The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  In 1944, Baltimore had been among the cities to tap Robert Moses for a solution. He found the lay of the place vexing. The southeastern quarter is dominated by the Patapsco River, a tidal estuary of the Chesapeake Bay, which enters the city two miles wide, then splits three ways, throwing up myriad obstacles to crosstown travel. The Patapsco's southern two forks dead-end among piers and factories. The third, North Branch, splits off at Fort McHenry, where in 1814 Francis Scott Key witnessed the Star-Spangled Banner survive a British siege, and bends northwest toward Baltimore's center. It is the narrowest of the forks, lined with shipyards, foundries, and old brick homes and warehouses, and swings first left, then right, before ending at a squarish basin. Today, this Inner Harbor is Baltimore's showplace, encircled by high-rise apartments and offices, shops, restaurants, and the National Aquarium, the nighttime lights of all reflecting almost magically on the water. Hotels rise from docks where excursion boats tie up, and a few blocks away looms the celebrated Oriole Park. But in 1944, few tourists ventured anywhere near the Inner Harbor, which was oil-fouled and trash-strewn and home to a transient population almost as unsavory as the stinking water itself. The central business district kept its distance, clustering several blocks to the north.

  One question confronting Moses was whether to locate his expressway along the Inner Harbor, thereby serving the downtown area from its southern fringe, or to route it through densely packed residential and commercial blocks to the north. Moses chose the latter; he called for a six-lane, mostly depressed expressway that entered Baltimore from the southwest, then made a hard turn east to run between two parallel streets, Franklin and Mulberry, past downtown. It continued on that eastward line, varying no more than a block or two, clear across the city. He called it the Franklin Expressway.

  The alignment not only made for an arrow-straight highway, it wiped out the city's worst slums, which were concentrated to the west of downtown. Some of the back alleys there were truly wretched, reeking of garbage and overfilled privies. "Flies swarm by the thousands," the Baltimore Sun reported. "Rats scurry from piles of garbage into pockmarked, cementless yards where they make their homes. Dogs paw through discarded foodstuffs dumped indiscriminately in yards and alleys. Wooden fences around back yards are falling down, some due to the tenants tearing out boards to use for heating purposes." Because slum land could be snapped up for a song, the Franklin Expressway was also affordable, as Fairbank had foreseen.

  But the slums, grotesque though they were, housed a large chunk of Baltimore's population, and the Moses proposal was sparking dissent months before it was finished. A protest group sprang up to argue that the Franklin Expressway would be unnecessarily destructive and wouldn't really fix the city's congestion woes; traffic surveys showed the busiest streets ran north-south, not east-west. Others protested that the highway would create a "Chinese Wall" dividing Baltimore in half.

  Moses had little patience for such trifling worries. Sure, the road would put nineteen thousand people out of their homes, but "the slum areas through which the Franklin Expressway passes are a disgrace to the community," he wrote, "and the more of them that are wiped out the healthier Baltimore will be in the long run." As for the talk of a Chinese Wall, well, that was "an old chestnut" that had been hung on "every parkway and express artery since the internal combustion engine was perfected." Progressive communities mounting such objections had "lived to retract their epithets," he wrote, then sneered: "Some are beyond conversion, but these are the same people who don't believe in automobiles, live in the past, and honestly believe they have no debt to the future." The Franklin Expressway, he assured Baltimore, would be "a genuine municipal improvement."

  The city's business community got behind the plan, producing a brochure that called it a key to postwar prosperity. The citizenry was unconvinced. When the City Council considered the plan in March 1945, a crowd of 1,500 taxpayers showed up, and a long parade of speakers denounced it to a chorus of cheers and shouts. The last to speak, one Mrs. Rufus Gibbs, read a letter from acerbic Sun staffer and syndicated columnist H. L. Mencken, saying he figured the expressway would win approval. It had "everything in its favor," he explained, "including the fact that it is a completely idiotic undertaking."

  To Mencken's happy surprise, he was wrong. The proposal died. Not so the thinking behind it, however. In its place, City Hall mulled a more complicated highway scheme of radials and loops. This new plan prompted an appearance by Herbert Fairbank, who told his hometown's advertising club that Baltimore, like every other old city in America, faced a choice: shake off its resistance to change or witness its downtown suffer a lingering death. Employment there had seen no growth in more than a decade. Property values were in free fall. Empty loft and warehouse space abounded; vacancies were so high in some buildings that their cash-desperate owners tore them down for parking lots. Sales were dwindling at the big flagship department stores. Not a single new office building had been erected since the twenties.

  "The arteries are clogged, and when the arteries clog, the body dies!" Fairbank warned. "You are going to have to do something about it. And the answer is: expressways." The city needed a system of fast, free-flowing radials sprouting from a beltway around the central business district, a setup "very much like the hub and the spokes of a wheel" and linked to a rim out in the far suburbs. "The whole system is needed," he insisted, and to the city's good fortune, the first step to getting it was already figured out: the proposed highway running across town between Franklin and Mulberry. "We are satisfied that this proposal is thoroughly sound," he said, "and will approve it."

  Baltimoreans weren't nearly so satisfied. A few weeks later, the city's chief engineer was booed loudly by residents at another packed City Council session. He told them he sympathized with their position but didn't "feel like laughing off" the millions of dollars the feds would contribute to the project. That would become an oft-heard refrain of city leaders and state highway officials across America in decades to come: they couldn't afford to refuse Washington's money.

  While all this excitement was unfolding, a quiet, studious young black scientist named Joe Wiles moved to town. He was a New Yorker, a native of Brooklyn, raised in working-class Prospect Heights by parents who'd immigrated from Barbados. Neither his father, a printer, nor his mother, a homemaker, had much education. Still, they'd infused Wiles and his four younger brothers with a hunger for learning and service, and with an understanding that "community" meant more than lines on a map. So young Joe Wiles had earned admission to Brooklyn College, where he'd studied biology for five semesters, then had transferred to Morris Brown College in Atlanta on a basketball scholarship. He'd started graduate work at Atlanta University, intending to eventually enter medical school, and had performed brilliantly.

  On visits back to Brooklyn he'd passed time shooting hoops outside of P.S. 35 and had caught the eye of Esther Ogburn, the pretty daughter of a local Episcopal priest. One day Wiles left his bike lying around, and Esther's father, Rev. John'T. Ogburn, drove his car over it; the accident gave Esther and Joe a few minutes to talk. They reconnected in more relaxed fashion at church socials, where Wiles wowed the girls with his dancing. He soon had a steady partner, and before long, the two were seeing each other all the time. That ended when his draft notice arrived.

  The army had sent him first to Fort Benning, where he was given an intelligence test. The cadre quickly accused him of cheating; Wiles's score blew away those of his fellow conscripts, which wasn't expected of a black man with a New York accent, and they had him take it again while they sat in the room. He topped his previous score. Ah, one of the officers said, we have ourselves a smart one. They made him a medic.

  Wiles and Esther had written each other throughout his training, kept up their correspondence when the army shipped him overseas, and in one of his letters he proposed. When Germany collapsed, the army transferred Wiles to the Pacific, with a stateside furlough on the way. He used it to marry Esther in her father's church.


  Freshly discharged in July 1946, Wiles had landed a job at the Edgewood Arsenal, an army chemical and biomedical research lab northeast of Baltimore. Housing for blacks was not to be had nearby, so he and Esther moved into a one-room apartment on Baltimore's west side. It was so tiny they couldn't get dressed at the same time, and almost an hour's commute from the lab on busy U.S. 40, but it wasn't far off Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore's black shopping and entertainment district of the day, and convenient to Druid Hill Park, a massive preserve just to the north, and they made a home of it. Little more than a year after they married, Esther was pregnant with their first daughter, Carmen.

  With her arrival, the Wileses found a bigger place in Mount Washington, north of the city in rural Baltimore County, where not long after, Esther gave birth to another daughter, Carole. And not long after that, with the cold war threatening to go hot in Korea, Wiles was called up by the army. Stuck in a succession of stateside posts, the only black sergeant in his unit, he wrote Esther of conversations with white noncoms that made him feel "very envious and jealous" of the homes they owned, when he was "older than them and had two children and didn't have a home to offer you or them either."

  The conversations left him with a hardening resolve. He wrote Esther that it was now his "prime aim to direct all of our resources, energy and ambition towards getting a place that we can call ours and fixing it up so that we can live comfortably." He begged her not to "run up any more bills," to sock away all available cash. And he shared with her a detailed picture of what he had in mind: "one of those fine red brick two story affairs with a nice large cemented cellar," three bedrooms, a big front porch, "paneled painted walls with indirect lighting in the living and dining rooms," and a "modernistic" kitchen with "inlaid linoleum and tile walls, fluorescent lighting, built-in wall cabinets."

  "That's a beautiful picture, isn't it, honey?" he wrote. "I can dream, can't I?"

  He could. He did. Once out of uniform and back at Edgewood, Wiles bought a house that fit this description in virtually every respect, in a solidly middle-class corner of west Baltimore called Rosemont.

  The Wiles family was at the vanguard of a westward migration of Baltimore's middle-class blacks. Long penned in overcrowded streets and alleys that hugged the city's downtown (the very neighborhoods that Robert Moses had targeted), they shared a postwar hunger for safety and shade trees, decent schools and a little privacy, and found them in traditionally white neighborhoods along U.S. 40. Some parts of town saw their racial makeup flip practically overnight.

  So as the Wileses moved into their new place and other black families did the same, Rosemont's remaining whites prepared to flee to the county's fast-rising suburbs. Just as Wiles had imagined, the family's new row house was two stories tall and brick, with a big azalea in the yard and a façade dominated by a deep wooden porch. It had airy living and dining rooms, a dry basement, and a nice kitchen with plenty of room for a table. A detached one-car garage opened onto the paved alley out back. Its surroundings were tranquil; traffic was light, the sidewalks were safe, and everywhere they turned was green. The front porch looked onto a dense thicket of hardwoods—houses ran up only one side of Ellamont Street—and just across the back alley, and forming the central two-thirds of the block, was a low wetland tangled with vines and scrub and reputedly full of snakes.

  Wiles draped a canvas awning from the front porch, put a metal glider out there for warm summer nights, and started transforming the basement into a game room. He bought concrete flower boxes in which Esther planted geraniums. The girls instantly made a passel of friends and spent afternoons playing jacks, jumping rope, and riding bikes in the alley. Rosemont became home.

  Yet Wiles saw that nice as the neighborhood was, it had lost an important piece of itself when the population turned over. Its new residents had no shared memories, no common traditions, no consensus as to what or how the community should be. Mature trees or no, it felt a little like a new subdivision. So in 1952, he and a few of his neighbors organized the Rosemont Neighborhood Improvement Association, and at its first meeting, despite his soft-spoken, almost shy manner, Wiles was elected president.

  The association met monthly in members' homes and on weekends embarked on cleanups of the vacant lots scattered among the houses and the weedy open land straddling the railroad tracks that curved by a few blocks to the south. Its members helped older residents with big maintenance chores and kept an eye on each other's kids. The culture of involvement fed on itself; Rosemont came to seem a village in the city.

  Always, Wiles had an eye for further improvements. Some of Rosemont's men decided the neighborhood's boys could use a little structure, and they organized a troop of the Kadets of America, a patriotic youth organization big on military-style marching drills. A couple of years later, Wiles started a girls' troop that Carmen and Carole joined, and he drilled the unit a couple of times a week. He was serious about it, as he was about anything he took on, and the girls held their own in weekend competitions with Kadet troops from out of town.

  He and the neighbors decided the jungle in the middle of the block was wasted opportunity and resolved to clean it up. They whacked down its brush and high grass to expose a sloping, two-acre clearing and eventually convinced the city to fill and level it. The association put flower boxes around the trees and built picnic tables, and it became a neighborhood jewel.

  He preached to the girls the value of having a plan and working toward it, and the house around them bore witness to his methodical nature. The yard matured into a crisp arrangement of lawn and flower beds. The basement acquired paneling, a full bath, and a bar. The same went for Wiles's performance at Edgewood; he steadily rose through the ranks at the biomedical lab and on the side authored a growing body of scientific papers, even patented an inoculation gun.

  His calm determination was especially useful when Rosemont confronted crisis. The first came five years after the family arrived, when the association learned that a box factory was to be built down by the railroad tracks. Wiles and his neighbors organized a protest that drew five hundred people to a local Baptist church. They met with members of the City Council, too, and won a promise of help. It turned out the property had been zoned for just such a purpose for twenty-five years or better, and the councilmen couldn't block it, but the experience spurred the association to pursue zoning changes that would discourage industry and apartments, and to develop an expertise in navigating City Hall.

  At almost the same time, the Wileses and twenty-five other families whose homes backed onto the open field learned that the school board planned to condemn their properties for a new elementary school there. Wiles convinced the city to instead condemn the woods across Ellamont.

  It was a close call. And, it turned out, a warm-up for battles to come.

  The Yellow Book's map of Baltimore resurrected talk of an east-west expressway. It depicted the highway making a straight shot across the city's waist on top of U.S. 40, which formed Rosemont's southern boundary. But by the autumn of 1956, city planners mapping out the specific right of way for what was to be Interstate 70 had come up with a decidedly different path. Looking to avoid the expense and hassle of buying commercial property along U.S. 40, they chose a route through two big city parks west of Rosemont, then swooped it south to join 40 in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor. In the process, they penciled in a route that drilled straight through Rosemont's heart.

  If built as proposed, I-70 would pass within a yell of the Wileses' house, in two directions. It would cross Ellamont to the south and come up behind the school now planned for the woods across the street. It would dominate the view from the front yard. It would obliterate the quiet. It would cut the neighborhood in half. And the Wileses would have to count themselves lucky, because the expressway also would flatten 880 of their neighbors' homes.

  Wiles and those neighbors knew that a parade of expressway proposals had come and gone over the previous decade, and that this one might well meet the sort of
shout-down that had killed its predecessors. Still, it was galling. Rosemont was a genuine success story. Its household income exceeded the city's average. Its people were better educated than most of their fellow Baltimoreans. It had a higher-than-average rate of home ownership. Why target such a place?

  By 1962, city and state officials had considered four main paths for Baltimore's east-west expressway, along with a slew of quickly forgotten variants. Three of the four had in common an alignment through Leakin Park and Joe Wiles's well-educated, middle-class neighborhood of Rosemont.

  The question went unasked—and certainly, unanswered—outside Rosemont. The press and most of the population concentrated their outrage on what the road planners had in mind for the white neighborhoods to the east. Nearing downtown, I-70 would encircle history-rich Mount Vernon Place (and the nation's first monument to George Washington) to meet a partially built north-south radial, the future I-83, in a lavish interchange. From there, it would bull eastward through a half-dozen communities, displacing thousands. Most outrageously, in the view of many Baltimoreans, the six-lane freeway would blast through Tyson Street, where a band of artists and professionals had won national acclaim by transforming an enclave of derelict houses into a bright, funky arts district.

  At first, the planners said they might be able to adjust the route to spare the "Pastel Block," as Tyson was nicknamed, but that was before they muscled up the proposed interstate to eight lanes; by the summer of 1957, the city was saying that the street's future was "bleak—almost nil." And to add insult to injury, I-70 would be double-decked and elevated for most of its swing through town, so that its upper level stood nearly sixty feet off the ground.