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6 The City and the Six-Lane Highway Bread and Roses and Parking Garages It won’t be a six-lane highway, but two three-lane roads. —Redevelopment Agency official speaking at a 1968 public meeting in defense of a plan to widen State Street into a six-lane highway and build a half-mile-long parking garage1 It is clear that such public hearings are a farce. The city does its planning in secret with the corporations, not in public with the people. —Harris Stone, testimony at public hearing on State Street Renewal Plan, October 23, 1969 B y May of 1967, New Haven’s prominence as an urban renewal showplace had long since waned, but the legacy of Lee’s unfinished vision persisted in plans for highway ramps, parking garages, and high-speed, six-lane stretches of road through the center of the city. At that time, the New York Times reported that “planners and urban experts” across the country had turned their attention to two particular projects—the New Orleans Expressway, which had been “under planning and attack for 10 years,” and a 600-foot, $14.6 million “tension bridge” to span Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Both projects were controversial proposals that intensified what the Times called the “urban expressway debate,” one that had failed to materialize in New Haven when Oak Street was cleared to make way for a highway ramp in the 1950s, but which nonetheless took center stage a decade later. The Baltimore bridge was seen by some as a potential “trademark for Baltimore in this century,” and by others as a sure death sentence for the neighborhoods at either end of the fourteen-lane span. The New Orleans project, like New Haven’s master plan, called for six lanes of highspeed traffic to shoot across the edge of the city’s historic Vieux Carre, cutting by the corner of Jackson Square, a National Historic Landmark. “Few subjects have stirred more local controversy,” wrote New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Citing preservationist and environmental reasons for opposition, Huxtable reported, “Almost every city is split down the middle today between the need for new traffic arteries and the displacement and blight that giant roadways seem to bring in their wake.”2 But New Haven didn’t seem to be split anywhere near the middle when plans for a six-lane divided highway and a massive parking garage threatened a low-rent downtown section of the city, home to a dense collection of small businesses, light industry, and cheap apartment buildings. In fact, the State Street Redevelopment and Renewal Plan, which was tied to controversial and covert plans for a six-lane loop highway through the city, was roundly condemned by citizen groups, and significantly revised by a vote of the city’s board of aldermen after a series of public hearings attended by hundreds of angry and organized people. Resistance to the city’s plan for State Street mobilized in and around particular neighborhood spaces, while bringing together residents from different neighborhoods and backgrounds to fight for a new urban model. This model took into account the changing regional framework of urban life in which automobile traffic was an unavoidable reality in and out of growing suburbs, but in which a combination of improved public transportation and a system of peripheral parking garages would keep the city accessible to those who lived outside of it, while keeping its interior spaces intact and both economically and geographically accessible to those who wanted to live urban lives. This fight in New Haven unfolded as the ongoing “urban expressway debate” extended its reach beyond dense and decaying downtowns . Even for those who chose the seclusion and quiet of rural and suburban areas over the “street ballet” of the city, and who defined their ideal communities in very different ways, six-lane expressways posed a signi ficant threat. “We love silence,” said Mrs. Milton S. Ross, who moved with her husband, a doctor, to suburban Bedford, New York, in 1956. Forty miles north of New York City, the Rosses built a high-ceilinged house on eight acres of land, nestled between two wildlife sanctuaries. Before too long, six concrete lanes of Interstate 87, a thirty-one-mile highway built with nearly $50 million in federal aid, took out the houses of three of their neighbors , then gobbled up six acres of the Rosses’ own land. “And now [the silence...

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