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4. “White Man’s Lane”: Hollowing Out the Highway Ghetto in Baltimore
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4 “White man’s lane” Hollowing Out the Highway Ghetto in Baltimore emily lieb “t he coming of violence to Baltimore’s ghetto,” began the American Friends service Committee’s “report on Baltimore Civil Disorders, April 1968,” “was no surprise.” Baltimore’s African Americans were subject to the same abuses and indignities that had sparked riots in other American cities: in Baltimore, just as in Watts and Harlem and newark and louisville and Detroit, white children went to better schools than black children, played in cleaner parks and community centers, and rarely had to watch as police officers harassed their parents for no good reason. many of Baltimore’s African Americans lived in overcrowded, fetid apartments in run-down neighborhoods where zoning and housing ordinances were barely enforced, good jobs did not exist, and white merchants and landlords exploited their customers without restraint. “When one accumulates a list of the complaints of Baltimoreans,” the Quakers concluded, “one tends to wonder why the retaliation was not worse.”1 in its report on the riots, the maryland Crime investigating Commission took a more expansive view: “the finger is pointed to the white, middle class man who, knowingly or not, establishes barriers of racism,” the commission declared. “not flagrant racism or violent racism, but a sort of ‘cold-shoulderism’ toward the negro that excludes their feelings and their rights.”2 Baltimore’s cold shoulders were made of concrete: the highways, or prospective highways, that planners had been mapping over and over 52 / Emily Lieb since the 1940s. they hoped that these roads would make downtown more convenient and accessible; they also hoped that these roads would replace the city’s most troublesome neighborhoods. instead, those lines on the expressway maps had the opposite effect: they carried disinvestment and decay wherever they went. that most of the roads were never built hardly mattered: as the Baltimore Sun reporter James Dilts pointed out, “plans for highways, if they are around long enough, become self-fulfilling prophecies .”3 the neighborhoods in their path rotted so thoroughly that they were unsuited to any other use. in many ways, the highway plans and the riots were linked. to the people who lived in the neighborhoods slated for clearance, the expressway proposals made it clear that their homes and schools and luncheonettes and grocery stores were less important than an exit ramp. public policy declared over and over again that Baltimore’s black neighborhoods were disposable; in 1968 rioters treated them accordingly. However, it was the highways, not the riots, that made a ghetto out of black Baltimore—for instance, in places like rosemont, a middle-class community of African American homeowners on Baltimore’s west side. in the early 1960s, rosemont was emphatically not a slum; on the contrary, it was the kind of place that, said one reporter, “every explosive . . . city would most like to have: a highly stable and cohesive [black] neighborhood.”4 At the end of the decade, after years of quibbling over an expressway route through its middle, rosemont had become exactly the kind of blighted neighborhood that the roads were supposed to be eliminating. the threat of urban renewal had forced disinvestment and neglect even onto homes and communities whose residents cared very deeply about them. By the middle of the 1970s, Baltimore’s highway ghettoes were indistinguishable from its riot ghettoes. the riots were a symptom, and not the cause, of the epidemic of abandonment that was spreading through the city’s residential neighborhoods. these places were casualties of ham-fisted and poisonous urban-renewal and transportation policies that undermined the city they were supposed to be saving. Magic Motorways By the early 1940s, the idea that express highways were the solution to the problems facing aging cities was a popular one in urban-planning circles. some people believed that traffic was choking cities to death. “it has caused congestion,” according to the Baltimore planning Commission, “made our streets dangerous . . . and created blight.”5 At the same time, the highway builders embraced a knock-it-down-and-build-it-over ethos of urban renewal: to eliminate the “obsolete buildings and lowered property values” that plagued the inner city, all the city had to do was pave them over. this, in turn, would make people want to come downtown again, [3.146.65.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:10 GMT) “White Man’s Lane” / 53 and more efficient roads—the “convenient access now found only in suburban centers,” as one federal...