“Why does Franklin/Mulberry need to be an expressway at all?”: Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere
BHW 30: August 26, 2023
The urban development of the American Interstate highway system in the 1960s and 1970s destroyed entire city neighborhoods, disproportionately affecting Black and lower-income residents. One failed Baltimore expressway project provides a particularly egregious example of this. On March 9, 1973, Horace Ayres wrote in the Baltimore Evening Sun: “If the Leakin Park route is ultimately blocked, the Franklin-Mulberry corridor might be left as a short segment of expressway, unconnected to the rest of the Interstate System.” [2] Remarkably, that is exactly what happened to the Interstate 170 (I-170) project, infamously known as “The Highway to Nowhere,” over the next decade. It was never connected to the highway system. This road spans 1.3 miles and was originally planned to save suburban commuters into Baltimore City a few minutes of driving. City planners eager to trim commutes for wealthy and predominantly white suburban residents moved forward with the project despite its uprooting of predominantly Black West Baltimore residents. The ensuing neighborhood destruction spanned three mayoral administrations. By the time Mayor William Donald Schaefer started construction of the freeway, the area was already razed. [3] According to a Sun report, “The total cost of acquiring and demolishing more than 900 homes and 60 business structures came to $7,822,000 [in 1973 dollars].” [4] Baltimore City’s urban planning decision-makers long embodied racially harmful perspectives. Mass organizing against highway infrastructure in Baltimore pushed heavily against the project, but to no avail. Ultimately, thousands of Black Baltimoreans lost their homes or had their quality of life negatively impacted as the I-170 development ripped through West Baltimore.
The story of Baltimore urban planners targeting West Baltimore Black neighborhoods began in 1944, when a city traffic committee called in prominent national urban highway developer Robert Moses. His 1944 “Baltimore Arterial Report” called for the creation of a Franklin-Mulberry expressway. It also noted that this would displace lower-income Black communities, the destruction of which Moses deemed good for the city. [5] A week later, the Sun reported: “All existing structures on approximately 200 blocks of city streets and some of the buildings on a dozen additional blocks will be wiped out if the Franklin expressway is constructed as recommended by the Moses report.” [6] Many of the areas included in the report’s recommendations were later removed. However, it is remarkable that the same Franklin-Mulberry stretch targeted by Moses became the Highway to Nowhere in the 1970s. In the years between Moses’s report and I-170, Baltimore decision-makers did not remove this recommendation, despite its racist origins. [7] In a 1945 article published in The Atlantic, Moses clarified his views on wiping out lower-income urban areas, what he termed “slum clearance.” He wrote, “It is safe to say that almost no city needs to tolerate slums. There are plenty of ways of getting rid of them.” He argued that expressways provided an efficient means of doing this, adding, “And the best thing about it is that we have substituted nothing for the rookeries [sic] but broad highways lined with landscaping and recreation facilities, open to the sun and the elements, and affording the very best incentive to further slum clearance and improvement on their boundaries.” [8] But what about the people who lived on that land? Anti-freeway activists asked this very question.
The anti-freeway movement in the United States started shortly after Moses published his 1945 Atlantic article, yet it really took off with the overall American activist enthusiasm of the 1960s. In December 1946, hundreds of white Baltimoreans formed the city’s first anti-freeway group. Known as the Southwest Baltimore Civic and Improvement Association, its agendas reflected its white racial makeup. [9] With this group and others, anti-freeway activism in Baltimore remained disorganized. This changed with the creation of the Relocation Action Movement (RAM) in 1966, followed by its 1968 merger into the Movement Against Destruction (MAD) coalition. RAM was created to represent the voices of Harlem Park and Rosemont, two harshly targeted Black Baltimorean neighborhoods. [10] MAD remarkably brought together an interracial group of thirty-five organizations. [11] The coalition described its mission as, “to promote citizen participation in comprehensive planning for and implementation of transportation in the Baltimore metropolitan area… [and be] responsive to the citizens’ desires to preserve and enhance their environment.” [12] While this mission statement applies to all Baltimore neighborhoods, MAD significantly continued working towards RAM’s primary goal of saving West Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods [13].
MAD representatives emphasized that residents must be wary of state and local government attempts to lump in destructive freeway projects with other urban policies. The minutes from MAD’s March 17, 1969, meeting state: “WARNING!! It appears likely that bonds may be presented to the voting public that include financing for both an expressway and some other public improvement. Another attempt to finance the road with the glamor of another project.” [14] While sneaking controversial measures into larger pieces of legislation has been common practice throughout American legislative history, this is especially concerning when considering how highway funding was allocated. As historians Mark H. Rose and Raymond A. Mohl point out, “The federal government provided most of the funding for Interstate highway construction, but state highway departments working with local officials selected the actual Interstate routes. The consequence of state and local route selection was that urban expressways could be used to carry out local racial, housing, and residential segregation agendas.” [15] The federal government covered a tremendous portion of the costs for these highway projects and I-170 was no exception. The aforementioned Sun report about the costs of neighborhood destruction to make way for I-170 exemplifies this. Of the $7,822,000 total, $7,077,000, over ninety percent, came from the federal government. [16] State and local officials were happy to use federal funding to carry out their own agendas.
Black residents of West Baltimore were forcibly dislocated by the I-170 project, all in service of infrastructure that was never made functional. Rose and Mohl emphasize that Black residents bore the brunt of highway construction impacts even when not directly targeted. Indeed, in cities across the country, Black residents “were heavily concentrated in areas with the oldest and most dilapidated housing, where land acquisition costs were relatively low, and where organized political opposition is weakest.” [17] What they fail to point out here is that racially discriminatory government policies like redlining and segregation greatly contributed to these racial inequities. We must amplify the Black voices in this story. Two such voices come from MAD’s Franklin-Mulberry representatives Charles Curtis and Everett Griner. Asked to report on their findings at a MAD meeting on February 15, 1969, they began their response with a question: “Why does Franklin/Mulberry need to be an expressway at all?” [18] It appears the answer relates to systemic racism embedded in notions of urban renewal, stretching back to Moses’s 1944 report and continuing through subsequent urban planning.
The action against the I-170 project that gained the greatest momentum was the Urban Design Concept Team’s (UDCT) joint development plan. UDCT was a state and federally funded group of architects and urban planners tasked with conducting an expert study of highway development programs. [19] Their plan called for a three-block platform to be constructed directly above the planned I-170 expressway. This was to include residences, schools, and other community improvements. [20] Ultimately, it was abandoned at some point in the construction process. In October 1975, reporter James D. Dilts wrote, “the program, which appeared somewhat doubtful in 1972 due to warnings about air pollution from the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, has now evidently been canceled entirely.” [21] Perhaps another reason for the failure of the platform development plan was that state and local officials were in a rush to break ground on the project. They just barely made the deadline to begin construction and keep its generous amount of federal funding. [22] The joint development plan could have softened the blow of the highway project to the West Baltimore community. Dilt also reported that, “It was to consist of 358 new housing units, an elementary school complex, health clinic, shopping center, and recreation facilities.” [23] It is hard to imagine the practicality of all this being built on top of an expressway, from both pollution and experiential perspectives. It seems it would be loud and quite damaging to the health of the community. It certainly goes completely against what MAD Franklin-Mulberry representatives Curtis and Griner asked for when they said, “we insist that we don’t ‘see it, hear it, or smell it’ and that pertains to any road through Franklin/Mulberry.” [24]
The construction of Interstate I-170 began one year after the Leakin Park I-70 extension that was to link it to the national highway system was halted by a court injunction. In 1983, I-170’s name was changed back to “Route 40,” as legitimate hopes of connecting it to the Interstate ended. [25] The I-170 case shows how racism permeated urban planning agendas in the 1960s and 1970s. It also shows how community activist groups rose to challenge destructive urban highway projects, although in this specific case they were unsuccessful. The most important aspect of this story is the Black Baltimoreans displaced and deeply harmed by this urban planning debacle. Much of the areas surrounding Franklin-Mulberry deteriorated in the years prior to I-170 construction when the clearing of the area led to disinvestment on its perimeters. When public historian Eli Pousson wrote on the problem of vacant houses in Baltimore in 2019, he noted, “for the largely black residents of Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park in West Baltimore, more than one-third of the houses in their area are vacant—more than two thousand buildings.” [26] This vacancy makes the empty swath of road that sits in the neighborhood today even more ominous (Figure 1). It has no usefulness as a piece of infrastructure but has great value for understanding stories of racism in Baltimore urban planning histories.
[1] Famartin, “View east along U.S. Route 40 (former Interstate 170) from the overpass for North Schroeder Street in Baltimore City, Maryland,” photograph (Baltimore, August 25, 2019), Creative Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019-08-25_13_55_21_View_east_along_U.S._Route_40_%28former_Interstate_170%29_from_the_overpass_for_North_Schroeder_Street_in_Baltimore_City,_Maryland.jpg.
[2] Horace Ayres, “I-170 Road Spur Project Activated,” Evening Sun (Baltimore, MD), March 9, 1973, 13, https://www.newspapers.com/image/371799847.
[3] E. Evans Paull, Stop the Road: Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars (Newark, OH: Boyle & Dalton, 2022), 172, Kindle edition.
[4] Ayres, “I-170 Road Spur Project Activated,” 13.
[5] Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (July 2004): 690, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0096144204265180.
[6] “EXPRESSWAY WOULD RAZE 200 BLOCKS,” Sun (Baltimore, MD), October 16, 1944, 20, https://www.newspapers.com/image/373974606.
[7] Paull, Stop the Road, 160.
[8] Robert Moses, “Slums and City Planning,” The Atlantic, January 1945, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/01/slums-and-city-planning/306544/.
[9] Paull, Stop the Road, 18.
[10] Paull, Stop the Road, 73-74.
[11] Mark H. Rose and Raymond A. Mohl, Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy since 1939, third edition (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2012 [1979]), 109-110, https://archive.org/details/interstatehighwa0000rose.
[12] Movement Against Destruction, “Bylaws, 1969,” Baltimore Studies Archives, Box 1, Folder 2, The University of Baltimore Archives (Baltimore, MD), 1, https://archivesspace.ubalt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/45222.
[13] Movement Against Destruction, “Minutes, 1973,” Baltimore Studies Archives, Box 1, Folder 10, The University of Baltimore Archives (Baltimore, MD), https://archivesspace.ubalt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/45229.
[14] Movement Against Destruction, “Minutes, 1960-01 - 1969-12,” Baltimore Studies Archives, Box 1, Folder 6, The University of Baltimore Archives (Baltimore, MD), 40, https://archivesspace.ubalt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/45225.
[15] Rose and Mohl, Interstate, 97.
[16] Ayres, “I-170 Road Spur Project Activated,” 13.
[17] Rose and Mohl, Interstate, 103.
[18] Movement Against Destruction, “Minutes, 1960-01 - 1969-12,” Baltimore Studies Archives, Box 1, Folder 6, The University of Baltimore Archives (Baltimore, MD), 19, https://archivesspace.ubalt.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/45225.
[19] Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” 692-693.
[20] Paull, Stop the Road, 165.
[21] James D. Dilts, “Franklin-Mulberry highway’s cost is double 1972 estimate,” Sun (Baltimore, MD), October 1, 1975, C1, https://www.newspapers.com/image/377591988.
[22] Ayres, “I-170 Road Spur Project Activated,” 13.
[23] Dilts, “Franklin-Mulberry highway’s cost is double,” C1.
[24] Movement Against Destruction, “Minutes, 1960-01 - 1969-12,” 19.
[25] Paull, Stop the Road, 179.
[26] Eli Pousson, “Vacant Houses and Inequality in Baltimore from the Nineteenth Century to Today,” in Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, ed. P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Clark Davis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 61, Kindle edition.