Construction of the 10 cut through some of LA’s most diverse neighborhoods in the 60s, displacing tens of thousands. It’s revealing that while basic improvements to public transit take years, CA fully mobilized after a fire shut the 10 last week, declaring a “state of emergency.” Seen at the beginning, the 10 cut through Boyle Heights, known as the “Ellis Island of the West Coast,” with the East LA Interchange alone displacing at least 15,000 residents. @sahrasulaiman writes more on this legacy in Boyle Heights here: la.streetsblog.org/2015/10/02/new…

Sugar Hill, once home to LA’s Black elite, before-and-after construction of I-10. Previously the wealthiest Black neighborhood in Los Angeles, construction of the 10 cut Sugar Hill in half in the 1960s. Despite residents’ protest, the highway took hundreds of homes with it. More on Sugar Hill here: segregationbydesign.com/los-angeles/su…

"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…

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. 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.

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.

🧵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.

🧵 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 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.

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 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.

Aldine Sq. on the South Side of Chicago, before/after “urban renewal.” In 1939 the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) destroyed this block and dozens surrounding in northern Bronzeville, a neighborhood known as “The Black Metropolis,” due its large Black middle class. #Reparations Among the many Bronzeville businesses was the Pekin Theater, seen here, the first Black-owned musical theater in the US, founded in 1905. By the 1930s as the CHA was seizing property the neighborhood, the building had been converted into the 3rd District Police Station and Jail.

Downtown Camden, NJ, was demolished for the automobile. In the '60s, construction of the I-676, seen here, displaced 1,289 families (at least 5k people), 85% families of color. Adjacent urban renewal projects flattened the commercial core on Broadway and displaced thousands more. Before WWII, Camden had grown as an industrial center due to its proximity to Philadelphia and its railroad connections to the rest of the eastern seaboard. Much like its neighbor Phil, Camden’s waterfront was home to working-class mix of European immigrants and African-Americans

The freeways “tore across the residential heartland of Oakland” in the 1960s, forcing the demolition of ~7,000 units of housing—5,000 of which were in the historic heart of the city’s Black community, West Oakland. Federally-financed "urban renewal" displaced thousands more. West Oakland was entirely encircled with freeways, physically dividing the primarily African-American neighborhood and its residents from the rest of the city. The freeways form a literal wall of concrete, pollution, and deafening noise wrapping around the entire community.

The neighborhood Black Bottom in West Philadelphia was entirely razed in the 1960s by federally-financed “urban renewal.” By some estimates, up to 15,000 people were displaced in this area through eminent domain, the vast majority of them African-American. Black Bottom is outlined in this colorized 1939 photo. Despite the organization and protest from local residents and sympathetic students, ultimately the neighborhood was lost to the “federal bulldozer” of urban renewal. James Baldwin noted: “Urban renewal means Negro removal.”

In the 40s & 50s, Robert Moses cut a seven mile long gash through The Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, displacing over 60,000 people in some of the most racially-integrated communities in the country. Started in 1948, the Cross Bronx was one of the first urban freeways in the country. It was also the most complicated, most disruptive, and the most expensive road ever built to date. Seen here is a below-grade portion under construction (colorized).