by Earl Swift
Even while they were still under construction, the loops formed a psychological barrier to further development, a seam between metropolis and countryside—a role captured most literally by Atlanta's name for I-285, the Perimeter. But before long the circumferentials, and the radial interstates shoving their way into the central cities, enabled the burbs to push farther from the center, much farther, and the development they fostered was of an odd, new type. Subdivisions and shopping centers didn't simply appear on the roadside; the old motor slum that Benton MacKaye had so chastised wasn't suited to an expressway that you couldn't enter and exit wherever you wished. Instead, they popped up around interstate exits, in nodes that planners called "nucleated" development.
To fly over an outer suburb of the early sixties was to look down on islands of houses, stores, and industry, sometimes separated from their neighbors by miles; builders looking for cheap land leapfrogged those exits already claimed to put down stakes farther out. In time, the open space between islands filled with newer subdivisions, newer schools, newer shops and offices, until most of the American metropolis became a rambling patchwork of lawns, streets, and parking lots.
Once development leaped the outer rings, it wasn't long before the farm burgs beyond morphed into bedroom communities. Harry Truman's once-rural hometown of Independence, Missouri, saw 1,500 homes and eleven apartment complexes sprout alongside I-70 in eighteen months. Cropland outside Atlanta yielded galloping subdivisions. And on the strength of three-bedroom "Caribbean cottages" for just over twelve grand apiece, little Irving, Texas, population 2,621 in 1950—a place where, as Architectural Forum put it, "cows were lonely"—had by 1961 ballooned to 45,489 souls scattered chaotically over twenty square miles. "There are just houses, roads, cars, children, and signboards promising more houses," the magazine reported.
Land values at the exits leaped crazily. Outside Louisville, a run on interchange property three or four years ahead of highway construction boosted the price of tobacco farms by 250 percent or more—and in one instance, fifteen times over. In Robeson County, North Carolina, an average acre near I-95 leaped from $1,684 to more than $26,000.
Farther out in the country, beyond the cities' gravitational pull, the new roads touched off an economic revolution no less profound than that ushered in by the railroads a century before. Manufacturing jobs left the cities for rural property that was abundant, cheap, and alongside the new or planned interstates, which promised companies a ready distribution network. Factories mushroomed beside I-80 in Pennsylvania—a mobile home company in Pottsville, a U.S. Rubber building in Wilkes-Barre, a Japanese plastics firm in Hazleton. Chrysler cited the proximity of I-90 for its decision to build a $50 million factory in tiny Belvidere, Illinois, and of I-44 for its construction of another assembly plant in the Ozark foothills southwest of St. Louis. Interstate 35 spurred E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. to locate a cellophane plant, and the Hallmark Co. a ribbon and gift wrap factory, in eastern Kansas.
Spartanburg, South Carolina, saw thirty-one new plants or expansions in a single year, part of an industrial boom on and near I-85 that stretched from Danville, Virginia, to Atlanta. The surge spawned severe labor shortages—companies couldn't recruit outside workers for lack of housing, and new housing couldn't be built for lack of workers—and unforeseen social change; hungry for labor, firms offered better working conditions, higher wages, and new opportunities for blacks.
Mount Vernon, Illinois, at the junction of Interstates 64 and 57, found itself new home to a slew of interchange restaurants and motels, a General Tire plant boasting 1,800 jobs, and a five-hundred-bed regional hospital. The population was swelling, household income on the way to doubling, and soon townsfolk could take in live music any night of the week at the Ramada Inn lounge. "The day we cut the ribbon on I-57," the mayor later said, "it was like turning on a spigot."
As Frank Turner had promised, soon pieces of the system were under construction all over the country. For all this encouraging progress, he and his lieutenants were wrestling with an unforeseen difficulty on both suburban and rural legs. As the bureau and states had planned to run a good many of the new routes right on top of the old U.S. highways they would supersede, they expected that they would have to buy only so much land for the system; the existing resources, they figured, merely needed an upgrade. But as plans moved toward construction, it became obvious that in most of the country, that approach wouldn't work.
Virginia's experience with Interstate 81 illustrates why. The commonwealth had initially resisted plans to upgrade U.S. 11, a critical but narrow link between the Deep South and the Northeast that within the state ran 343 miles up the Shenandoah Valley from Bristol, on the Tennessee line, through Roanoke and Staunton to West Virginia. It was among the country's most historic corridors, the descendant of the Valley Road on which early European settlers had ventured beyond the Blue Ridge, and of the Wilderness Road on which Daniel Boone had struck farther west. In the eyes of the state's highway bosses, it was just fine as it was—a two-laner that here and there widened to three or four.
The feds convinced them that the corridor needed Interstate 81, and that the new road would have to hew to a four-lane standard. But building a much bigger highway on the old road was no simple matter, because over the centuries, a lot of people had settled alongside U.S. 11. Farmers depended on the highway to get their crops and cattle to market; restaurants and stores catered to the travelers who streamed past at all times of day, as well as residents of nearby towns and colleges; churches and filling stations abounded. All of these properties had driveways opening onto the road.
If built on top of the existing road, the limited-access interstate would run right past their front doors but deny them entrance. Many, if not most, had no other way on and off their parcels. And that, as Turner would recall years later, spelled trouble. "The right of access to a public highway was considered a property right by law," he said. "And therefore, it had a dollar value." So did the property itself. If you run a restaurant and the state barricades you from your customers, that's denying you a right beyond simple access; you're being deprived of livelihood. The state likely would have to buy your whole property, and chances are, you wouldn't settle for a lowball offer; commercial real estate, because appraisers consider it a "highest and best use" of a tract, always costs more than, say, pastureland.
Which is not to say that farmland would come cheap. "Every driveway to a rural farmstead," Turner said, "had the potential of costing us virtually the price of the farm itself, at least." Had Virginia tried to buy access rights and properties along the highway's length, it would still be paying for them today.
Instead, after a great deal of haggling with Turner and company over the details, Virginia moved the interstate away from the existing highway, surveying a line that ran parallel to U.S. 11 but passed a few hundred yards behind the farmhouses and businesses. Because their owners had no right of access to a road that had not previously existed, prices were kept to a minimum.
That scenario played out all over the country. It turned out that three miles of every four had to be built on new alignments. One happy byproduct of these new paths was that they tended to be straighter, and thus shorter, than the U.S. highways on which estimates of their lengths had been based—1,102 miles shorter, system-wide, meaning the bureau had that much in extra interstate to parcel out. It was enough, when added to the 1,000 miles that Congress had tacked onto the original 40,000-mile cap, for nine intercity additions to the network—including one from Pittsburgh to Erie, Pennsylvania, a 102-mile highway that became I-79; another from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Canton, Ohio, to be known as I-77; and most dramatically, a 547-mile extension of Interstate 70 through the Rockies, from Denver to Cove Fort, Utah. It also added mileage in the cities, in part to satisfy the military's desire for "traffic to pass around potential target areas."
Still, satisfying the property-rights question added time and expense to planning and construction. Clearing a path fo
r the interstates required the taking of more than 750,000 properties. In just the first ten months after Ike signed the 1956 act, the bureau allocated $321 million to the states for real estate.
With such money on the line, it was a given that some might try to take advantage of the right-of-way process. The first scandal broke in Indiana, where the chairman of the state highway commission was sneaking inside dope about upcoming land acquisitions to his friends, so that they could beat the state to the properties, then sell them to the taxpayer at jacked-up prices. The bureau increased its scrutiny of land deals, which further delayed construction. And the challenges didn't ease. Before long, New Mexico suspended all interstate construction because land in the rights of way was selling for thirty times its appraised value.
More trouble loomed. One provision of the 1956 act had required the Department of Commerce to update Congress every couple of years on adjustments to the system's costs, and the first such report came in January 1958. What with soaring construction costs and right-of-way prices, not to mention the lowball amount originally earmarked for urban routes, the projected outlay had jumped from $27 billion to $37.6 billion; the interstates were now expected to average close to a million bucks a mile.
Rudely shocked by the new figures, some members of Congress concluded that states fat with Washington's money were tossing cash around—or worse, had succumbed to corruption. "Congressman after congressman got up on the floor of the House and made wild speeches, frightening speeches," one Democratic member, John A. Blatnik of Minnesota, later recalled, "saying we had a shortage of funds because the States were playing fancy-free and foot-loose with the taxpayers' dollars." So strident was the talk that in September 1959, the House mustered a Special Subcommittee on the Federal-Aid Highway Program to look into the matter, led by the same John Blatnik, a former high school chemistry teacher and World War II veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
Blatnik and his eleven fellow committeemen were "real gung-ho" about the assignment, Frank Turner later recalled, and "took an antagonist confrontational approach" to their dealings with the bureau. The press piled on with gusto. In July 1960, Reader's Digest, then among the biggest magazines in America, published a blockbuster story titled "Our Great Big Highway Bungle," which labeled the highway program "a multibillion-dollar rathole" of graft and incompetence, overseen by an "inept" bureau and carried out by states with "an easy-come, easy-go attitude."
"Judging by the record to date, it is time to stop and evaluate," the story suggested, "to make every possible effort to cut out the waste, graft and stupidity, if that beautiful dream we all once had is to come true."
Parade followed suit in February 1962, with "The Great Highway Robbery," by veteran muckraker Jack Anderson, who quoted Blatnik as saying that corruption "permeates the highway program." NBC's David Brinkley brought up the rear, with a special that repeated the accusations.
In fact, the committee did turn up some rotten business. In New Mexico, investigators found that contractors ran roughshod over roads officials, exhibiting "open contempt" for construction specs and quality controls as "a continuing course of conduct over a period of almost ten years." They got away with it, Blatnik's people found, because the state didn't know enough to object; its highway department was managed by unskilled laborers who had been advanced up the ranks without a lick of training. Some state men testified that they didn't know how to test roadbed materials, so they OK'ed all that came before them. Their boss admitted he wasn't schooled on how to do his work until after it was finished. The committee discovered one stretch of highway that was in the act of collapsing even as New Mexico officials signed off on it.
The bureau stopped payments to New Mexico until it got itself together, and did the same to Massachusetts and Oklahoma. Its position was that the problems uncovered by Blatnik's sniffing were probably inevitable—officials were human, after all, and big money was involved—but that they were nonetheless rare. And indeed, they were; the vast majority of states stood up well to the committee's scrutiny.
Still, the bureau put some new safeguards in place, instituting drop-in inspections and materials testing, and creating, in July 1962, two new offices: Audit and Investigations, led by a former FBI agent, would dig into any charges of fraud, sweetheart dealmaking, and the like; the Office of Right-of-Way and Location would verify that property for the system was obtained on the up-and-up and at a price that made sense.
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Much to Turner's chagrin, the Blatnik committee didn't restrict its inquiry to corruption and waste. It attracted almost as much attention investigating whether the "national and defense" highway system could accommodate the military—in particular, whether its overpasses left enough clearance for the army's tanks and heavy trucks. Those clearances, which the bureau initially set at fourteen feet, were revised up to sixteen shortly after the committee convened, but some army vehicles needed much higher clearance than that, and Blatnik's people smelled negligence. How else to explain defense highways that were too puny for the job? One trucking company president testified that low overpasses so slowed down his crews that it took nine days to deliver an Atlas missile from its California factory to its Florida launch site. The trucks were equipped with hydraulic shocks that enabled them to duck under some bridges, but even so, drivers often had to let air out of the tires to make it.
Here was evidence, the committee charged, that the bureau had ignored the needs of the Defense Department. Turner knew better; he and "all of us at the staff working level had been working for years on these kinds of things," he later explained with some bitterness. Both the bureau and the military were well aware, and had been all along, that some gear wouldn't fit under the bridges, but they'd agreed that only a tiny number of vehicles would be blocked, and that the army probably wouldn't want them rolling down the interstates, anyhow. So, rather than spend extra billions for soaring overpasses, the parties simply came up with alternate routes. A too-high truck might go around an overpass on a diamond interchange or parallel the interstate for a short way on a feeder road. All these Plan Bs were mapped and well known to Defense officials.
To Turner, the whole inquiry smacked of a misunderstanding about the nature of the system's "defense" role. A myth persists today, as it did in Blatnik's hearings, that the interstates were designed for the rapid movement of troops—"boys in brown uniforms riding in trucks, an infantry battalion or something," as Turner put it, when they were really "a 'goods movement' facility, rather than a 'human-persons movement' kind of thing."
Another piece of conventional wisdom, still alive on the Internet, was that every fifth mile of interstate was designed as a straightaway so that warplanes could use it as a runway in national emergencies. This may have had its origins in talks between the bureau and air force that did, in fact, occur early in the acquisition of the system's right of way. Turner later said that he was "pressured pretty hard" by the service to build a runway capability into the highways, and that he did his best to accommodate it. The bureau strove to "twist the alignment here to get in the wind directional considerations, and the low gradients and lack of obstructions" necessary for such double duty, hoping that "every forty or fifty miles, we'd have about a three-mile section there that would meet those requirements." He even sent a team over to Germany to reexamine the autobahns. Ultimately, however, he decided it couldn't work. Just from a traffic standpoint, the interstates could not serve two masters. They're strictly for ground traffic.
PART IV
The Human Obstacle
15
WHATEVER THE CHALLENGES the states and the bureaus faced in buying and building in the countryside and low-density suburbs, they confronted a much tougher task in America's central cities, particularly those that had been around for a century or more: Providence and Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Detroit—settlements of closely packed neighborhoods, narrow streets, shoulder-to-shoulder industry. In a nineteenth-
century cityscape, the destruction that attended bulldozing space for the new roads was extreme. In Washington State, engineers gutted a long belt of old neighborhoods and businesses to force Interstate 5 through Seattle's clotted heart; in Wilmington, Delaware, I-95 split the downtown, mowing down hundreds of homes and businesses and four historic churches; black neighborhoods in St. Louis fell to one interstate, a famed Italian enclave was nicked by another, and the downtown was separated from its Mississippi riverfront by a wide and deep ditch, a second river filled with speeding traffic.
As the Chief had warned, urban interstates would bring pain. And one city that stood to feel as much as any was Herbert Fairbank's hometown, the bureau's very model for how such highways might transform cities for the better: Baltimore.
In the fifties Baltimore was, as it remains, a gritty industrial port town with as much in common with cities in the Northeast as with its sisters in the South. Settled in the late seventeenth century, it is situated on a great natural harbor convenient to the agricultural fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio. First as a shipping center for tobacco, later for corn and other food crops, and eventually as a major exporter of flour, Baltimore expanded until, by the early 1800s, it was the second-largest city in the country.
As was the case with other colonial settlements, its streets were narrow and crooked and met at odd angles, making traffic a nightmare even before the Civil War. In the century since, the population had erupted to nearly a million, much of it packed into Baltimore's famed brick row houses. Two of the country's most important highways crossed the city—U.S. 40 from west to east, and U.S. 1 on a diagonal, carrying traffic to and from Washington, to the southwest, and Philadelphia, to the northeast. In Baltimore's heart these big roads dwindled to doglegging lanes and became, as Fairbank had put it in Toll Roads and Free Roads, "the despair of the stranger and the daily inconvenience of [Baltimore's] own citizens." The halting flood of autos, trucks, and streetcars, whether bound for the next block or two states away, created a fatal sludge. Congestion was epic.
