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

by Earl Swift

  Granted, there were tradeoffs. The Inner Harbor would be cut off to anything but canoes and skiffs except in one spot, a 150-foot-wide opening tall enough for tugs and small sailboats. And east of the harbor, 10-D would, like the earlier plan, uproot folks from those purportedly seedy riverside neighborhoods. But next to what had come before, the route seemed positively light-handed; its residential victims would number under 4,800.

  The business community swooned over it. The mayor backed it. The city's public works director proclaimed it "the most advantageous route for the city." Again, the population disagreed. Nine white west side neighborhoods were up in arms over I-70's proposed course through the two parks—heavily forested, vine-tangled Leakin Park, one of the biggest pieces of urban wilderness in the East, and Gwynns Falls Park, a greenbelt straddling its namesake stream. Then there were the seedy neighborhoods east of the Inner Harbor. They were a quiltwork of Italian, Greek, and Polish enclaves, settled generations before, mostly working-class, fiercely house-proud. Their two-fisted residents didn't view themselves or their communities as expendable. One of those neighborhoods, Fells Point, was attracting more upscale defenders, who recognized its ragged eighteenth-century buildings as architectural treasures.

  City Hall was aware of a mounting alarm in Rosemont, too, and along the Franklin-Mulberry corridor, but neither prompted much worry. Those neighborhoods were black.

  Days before a public hearing on the plan, the city's public works director, Bernard Werner, announced that he wouldn't put up with any demonstrations. "You can't build an expressway without tearing down some homes," he said, in a variation on the old saw about omelets. "Somebody's going to have to be displaced no matter where we build it." He got a protest, all the same. For three hours, 1,300 angry Baltimoreans booed, heckled, and otherwise tormented 10-D's backers. The worst of it came when a spokesman for the engineering firms commented that "many of the neighborhoods affected have already been earmarked for slum clearance." As the Sun reported: "A chorus of boos greeted this remark, interspersed with shouts of 'Who says?' and 'My home's no slum.'"

  When a spokesman for the Jaycees completed a short speech favoring the highway, city councilman William Bonnett, seated on the auditorium's stage, leaped to his feet, grabbed the microphone, and hollered that the speaker must be some suburbanite from Baltimore County. Again, from the Sun: "Mr. Werner struggled with Mr. Bonnett for possession of the microphone, but the determined councilman held on. 'About 15,000 people are going to be put out on the street because of this expressway. They are the people who ought to be heard, not those who live in the county,' he said.

  "With this, Mr. Werner finally regained the microphone and ordered Mr. Bonnett to his seat amid jeers and cries of 'Let him talk!' from the crowd."

  George H. Fallon, Baltimore's big man in Congress, figured some such discord was unavoidable. "The fact that the road program has an impact on every American makes it the center of innumerable controversies," he told AASHO's annual meeting late in the year, no doubt thinking of his hometown. "You cannot avoid these controversies. You can prepare yourself for them, and you may be able to minimize controversy by telling your side of the story in a convincing manner, but you cannot eliminate the controversies."

  The State Roads Commission was nonetheless stung by the fiery reception. It recommended no immediate action on the expressway's Inner Harbor leg and a quick start on the westernmost stretch, through the parks and Rosemont—what it called the "noncontroversial section."

  A year after John Bragdon's report disappeared into the bureaucratic abyss, some of its central tenets resurfaced in a joint study conducted by the Commerce Department and the U.S Housing and Home Finance Agency. The subject was urban mass transportation, and this new document, released in March 1962, urged that American cities make their transportation plans "integral parts" of broader community planning, just as Bragdon had advocated. The joint report also recommended that the feds withhold transportation money from any city that failed to do so.

  The suggestion came as the interstate system's urban legs moved from theory to designated corridors. In Atlanta, in Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis, in the Boston area and Miami, homeowners, apartment dwellers, and businesses were finding that they were in the way, and more often than not, that they could do little about it. In most places, the men calling the shots were state highway engineers, unelected technocrats immune from voter anger, and they were armed with sheaves of technical studies and statistics and cost-benefit analyses that supported their positions. Public hearings were filled with words their audiences didn't understand.

  Highway plans were almost always freestanding, disconnected from any vision for the city at large, including other forms of transportation. Pressure for a more comprehensive approach mounted quickly. In April 1962, John F. Kennedy borrowed from the joint report in his first message to Congress on transportation, placing the administration firmly behind the idea. In June, another conference of highway officials in Hershey, Pennsylvania, concluded that expressways "cannot be planned independently of the areas through which they pass." And in October, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962 declared that as of 1965, the secretary of commerce would not approve "any program for projects in any urban area of more than fifty-thousand population unless he finds that such projects are based on a continuing comprehensive transportation planning process carried on cooperatively by states and local communities." Cooperative, comprehensive, continuing—the act's "3-C" requirement gave urban planners hope that highways might become tools for improving city life, rather than battering rams.

  The new act notwithstanding, I-70's route through Baltimore's black neighborhoods seemed a foregone conclusion. By the middle of 1964, it was easy to pick out sections of the corridor. The stretch along Franklin and Mulberry streets, the one part of the proposed highway that had been included in every plan since the war, had fallen deep into blight, its occupants seeing no reason to maintain properties that were doomed. The decay had spilled into the adjacent blocks and was spreading; the future I-70, Baltimoreans noted bitterly, was killing neighborhoods even before the wrecking crews arrived.

  That fall, state and federal officials signed off on 10-D. A young lawyer and city councilman, Tom Ward, urged his colleagues to cut the expressway from the city budget, calling the state roads boss "the people's enemy." The vote went against him, 22 to 1. Still, Ward was able to postpone the start of construction, first by insisting that the city's park board weigh in on the expressway's path, and later, by demanding that the planning commission review small adjustments to the route. The delays proved critical; they bought time for the opposition to organize.

  The resistance in Baltimore was echoed all over America. In Nashville, I-40's planned path through black neighborhoods on the north side of town, a route that isolated one hundred blocks from the rest of the city and smashed through a long-established black commercial district, prompted those in the way to seek help from the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, which started building a discrimination case against Tennessee's highway authorities. A few hours to the west, citizens stirred in Memphis, where the same interstate was to chew six lanes wide through Overton Park, a leafy preserve that included the city's zoo, a nine-hole golf course, and picnic grounds. Protest groups sprang up in Philadelphia, where a crosstown freeway threatened to sequester black neighborhoods, creating a Mason-Dixon Line of elevated concrete, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where state highway officials planned to thread an interstate between Harvard University and MIT and straight through a belt of middle-class homes.

  In New Orleans, opposition swelled against plans for an elevated freeway that would skirt the famed French Quarter and carry its thundering traffic within view and earshot of Jackson Square and the country's oldest cathedral—a project that federal housing authorities judged would have a "severely deleterious impact" on the historic neighborhood, but which city and state officials pressed for, nonetheless.

  When Baltimore held its first he
aring on a condemnation ordinance for I-70, the first legal step to seizing land and clearing houses, the audience of 550 protesters was so boisterous that the councilman running the meeting walked out; the Sun reported that the session reflected all of the city's expressway plans: it ended "in shambles."

  He rarely made it into the city's newspapers, but dig into the local history collections at the University of Baltimore, and Joe Wiles surfaces repeatedly. He was the quintessential background operator, a man whose community activism took quiet but persistent form, who put faith in persuasion and persistence over making a lot of noise. And now, under his leadership, the Rosemont Neighborhood Improvement Association turned its full attention to the expressway threat.

  When homeowners in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor formed the Relocation Action Movement, or RAM, aiming to get a fair shake for families displaced by the expressway, Wiles and the Rosemont association joined it. That homes would be lost seemed a sure thing, but the group was outraged that in return the city offered nothing beyond fair market value; it was up to the displaced, most of them poor, to cover their own moving costs and to find replacement housing, which was sure to cost more than the homes from which they would be evicted.

  That bum deal was aggravated by slack city housing inspections in the expressway's corridor. As the condition of properties slid, the market value of the surrounding neighborhood went with them, meaning that the sums the dispossessed would get for their places were shrinking fast. Within weeks, as the group's complaints resonated with Baltimoreans both within and outside the condemnation zones, RAM grew to hundreds strong.

  Across town, another protest group mushroomed at the same time. Tom Ward and several well-heeled allies founded the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill, Montgomery Street and Fells Point, dedicated to saving irreplaceable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings in the city's southeastern neighborhoods. While tussling publicly with officials over the expressway's merits, the group quietly laid the groundwork to have the neighborhoods listed on the newly created National Register of Historic Places. Two upstart groups—one mostly black and poor, from west Baltimore, and the other white and better-off, and from the east—had joined separate battles in the same war.

  Frank Turner and his colleagues in the Bureau of Public Roads witnessed the protests unfolding in city after city with dismay and frustration. Since early in its history, the bureau's reliance on technical expertise and isolation from politics had been the foundation of its strength. For more than forty years, its judgment as to where and how to build roads had been unquestioned. It had been entrusted by the American people to foster an implied right—of mobility, of freedom to roam—and it had served that task and the people well. In 1966, Americans owned 57 percent of the world's passenger cars, drove 922 billion miles, made 92 percent of their intercity trips by road. Pleasure driving was considered the nation's top form of outdoor recreation.

  Just imagine what a mess the place would be if the bureau hadn't known its stuff. But now, look—that work was vilified from coast to coast. The Atlantic Monthly made it sound like a bad thing that American highways occupied an area the size of West Virginia. Writers for the conservative National Review sniffed that expressways "had become the symbol of a complex and undisciplined society" and decided it was "high time for President Johnson or Secretary Udall to restrain their minions in the Bureau." Innumerable newspaper stories called the urban program into question, along with the agencies behind it.

  Then there was Lewis Mumford, the Freeway Revolt's ideological Adam, who was in more of a rage than ever. In 1961 he'd published The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, a 657-page masterpiece in which he'd described expressways as "funnels that help to blow the urban dust farther from the center, once the top soil of a common life has been removed." Many critics had judged it his finest work; the following year, it had won the National Book Award, and in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

  In "The American Way of Death," published in the New York Review of Books in April 1966, Mumford reprised his attack on "that religion for whose evidences of power and glory the American people, with eyes devoutly closed, are prepared to sacrifice some 59,000 lives every year, and to maim, often irreparably, some three million more." Most of the article, a review of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, was a diatribe against the automobile itself, which "could have made an invaluable contribution in creating a regional distribution of population" but instead accounted for some of the greatest crises facing city and countryside alike—"the nightmare of the air becoming toxic with poisonous exhausts, including the highly lethal carbon monoxide; of the water supply polluted with deadly lead from gasoline exhausts already half way to the danger point even in the Arctic wastes; the nightmare of diurnal mass commutation by car... ."

  He reserved special scorn for the sterile monotony of the interstates:

  The same compulsory high speed, the same wide monotonous road, producing the same hypnotic drowsiness, the same air-conditioned climate in the car, the same Howard Johnsons, the same clutter of parking lots, the same motels. No matter how fast he travels or how far he goes, the motorist never actually leaves home: indeed no effort is spared to eliminate variety in the landscape, and to make famous beauty spots by mountain or sea into as close a counterpart of the familiar shopping center as the original landscape will permit. In short, automobility has turned out to be the most static form of mobility that the mind of man has yet devised.

  Let that sort of talk get to you, and it could be pretty damn disheartening to work in the Bureau of Public Roads, to be any kind of highway man. Turner was especially bothered by the personal nature of some criticism. Lifelong public servants, men who had devoted their careers to their fellow citizens, to their communities, were being held up as heartless, single-minded bastards whose work ruined cities, left psychic and physical scars, and benefited an already fat consortium of oil, auto, and trucking companies. Turner decried the "nonsense" that "all highway people want to do is build highways. Just push 'em through, and to the devil with the consequences," as he put it to an interviewer. That the bureau had designed every mile of the interstates to "ravage a park; or to cut through a college campus; or to deliberately destroy a wilderness area or a fine trout stream," and to "remove tens of thousands of helpless homeowners and businessmen" with "no consideration except dollars being the yardstick."

  If the taxpayers had an inkling of the thought that went into highway locations, Turner believed they wouldn't be so quick to denounce either the roads or their builders. He worked for the common good. "Highways, you know, are for people," he told the friendly Highway User magazine. "There is no reason for highways apart from people. Very simply, highways are people. Those who think they are a broom to sweep people aside simply don't know highways or how we think about them."

  Urban interstates alone hadn't worked up the masses, he suspected. Something bigger was afoot—anti-highway sentiment was part of a series of tectonic shifts in American culture that dominated the TV news he watched with Mable every night. "We are in a period of change, of seething transition, when old values are under question everywhere," he wrote. "It is an age of hippies, of pot, of LSD, of dropouts, of teachers' strikes, of race riots, of looting. It is the period of the breakup of the home, the abandonment of morals, or at least the adoption of a different moral code than the one we knew and respected for centuries.

  "In a time when even religion is questioned, then it is understandable that the value of the highway program should be questioned, too."

  That didn't make the criticism sting any less, but it helped explain it, at least. Turner struggled to keep perspective, to not take the harsh rhetoric personally. Oftentimes, he succeeded. On days he didn't ride the bus he commuted into the district with his son Jim, who was impressed by how calmly his father could discuss attacks on the program. And by how open-minded the old man
was: beginning in February 1967, when he was again promoted, Turner devoted many of his speeches and interviews to preaching empathy and an "enlightened view."

  "We've heard a lot these past few years about human and social values," he told western state highway officials in an August 1967 speech. "And it's not just talk. If there ever was a time when roads were built only to move people and goods, that time is long gone."

  In Highway User he almost sounded like a protester himself. "You cannot just ram a highway through a city area and say to the people, 'Oops, sorry! You'll just have to take yourselves and your businesses somewhere else. You know how it is—there's always some poor guy in the way,'" he told the magazine. "Let me tell you something else that we unfeeling highway people know, and some of us have discovered it the hard way. These people won't sit still for it. They'll fight."

  Turner's new job was "director of Public Roads," which on paper seemed much the same post that Thomas MacDonald had left fourteen years before. But the bureau and its place in government were in the midst of change. In addition to overseeing the interstate program and riding herd on most of the rest of the Federal Aid system, Turner had spent months on a task force designing a new cabinet-level Department of Transportation, to which the bureau shifted in the spring of 1967. As part of the new setup, Public Roads became part of a new Federal Highway Administration. Turner speculated that this extra layer of supervision was prompted at least in part by the mushrooming crisis in the cities, by the perception that the interstate program's engineers had to be reined in. Whatever its genesis, the new DOT was the fourth-largest department in the government, with a budget of nearly $6 billion and more than ninety thousand employees, the bulk of both devoted to motor transport.