The Highway to Nowhere

A Report from Baltimore

In 1944, the city of Baltimore brought in Robert Moses, New York City’s famed Parks Commissioner and mastermind of enormous construction (and destruction) projects, as a consultant. It would be another five years before the Federal Housing Act established the Urban Renewal Agency to begin wide-scale “slum clearance” projects around the country. Already, though, cities were experimenting, planning, and testing the ideas and narratives that would later alter cityscapes. 

In Baltimore, Moses demonstrated how he had already fully formed the narrative that would power the bulldozers for the next quarter century. He told city officials there that “The more [supposed ‘slum’] neighborhoods that are ‘wiped out,’ the healthier Baltimore will be in the long run…. We do not propose to tear down familiar and cherished landmarks…. Nothing which we propose to remove will constitute any loss to Baltimore.”

That’s as concise a summary of Urban Renewal in the United States as you’ll find, in the cultural sense. Everything is there in just a couple of sentences: the assumption that neighborhoods of the poor or powerless are open wounds; the notion that displacing the poor improved an urban area’s long-term prospects; the idea that wealth and ease are health, rather than moral turpitude; the inability to imagine that oppressed people have cherished spaces or landmarks; the fiction that such a thing as “Baltimore” existed, or could exist, without the tens of thousands who lived sacred lived and did hard jobs and raised beautiful children in the neighborhoods the ruling class so despised.

Moses’ vision won out. The bulldozers cranked up. The planners mapped out their highways. Families packed up their homes quickly, often with little warning, and tried to figure things out in new places, not always friendly ones. 

My beloved friend Scott Stafford, who has lived and organized in Baltimore for 20 years, drove me through some of the devastated areas. In some spots, full blocks of abandoned row houses stand and sag and lean. Some of them are marked with red dots or Xs to indicate that firefighters won’t go in them in case of fire. They are too unstable and the risk to human life is too great.  The freeways are nearby to reinforce who belongs and who doesn’t. In Baltimore, the most egregious of them is called “The Road to Nowhere.” It’s a one mile stretch of freeway that the city abandoned in the face of mounting opposition. Most of it is in a trench, a giant canyon dug out of a lively, human-scale neighborhood.

 

When work on it stopped, the freeway had moved to ground level and was rising to an elevated section. Workers left it incomplete, rebar poking out of concrete. For forty years it stood that way (until the mid-2010s), a road to nowhere slowly becoming a ruins, a municipal middle finger to a community that organized to stop it. 

Scott also hinted that I might not want to walk from the train station over to the University of Maryland Baltimore campus after my return from DC. It was a long walk and I had a heavy bag. But also, Baltimore is a tough place. I heard him but didn’t listen. On all my walks during this tour I’ve noted how history and future rub up against each other from block to block, even lot to lot. On many corners you can see broken promises and outrageous dreams standing shoulder to shoulder. Outside my own city I don’t know the details of what happened, but I know how the story goes.

The walk from the train station had all the expected contradictions. 

Some blocks were pleasant, filled with historic buildings of architectural significance. I enjoyed pausing to gaze at the historic structures.

Then suddenly the next block was 100% boarded up. There were people suffering on the streets, lying in front of vacant storefronts in clear distress and desperate poverty. Just down the hill was the Baltimore Harbor and Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The people on those abandoned blocks are not free, though. Freedom requires some measure of material security, or else one is subject to constant fear and exploitation. 

Nor is a country of great material abundance and a miserable housing crisis brave. We are shriveling under a horrible moral cowardice that occasionally turns neighborhoods into canyons and then looks with helplessness at a housing crisis.

[Read a bit more on Baltimore’s Highway to Nowhere here and here.]

One Last Note: Abbey Lincoln sings, “The world is falling down, hold my hand.”