Architecture
2014
228
When the interstate highway program connected America's cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a much heralded “freeway revolt,” saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans's French Quarter. This book tells of the other revolt, a movement of creative opposition, commemoration, and preservation staged on behalf of the mostly minority urban neighborhoods that lacked the political and economic power to resist the onslaught of highway construction. Within the context of the larger historical forces of the 1960s and 1970s, Eric Avila maps the creative strategies devised by urban communities to document and protest the damage that highways wrought. The works of Chicanas and other women of color—from the commemorative poetry of Patricia Preciado Martin and Lorna Dee Cervantes to the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes to the underpass murals of Judy Baca—expose highway construction as not only a racist but also a sexist enterprise. In colorful paintings, East Los Angeles artists such as David Botello, Carlos Almaraz, and Frank Romero satirize, criticize, and aestheticize the structure of the freeway. Local artists paint murals on the concrete piers of a highway interchange in San Diego's Chicano Park. The Rondo Days Festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Black Archives, History, and Research Foundation in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami preserve and celebrate the memories of historic African American communities lost to the freeway. Bringing such efforts to the fore in the story of the freeway revolt, The Folklore of the Freeway moves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization. Losers, perhaps, in their fight against the freeway, the diverse communities at the center of the book nonetheless generate powerful cultural forces that shape our understanding of the urban landscape and influence the shifting priorities of contemporary urban policy.
If you’re a city boy like me, freeways are pretty normal — they’re kind of just there, people use them every day, and you don’t often think of them as anything more than just a way to get from home to work or from here to there. However, for a different generation, freeways meant more than that — for some, progress; for others, devastation. In The Folklore of the Freeway, Eric Avila tells the story of the freeway’s effects on a number of cities — on how city planners and officials looked at them as the call signs of advancing civilization, but how residents saw them as disruptive and displacing forces. Some groups were successful in fighting them off and their leaders sometimes became heroes that ended up in public office; others, often poor and minority, were not so successful and had to deal with their ways of life changing forever.
I love cars. In fact, I also love the driving culture — the road trip, in particular. Taking a good-handling car out on a nice windy road, or out on the open road in general, is something that I still look forward to, even now. I have an affinity for maps and routes and geography in general, so this interest in going places I’ve never been before by car lines up with a number of others in my life. Growing up, I never really thought much about the effect the mighty Interstate Highway System had on my environment. I don’t just mean the earth in general — I’m talking about what I saw every day growing up in 1980’s Washington, DC, going places with my parents through neighborhoods of all kinds in DC and Baltimore, to run errands or visit family. I knew about white flight, and how some neighborhoods seemed to be consistently a lot better off than others no matter who came and went, we learned in school about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement and what remained to be done to make things better. And I definitely noticed projects and run-down areas, and sad business districts — and beautiful houses, well-kept suburban properties and vibrant suburban shopping malls, and the main difference between the people there (hint: it wasn’t always money). But it took a while for me to connect all that with a decision that was made in the ’50s to expand the highway system.
Avila starts off his book with the well-known story of the freeway revolts of the late ’60s and ’70s — of how grassroots movements in cities like Baltimore, San Francisco, New York, Boston and New Orleans figuratively stood in the way of the bulldozers and kept the politicians from demolishing now treasured neighborhoods like the French Quarter and SoHo. However, like many things in this era, the success was unequal — if your neighborhood was white and powerful, you had a really good chance of getting freeways canceled. However, the poor and black or Latino areas proved to be paths of least resistance and often weren’t recognized as worth saving until they were gone.
He moves on to the basics of the 1956 Interstate Highway and Defense Act, the modernist mindset of city planning that was prevalent starting in the ’30s and throughout the interstate-building era, and what the builders thought they were trying to accomplish. As we know, many things start off with the best of intentions but don’t always end up accomplishing them. As we know from other media (like sci-fi, for example, or cartoons), futurism was big in the ’50s, this was the Space Age, and the wave of the future for cities was considered to be a network of freeways that allowed people to move from crowded cities (so 19th century!) to the spacious suburbs and to commute into work in speed and comfort. Looking back on it from the 2010’s, we tend to shake our heads at what these folks were thinking, don’t we? Avila makes an attempt to explain why here.
He then methodically goes through how different communities responded to the threat (or reality, depending on the group) of their communities disappearing, starting with women, who were not really considered in the whole “suburban home-urban workplace” model (remember, this was the ’50s, before most white women were in the workforce). Avila further breaks this group down into women who were able to leverage connections, organize and force change, and women of color, who were often ignored by the public apparatus and were left to deal with the aftermath. Avila starts a pattern here that he uses throughout his book, where he describes cultural means of resistance to the fate of one’s neighborhood dying, whether it is poetry or art or forcing a city to honor promises to protect what little green space is left after building the freeway. This, actually, is the main focus of his book — showing how communities with no political pull struggled for ways to have their voices heard and in the end managed to survive even though society deemed them expendable.
In the next sections, Avila does a good job of relating the history of several neighborhoods that have vanished from the map — but not completely from the collective memory of the people who lived there. This for me is the most tragic of the chapters; there are a lot of historically black neighborhoods — places where black folks were forced to live by de jure (in some cases, particulary in the South) and de facto (in most cases everywhere else) segregation — that were living, functioning, vibrant places despite the hardships, that were deliberately wiped off the map to make way for an interstate. Growing up, I’d learned about Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, and Rosewood, and other places where violent race riots burned successful black neighborhoods to the ground, and due to recent events in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere, I’d become aware of how constricting redlining was, but the first time I encountered tales of state-sponsored “slum clearance” by way of highway building that targeted neighborhoods purely due to their racial makeup was when I first found this book and read the excerpt that later led me to buy it. In New Orleans, the Vieux Carré was saved, but I-10 plowed through the oldest community of free blacks in the country, Faubourg Tremé. In St. Paul, I-94 took out Rondo, which was an integrated neighborhood that was more or less the only place that was open to black folk to live. In Rondo’s case, and in the case of Miami’s Overtown, there were other, less-destructive routes for the highway that could have been chosen, but officials decided to use the road to get rid of “blight” (i.e. the black neighborhood). In L.A. and San Diego, freeways devastated Latino neighborhoods in much the same way and for many of the same reasons.
Avila follows this history lesson up with a discussion on how devastated communities strove to take back the dead space created by highways — those places that discouraged pedestrian traffic and fostered crime if left unattended. In St. Paul, there’s a festival to commemorate the Rondo neighborhood. In San Diego, a park with beautiful murals on the highway pylons makes good use of otherwise stark infrastructure. Poetry, theater, and other art forms make an appearance here, all to good effect. The book finishes with a tale of Interstate H-3 in Hawaii, which was finished despite protests that it paved over sacred land for the native islanders.
There are several good things about this book. There’s a lot of good history in here, stuff that would take you some time to find on your own. Avila takes care to point out the motivations of the engineers and architects — they thought they were being objective and data-driven in their attempt to improve society’s standard of living. In this, he points out the dangers of ignoring bias and abdicating responsibility for the effects of bias by claiming objectivity — otherwise known as the “The data made me do it!” argument. That is a lesson that is valuable to learn in our current time and across many disciplines.
However, while I find his focus on the Southwest understandable considering he’s based in L.A., I did find a couple of conspicuous omissions in Avila’s narrative. There was very little discussion of freeway battles in DC, some of which were actually won by black folks in contrast to other areas. (I know I’m biased in this, since I was born and raised in DC and have researched the freeway battles here, so I’m not really faulting him here.) There was no discussion at all of what happened in Chicago, which after L.A. and New York must have the most urban freeways of any large city that I’ve ever seen in person. I was really hoping for some Chicago talk, since I don’t know anything about the neighborhoods that the interstates run through. Also, considering when this book was released (in 2014), there was no talk of St. Louis and its surrounding area, which also had its share of predatory road routing; this may have been a fluke of timing, though, since the unrest there happened in relatively late 2014.
Overall, this was a really good read. Keep in mind that the focus of this book — as hinted at by its title — is in the stories told and generated by freeway incursion in urban areas. The “progress” propaganda, the myths around the freeway revolts, the laments for lost neighborhoods and the wonderful arts that attempt to keep those neighborhoods alive and to make the best of the situation are the aim of this book, and Avila does a good job of conveying all that.
Very insightful blog. Wish it were more public.