harry E. Stark to All Division Engineers, November 15, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, Central
Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 103.

29.

August Schofer to Lowell K. Bridwell, November 8, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, General
Subject Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; F. B. Farrell to Lowell K. Bridwell, November 9, 1967, ibid.,Box 13.

30.

Harry E. Stark to Lowell K. Bridwell, November 13, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, General
Subject Files, 1967-1968, Box 13.

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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31.

A. C. Taylor to Lowell K. Bridwell, December 6, 1967, FHWA Records, RG 406, General Subject
Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; Harry E. Stark to Lowell K. Bridwell, December 5, 1967, ibid., Box 13;
F. B. Farrell to Lowell K. Bridwell, December 6, 1967, ibid., Box 13.

32.

Harry E. Stark to Lowell K. Bridwell, January 5, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, General Subject
Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; Harry E. Stark to E. H. Swick, January 23, 1968, FHWA Records, RG
406, Central Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 103.

33.

Harry E. Stark to Lowell K. Bridwell, February 5, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, General Subject
Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; W. N. Dulin to Harry E. Stark, February 6, 1968, ibid., Box 13; "Bull
St. Extension Protested," Columbia State, February 6, 1968, clipping in ibid., Box 13.

34.

Harry E. Stark to Lowell K. Bridwell, March 5, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, General Subject
Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; John A. Hanson to Lowell K. Bridwell, March 11, 1968, ibid., Box 13;
B. J. McClarty to Lowell K. Bridwell, March 6, 1968, ibid., Box 13.

35.

Harry E. Stark to Lowell K. Bridwell, May 2, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, General Subject
Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; August Schofer to Lowell K. Bridwell, May 10, 1968, ibid., Box 13.

36.

Franchot Brown to Director, Federal Highway Administration, April 2, 1968, FHWA Records, RG
406, General Subject Files, 1967-1968, Box 13; "Bias Is Charged Highway Chiefs," Columbia
State, April 4, 1968, clipping in ibid., Box 13.

37.

Charlotte Observer, May 14, May 15, 1968, clippings, in FHWA Records, RG 406, L. K. Bridwell
Files, Box 7.

38.

Richard Leverone to Lowell K. Bridwell, May 16, 1968, May 21, 1968, May 31, 1968, June 4,
1968, all in FHWA Records, RG 406, L. K. Bridwell Files, Box 11; R. R. Bartelsmeyer to F. C.
Turner, June 2, 1969, FHWA Records, RG 406, F. C. Turner Files, Box 6. Additional Flash Reports
for 1968 and 1969 can be found in FHWA Records, RG 406, F. C. Turner Files, Box 6.

39.

Alan S. Boyd to Jennings Randolph, July 19, 1968, Congressional Record-Senate (July 29,1968), p. S9681; Washington Post, November 8, 1967; Boyd interview with Schrag, October 2,
2001, pp. 7, 13-14, 20-22; Ben Kelley, The Pavers and the Paved (New York, 1971), 116-117.
On Lowell Bridwell, see Priscilla Dunhill, “Reconciling the Conflict of Highways and Cities,” The
Reporter, 38 (February 8, 1968), 21-23; Lupo, et al., Rites of Way, 185. For a summary of DOT
thinking under Boyd about highway design and social impacts, see U.S. Department ofTransportation, The Freeway in the City: Principles of Planning and Design (Washington, D.C.,
1968).

40.

Howard A. Heffron to Lowell K. Bridwell, September 23, 1968, FHWA Records, RG 406, Turner
Files, Box 7; Francis C. Turner to Lowell K. Bridwell, September 23, 1968, ibid., Box 7; "Right-ofWay for People," New York Times, November 21, 1968, editorial clipping, ibid., Box 7; “Cry,
Havoc!" Providence Journal, October 25, 1968, editorial clipping, ibid., Box 7; "Stop Signs for
the Highway Lobby?" New York Post, November 1, 1968, editorial clipping, ibid., Box 7.

41.

"Agreement between the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development
and the Secretary of the Department of Transportation," September 9, 1968, FHWA Records,
RG 406, Turner Files, Box 4; John E. Robson to Lowell K. Bridwell, September 19, 1968, ibid,
Box 4; E. R. Holmes to Lowell K. Bridwell, November 16, 1968, ibid., Box 4; Federal Highway
Administrator's Weekly Report to the Secretary, December 12, 1968, ibid., Box 1. See also
Chester Hartman, "The Housing of Relocated Families," Journal of the American Institute ofPlanners, 30 (November 1964), 266-286; Charles Martin Sevilla, "Asphalt Through the Model

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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Cities: A Study of Highways and the Urban Poor," Journal of Urban Law, 49, No. 2 (1971), 297322.
42.

J. A. Swanson to Regional Federal Highway Administrators, February 7, 1969, FHWA Records,
RG 406, 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 Programs," Highway Research Board, Relocation: Social andEconomic Aspects, Special Report 110 (Washington, D.C., 1970), 13-18; Mashaw, "The Legal
Structure of Frustration," 13; Peter W. Sly, "In the Path of Progress: Federal Highway Relocation
Assurances," Yale Law Journal, 82 (December 1972), 373-401, quotation on p. 375.

43.

Kenneth R. Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making: Political Processes of Urban Freeway
Controversies (Springfield, Va., 1970), 239; George Denison and Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, "Let's
Put the Brakes on the Highway Lobby," Reader's Digest, 94 (May 1969), 102; Lupo, et al., Rites
of Way, 185-186; Hapgood, “The Highwaymen,” 78.

44.

Francis C. Turner, "Highway Relocation Assistance," March 20, 1969, Speech to Mississippi
Valley Conference of State Highway Departments, FHWA Records, RG 406, Central
Correspondence, 1968-1969, Box 129; Janus, “Transportation,” 49.

45.

John A. Volpe, "Trends in Transportation Policy," Traffic Quarterly, 27 (April 1973), 163-171;
Janus, “Transportation,” 38-40, 49; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 47-126;
Richard O. Baumbach, Jr., and William E. Borah, The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of
the Vieux Carre Riverfront-Expressway Controversy (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1981), 193-206; Burby,
The Great American Motion Sickness, 57-59. One source gives Braman credit for influencing
Volpe’s decision to cancel the New Orleans Riverfront Expressway. See Beverly H. Wright, “New
Orleans Neighborhoods Under Siege,” in Robert D. Bullard and Glenn S. Johnson, eds., Just
Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility (British Columbia, Canada,1997), 121-144, esp. p. 131.

46.

James W. Follin, "Coordination of Urban Renewal with the Urban Highway Program Offers
Major Economies in Cost and Time," Urban Land, 15 (December 1956), 3-6; James W. Rouse,"Will Downtown Face Up to Its Future?" Urban Land, 16 (February 1957), 1-5; William H.
Clare, "Urban Renewal and Transportation," Traffic Quarterly, 13 (July 1959), 414-422; Wilbur
S. Smith, "Traffic and Transportation in Urban Renewal," Civil Engineering, 30 (October 1960),
45-47; Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and the Interstate System," 484-485, 507.

47 .

Miami City Planning and Zoning Board, The Miami Long Range Plan: Report on Tentative Plan
for Trafficways (Miami, 1955), 2, 4; Wilbur Smith and Associates, A Major Highway Plan for
Metropolitan Dade County, Florida, Prepared for State Road Department of Florida and DadeCounty Commission (New Haven, 1956), 33-44.

48.

Raymond A. Mohl, "Race and Space in the Modern City: Interstate-95 and the Black
Community in Miami," in Arnold R. Hirsch and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy inTwentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993), 100-158.

49.

George E. Merrick, Planning the Greater Miami for Tomorrow (Miami, 1937), 11; Dade County
Planning Board Minutes, August 27, 1936, George E. Merrick Papers, Box 2, Historical
Association of Southern Florida, Miami, Florida; Raymond A. Mohl, "Trouble in Paradise: Raceand Housing in Miami during the New Deal Era," Prologue: The Journal of the National
Archives, 19 (Spring 1987), 7-21; Raymond A. Mohl, "Whitening Miami: Race, Housing, andGovernment Policy in Twentieth-Century Dade County," Florida Historical Quarterly, 79 (Winter2001), 319-345.

Poverty & Race Research Action Council Civil Rights Research 2002

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50.

"Transcript of Public Hearing on North-South Expressway," February 7, 1957, Florida DOT
Records, Central Files, Microfilm Reel 1761, Florida Department of Transportation, Tallahassee,
Florida; Statement of Miami-Dade County Chamber of Commerce, February 18, 1957, ibid.,
Reel 1761; J. R. Brumby to Wilbur E. Jones, February 28, 1957, ibid., Reel 1761.

51.

Athalie Range, "Citizen Participation 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 Transportation Projects on the Overtown
Community (Miami, 1998); Raymond A. Mohl, "Making the Second Ghetto in Metropolitan
Miami, 1940-1960," Journal of Urban History, 21 (March 1995), 395-427; Mohl, "Race andSpace in the Modern City," 139-141.

52.

J. E. Preston to Wilbur Jones, April 26, 1957, Florida DOT Records, Central Files, Reel 1761;
Greater Miami Urban League, "Statement on Expressway and Housing," 1957, ibid., Reel
1761; Miami Times, March 2, 1957, April 30, 1960; Wilbur E. Jones to J. E. Preston, Florida
DOT Records, Central Files, Reel 1761.

53.

"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 Collins, 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; Winifred Nelson to Wilbur Jones, March
13, 1957, Florida DOT Records, Central Files, Reel 1761; George T. Wolf and Donald L. Shriver,“De Facto Segregation in Low-Rent Public Housing,” Urban Law Annual, 1 (1968), 188189.

54.

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,"Expressways: Boon or Blight?" Ink Newsletter, 16 (April 1964), unpaginated; Elizabeth Virrick,"Expressways," Ink: The Journal of Civic Affairs, 16 (November 1964), unpaginated; RaymondA. Mohl, "Elizabeth Virrick and the 'Concrete Monsters': Housing Reform in Postwar Miami,"
Tequesta: The Journal of the Historical Association of Southern Florida, 61 (2001), 5-37.

55.

Jim Dilts, "A Brief History of Baltimore's Transportation Planning," 1977, typescript, pp. 1-2, inMovement Against Destruction Collection (hereafter cited as MAD Collection), Series VII, Box
A1, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland; W. G. Ewald to Board of Directors, Baltimore
Association of Commerce, November 27, 1943, with attached “Tentative and Confidential”
Report, November 12, 1943, MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A1; Baltimore Association ofCommerce, "Comparative Study of Various Suggested Express Highway Routes ThroughBaltimore, Connecting U.S. Route No. 40 Northeast with U.S. Route No. 1 Southwest," January
18, 1944, typescript, MAD Collection, 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, MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A1.

56.

Dilts, "A Brief History," 1-2; Herbert M. Brune, Jr., “Analysis of Freeway Proposal: Statement toHarbor Crossing-Freeway Committee, October 11, 1944, with supplement dated October 13,
1944, MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A!; Abbott to McKeldin, February 23, 1944, MAD
Collection, Series VII, Box A1; Mark Reutter, Untitled typescript on "History of Baltimore
Expressways," Chapter I, pp. 6-10, Mark Reutter File, MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A1;
Kenneth R. Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making: Political Processes of Urban Freeway
Controversies (Springfield, Va., 1970), 131-132.

The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt

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57.

City Council of Baltimore, Journal, October 30, 1944, pp. 374-411, copy in MAD Collection,
Series VII, Box A1; Michael P. McCarthy, "Baltimore's Highway Wars Revisited," Maryland
Historical Magazine, 93 (Summer 1998), 137-157; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision
Making, 132-135; Teaford, The Rough Road to Urban Renaissance, 41-42.

58.

Judson Gooding, "How Baltimore Tamed the Highway Monster," Fortune, 81 (February 1970),
128; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 154-165; Reutter, "History of Baltimore
Expressways," Chapter I, 13-23.

59.

Reutter, "History of Baltimore Expressways," 24-25; Baltimore Sun, July 21, 1965, quoted in
Dilts, "A Brief History of Baltimore's Transportation System," 3.

60.

Louise Campbell, "Transport: A Concept Team for Baltimore," City, 1 (November 1967), 25;
Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 132, 143; Boyce L. Kendrick, "The Bumpy Road
to a Better Highway," Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 51 (February 1969), 71;
Lupo, et al., Rites of Way, 181; Movement Against Destruction, MAD Minutes, August 4, 1969,
MAD Collection, Series I, Box 2.

61.

Gooding, "How Baltimore Tamed the Highway Monster," 128-129.

62.

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), 246-256; Campbell, "Transport," 15-16, 25-27; Louise Campbell, "In Baltimore, New
Options Are Opened and New Alliances Formed," City, 2 (September-October, 1968), 30-34;
James Bailey, "How S.O.M. Took on the Baltimore Road Gang," Architectural Forum, 130(March 1969), 40-45; Kendrick, "The Bumpy Road to a Better Highway," 70-77. See also
Norman Klein, "Baltimore Urban Design Concept Team," Highway Research Record, 220(1968), 11-16; John M. Courtney and Lois Dean, "Joint Development and Multiple Use of
Highway Rights of Way: A Concept Team Approach," Urban Law Annual, 3 (1970), 39-55;
Anthony Downs, "Housing Relocation and Compensation Related to the Interstate Highway
System, Baltimore, Maryland," Report for Baltimore Urban Design Concept Associates (February1968).

63.

Movement Against Destruction, MAD Newsletter, 1 (April 1979), 1, copy in MAD Collection,
Series III, Box 1; Dilts, "A Brief History," 3-4; Bailey, "How S.O.M. Took on the Baltimore Road
Gang," 40-45; "Biggest Snarl on City Highways," Business Week (October 18, 1969), 144-145;
David Allison, “The Battle Lines of Baltimore,” Innovation Magazine (July 1969), 9-21; Gooding,"How Baltimore Tamed the Highway Monster," Fortune, 81 (February 1970), 128-129, 152,
157.

64.

David W. Barton to Lowell K. Bridwell, October 28, 1968, MAD Collection, Correspondence
File, Series II, Box 1 [on “highway hawks”]; Anthony Downs, “Community Reaction to a New
Transportation Corridor and the Effects of Relocation on the Community,” in Highway Research
Board, Relocation: Social and Economic Aspects (Special Report No. 110; Washington, D.C.,
1970), 25-27; "A History of the Relocation Action Movement," typescript, c. 1968, MAD
Collection, Series VII, Box A1; Relocation Action Movement, "Position Statement," January 16,
1968, ibid., Series VII, Box A1; Baltimore Department of Housing and Community
Development, “Relocation Activities in Baltimore,” typescript, January 7, 1969, MAD Collection,
Series VII, Box A1; Maryland State Roads Commission, Interstate Division for Baltimore City,“Interim Brochure, Relocation Assistance Section,” typescript, June 10, 1969, MAD Collection,
Series VII, Box A1; Geiser, Urban Transportation Decision Making, 202-207.

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65.

Thomas M. Fiorello, Letter to Editor of the Baltimore Sun, typescript, September 15, 1969, MAD
Collection, Correspondence File, Series II, Box 1; Southwest Baltimore Citizens Planning Council,"Policy Statement of the Citizens Planning Council on the East-West Expressway," n.d., c. 1969,
MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A1; SWACO Newsletter, August 1972, March 1973, September
1973, in MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A1.

66.

MAD Newsletter, July 1969, August 1970, MAD Collection, Series III, Box 1; MAD Minutes,
August 26, 1968, December 29, 1969, May 4, 1970, March 13, 27, June 27, 1972, November
13, 1973, MAD Collection, Series I, Box 2; Neil Friedman, “City Hall,” Baltimore Magazine(November 1971), 18-19, 64-65; “Barbara Mikulski: The Senator as Community Activist,” inElizabeth Fee, et al., eds., The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History (Philadelphia, 1991),
147-149.

67.

MAD Newsletter, August 1970, MAD Collection, Series III, Box 1; Carolyn Tyson, “The Road:
Beating a Path Through the City,” typescript, n.d., (c. 1973), p. 6, in MAD Collection, Series VII,
Box A1; Carolyn Tyson, “The Road: The Expressway War,” typescript, n.d. (C. 1973), in MAD
Collection, Series VII, Box A1. For the wide-ranging activities of MAD, see MAD Newsletter,
1968-1976, MAD Collection, Series III, Box 1.

68.

MAD Minutes, June 9, 30, August 11, 1969, April 24, May 22, June 19, 1972, MAD Collection,
Series I, Box 2; Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis, “The Freeway Fighter’sPrimer,” mimeo, in MAD Collection, Series III, Box A4; National Coalition on the Transportation
Crisis, “A Statement of Aims,” typescript, April 12, 1969, copy in MAD Minutes, June 9, 1969,
MAD Collection, Series I, Box 2; Tom O’Brien, et al., “Old Highways Never Die,” Environmental
Action, 7 (December 6, 1975), 7-9, copy in MAD Collection, Series III, Box A4; “Bulldozer
Blocking,” The Concrete Opposition (March 1973), p3; (August 1973), pp. 4-5, copies in MAD
Collection, Series III, Box A4; National Coalition on the Transportation Crisis, NCTC Newsletter(August 1972), 4, copy in MAD Collection, Series III, Box A4.

69.

Angus Macbeth and Peter W. Sly, “How to Hold Up the Highwayman,” The Concrete
Opposition (March 1972), six-page insert, unpaginated, copy in MAD Collection, Series III, Box
A4; Tyson, “The Road: Beating a Path Through the City,” 7.

70.

Christopher George, “The Road: Progress for What?” Fells Point Telegraphe (October 1973),
23- 24, copy in MAD Collection, Series III, Box A2; V.O.L.P.E. Newsletter, No. 3 (December 7,1972), 1-2, copy in MAD Collection, Series III, Box A2; [Carolyn Tyson], “V.O.L.P.E.: The End of
the Road,” typescript, n.d. (c. 1973), in MAD Collection, Series VII, Box A1; Tyson, “The Road:
Beating a Path Through the City,” 2-4 ; George Tyson to Editor of Washington Post, typescript,
September 5, 1971, copy in MAD Collection, Series II, Box 1; Bulletin of the Greater Baltimore
Sierra Club (October 1973), 1-2, copy in MAD Collection, Series III, Box A2; Dorothy Strohecker[Better Air Coalition], “Citizen Action in the Highway Process,” typescript, June 1973, in MAD
Collection, Series VII, Box A1; and, more generally, Macbeth and Sly, “How to Hold Up the
Highwaymen.”

71.

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

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