by Earl Swift
To this point, Baltimore's citizens had been neither asked whether they wanted an expressway nor consulted about its route and design. It was handed to them as a done deal; by the time they were briefed on its specifics, the decisions about where and how and whether it went seemed unalterable. Baltimoreans didn't care for being treated this way, and they didn't keep it to themselves. Letters poured into the newspapers condemning the coming Chinese Wall. Property owners in Mount Vernon decried an "unnecessary eyesore" in their midst. A citizens' group threw a fit over the absence of plans to relocate those who would be put out of their homes. A delegation of fifty residents chartered a bus to protest the city's secrecy and arrogance to bureau officials in D.C.
It was too much for the mayor, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. He asked planners to eyeball some of the older expressway proposals—and by now there were plenty to choose from—for alternatives that might spark less controversy. They received some unsolicited advice from Lewis Mumford, whose letter castigating the interstate's route through the parks west of Rosemont appeared in Landscape Architecture. "What is happening in your community is a classic case of the wanton damage now being done all over the United States for no good purpose," he squalled, fingering engineers and municipal officials "of bulldozer mind" who measured progress by "the amount of devastation that they can cause."
"If these engineers had the faintest insight into the art of city planning, they would know that long-distance highways should never enter a city's limits; that, on the contrary, they should bypass every large urban area, though offering a number of approaches."
Any other scheme could "only work damage to your city," he concluded, "of which the damage caused by the highway robbery of your park space would only be a small part of the total damage such a plan would finally work."
The city's planners were unswayed. They bought fifteen acres of land at Baltimore's western line, adjacent to one of the parks. The interstate's path through the middle of town might be in contention, officials explained, but its route on the west side, over by Rosemont, was settled.
16
AT THIS POINT, the patterns of settlement and movement that would define American life for the rest of the twentieth century had been fixed. The suburbs were booming, not only among homebuyers but among workers. City after city saw its downtown jobs flatline while openings exploded on the metropolitan fringe. Factories and warehouses sprawled on the cheaper land out there, and retailers were planting satellite stores amid their shifting customer base or abandoning downtown altogether.
These developments posed a real worry for cities jealous of their tax bases, as you might imagine, which is why the fifties saw so many push out their borders to ensnare surrounding bedroom communities. Another dilemma wasn't so easily solved. Mass transit worked only when its riders shared common destinations for work, entertainment, and shopping. Combine the suburbs' low-density housing with jobs scattered hither and yon, and no transit system—certainly not one on fixed rails, anyway—could do much to relieve dependence on the automobile, even if allowed to operate deep in the red.
A few cities, notably San Francisco and Washington,D.C.,studied light rail or subway systems, regardless. Some others considered more radical fixes to their clogged streets. When utility officials in Fort Worth hired shopping mall pioneer Victor Gruen to rethink the city's downtown, he responded by banning cars altogether. Residents would drive to a beltway around the central business district, where they would park in one of a half-dozen huge garages, none more than three or four minutes' walk from dead center, and hoof it the rest of the way to jobs or stores. Electric shuttle cars would move those unable to walk, and deliveries would be made underground. Some streets "will be narrowed in stretches so that they become malls," Gruen explained. "In other places, streets will be widened into courts, and the rich colors of the paving, the trees and the little pools in the central district will stand out like jewels against the backdrop of the buildings surrounding them."
Sounded good, and got a lot of people excited. But many missed the fine print. The garages would accommodate only enough cars to carry half of the district's daily head count. The other half would ride in on buses. In Fort Worth, which was already spread-eagled all over the countryside, and in which only 17 percent of the population used public transit, that wasn't likely to happen.
So municipal officials found themselves stuck. The shape of the American city was changing, and the only form of transportation suited to this new shape was the very agent of the change. And cars had become so multitudinous that only more and bigger highways, it seemed, could keep the out-of-town exodus from becoming total.
Which is why the nation's highway men can be forgiven for feeling a bit self-satisfied when they gathered outside Hartford, Connecticut, in September 1957, at the first national summit on urban superhighways. Saving the American metropolis was up to them, they believed, and they had the expertise to accomplish the job. They came expecting that view to predominate.
An ambush waited. The conference, titled "The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region," was held at the spanking-new headquarters of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, which had just moved its operation out of downtown Hartford to a roomy modernist campus on 280 acres in suburban Bloomfield. It was a cool, airy, classy place for a blooding.
Early speakers toed the highway line. Pyke Johnson, an old friend of the Chief's and a longtime auto industry cheerleader, predicted that the "already phenomenal pace of suburbanization will increase rather than diminish," but that "first-class highway links between the suburbs and the downtown areas are sure to help the latter recapture some of their lost commercial and recreational appeal." Another lauded expressways as "our great new 'topographic' opportunity to give neighborhoods definition." Finally, Bert Tallamy told the conference that the interstates promised to be "probably the greatest single tool" for curing urban woes and offered "the chance of a century to make our cities sparkle brightly."
"Great care must be exercised," he acknowledged, "to make certain that urban areas will obtain the maximum amount of benefit from arterial highway construction." Even with such care, the highway community could rest assured that "there will develop forces opposed to it"—most of which, he predicted, eventually would come to recognize the genius of the new roads and their builders, and morph into supporters eager to "cut the ribbons and take the credit they do not deserve."
He did not have to wait long to meet the opposition; it showed up in the form of urban planners, who over the next two days made it clear that they did not regard the highway men as saviors. Rather, they called for a halt to urban highway building until the affected cities had time to plan for them in detail, something that virtually none had done. How could a state highway department know where to place an urban freeway, if the cities weren't sure themselves?
By and large, the criticism was firm but polite. "Past emphasis in highway planning may have been too much upon sound engineering features and too little on the overall picture," one planner suggested. The shortest distance between two points might satisfy motorists, but did it justify dissecting parks, fouling creeks, and casting neighborhoods in shadow? A housing activist took a harsher tack, objecting that the nation's highway program was too important to be "placed in the hands of highway engineers."
That was prelude to the conference's last speaker, who dispensed with any pretense of politeness and changed the whole tenor of the gathering: an eloquent, forceful, and very cranky Lewis Mumford.
***
Just a month before, Mumford had been all but branded a has-been by the New Republic, a magazine for which he'd written extensively. His latest book, the just-released The Transformation of Man, had been "hardly noticed." The conventional explanation for "this devastating reversal in esteem," the magazine said, was that "while Mumford's earlier and well-known writings on literature, architecture, and the urban scene had remarkably fresh interpretations, his latest books, concerned with morals, ideals
and metaphysics, are ... sermons on 'the condition of man' and 'the conduct of life.'"
But if Mumford did, in fact, teeter at the brink of irrelevance in August 1957, he took a decisive step back from the precipice on September 11. His remarks in Bloomfield were the first publicized attack on the year-old interstate program, and an opening salvo in what would come to be called the Freeway Revolt. They made Mumford a darling, to this day, of urban planners, anti-sprawl activists, and critics of the suburban lifestyle.
He went straight for the jugular on taking the stage. Tallamy and his colleagues lacked "the slightest notion of what they were doing," Mumford told the conference. Otherwise, "they would not appear as blithe and cocky over the way they were doing it." The interstate program was bound to bring destruction, not salvation, to the nation's cities. It had been founded "on a very insufficient study" of highways, rather than transportation—on "blunders of one-dimensional thinking"—and would benefit only the "fantastic and insolent chariots" that jammed the streets, "the second mistress that exists in every household right alongside the wife—the motor car." Want to save the cities? Forget about roads. The solution, Mumford said, lay in restoring a human scale to urban life, in "making it possible for the pedestrian to exist."
A choice was looming, for "either the motor car will drive us all out of the cities, or the cities will have to drive out the motor car." Americans should "apply our intelligence to the purposes of life," he said, concluding: "That means eventually we will put the motor car in its place. We will cast off the mistress and live with our wives instead."
It was a heck of a note on which to close a conference. The shocked highway community staggered from Bloomfield to lick its wounds, while Mumford recast the substance of his speech into an essay, "The Highway and the City," for Architectural Record. A half century later, it feels remarkably undated. "When the American people, through their Congress, voted a little while ago for a $26 billion highway program," it began, "the most charitable thing to assume about this action is that they hadn't the faintest notion of what they were doing. Within the next fifteen years they will doubtless find out; but by that time it will be too late to correct all the damage to our cities and our countryside, not least to the efficient organization of industry and transportation, that this ill-conceived and preposterously unbalanced program will have wrought."
His thesis stated, Mumford hacked away at the 1956 act, calling its "Defense Highway" label "specious, indeed flagrantly dishonest," and its urban freeways a sore on any town they touched: "The wide swathes of land devoted to cloverleaves, and even more complicated multi-level interchanges, to expressways ... butcher up precious urban space in exactly the same way that freight yards and marshalling yards did when the railroads dumped their passengers and freight inside the city." They devoured not only open land, but real estate already occupied by people and homes. "Perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator," he wrote, "and in many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb."
The hell of it was, all that disruption would do nothing to ease congestion. Here was a tool that "actually expands the evil it is meant to overcome," the piece argued, and which would continue doing so "until that terminal point when all the business and industry that originally gave rise to the congestion move out of the city, to escape strangulation, leaving a waste of expressways and garages behind them.
"This," Mumford declared, "is pyramid building with a vengeance: a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of a city."
Still bruised from the clubbing it received at the Hartford conference, the nation's highway community held another get-together at Syracuse University's Sagamore Center in October 1958. Mumford and his fellow critics were left off the guest list, which might explain why the five-day First National Conference on Highways and Urban Development felt like a love-in. Safe from the naysayers, highway men congratulated themselves on how well they cooperated, and they agreed with the city officials attending that they should work together at every stage of urban highway development.
They also agreed that roads should be part of a broader effort at city planning, and that they should keep the public apprised of what they had on the table. To help people understand why one plan might be stronger than the alternatives, they would make "a grand accounting of the costs and benefits," Pyke Johnson summarized. "Advantages and disadvantages of each alternative—in terms respectively of the highway user and the community—would be added up and evaluated."
That assumed, of course, that everything Americans loved or hated about their cities was quantifiable, that they measured the value of a park or river view, or the dispiriting advance of blight, in dollars and cents. The post-conference glow had not yet faded when the highway men received their first hard lesson that this wasn't so.
In San Francisco, state highway officials were at work on Interstate 480, a long-planned link between the Bay Bridge, which sprouted from the eastern waterfront, and the north shore's Golden Gate Bridge, which carried U.S. 101 across the mouth of San Francisco Bay. To highway engineers, I-480's route made obvious sense. The four-mile highway would hug the waterfront, which was jumbled with old piers and warehouses, but no homes, and skirt the business district, thereby serving commuters from both sides of town. In the interest of shrinking the interstate's footprint, the state opted to make it a double-decked "skyway."
Seeing a highway depicted on paper is one thing; beholding it finished, something else entirely. Too late, San Franciscans realized that they'd permitted a terrible blunder. In place of their waterfront—which, though partially blocked by low buildings, offered one of the most breathtaking urban vistas in the world, overlooking the shimmering bay and Alcatraz Island—they now saw an unadorned gray concrete barricade rising, at its peak, fifty-seven feet from the city's historic Embarcadero. It cast its surroundings in all-day twilight, severed downtown from the docks that had birthed it, and ran smack across the face of a beloved landmark, the Ferry Building, a gathering spot for generations and a survivor of the 1906 earthquake.
To tens of thousands of San Franciscans, the Embarcadero Freeway seemed less a highway than a vivisection. Petitions circulated. Protest groups bloomed. And the public's outrage was shared by the city fathers: on January 27, 1959, citing "the demolition of homes, the destruction of residential areas, the forced uprooting and relocation of individuals, families and business enterprises," the Board of Supervisors approved a resolution opposing seven of the ten freeways planned for the city, including the yet-unbuilt western two-thirds of I-480.
This meant refusing $280 million in Federal Aid money, an unthinkable act in the eyes of most municipal officials. It was a vote heard around the country. Not only did it effectively kill the state's ambitions for a lavish freeway grid through town, it reverberated with every American confronted by expressways he wasn't sure he wanted.
Highway officials predicted San Francisco would pay dearly for its stand. "It's the traffic which is the monstrosity, the traffic itself, not the freeway," as one former California highway commissioner said. "Building freeways is no different from building schools, a city hall, a hospital or other public buildings. It is the general public interest which must be served, and not the special interests of a few affected people."
The supervisors stood firm. The Embarcadero Freeway was left a stump, its westward flow abruptly halted near Telegraph Hill. The San Francisco Chronicle campaigned to have the completed mile and a half torn down, arguing that its "monstrous defects have so inescapably manifested themselves that they are now being inveighed against even by those who were shouting loudest for quick construction of the freeway," and denouncing its "corrosive effect" and "power to afflict the entire downtown area."
Mumford must have found grim satisfaction in these stirrings. At long last, he was leading a chorus. MIT profe
ssor John'T. Howard told readers of the American City that if a highway "worsens the livability and efficiency of a metropolitan area rather than bettering it, that highway is a disservice to the community—even if it carries traffic to capacity, and all the traffic seems to want to go where it is carried."
Mumford might have written that himself. The mainstream press joined in. David Cort of The Nation decried "Chinese Walls," noting: "Every expressway excludes a number of people from what they love on the other side of the road." Harper's glumly observed: "The gasoline motor is making America a fit place for wheels to roll around in. Whether America will also be a satisfying place for human beings to live in, seems neither here nor there." Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professor who would soon begin a long career as a United States senator, drew a bead on what he saw as a rush to build urban highways with a piece in the Reporter magazine. "In one metropolis after another, the plans have been thrown together and the bulldozers set to work," he wrote. "It is not true, as is sometimes alleged, that the sponsors of the interstate program ignored the consequences it would have in the cities. Nor did they simply acquiesce in them. They exulted in them."
Author John Keats's seminal 1958 critique of the automobile, The Insolent Chariots, went so far as to borrow its title from a phrase Mumford had coined at the Hartford conference. Mumford kept up his own attack in a November 1959 New Yorker article, "The Skyway's the Limit." His specific target was Robert Moses's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn, but his observations applied to projects in Baltimore, San Francisco, any number of cities. The bridge would displace nearly eight thousand people in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge section, to say nothing "of the many other people whose lives or properties will be unfavorably affected by the elevated highway through their neighborhood," he wrote. "But what is Brooklyn to the highway engineer—except a place to go through quickly, at whatever necessary sacrifice of peace and amenity by its inhabitants?