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Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
@SegByDesign
Sep 27 • 10 tweets • 4 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
"Across Southern CA, freeways that paved over Black and Latino neighborhoods—such as the 5, 10 & 110—were completed, while those proposed to cross whiter, more affluent areas were stopped," writes @latimes. The 110, seen here, cut through South LA, displacing tens of thousands.
@latimes More info about the racist history of freeway construction in this NYT article I had the opportunity to write last fall: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Construction of the 110 in the 1950s required the demolition of thousands of homes and buildings across Downtown and South Los Angeles. Simultaneous “urban renewal” projects cleared vast swaths of the city, also displacing thousands of residents.
More info on highway construction in LA here:
latimes.com/projects/us-fr…
Two of the most prominent urban renewal projects seen in this animation: First the clearance of the Mexican-American community in Chavez Ravine & construction of Dodger Stadium; and next the redevelopment of racially-diverse Bunker Hill. These projects displaced 12,000 residents. Image
The dense, historic buildings of Bunker Hill were replaced with a high-rise financial district. The diverse community that occupied the neighborhood was dispersed. In redlining maps, the gov't derides the neighborhood as “one of the city’s melting pots.” dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redli…
Image
In “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis writes: “Redevelopment massively reproduced spatial apartheid. The moat of the Harbor Freeway [110] and the regraded palisades of Bunker Hill cut off the new financial core from the poor immigrant neighborhoods that surround it on every side.” Image
The freeways themselves cut through existing neighborhoods and made possible the development of new suburbs on what had previously been the periphery of the city. The vast majority of these new developments were closed to anybody considered nonwhite: latimes.com/opinion/story/…
If you find these posts informative, consider supporting on Patreon! Many of the images and aerial photos I colorize and remaster aren’t free, so any support goes a long way towards enabling me to make more. Thanks very much to my existing supporters! segregationbydesign.com/support
More on Los Angeles to come. These are the other animations I’m planning for the region. Image

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More from @SegByDesign

Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
Mar 4
Downtown Brooklyn before-and-after the construction of the BQE in the early 1950s and subsequent “revitalization” and “urban renewal” schemes in the '50s and '60s. Image
Downtown housed tens of thousands of low-income residents working at the nearby docks and Navy Yard. After the highway and renewal projects (and until relatively recently), the neighborhood had been transformed into a 9-to-5 business district. Image
Prior to these projects, residents consisted mostly of recent European immigrants and Black people who had moved north during the Great Migration—or, as the official comments accompanying the 30s redlining map put it, the neighborhood had an “infiltration of Italians & Negros.” Image
Read 11 tweets
Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
Dec 29, 2022
Aerial footage of Overtown, Miami before and after much of the neighborhood was bulldozed for the construction of I-95 in the 60s. Over 12,000 residents of the neighborhood were displaced for the highway, along with thousands more in subsequent "urban renewal" projects.
3rd Ave (seen in the 1929 photo) and 2nd Ave formed the commercial heart of Overtown, with 3rd hosting an electric streetcar providing direct service to Downtown. Much of these avenues were consumed by I95 for its knot of viaducts and offramps.
3rd & 2nd were lined with hundreds of Black-owned businesses, including “dentists, law offices, restaurants of every flavor, laundries, beauty salons, and drugstores,” NDB Connolly writes in “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida."
Read 4 tweets
Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
Sep 8, 2022
🧵In Houston, freeway widening will demolish hundreds of homes in the primarily Black & Latino neighborhoods Independence Hts. & Near Northside, building on decades of the gov't using highway construction to segregate cities & destroy communities of color.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Local groups like @StopTxDOTi45 are fighting the project, helping residents file complaints against @TxDOT. This advocacy led @POTUS to halt construction, invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Texas relocated over 110 people anyway.
This project builds on a legacy of forcing freeways thru communities of color. While this legacy is often discussed as history, an @LATimes study found that freeway construction has displaced more 200,000 people since 1990—mostly in communities of color. latimes.com/projects/us-fr…
Read 14 tweets
Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
Aug 21, 2022
🧵 Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market before and after government-funded “urban renewal.”

The Maxwell Street Market was the largest open-air market in the US, covering over nine square blocks in the primarily Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhood of the Near West Side.
Reaching its peak during the first half of the 20th century and featuring items for sale from all over the world, the Market was also the birthplace and incubator of the Chicago Blues.
The many Black artists who had come to the city fleeing the Jim Crow south in the 40s and 50s would perform at the market, where they could easily reach the largest audience. The loud setting helped give birth to a new genre: the Chicago Blues.
Read 11 tweets
Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
Aug 3, 2022
The Mecca Flats in Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago was demolished in 1952 by @illinoistech after evicting its hundreds of residents—nearly all of them middle-class, Black families. Bronzeville's prosperous Black population led to the nickname, "The Black Metropolis."
The Mecca was one of thousands of residential buildings destroyed during federally-funded “urban renewal and slum clearance,” along with the thousands more destroyed for the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway.
Despite a long campaign from residents against this early example of an “urban renewal” project, IIT ultimately succeeded in eliminating this building—as well as much of the surrounding neighborhood—for its campus expansion plans; designed by architect Mies van der Rohe.
Read 15 tweets
Segregation_by_Design Profile picture
Jul 28, 2022
While Chicago has retained much of its legacy rail infrastructure, the city has repeatedly followed suburban-focused planning strategies, which has led to the abandonment of large parts of the system. Seen here: Dorchester El Station in Woodlawn on the South Side, demolished 1973 A before/after image of an elevated train station on the Sou
Rail transit was another casualty of the fed govt’s effort to create a white, car-based suburbia. While local transit systems provided mobility within the city, the govt plowed highways through urban neighborhoods for mobility OUT of the city—to the racially-restricted suburbs.
The rail transit system that remained in Chicago had its focus shifted from primarily serving city-dwellers to instead primarily serving suburban commuters. Seen below, throughout the West and South Sides several lines, branches, and stations were abandoned. Maps comparing the transit service in 1938 vs. 2022
Read 8 tweets

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