Interstate Highway Act
The 1956 Interstate Highway Act authorized $25 billion to construct 41,000 miles of interstate (and intra-city) highways and established the Highway Trust Fund to operate/finance the system. The legacy left by highway construction, however, may have been as important to economic development as the change caused by construction itself. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act has profoundly affected the history of our profession in that it has been incorporated into our continuing urban renewal saga. Interstate highway construction overlapped with Big City urban renewal to such an extent that the two became almost inseparable in our memory. This overlap requires the Act to be placed within the context of the larger urban renewal discussion. In the next chapter, which describes urban renewal at the city level, the interstate highway act is considered an “epoch,” one of six, that constitutes our Age of Urban Renewal. This chapter, however, concentrates on the Act and its impact on sub-state ED.
Postwar Big Cities and highways
Since the 1920s suburban decentralization had acquired increased prominence in Big City economic development strategy. Burnham’s 1909 Chicago Plan envisioned an extensive highway network from the CBD to the furthest periphery as the best strategy to maintain CBD dominance. Highways figured prominently in facilitating decentralization and as a solution to congestion, traffic and insufficient parking that allegedly drove residents to the suburbs. States were primary policy actors regarding non-Big City highways. Cities, of course, were primary in regard to streets and intra-city expressways/freeways.
The nation’s first limited-access highway (grade separation, ramps, no curb cuts) was New York City’s Bronx River Parkway (1923). It spawned parkways and a suburban boom in highway construction. By the end of the 1920s, Big Cities across the nation were developing freeway/limited-access systems. New York remained the pacesetter with the Henry Hudson Parkway and the West Side Highway (1931), followed by Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive (1933). The New Deal used highway construction as a job stimulus, increasing funding from $216 million in 1932 to over $800 million by 1936. New York City, for example, used federal aid for bridge and tunnel construction, and Los Angeles began planning for a regional freeway and bypass system, starting in 1937 with the Arroyo Seco Freeway. In 1937 FDR asked the federal Bureau of Public Roads to design a national system of toll roads. War shifted priorities, but in 1944 Congress authorized construction of a 40,000-mile toll-free national highway (including 4000 miles of Big City highways)—but “forgot” to include money to start construction (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, pp. 76–9). The Bureau of Public Roads, working with states (not cities), had by 1954 prepared maps indicating where the interstate would go.
After the war Big Cities developed plans and engineering to build city highways, and by 1956 there were 480 miles (completed or under construction) in the 25 largest cities—more than half in NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 79). Virtually no federal funds were involved, and all required eminent domain and removal of existing uses along the route. Cities were already building freeways on their own dime and initiative, bushwhacking paths through neighborhoods long before interstate highways. In 1955 the American Municipal Association, representing America’s Big City mayors, wholeheartedly endorsed an Eisenhower–Clay Commission Report estimate that 15 percent of the interstate highway system went through Big Cities and would carry half the total traffic—and account for more than half ($27 billion) of total construction costs (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, pp. 79–81). Postwar car registration, truck logistics and horrendous traffic made highway construction, by all levels of government, a first-order priority. In 1955 only 10 percent of highway spending was borne by the federal government—by 1961 that increased to 31 percent (Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003, p. 82, Table 4.1).
Interstate highway approval
It is not our purpose to reconstruct either the politics behind passage or the history that led to the Highway Act (Rose and Mohl, 1990). Routes and plans had been kicking around for a generation, and were updated by the 1954 Clay Commission. Legislation, however, was another matter; proponents could not agree for the better part of a decade what the bill should say, who should benefit and who would pay. Road contractors sparred with truckers; state highway engineers fussed with private auto clubs and local public works departments; and rural states had different ideas than urban states. A national advocacy group, Project Adequate Roads, assembled a coalition of road users, contractors and engineers behind a planned, toll-free highway system—but once it moved into detail, the coalition members fragmented. House–Senate committees also failed to put it all together.
Final agreement was reached in 1956 when its chief congressional proponents (Hale Boggs of Louisiana, George Fallon of Maryland and Virginia Senator Byrd) gave something to everyone: no special tax on truckers; funds to farm areas, urban and trunk roads that provided enough to each; and additional sums for the Big City systems (urban roads 90 percent federal reimbursement) and increased future year appropriations. At that point, New York Senator Wagner introduced legislation to compensate those relocated by construction; it was voted down. On June 25, the Senate voted 89–1, the House (by voice vote) on 26th, and the President signed it on June 30, 1956.
A shared belief: slums must be removed
Rural and farm states viewed interstates through their own prism, pursuing different objectives than Big City states. The latter perceived highways as a strategy for CDB-focused anti-decentralization, a strategy that also included the removal of blighted neighborhoods. Rural states saw the interstate as access to communities, regions and agricultural/mining logistics. Engineers, who planned the routes and managed construction budgets, wanted a direct, cheap easily constructed road that moved traffic fast, with minimum congestion, and got users where they wanted to go. In short, everybody fervently wanted to build a highway for their own reasons and terms—but beyond that, “forget about it.”
Federal and state highway engineers and truckers, in particular, were totally unconcerned with the urban renewal/slum clearance/decentralization agenda that motivated urban policy actors and city planners: “The federal Bureau of Public Roads and the state highway departments believed that their business was to finance and build highways and that any social consequences of highway construction were the responsibility of other agencies” (Rose and Mohl, 1990, pp. 65, 96). Construction contracts were managed to meet budget and time schedules, with minimum, if any, attention or concern for other factors. Route changes to avoid neighborhoods, go underground or install sound barriers did not enter their managerial calculus. In a 1947 speech to a US Chamber conference on urban problems, the federal director of the Bureau of Public Roads (Thomas A. MacDonald) dismissed the inevitable housing destruction, observing instead that “It is a happy circumstance that living conditions for the family can be re-established [through slum removal] and permit the social as well as economic decay at the heart of the cities to be converted to a public asset” (Rose and Mohl, 1990, p. 99).
There was nothing in the federal legislation or in the funding distribution formulas that directed state highways to provide relocation assistance to displaced families, businesses, churches or schools. When state highway departments signed contracts with the firms to prepare sites and build the roads, such contracts lacked procedures or funds for relocation. If someone else didn’t do it, relocation assistance didn’t happen.
Highway builders were clearly conscious of social consequences of Interstate route location. It was quite obvious that neighborhoods and communities would be destroyed and people uprooted, but this was thought to be an acceptable cost of creating new transportation routes and facilitating economic development. (Rose and Mohl, 1990, p. 97)
After routes were approved local governments were left out of decision-making and construction. State highway departments managed the projects, received and disbursed funds, wrote contracts and bid/managed contractors. The go-to place to resolve issues was the state legislature, which in many states Big City interests were not well served. Intra-urban highway construction across Big City neighborhoods was a state affair, with municipal bureaucrats, politicians and residents on the outside looking in. This was state-directed highway construction—not locally determined urban renewal.
While literally correct, however, that last sentence is complicated. While they may not have been able to meaningfully impact intra-urban highway construction, local officials did have a say in the routes—and they could have provided relocation assistance or developed alternative housing. Sometimes that happened; for the most part localities let state highway construction run through their city with minimal oversight. In a few instances, Boston being one, the mayor took on the state and tried to protect his neighborhoods—unsuccessfully. A goodly number of horror stories included in today’s textbooks and urban renewal literature cite neighborhoods destroyed by New Deal and postwar Housing Act slum removal/public housing or federal/state interstate highway construction as examples. Why did city after city allow their neighborhoods to be torn up? They were trying to bet the suburbs at their own game and “tame the automobile.” For that we can thank Victor Gruen, the father of suburban malls.
Highways, planning and refunctioning the CBD: Victor Gruen and Jane Jacobs Pound for pound, highways did the most damage to neighborhoods. Low-income minority neighborhoods and residents were devastated; but highways cut through all kinds of neighborhoods—or followed along water providing a wonderful “wall” that precluded access/use of the waterfront. Nothing generated more intense vitriolic opposition than highway construction. Politicians “felt the burn” and stopping highway construction became a sixties pastime, a source for community organizing and a catalyst to form neighborhood CDOs: “Public officials in most of the older metropolises were growing more skeptical about the efficacy of superhighway programs … [but] Short of wholesale demolition of the entire building stock and street system there was no way to make central city thoroughfares as suitable for automobile traffic as suburban highways” (Teaford, 1990, p. 165). The car, similar to the rifle, was the instrument by which individual preferences and decisions wreaked horrible consequences on the urban physical/social landscape. The car made suburbanization likely and possible, and without some accommodation, the car was likely to destroy the CBD. Enter Victor Gruen.
An Austrian, a planner and a confirmed socialist, known today as the “father of shopping malls,” Victor Gruen loved cities and downtowns. His problem was simple—he could not convince central Big Cities to embrace the car, the shopper and, believe it or not, walking. If the central city could not adapt to the car it was doomed. That is what the suburbs did—they accommodated the car. More than anything Gruen wanted to rebuild the CBD to compete with the suburbs’ access to the auto and walking. He tried to make the CBD the king of metropolitan retail/commercial.
In 1956, a decade and a half off the boat, Gruen designed a shopping center outside of Detroit: “Northland”—around its hometown department store, Hudson. With 163,000 acres and 10,000 parking spaces Northland was allegedly the nation’s first outdoor regional shopping mall. Gruen quickly followed up with Southdale in Edina Minnesota, an unknown suburb of Minneapolis. Southdale revolutionized suburban shopping center, spreading across the nation. Over the next two decades Gruen designed over 50 malls himself. The sprawl of malls was not in Gruen’s plan—and he wasn’t happy or proud. In 1978, despairing of what malls had become, he claimed developers had “bastardized his ideas” and he refused “to pay alimony for those bastard developments” (Gladwell, 2004). The father of malls had disinherited his children. Ironically, Southdale is about 15 minutes from the Mall of America (the largest mall in the nation, with over 500 stores and 12,000 parking spaces).
Fort Worth’s plan
While he was developing Southdale (1956), Gruen was also preparing Fort Worth’s CBD redevelopment plan. The goal behind that plan was to counter suburbanization. Up to that time, CBDs based on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City were gloried in density and separated economic activities into discrete compact areas, while integrating green spaces, parks and recreation between these dense uses. Pittsburgh’s Plan, grounded in the Radiant City, had guided that city’s Golden Triangle revitalization. The problem, as Gruen saw it, was that Le Corbu’s build-to-the-sky density fostered congestion. CBD congestion fueled suburban growth. Originally a disciple of Le Corbusier, Gruen searched for an alternative—and he found it in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City.
Gruen’s dilemma, obviously, was to incorporate Lloyd Wright’s polycentric metro landscape to preserve the monocentric metropolitan area. The heart of the Broadacre suburb is its regional shopping center, which integrated the car and yet was a dense concentration of retail—in fact the regional shopping center was the CBD of the suburb (Gruen, 1964, p. 186). Gruen intended to convert the CBD into a shopping/consumer nexus that enhanced sales, pedestrian traffic and profitability. To remake the Fort Worth CBD in this image required a pedestrian-only CBD. This could happen if highways and freeways from all parts of the metro area led to the CBD and terminated in the parking garage at the edge of the CBD. Accordingly, his plan called for the CBD to be embedded in a ring of parking garages linked to highways by ramps. The traveler must park, get out and then walk into the CBD to shop—just like he/she did for the suburban shopping center. The shopper would willingly park and walk because the CBD provided the experience and pleasure that they expected. That meant the CBD had to be redesigned (Gruen, 1964, Part 3).
Multiple uses within a single block created excitement, variety and diversity. So Gruen’s pedestrian-accessed downtown was itself jumbled into blocks containing all sorts of use (office, commerce, retail, entertainment, culture and recreation). Streetlevel design encouraged retail and entertainment, but also included “inspirational” uses such as waterfalls, landmarks and viewing vistas. Extensive landscaping and beautification raised spirits and provided pleasure; and it was so compact it was walkable from one end to the other and then back to the car. Gruen’s Fort Worth plan’s timing was perfect. Fort Worth, and 70 other CBDs for which he developed plans, rejiggered to some degree its CBDs to accommodate the car-dominated modern world. They were going to beat the suburban mall at its own game.
Spreading across the nation, Gruen’s new downtown grabbed the attention of those who rejected Le Corbusier’s rigid segregation of uses: sterile and austere skyscraper density and functional modernist designs which built impressively up, but ignored, the street level. They rejected blocks with uniform setbacks, a sameness of spartan architecture that segregated office from retail, from entertainment. Rejected also were fountains, traffic circles and monuments that could not absorb the traffic flooding off Le Corbusier’s wide boulevards and freeways. All these conventional planning designs were exposed as postcards for suburban living. In 1958 Fortune magazine presented a series of high-powered articles based on Gruen’s image that hopefully would change how CBDs conducted their affairs. So successful was the articles that Fortune published them in book form as The Exploding Metropolis (Fortune, 1958). The articles included William H. Whyte’s “Are Cities Un-American?” and “Urban Sprawl,” but the one that got people going was Jane Jacobs’s “Downtown is for People.”
The exploding metropolis
Jane Jacobs praised Gruen’s downtown, likening it to a garden city that:
enlivens the street with variety and detail. Gruen’s plan [which] includes … sidewalk arcades, poster columns, flags, vendor kiosks, display stands, outdoor cafes, band stands, flower beds, and special lighting effects. The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before.
The plan’s beauty is that it mixes old buildings which are not destroyed with new: “Downtown streets should play up their mixture of buildings, with all its unspoken, but well understood implications of choice … where people can see them at street level” (Jacobs, 1958, pp. 145–6). Also streets should be narrow, short, and not choked by cars, offering continual choice to the pedestrian.
Jacobs saw in Gruen a fundamental critique of CBD standard redevelopment. To her, planners focused on a single block or a collection of blocks—at the expense of the entire stroll and the aggregate personal experience. The UR project was usually collapsed into a superblock that conformed to a planner’s codes and configurations. Each “project” was designed in isolation from the blocks around it: “the cultural superblock (Lincoln Center) is intended to be very grand and the focus of the whole music and dance world … but its streets will be able to give it no support whatever.” Downtown was chopped up into indigestible superblocks which did not relate to each other (Jacobs, 1958, pp. 162, 157).
In particular, Jacobs rejected ponderous collections of government architecture known as “civic centers,” which were doomed to failure: “Big open spaces are not functional for this type of civic activity.” This is why she believed CBD urban renewal would fail—because of the project approach which concentrates on blocks and superblocks. For her, the Moses-style UR project: assumes that it is desirable to single out activities and redistribute them in an orderly fashion … But this notion of order is irreconcilably opposed to the way in which downtown actually works; what makes it lively is the way so many different kinds of activity tend to support each other. We are accustomed to thinking of downtowns as divided into functional districts—financial, shopping, theater—and so they are, but only to a degree. As soon as an area gets too exclusively tied to one type of activity … it gets into trouble; it loses its appeal to the users of downtown. (Jacobs, 1958, pp. 161–5)
Half-hearted herds implement his plans
Jon Teaford’s reaction to Gruen’s Fort Worth plan was that it was the “culmination of twenty years of thought by American urban leaders and planners about how to thwart commercial decentralization and reinforce the existing single-focus city” (mono-nuclear). In the plan centripetal expressways carried traffic to a highway that looped around downtown Fort Worth. At each exit of the loop ample parking garages accommodated incoming drivers who then could [must] walk the remaining few blocks to work or shopping in the compact pedestrian business district. (Teaford, 2006, p. 49) Most cities only partially implemented his plans—the few that opened downtown pedestrian malls regretted the decision. Gruen’s new downtown intrigued city elites, but hard realities confronted its effective implementation.
Who was going to pay for all this? After all, much of the city’s tax base (the CBD) would have to be rebuilt. Revenue bonds and TIF would help, but future use and profits were not guaranteed. In those days, the federal government drove much of the urban agenda—by grants and such. On this issue, there was no rush to federal leadership in prescribing the form urban renewal should take. That well was dry. Almost all of the famous urban renewal projects of the 1950s were totally privately financed and consisted of major corporations building or rebuilding office headquarters. Post-1956 federal urban renewal legislation opened the door for big non-profit institutions, the famous “eds and meds” and middle/upper-income residential projects; they would assume an early 1960s’ prominence. None of these users thought in terms of a holistic CBD—they required financeable, phased construction built on superblocks, designed to achieve their own purposes. There was a reason why Moses-style urban renewal had been so popular: it fit the fiscal and financial realities of downtown redevelopment.
Conventional planners, on the other hand, left highway engineers to their devices because, in their mind, highways served two purposes: to connect the CBD to markets and metropolitan population centers; and if highway construction removed obsolete blighted housing and slums that drove city residents to the suburbs—so much the better. Planners like Harland Bartholomew (St. Louis) pressed for downtown development as the best solution to urban sprawl. Highway access stabilized property values and relieved congestion, both essential to CBD revitalization (Rose and Mohl, 1990, p. 57).
To most, highways, in the words of James Rouse, must “rip … through to the central core” if CBD redevelopment were to happen. ULI’s Urban Land encouraged surveying “blighted areas [to] provide suitable highway routes,” and urban developer James Follin saw urban highways as a “wide-open opportunity” to eliminate blighted housing and recapture central city land for redevelopment.” Even liberal mayors such as Detroit’s Albert Cobo publicly asserted (1954) that highway construction not only enhanced property values along their right of way but were also a “picture of beauty.” Kansas City’s city manager (L.P. Cookingham) stated: “no large city can hope for a real future without expressways that cleared slums and preserved the central business district” (Rose and Mohl, 1990, pp. 99–103). CBD redevelopers were not in the business of providing housing to slum residents. That was someone else’s job.
So, pre-1965 CBD-focused ED strategies lived in an alternate universe from that of 2016. Slum clearance by state highway departments was not a problem requiring their intervention. They shared with state and federal highway departments a common line of reasoning that Rose and Mohl characterize as a “two birds with one stone mentality”:
cities and states sought to route Interstate expressways through lower income or slum neighborhoods, using federal highway money to reclaim downtown urban real estate. Inner-city slums should be cleared, [including] blacks removed to more distant second ghetto areas, central business districts redeveloped, and transportation woes solved at the same time—and mostly at federal expense. (Rose and Mohl, 1990, p. 103)
After the 1960s the paradigm justifying slum removal was turned upside down—but in the decade after 1955 slum removal was not perceived as it is today. The average citizen didn’t like slums, and wanted highways. That the latter destroyed the former was quite acceptable.
And, finally, the thorniest and most horrendous aspect of this discussion: “Negro removal.” It is my belief that the first use of the expression was in a 1963 Kenneth Clark interview with the black James Baldwin. Jane Jacobs, Martin Anderson and Herbert Gans, early critics all of slum clearance and federal urban renewal, did not focus on black neighborhoods and black relocation. Anderson’s research found that two-thirds of those displaced who needed housing relocation were black and Puerto Rican. The Great Migration was, if anything, picking up steam, and African-Americans were flooding in large numbers to most Big Cities. Blacks inevitably settled in neighborhoods characterized as slums and blighted, candidates for urban highway construction.
Their timing, as political scientist James Q. Wilson would later observe, was as terrible as could be. Today no one questions that African-Americans were the most affected by slum clearance and the absence of alternative housing; it is clear that the characterization “Negro removal” is sadly and disturbingly appropriate. Highway and expressway construction, of course, did cut through white, ethnic and a few affluent areas on its way to suburbs; but, for the most part, those affected owned rather than rented, and were able to manage without having alternative housing provided.
The bottom line
The Interstate Highway program was the largest single source of federal aid to states between 1958 and 1966. By 1964, 2612 miles of Big City expressways had been built, with another 1600 miles under construction. That was a ten-fold increase in urban expressway mileage. Between 1956 and 1967 more than 300,000 households were displaced to make way for federal highways (urban and non-urban) (Rose and Mohl, 1990, p. 103). Alexander von Hoffman may have said it best: “The U.S. Interstate highway program, enacted in 1956, probably demolished more low-income neighborhoods, if it were possible, than either urban renewal or public housing” (2012, p. 15).
Ron W. Coan 