It’s hard to picture American cities without the highways running through their core,
but highway removal projects, like this one in Boston, can give us a sense of how disruptive
it was when the US built huge highways through the cities after World War 2.
“These new highways will have a far reaching economic impact on the entire nation!”
That was definitely true. Highways revolutionized the ways we transport goods. But inside cities,
they demolished and isolated entire neighborhoods, ...they gave wealthy taxpayers a way out of
the city and gave air pollution and traffic noise a way in.
And they redesigned urban life around the car: Now 85 percent of Americans drive to
work every day.
So why did American cities agree to build highways that were bad for cities??
It’s a really interesting question, and part of it goes back to the 1930s, when a
group of auto interests such as General Motors and AAA formed something called the National
Highway Users Conference. They began lobbying for taxes that would help
fund highway construction. General Motors started to design what a new
highway system could look like. And they displayed that vision at the 1939 World’s Fair with
“Futurama”, an exhibit featuring expressways that not only connected cities, but ran right
through them. It was a design that allowed for more cars and less congestion.
By 1955, the Department of Commerce echoed GM’s vision with something called the “Yellow
Book.” It laid out all the routes that interstates would take throughout the country under Eisenhower’s
Federal Highway Act of 1956, which funded the national highway system.
A lot of it is logical, its connecting most of the US’ major cities, but the really
interesting thing is that you also have highways slicing right through the downtowns of many
of these cities. Pretty much every major city in the country — New York, DC, San Francisco,
Philadelphia — you have major
highways cutting through neighborhoods, requiring the demolition of lots of housing
and other sorts of buildings. That’s largely because some of the key contributors
to the plan were auto industry members — but no urban
planners. And that’s because the profession barely
even existed at the time. Nowadays there’s a value placed on preserving neighborhoods,
keeping cities intact, and that concept really just didn’t exist in the 40s and 50s ... So
when people were talking about connecting the country with highways it seemed natural
to drive them through the centers of cities as well.
Local municipalities were particularly eager to build highways under this plan because
90 percent of funding came from the federal government and the other 10 percent from states.
There’s also a darker side to the reason why all these planners wanted to build highways through
downtowns and urban neighborhoods. Highways not only paved the way for more and
more white people to move into homogenous suburbs, they also provided cover for targeted
demolitions inside the city. During that era, federal policies and implicit
priorities in planners dictated that if you had vibrant dense downtown neighborhoods filled
mostly with African American residents, instead of being preserved under the plan, they were
slated as targets for removal. They were considered “blight,” and an easy way of getting rid of
that blight was by demolishing them and paving a highway through it.
"Neighborhoods and streetcars were pushed aside to make way for the automobile."
Look at the neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit.
When you go back to the 30s and 40s, these are thriving, dense neighborhoods filled with
hundreds of thousands of residents, of businesses, and if you go back today, they’re mostly
just empty grass plots. This wasn’t just a historical accident,
it became a pattern in cities across the country. Poor and minority residents were displaced
to make way for highways, and white residents used those highways to commute into the city
for jobs and commute back home at night. The only exception to this pattern is in places
where highways were slated to go through wealthy neighborhoods.
There were actually proposals to put a highway through northwest DC. And through Greenwich
Village in Manhattan. But you can guess what happened there.
Anywhere where residents had the means to organize and protest, they were often able
to stop the highways from being built, whereas in places where residents didn’t have the
political capital, and other sorts of privileges that allow you to do that, their neighborhoods
ended up being demolished, and they’re now
highways today.
Even before he signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956 Eisenhower was
already a really big fan of highways in general.
Part of that has to do with his time in Germany during World War 2, where he realized
how important it is to have a good system of highways to transport goods and people
very efficiently. But it also has to do with this military road trip that he took in 1919,
where he went all the way from Washington, DC to San Francisco, California.
And that road trip took 62 days at the time. Today, it takes about 42 hours.
And part of that had to do with the state of cars at the time, but it also had to do with the state of roads
at the time.
After seeing that, he realized that 62 days was way too long to wait
in any situation where they might need to defend the country.
And that's where he became such a big fan of highways.