First, some history.
At the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York, FDR saw a map of a proposed system of national superhighways based on the German autobahns. Roosevelt laughed at the map and called it “bunk.”
But the Pennsylvania Turnpike, based on the autobahn concept, was already under construction. The autobahns don’t go through cities but around them. You have to leave the city to get access to the autobahn. If you look at a map of Pennsylvania, you’ll note that the turnpike goes around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, not through either city.
General Eisenhower got a good look at the autobahns after the war, and they planted a seed in his mind. That seed eventually sprouted to become the National Interstate and Defense Highway System, passed by Congress and signed into law by Eisenhower in 1956. Ike wanted the interstates to go around the cities, not through them.
In 1960, Ike was riding in the presidential limo when he saw a block of brownstone homes being demolished. He asked the driver what was going on. The driver answered that the homes were being razed to make room for I-95. Ike had a fit. Arriving at the White House, he asked his chief of staff to find out who made the decision to ram the interstate through Washington. It turned out to be the head of the Federal Highway Administration, a man who had been appointed by Calvin Coolidge in 1927 and was still there. “Tell him that as of tomorrow he’s retired,” Ike said. The errant head of the department retired and married the secretary with whom he had been carrying on an affair for years, and they went on their honeymoon – by train.
If you check a map of DC, you’ll note that I-95 joins the I-495 beltway and does not go through the city. Ike won that battle.
But with the arrival of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, urban Democrat machines saw an opportunity to build urban freeways as a tool of urban renewal. Inside the clubhouse, politicians joked that urban renewal was code for Negro removal. Black politicians should have raised holy hell, but they had been bought out by the machine. Thus thriving black neighborhoods that had existed for years were bulldozed to make way for urban freeways. Yes, it was racism, but it was liberal racism, the “good racism.”
The thriving black neighborhoods are gone, and they aren’t coming back. Demolishing a stub freeway that was once intended to be a major urban freeway is too little and too late. That horse left that barn 60 years ago.
I-83 in Baltimore was to connect with I-95 not far from where the Ft. McHenry tunnel is. The entire Polish neighborhood around Fells Point was demolished before activists stopped it. The chief activist? Barbara Mikulski.
I-70 was stopped before it reached I-83. It runs below grade before emptying onto surface streets. It is in a black neighborhood.