Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways

2. The 1930s: Forays into the Urban Realm

2 The 1930s: Forays into the Urban Realm Initial Opportunities for Urban Freeway Construction With the onset of the Depression in 1929 and its deepening during the following years, American cities experienced severe fiscal stress and retrenchment . Funds for highway improvements dwindled. The ambitious urban plans of the 1920s now seemed completely unrealistic, as cities tried to cope with more pressing issues of unemployment and the maintenance of basic services. Ultimately, however, in conjunction with the pump-priming initiatives of the New Deal, the 1930s would offer the first opportunities for significant urban freeway construction. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programs of federally funded public works enabled Robert Moses, the country’s premier public entrepreneur, to take his urban projects off the drawing board and into the city. As World War II approached, some of the most famous exemplars of urban freeways were constructed, such as the Henry Hudson Parkway and Gowanus Parkway in New York City and the Arroyo Seco Parkway in Los Angeles. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940. These exemplars, in turn, influenced the codification of urban freeway policy during the war years. The Depression slowed the rate of automobile expansion, but pressures on traditional street networks continued to build. Car registrations in 1930 totaled almost 23,000,000; by 1940, they had reached almost 27,400,000.1 This was stagnation compared with the 1920s but did not end the search for solutions to urban traffic congestion. The limited-access highway within the built-up area of the city remained on the agenda. In 1930, urban freeway planning was still a poorly charted landscape. Rural and suburban parkways served as models of new free-flowing thoroughfares for the auto age but only on the urban fringe. Boulevard and parkway elements of City Beautiful plans had been completed in Chicago , Philadelphia, and other cities, but these were not true limited-access 24 Chapter 2 thoroughfares and often involved only the widening and embellishment of existing surface streets.2 Approaches to large bridges had required clearance of congested areas but only for a limited distance on each side of the spans. The “superhighway” plans for Detroit and Chicago portrayed extensive networks of limited-access highways, but the cities lacked the funds to build the segments that traversed expensive central city land (figure 2.1).3 The 1930–1938 period saw the construction of numerous influential exemplars . Robert Moses’ urban parkways and bridges showed public officials , engineers, planners, and designers that limited-access roads could be pushed into urban centers, often with considerable attention to aesthetics and associated amenities. Thus, when urban freeway planning doctrine was made more explicit during the war years, the authors of national policy could gaze upon actual achievements rather than paper plans. Urban Freeway Planning: First Forays of the Highway Engineers During the 1930s, the highway engineering profession, led by the Bureau of Public Roads at the federal level, began to make its first forays into the realm of urban freeway planning. This was not entirely a matter of choice: the bureau’s turf was being invaded by other political actors. After Roosevelt’s election in 1932, New Deal economists wanted to use highways as employment generators. Superhighway advocates called for a national system of divided, high-speed roads, and toll-road builders wanted to construct new toll highways outside the federal-aid system. The bureau faced the specter that its hegemony in road-building affairs would be gradually chiseled away.4 As Bruce Seely has pointed out, the bureau was aware of the need for federal aid for urban highways, endorsing “legislation to include urban portions of state highway systems in the federalaid network in 1930 and 1932,” proposals that were finally enacted in the Hayden–Cartwright legislation of 1934.5 But as urban freeways rose higher on the national public works agenda, the bureau sought to ensure that new urban highways would not fall under the jurisdiction of other divisions of government.6 Thus far, the highway engineer’s mission had been to improve farmto -market roads and construct a rationally connected system of national highways, the federal primary system. Neither the Bureau of Public Roads nor the state highway departments had a tradition of cooperation with municipal officials on urban highway design. The formidable research The 1930s: Forays into the Urban Realm 25 capabilities of the bureau and the Highway Research Board had not been directed at the problem...