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

by Earl Swift

  He'd also ballooned his audience and solidified his reputation as a critic by taking over "The Sky Line," an architecture column in The New Yorker. Mumford's columns minced no words in meting out praise or damnation. An architectural detail he didn't like was "the new cliché" and would "soon belong in the done-to-death department." A proposed bridge was "one of those plans that should be firmly discarded and never mentioned in anyone's presence again." A Manhattan milk bar was such "a monstrosity" that "it would take a lot of ingenuity to create anything more massively vulgar."

  His "Sky Lines" had earned immediate and lasting notice. Time praised them as the "most perceptive, severe and expert column of architectural criticism in the U.S.," noting that "Manhattan architects, conscious of having blundered or faked, have learned that if nobody else will discover it, Critic Mumford probably will." In short order he was invited to tackle the magazine's art criticism, as well, giving him a regular footprint in its pages and a rare prominence, bordering on celebrity, among American critics.

  As he'd settled into his new role, New York had continued to change around him with alarming swiftness. The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center rose in midtown, Depression be damned. Suburbs crept eastward across Long Island, slowed but not stopped by the nation's economic woes. And Robert Moses, Carl Fisher's old adversary at Montauk, built a corona of parkways radiating through the growing sprawl to countryside and beach.

  Early on, Mumford had admired Moses's landscaped roads, which were the closest thing the country had, at the time, to townless highways. They were smooth, concrete four-laners with no at-grade intersections, no commercial traffic (thanks to low underpasses that kept buses away, as well as trucks), and visual insulation from the rude metropolis beyond their wide rights of way; no billboards intruded on the pleasure of the drive, no slapped-together snack stands. He'd been taken, too, with Moses's prewar transformation of the Hudson's muddy and trash-strewn waterfront into a park-lined expressway; Mumford had found it "thoroughly modern" and the "finest single piece of large-scale planning the city can point to since the original development of Central Park." His description of the West Side Highway's interchanges had bordered on rapture: "The visual key to the design is the great traffic intersections, with their clover-leaf form, their changes of level, their vigorous curves postulated by the necessity for swift, uninterrupted motion."

  But even as he'd written those words, Mumford's views on the automobile, and on Moses, were starting to shift. Traffic congestion was all but paralyzing, and schemes to ease it were even more vexing. Soon Moses wanted to punch three huge expressways 160 feet wide through Manhattan, one clear-cutting the skyscrapers lining 30th Street, another burying Washington Square. He started demolition for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a ditch bulldozed through the borough's heart that felled apartments by the tens of thousands, crushed small businesses, split neighborhoods; and he envisioned a tangle of similar highways across Brooklyn, Queens, and beyond, out through the far satellite towns of Long Island. Cities all around the country were embarking on their own crosstown highways—Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Fort Worth—but Moses's New York expressways and bridges dwarfed them all in scope and collateral damage.

  By 1947, Mumford was writing a friend that it was "hard for an honest man to tell" whether Moses had "done the city more harm or more good, on a balance of considerations." His magazine pieces soon made it clear that he'd arrived at an answer. The United Nations headquarters complex overlooking the East River, in which Moses was deeply involved, was an architectural mishmash on a too-puny site (a "fleabite," to use Mumford's term). Moses's Stuyvesant Town, a knot of Corbusian high-rise apartments on a fenced and guarded superblock, was the "greatest and grimmest" of the city's new housing, "a caricature of urban rebuilding," an exponent of "the architecture of the Police State, embodying all the vices of regimentation one associates with state control at its unimaginative worst."

  Moses had responded with a letter calling Mumford's views "bunk," and "grotesque misstatement," and "mumbo-jumbo," and "just plain tripe," and charged that Mumford was "poisoned by jaundice and envy" and must hate New York. "It is a sad bird," he wrote, "who fouls his own nest." The magazine published the letter with footnotes, supplied by Mumford, refuting its arguments point by point.

  From that exchange on, the two had disagreed on practically every- thing and didn't do so quietly. Moses devoted himself to highways and bridges without pause, and Mumford, the early champion of the expressway, the one-time admirer of the cloverleaf, came to see no other aspect of city planning—or lack thereof—as so potentially wasteful, disruptive, or stupid; Moses's calls for more high-speed auto roads were "temporary and futile palliatives," Mumford wrote, that "absorb funds badly needed for schools, hospitals, homes for the aged, libraries and other facilities already in stringently short supply."

  He'd lost every one of their fights. Moses leveled great swaths of the city for his expressways. As a consultant, he recommended the same treatment across the country—in Portland, Oregon; in Hartford, Connecticut; in New Orleans. Motorists, which to an increasing degree meant just about everybody, seemed to side with the builder; in New York, especially, they greeted his new highway proposals with enthusiasm. Mumford's status as lone prophet was even reinforced in the pages of his own magazine. One of his columns detoured around a big Chevy ad that depicted a guy happily tooling up Moses's Saw Mill River Parkway, north of the city.

  But when few others were objecting that building new highways into New York didn't alleviate the crush of traffic but spurred it on—seemed, in fact, to actually breed it—Mumford was making the point. And when few suggested that the automobile no longer simplified American life but in fact complicated and tainted it, Mumford—who, like Moses, never learned to drive—was practically shouting it.

  In 1955, Mumford stepped up his criticism of the automobile's noxious effects with a four-part essay in The New Yorker titled "The Roaring Traffic's Boom." It was largely an attack on Moses, who was about to begin building the Long Island Expressway and planned a host of new bridges in the region—which, Mumford observed in his first piece, would pump more cars onto city streets already so packed that "after ten in the morning, a reasonably healthy pedestrian can get across town faster than the most skillful taxi driver." You could say that Moses and his colleagues were leaving a baby on the doorstep, he wrote, but it was more like "dumping a whole orphanage on an overcrowded and bankrupt home."

  Mumford's anger was not confined to the situation in New York. Readers all over the country could find application to their cities and local highways in the essay—such as when, in that same opening piece, he decried a planned bridge approach as "one of those vast spaghetti messes of roads and clover crossings and viaducts that provide excellent material for aerial photography but obliterate the towns they pass through as mercilessly as a new Catskill reservoir."

  Or in the second installment, when he castigated highway engineers for behaving "as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum" and "building more roads, bridges, and tunnels so that more motorcars may travel more quickly to more remote destinations in more chaotic communities, from which more roads will be built so that more motorists may escape from these newly soiled and clotted environments."

  "Our transportation experts are only expert whittlers," he wrote, "and the proof of it is that their end product is not a new urban form but a scattered mass of human shavings. Instead of curing congestion, they widen chaos."

  Or in the series' third part, where he pointed out that the "fancy cures that the experts have offered for New York's congestion are based on the innocent notion that the problem can be solved by increasing the capacity of the existing traffic routes, multiplying the number of ways of getting in and out of town, or providing more parking space for cars," when the reality was that the city screamed for redesign and the dispersal of its crowd-generating employers, stores, and public amenities.

  "We have consi
stently acted," he wrote, "as if there were no relation between the number of people we dump on the land and the amount of congestion in the streets and arterial traffic routes."

  Finally, in the fourth installment, he likened city congestion to an arterial thrombosis "aggravated by the reckless subsidized building of superhighways" and offered this flourish: "Highway engineers currently act on the principle of the hostess who, spying at opposite ends of a crowded drawing room two people who have not yet met, thinks only of how to bring them together, though in doing so she may jostle and squeeze against her other guests, interrupt conversations, knock the cocktail tray out of the butler's hands, and embarrass the two recipients of her intentions, who would have been far happier had they been left alone."

  "The Roaring Traffic's Boom" was a call to arms. Here was a smart, sustained, and high-profile critique of the Futurama freeways that, just a dozen years before, Americans had welcomed as the cure for their urban transportation woes. Even before the interstate system was a fact, Mumford was raising the possibility that these wonderful roads might forever change, in less than wonderful ways, the very towns they were engineered to preserve.

  And here was an attack on highway engineers as a class—men who, since the dawn of the motor age, had been treated as saviors by the press and the motoring public. To Frank Turner and his colleagues, Mumford must have come off as a raving maniac. Couldn't the writer see that highway engineers were first and foremost public servants, dedicated to improving life for all Americans? Couldn't he see that for decades, they'd done just that—that without highway engineers, farmers would still be marooned, the city-bound would go without fresh meat and greens, the price of clothing, furniture, appliances, books, just about everything, would be higher? And equally important, couldn't he see that the highway engineer's work was divorced from politics—that his decisions were fact-based, numerically supported, scientifically derived? That the numbers didn't lie?

  Apparently, no. Such arguments would have had little traction with Mumford, who so passionately believed in the organic aspect of cities, and in their atmosphere, their personality, their feel. Besides, he could offer some numbers of his own. New superhighways pumped an ever-heavier flow of cars onto streets and avenues designed for a New York of four-story buildings. Now "we have in effect piled from three to ten early Manhattans on top of each other," he wrote. "If the average height of these buildings was only twelve stories, the roadway and sidewalks flanking them should, according to the original ratio, be two hundred feet wide, which is the entire width of the standard New York block."

  Mumford's words especially resonated in the handful of cities that had started to build their own urban expressways while the interstate system lay dormant, awaiting federal money—cities whose people had been uprooted from their homes by advancing concrete, had already seen their downtowns cleaved, had already realized that expressways were inventions best beheld from the air, from such heights that concrete and steel acquired an airiness, ramps slimmed to filaments, loops formed delicate lacework—that only with altitude were highways and interchanges things of beauty, of pleasing symmetry, of order imposed on otherwise wild and untidy terrain.

  They were a small minority, at that point. Most folks were impatient for the new roads. By the late summer of 1957, the press was grumbling that the vaunted interstates had started to appear in a few dislocated bits and pieces but looked nothing like a system, and surmising that the program must have stalled. U.S. News & World Report decided it was "apparent that the construction period will be a good deal longer than the thirteen years originally estimated." Look magazine, while allowing that "any program of this magnitude takes a good many months to get rolling," incited its readers: "Meanwhile, however, the states and federal government have been collecting more and more tax money from highway users, and motorists may soon be justified in asking: 'Where are all those new roads we were promised?'"

  Frank Turner countered that a project bigger than the Panama Canal, the Pyramids, and the Great Wall, combined, couldn't be built overnight. "Each step," he explained, "takes time—planning the roads, holding public hearings on the routings, designing the highways and the structures involved, getting the necessary approvals, relocating factories, homes and utilities that may be in the path of the new highway, advertising for bids, awarding contracts, waiting for materials and, finally, the actual construction.

  "We hope the public, which is already paying for the interstate system, will be patient," he said. "By 1960 there will be something substantial to show for all the effort and money going into this project."

  14

  IN YEARS TO COME the feds published a map every three months that was shaded to demarcate the sections of interstate completed, under construction, left to be built. You could make a flipbook of those maps, see in the whir of pages the steady fusion of the web's strands—could watch Interstate 10 crawl across the deserts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and the swamps and thickets down South; could watch I-90 arc through the Badlands, I-25 push north along the Rockies' eastern face in Colorado, and I-30 span the dirty-footed villages and rice paddies of rural Arkansas that Frank Turner had explored in his early career.

  But most Americans first experienced the new highways close to home, in the suburbs, where an ever-growing share of them already lived. The burbs were generations old by the mid-fifties and had exploded in the decade since the war's end. The desire for fresh air, cool breezes, and room to stretch their legs, for an opportunity to buy more house for the money, for relief from overcrowded apartment blocks that too closely evoked the barracks and berthings in which they'd spent the fight, had spurred millions out of the cities long before the interstates came along. Houses sprang from the soil after the Japanese surrender at double the rate of the previous fifteen years, the overwhelming majority of them in subdivisions carved from forest and field on the urban fringe; between 1950 and 1955, the suburban populations of the country's 168 metropolitan areas grew by almost 28 percent, while those of the central cities grew by less than 4 percent. By 1963, when the interstates were just making tentative inroads into most urban areas, the population of America's suburbs surpassed that of the cities they ringed.

  The new houses came fast and cheap, thanks to mass-production techniques that had stamped out hundreds of Liberty ships and thousands of bombers during the war. Their downside was that this factory approach to construction demanded limited variation in the product. A Virginia newspaper labeled tract homes "mass individualism," noting that it was up to homeowners to personalize their look-alike ranchers; in the meantime, they offered the young buyers of 1955 "the home that would have been merely wishful thinking ten years ago."

  The subdivisions in which these homes rose didn't vary much, either. They borrowed, here and there, from the Radburn design manual. Their concrete lanes curved sinuously, whether or not the terrain dictated they should; cul-de-sacs, virtually unknown in the horse-and-carriage days, often branched off the principal streets. But they bore a very different relationship to the mode of transportation that made them possible: Radburn had been billed as the first town designed for the motor age but had segregated the automobile from home life, hidden it away out back; the new suburbs passed themselves off as escapes from the noise and congestion and evil air of the too-crowded city but treated the family car as a vital element of home—in the form of a concrete driveway in every front yard, and a garage door that faced the street and dominated a rambler's façade.

  James W. Rouse, a Baltimore developer, succinctly described the exodus from town: "A farm is sold and begins raising houses instead of potatoes, then another farm; forests are cut; valleys are filled; streams are buried in storm sewers; kids overflow the schools; here a new school is built, there a church. Traffic grows; roads are widened; service stations and hamburger stands pockmark the highway. Relentlessly, the bits and pieces of a city are splattered across the landscape."

  All of which is to say that the suburbs were cook
ing along years before the 1956 act became law, were seeping farther and farther from every downtown, were fostering "a new kind of urban tissue," as Lewis Mumford put it in the spring of 1956, "a little looser than that of the central core but equally disadvantageous to a self-directed life, and often even more lacking in collective alleviations."

  It wasn't just households moving out. The Urban Land Institute observed that during the postwar boom, from 1948 to 1954, retail sales grew by 23 percent in central cities, and by a whopping 59 percent outside of them. In October 1956, Southdale, the world's first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall, opened in Edina, Minnesota, outside the Twin Cities.* Its architect, Austrian-born Victor Gruen, also opened three big suburban shopping centers that helped remake metropolitan Detroit. A month after Southdale's debut, Business Week worried there might be too many shopping centers in the suburbs. The ink on Ike's signature had barely dried.

  A city's circumferential interstate, the big ring road on which traffic orbited fifteen or twenty miles out of downtown, was usually among the first urban legs on which construction started. Way out on a settlement's edge, beyond all but the most ambitious commutes, it proved relatively easy for state highway departments. Existing development out there was of such low density that few homes and businesses stood in the way; in some places, the beltways had been planned for so long that much of the right of way had already been acquired.

  So in Washington,D.C.,and Baltimore, in St. Louis and Houston and Atlanta, stretches of the loops materialized—and instantly changed public perception of each city's size and shape. Houston was no longer a messy, fast-spreading stain, its edges as ragged as a cancer's; on maps, it became the neat circle of Interstate 610. In St. Louis, the city's crescent shape was mirrored by an arcing interstate a half hour's drive from the city limits, beyond the dozens of suburban satellites that had sprung up in St. Louis County. Cincinnatians saw the beginnings of a belt eighty-four miles long that would eventually pass through three states.