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

by Earl Swift

  The new secretary was Alan'S. Boyd, a Florida-born lawyer and past chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, whom President Lyndon Johnson called "the best-equipped man in this country" for "untangling, coordinating and building a national transportation system worthy of America." The new federal highway administrator, and Turner's direct boss, was Lowell K. Bridwell, a former reporter and columnist who, in a distinguished career with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, had made a specialty of transportation; among his long-running stories had been the Blatnik committee's investigations. Bridwell was an inspired choice; he was at once intimately familiar with the bureau's policies and beholden to none of them, a non-engineer who saw highways for their social effects as well as their traffic capacities. "We have learned how to build superior facilities for the fast, relatively safe, economic and convenient movement of people and goods by motor vehicle," he said. "But the way we go about planning, locating and designing [highways] is not good enough for today. It certainly isn't good enough for tomorrow.

  "Highway planning," Bridwell asserted, "is not and cannot be a completely quantifiable process in which all elements can be ... assigned numbers." A road's design might be a task strictly for engineers, he said, but the "planning and location of a highway facility involves many considerations other than engineering."

  ***

  Sensing that Baltimore's highway program promised heartache to all involved, local architects convinced Maryland officials that I-70 would go down easier if the engineers designing the highway collaborated with experts from other professions—if they joined architects and planners to form a "Design Concept Team," aided by sociologists, economists, landscape architects, and other specialists. An interdisciplinary approach, they hoped, could transform an eyesore into "a major and lasting civic monument, like the Roman aqueducts."

  The expressway's city and state bosses might have bought into just about any idea at that juncture, because the federal share of interstate spending carried a 1972 deadline, and the expressway was running late. Finishing in time meant evicting four thousand households in the coming couple of years, and somehow finding new homes for the dispossessed; demolishing not only houses but ninety businesses, seven churches, and eight acres of wharf; and relocating seventy miles of utility pipe and cable, all while building eighteen miles of highway and seventeen interchanges.

  It took until early 1967 to hash out the team's particulars. It would comprise four partners, led by a Maryland engineering outfit and an international architectural firm. The team's leader and public face hailed from San Francisco: architect Nathaniel A. Owings, who in terms of his view of the automobile had much in common with Lewis Mumford. The interstate system, he wrote, had "raised more problems than it solved," had "cut through neighborhoods, parks and historic areas" in cities throughout the country. "Part of the tragedy," he added, "is that the cities themselves have rushed with a strange sense of urgency to cooperate in their own mutilation."

  In exchange for $4.8 million, most of it supplied by the feds, the team was to blend the expressway, as best as it could, with Baltimore's "social, economic, and esthetic needs." It was a tall order. As Sun reporter and columnist James D. Dilts observed, "'Blending' a six- or eight-lane highway into the fabric of Baltimore is about as promising an assignment as 'blending' a buzz saw into a Persian rug."

  By the summer of 1967, the resumé of one Stuart Wechsler, age twenty-five, white native of the Bronx, included sit-ins, rent strikes, picket lines, several arrests and jail stays, a caning and kidnapping at the hands of Florida bigots, and up-close views of several shotgun barrels, all in the service of the Congress of Racial Equality. He'd joined the civil rights group while in college in New York, had agitated for its causes there and in the Mid-Atlantic in the early part of the decade, and had ventured into the South to register black voters. He'd been down there for two years when CORE asked him to tackle a tougher assignment: Baltimore.

  The city was schizophrenic on matters of race in the mid-sixties. Many of Baltimore's public gathering spots, including an amusement park not far from Rosemont, had only recently been integrated. Its neighborhoods and schools saw little mixing. Tensions between whites and blacks often spiked. Wechsler was not long settled in CORE's offices in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor before he came to see the expressway as a racial issue—no way would it be aimed through a stable, middle-class neighborhood like Rosemont if the population were white. It seemed a classic example of white men's roads going through black men's homes.

  So he responded eagerly to a call from RAM, asking for help in resisting the planned buyouts in Rosemont and Franklin-Mulberry. In early June 1967, the same month that the city approved a condemnation ordinance that enabled it to start snapping up houses, Wechsler helped Joe Wiles and his compatriots organize a mass convergence on City Hall to demand replacement value for doomed homes, rather than the market price. The event brought RAM's first victory against what Wechsler called "the city's Vietnam." The mayor, Theodore R. McKeldin, vowed that he would go to Washington to ask for buyout money. Come October, McKeldin made good on his promise, leading a contingent of city officials, residents from Rosemont and Franklin-Mulberry, Wechsler, and Wiles on a bus pilgrimage to the Federal Highway Administration, where they met with Bridwell and Secretary Boyd. The feds declared a moratorium on the taking of homes in the I-70 corridor until the state authorized adequate replacement payments.

  An even bigger victory came in January 1968, when the Design Concept Team judged the expressway's path through Rosemont so disruptive "that only a different road location could provide a reasonable solution." The team suggested shifting the alignment to the south and offered three variations on the idea. One followed U.S. 40's existing footprint along the neighborhood's southern edge, the path foreseen in the Yellow Book; it would cut the number of displaced Rosemont families by half. A second skirted Rosemont's west side and nicked a corner of Western Cemetery, the resting place of several thousand dead whites; it would take even fewer houses and save nearly $7 million over the original route. The third ran straight through the cemetery, at the expense of just 211 homes.

  The report came less than two weeks after Baltimore was rent by a major civil disturbance in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination; theoretically, at least, racial fence mending was a high priority.* But officials rejected the new choices, the state roads boss, Jerome B. Wolff, announcing that I-70 would run through Rosemont, like it or not. "I think we create more uproar by considering other routes," he explained to Joe Wiles. "We were reluctant to consider it in the first place. The route there is the final one."

  Wiles was mystified by the decision. How could the city choose to uproot its living families, rather than move its dead, and to spend more money doing it? Such questions dominated talk at the dinner table, with Esther, among other members of RAM, and in May, Wiles took them to Transportation Secretary Boyd, in a characteristically respectful letter asserting that Rosemont was an upstanding place and that its people wanted to stay where they were.

  A reply came from Frank Turner, and by any measure, it was disappointing. At a time when his speeches and published comments seemed to cast Turner as evolving toward a more thoughtful, inclusive approach to urban highway decisions, his letter to Wiles was a brush-off, in language of the sort that gives bureaucrats a bad name. "Alternate alignment considerations were studied, as you noted," he wrote, "and determination then made ... that the team should concentrate their efforts in the original corridor toward development of a design solution which would contribute to the environment of the area and which would bring to bear the skill and the thinking of all planning disciplines so that the final design solution would reflect full public and private interest."

  The Sun jumped on the letter. "What does one make of such official gobbledygook?" Jim Dilts wrote. "How, by any stretch of the imagination, can a highway that the Design Concept Team has shown will destroy Rosemont possibly 'contribute to the environment of the area'? Which area? W
hat environment?"

  Good questions, all. Turner had been making decisions without citizen interference for four decades, had sought consensus only with fellow engineers and small groups of community leaders—who, in his view (and it was by no means unique to him), "knew best"—and, it seems, simply didn't want or didn't know how to respond to someone outside the fold. It was one thing to encourage inclusion in the abstract, another to actually practice it.

  Such treatment only fueled RAM's impression that its members had no hand in their fate. That summer, while busy denouncing "pavement plutocrats" and "concrete conquistadors," Wechsler decided the time was ripe to unite Baltimore's various anti-expressway forces under a single banner. At an all-day summit in early August, east-siders and west created a new umbrella organization incorporating some two dozen factions—RAM, neighborhood improvement groups, small anti-road cells, civil rights outfits, the League of Women Voters. They called it the Movement Against Destruction, or MAD.

  Wechsler was elected its president and Wiles its vice president, and a young Legal Aid lawyer, Art Cohen, was recruited as its counsel. It was a motley union of people with little in common but what they simply called "the road," and its leaders well reflected the whole—Wechsler, the white community activist who hadn't finished college; Wiles, the black family man; and Cohen, the product of a private boarding school, Oberlin College, and Yale Law.

  The Design Concept Team remained troubled by the expressway's route through Rosemont and its enormous Inner Harbor crossing, and in August 1968 proposed another alternative. Why not bring the highway into town via the west-side parks, but then turn it south, around both Rosemont and the cemetery, and in a wider arc around downtown? And why not steer the highway onto the dock-lined peninsula that split the Patapsco River's middle and north branches, and cross the water on a bridge near Fort McHenry? Such a scheme would spare 1,400 homes slated for demolition, 500 of them in Rosemont.

  City Hall listened; come December, the Sun reported that 10-D had been "all but abandoned." Almost thirty years into its quest for an east-west expressway, Baltimore was yet again embarking on a new plan; no one in the press or officialdom could even say, at this point, how many had come and gone before it. That same month, December 1968, Art Cohen took over MAD's presidency. Just before Christmas, he was the only "citizen" invited to a closed-door meeting at which the Design Concept Team walked the mayor through variations on its proposal. At the meeting's end, Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III announced that Baltimore would pursue an option labeled "3-A," which would, indeed, cross the river on a high-rise bridge at Fort McHenry and spare Rosemont. But not Franklin-Mulberry; a spur, I-170, would drill east between those streets to downtown's west side. Neither would 3-A save the old neighborhoods along the water on the southeast side of town, which would be cleaved by a six-lane, elevated extension of I-83.

  As Baltimore had come to expect, the decision didn't stick. The National Park Service objected that a double-decked, eight-lane bridge soaring 180 feet over the water would overshadow Fort McHenry, at which the tallest object was a 98-foot flagpole. No one, it seemed, had consulted with the people running the city's most historic site. And at about the same time, the Department of the Interior named Fells Point, the oldest of the imperiled southeastern neighborhoods, a National Historic District. No highway had ever been built through a place bearing the designation.

  The Design Concept Team's 3-A proposal would have spared Baltimore's Inner Harbor, which has since become the city's showpiece. It would not have gone easy on the old waterfront communities southeast of downtown, however, or the black neighborhoods to the west.

  In early August 1969, the city and state held three public hearings on I-70's possible courses around Rosemont. They were packed, boisterous affairs, held in the auditorium of a local high school. Art Cohen arrived at the opening session to find whites seated on the auditorium's right side, blacks on the left—unusual in itself, as the city's races rarely convened in numbers. A white man stood and, speaking for many on his side of the room, complained that all four alternatives would drive the highway through Western Cemetery, sacred ground. At that, an older black man rose, said wait a minute—you're worried about dead people? I'm worried about losing my home. To which the white guy replied: You know, we face a common problem here, and the problem is this highway.

  U.S. senator Barbara Mikulski, then a grass-roots hell-raiser on the east side of town and cofounder of a mostly blue-collar anti-highway cell called the Southeast Council Against the Road, was there with a contingent from Fells Point. She later recalled that the white speaker was a tugboat crewman and World War II veteran, and that he then turned to the black side of the room and said: "I'm going to reach out my hand to my brother veterans. We fought in one war. We're going to fight and win this war." He offered his hand to the leader of Rosemont's contingent. The auditorium burst into applause, and whites and blacks left their chairs and moved to the room's center.

  It was a transformative moment. For the first time in the highway fight—and, a good many locals suspected, the first time in Baltimore's history—the city's people were united; a chorus of disconnected protests acquired a single, booming voice. From that point on, the hearings' speakers, black and white alike, rose to deliver the same message, over and over: Not only do we not want any of these alternatives, we don't want an expressway, any expressway. "You did one good thing," a woman speaker told the officials running the hearings. "You brought white and black together, and this is a beautiful thing."

  So exhilarating was the sense of unity that when a Baltimorean read a declaration of war from the "Black Volunteer Liberation Army," promising the arrival of its "troops" if the highway men made good on their plans ("And believe you me," the speaker said, "they're not just jiving"), whites in the auditorium applauded as vigorously as the blacks.

  Joe Wiles could celebrate the moment only so much. It had come too late for Franklin-Mulberry, which now was in such a ravaged state that its demolition, highway or no, was inevitable. And the unbuilt expressway had exacted a high toll on his own neighborhood. Having won replacement payments for their properties, nearly five hundred Rosemont homeowners in the original condemnation corridor had quit the place; their houses now stood empty, their lawns weed-choked, the streets littered with trash. The village in the city had so far kept the interstate at bay, but it was headed downhill, just the same.

  19

  OUT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, gaps in the system's concrete continued to close despite daunting physical challenges. Two thousand miles west of Baltimore, I-70 nosed across Utah's San Rafael Swell, a seemingly unbridgeable succession of canyons and ridges that had never been breached by paved road; the story goes that when surveyors encountered a sheepherder in its backcountry and mentioned they planned to build a highway there, the man nearly collapsed from laughter. He and other doubters soon witnessed engineers make good on the plan and complete the biggest pioneer road project since the Alaska Highway.

  A ways east, the Rockies presented one hurdle after another. The first was the Dakota Hogback, a towering ridge of sandstone and clay that marks the seam between the mountains and the Great Plains, just outside of Denver. Getting I-70 through it required a deep cut, which promised to defile a spectacular chunk of nature. But within the ridge, some luck waited; the bulldozers exposed stratified rock in a spectrum of pastels, studded with an array of fossil plants dating to the age of the dinosaurs—and so impressive was this window to the past that it became an accidental tourist attraction. Colorado highway authorities left the cut's stairstepped terraces in place so that visitors could reach the higher formations.

  Another, bigger challenge loomed to the west, at Loveland Pass, where I-70 crossed the Continental Divide. For decades, drivers had topped the mountains' spine on skinny, switchbacking U.S. 6, a white-knuckle trip of 10 miles and thirty minutes. In the fall of 1963, crews started work on the first of two tubes forming the Strait Creek Tunnel, which would burrow through 1.7 miles of gr
anite, talc, and clay, at the highest altitude—just over eleven thousand feet—of any such project in the world.

  It would take nearly ten years to complete that two-lane tube, thanks to loose stone, disputes among engineers over how much ventilation it would need, a worker walkout (over a woman in the hole, considered bad luck among miners and tunnel diggers), and the normal difficulties that come with blasting and drilling through a rock of almost unimaginable size. At its height, the effort employed round-the-clock shifts, six days a week.

  Lesser heights had to be scaled around the country: Snoqualmie Pass in Washington, chosen as I-90's passage through the Cascades; Sideling Hill in western Maryland, where crews would blast a notch for I-68 that is 340 feet deep and visible from miles off; the Great Smokies, through which I-40 wriggles, climbs, and falls from Tennessee to North Carolina.

  And in California's Mojave Desert, halfway between sun-baked Barstow and Needles, there rose the Bristol Mountains, a jumble of granite and soft volcanic rock close to 3,900 feet high and smack in the path of I-40. For as long as travelers had braved the desert on wheels, they'd been unable to get beyond the Bristols without a lengthy detour. Both U.S. 66 and the Santa Fe Railway had swung far to the south and climbed 1,000 feet to end-run them. The railroad sorely wished for a straighter and flatter alignment, but the Santa Fe found that getting it required either a two-mile tunnel or cuts 500 feet deep. Either way, the price was too dear.