The Federal Aid to Highways Act and The National Historic
Preservation Act, both passed in 1966, had provisions to protect
natural habitat, park and recreation land, and historic
buildings. Those laws became vehicles for activists to delay
the Leakin Park, Federal Hill, and Fells Point sections of the
broader expressway system plans in court. Preservationists
got Fells Point placed on the National Register of Historic Places
in early 1969. Federal Hill won the designation a year later.
Both neighborhoods, then and now majority-white, would ultimately
be saved.
“The national highway system was truly a great American
achievement, that was Eisenhower’s plan,” Mikulski says.
“However, the Robert Moses approach, his vision destroyed
neighborhoods so he could create other neighborhoods.”
Several cities Mikulski is referencing—New York, Boston,
San Francisco, Oakland, Milwaukee, Chattanooga, Providence—have already converted urban expressways to more
neighborhood-friendly boulevards. Others are in process.
The tragedy is the city’s long effort to link the east-west
expressway to I-70, I-95, and I-83 was all but dead by 1974,
when then-Mayor Schaefer gave the final go-ahead to build
the now pointless 1.39-mile spur. Relatedly, Schaefer’s and
city leaders’ obsession with building highways through the
city is the reason Baltimore doesn’t have a full Metro system
like Washington, D.C., which did not have a thriving downtown
like today when planning began for that project in 1967.
“It was well beyond the time when a reasonable person
would have said, ‘Wait, it’s time to reevaluate,’” says Evans
Paull, a former city planner and author of Stop the Road: Stories
from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road War. (See our full interview with Paull, here.)
“[He] was also a very strong pro-business
guy, and the Greater Baltimore Committee was the
No. 1 cheerleader behind the highway plan. . . . The
irony is that if the city business interests advocating
for highways had been successful, it would’ve
been economically disastrous for the city. The later
redevelopment of all those [Inner Harbor] neighborhoods
might not have happened if the highways
been built.
“I also don’t think the city would have ever entertained
an expressway through a comfortable
middle-class white neighborhood, the way it did
Rosemont, for example,” continues Paull. “I think
it’s just characteristic of the city’s low regard for African-
American neighborhoods that it was the only
section that got built in the end.”
To his point, just this summer, after an 18-year
battle with the city, Sonia and Curtis Eaddy saved
their rowhome, which sits a block south of the
Highway to Nowhere, from demolition. The city first
sent a condemnation notice to the Eaddys back in
2004, along with more than 100 of their Poppleton
neighbors, including dozens of homeowners. Baltimore
officials had decided to clear out the neighborhood
for a University of Maryland expansion and a
New York-based company’s proposed development.
The Eaddys’ struggle was part of a broader successful
community campaign to preserve a small
block of distinct 19th-century rowhouses around
the corner from their home on Sarah Ann Street.
Unfortunately, those residents were all forced to
leave before the homes were finally designated offlimits
and safe from development. Only a few, if
any, are likely able to return.
“My dad grew up in this block,” says the 57-yearold
Sonia Eaddy. “He was at 329 Carrollton Avenue and I’m 319. He bought his house in 1969 or 1970, and that’s where I
grew up. ‘The Highway’ was up the corner. My grandmother and grandfather
moved to the 1200 block of Mulberry, across the street, so as a
kid, I remember when the city demolished their property. I remember
the gravel, the metal poles with the wire surrounding the blocks that
were demolished. We used to play on those lots and throw rocks. Then
when they started to dig, you had to take what we called ‘the bridge’
across to see friends, go to school or church, or go to Edmondson Avenue,
which had a lot of shops.
“I was young, I can’t speak directly to how people felt about the
city condemning their property at the time,” she continues, “but with
our home and the Sarah Ann Street homes, it was basically like, ‘You
don’t count. You don’t matter.’”
There are also historical echoes between the building of the Highway
to Nowhere and the cancellation of the Red Line.
Just two months before King’s assassination and the riots in Baltimore,
Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III—in an address to the American
Road Builders Association, no less—acknowledged the dark truth that
the planned expressway, “will displace thousands of families, will
dismember neighborhoods and communities, will disrupt industry
and commerce, and will destroy parks and historical landmarks.” The
Little Italy native, whose father had been mayor when the east-west
expressway plans were first hatched, added that “the problem of dislocation
of people is particularly critical.” He even forewarned the
dislocations would become “a major cause of unrest.”
Nonetheless, as Paull highlights in his book, only two weeks after
the riots, D’Alesandro decided to stick with the final expressway design
that would devastate the Franklin-Mulberry corridor.
In an analogous gut-punch to a reeling West Baltimore, Governor
Hogan announced his decision to defund the Red Line two months
after the uprising following Freddie Gray’s death. At the same time, he
said he would increase infrastructure spending on roads and bridges
by $1.35 billion—“from Western Maryland to the Eastern Shore.”
At a 2015 news conference, Hogan defended, at least in part, his
decision this way: “We just spent $14 million extra money on the riots
in Baltimore City a few weeks ago.”
Thirty years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Schaefer, on the cusp of
running for governor, approved a deal that sent $261 million of the
last of the unused city-expressway funding back to the state. Part of
that money was used for an I-68 project in Western Maryland. History,
as they say, may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
