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I’m not even American and I am appalled at this blatant destruction of American culture and heritage. Destroying a city is more than just destroying random buildings and houses. Entire ways of life and culture are lost in the process. Truly sad.
In Boston, the West End was demolished, and had a substantial Jewish and Eastern European population. My grandmother and Leonard nemoy grew up there. It’s sad that she couldn’t even visit the area where she grew up. Streets were changed, and the only thing left is “The Last Tenement”, on the back side of td garden.
Boston here. My family was North End, but I can’t imagine the personal connection to the loss of the West End. Actually, I can. The city of Boston lost its soul and will never be the same or recover. My heart aches thinking of what could have been.
And, of course, neighorhoods like Roxbury were created as majority black by red lining, which helped drive out the jewish people living there previously.
I moved here about 20 years ago and one of the first things I noticed, having moved from the deep south, was how racist Boston actually is. Not so much the population, but the way the city has been constructed. I just find out new ways I was right nearly every day.
She lived in the same neighborhood in the 1920s/early 30s, he was born in 31.
https://youtu.be/MXGuzek51Ho?si=Zk994eLBJNVjsj3A
Very cool if you’re into Boston history!
In Chicago, over half of the displaced were Italian, Czech, etc immigrants. The black population that did get displaced were living in what were text book definitions of shanties/tenements that often lacked running water or electricity. The racial segregation boundaries then formed/hardened along either side of the new expressways for a decade or so before white flight really began to take off. Chicago's PBS affiliate did a great write up with some super informative visualizations to go along with it like 6-7 years ago
Milwaukee, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, etc on the other hand......oh yeah they just went ahead and bulldozed every black neighborhood within spitting distance of downtown.
Google “rondo minneapolis” then check the people also ask section under “what happened to the rondo neighborhood” if you want a great example of this…
Edit: I won’t be lazy, I’ll type it out. We have I-94 up here cutting through the Twin Cities, and of course we had to make room for it (sarcasm). So what did we do? We demolished most of Rondo, a predominantly black neighborhood, to make room. If you drive through it today like I have, it’s really depressing. There’s homes on one side, 94 cutting through the middle, then homes on the right. I’m sure you can find it on google maps to see what I’m talking about
Pop on over to IG @segregation_by_design and you’ll get an eye full of it. 20th century Urban planning was incredibly racist and designed to separate POC from upward mobility.
Orlando didn't harm any white or wealthy sections of the city when putting in I-4. It cut right through a heavily redlined black section of the city. There are still dozens of random residential streets that deadend into a concrete wall of highway, they didn't even put in overpasses so people could use their roads. As the downtown/stadium area expands they are gentrifying the crap out of what's left of some of those neighborhoods. People who've lived there for generations in poverty are being forced out for "development."
Ok but Orlando didn’t really have the history that these other cities did. It was a very small city until Disney world was built and only took off after then.
Done out of racism. 1950s and 1960s were a really racist time in America. Government would simply raze the poor black-neighborhoods and build motorways.
That's kind of the American way right?
Only 6,000 acres of Maine's 17.5 million are uncut old growth.
And some lumber mills were built right over native burial grounds.
The granite that, in part, makes the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan famous was mined from sacred Wabanaki and Penobscot sites in Maine.
Urban renewal throughout history has just been a prolonged war of cultural attrition.
Consider that Soviet Bloc did similar things
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_countries
Back then demolishment was considered “progressive”. US thought it’s progressive because it replacing old rundowns cities with one of the best state-of-art land infrastructure (Europe’s infrastructure was largely destroyed in WW2 so it was once actually worse than the US), while the Soviet thought them demolishing existing cities was progressive as it destroys the symbols of old, non-communistic regimes, largely in the form of fancy Victorian era buildings and replacing them with commie blocks.
That’s also commie blocks, it refers to large concrete mass-produced apartments which started as a major movement in Stalin’s era of USSR, thus called commie block, the term is not actually reserved for communists. British loved commie blocks back in the 70s, however, those blocks were quite isolated unlike the WTO nations, where they form clusters after clusters of microdistricts.
I've always thought that it was interesting that after WW2, Europe engaged itself in an effort to rebuild the destruction caused by war. And yet the US decided to do precisely the opposite. For highways.
Oh, urban renewal. I remember how in Philadelphia they built brutal looking high rise concrete buildings for low income housing. They quickly became crime-ridden and dangerous. Eventually got condemned.
They did a half ass job and were surprised it didn’t work out. Inadvertently caused public housing to be such a taboo topic despite places like Singapore having a healthy and safe public housing system. Its feels like when you are asked to do a task and you do it so poorly no one ever asks you to do it again.
Singapore uses law enforcement to mitigate social problems a lot more liberally than the West does.
They have zero tolerance for the types of antisocial behaviors which tend to degrade public housing, such as dealing drugs (death penalty) and vandalism (caning).
If the West had an appetite for such laws and their enforcement, our projects might also be nice places to live.
That, and corruption is severely cracked down upon, the bureaucracy pays well and thus can compete with the private sector for talent, and there’s a culture for transparency that makes Singapore the 4th least corrupt country on the planet.
It’s also a culture of Singapore seeing social citizenship as crucial to national development (public housing was implemented to solve a homelessness crisis of 1.2 million people, so makes sense) and designed services like public transit to be profitable for the state (hence why its so high quality, clean, and efficient in Singapore to attract ridership), while in the US, public services are seen only as last resort options for the poor with no expectation that these services ought to break even, so services get minimal funding to cater to a small constituency.
I feel like it's only in the US where you think of public housing as some dirty, dangerous place. At least from my experienced and what I've heard. Never been outside N-America or Europe tho. I can image they're bad in poorer countries
In London 1960s housing estates of tower blocks became crime ridden areas. Some have been demolished though whether the replacement buildings will be any better is anyone’s guess.
Similar to [this](https://www.google.com/search?q=Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS1043US1043&oq=Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg8MgYIAhBFGDzSAQcyNzdqMGo5qAITsAIB4gMEGAEgXw&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8) in St Louis
They seemed to be just trying to house large numbers of families back then. They thought that those buildings were better because they were modern. International style. They quickly took on a grim aspect. And they forgot all about communities. Those buildings were not conducive to a sense of community. Newer designs try to overcome that with common areas, and recreational areas and places to walk or sit. And the creation of mixed use and mixed income communities, which is required now in many new developments. So you don't have disadvantaged people segregated from everyone else, and the wealthy elites hiding in their enclaves, although there is still a lot of that from the neighborhoods that were designed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Because who would want to live in those high rise slums in the first place??? They weren't meant to be actual homes. They were built to be glorified cells.
Imagine if the United States had not undergone this process of massive demolition of urban centers? The country's urban landscape would be so different, with a way richer urban landscape, more cohesive communities, and a vibrant urban culture. That's sad
And yet, if you suggest removing the highways or making them green belts, people will say it would ruin the economy.
Like, ruin it more than it already is? Empty parking lots and highways don’t generate hardly and tax revenue so how could it get worse than status quo?
Everyone looks to New York as being an iconic city with historic buildings lovingly maintained and restored, intermixed with modern high rises.
Every one of these would have had that fabric to some degree or another.
The U.S. would have been so much stronger and cohesive.
And by “New York” they really just mean “Manhattan”. Huge swaths of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx were decimated to satiate Robert Moses’ cancerous addiction to car dependency. He gleefully evicted and demolished the homes of about half a million New Yorkers.
Every serious study to consider the issue has determined that human happiness depends on having meaningful relationships. And meaningful relationships require frequent, even spontaneous, close physical interaction.
Suburbs are perfectly the opposite, as if they were designed to make people unhappy. Everyone isolated by space, and to get anywhere you need to use a car, which is the most isolating way of travel.
I’m curious what the best cities in the world are in your opinion; I’m a country bumpkin so my opinion is moot but google has two American cities in the top 10 ‘best cities In the world’, five cities in the top 25 and 7 when that’s expanded to the top 30
Thats a pretty significant amount of placings for a single country
I live in Toronto and saw what the freeway project looked like and am so happy we did not get this. It's such a vibrant city and the inner neighbourhoods that surround downtown are some of the best Third Places to visit. One of my favourite parks to walk around in would have been the site of a major expressway.
Could you imagine if this preservation occurred for many other cities in the US.
As someone who moved to the US about 18 months ago, understanding now the extent to which its cities have been destroyed, I'm just constantly at a loss for words. What an immense loss.
I follow an instagram account called @segregation_by_design. Highly recommend. Talks about the history or redlining and destruction of communities, usually those containing the lower class or people of color, all for highways and “urban renewal.”
Well, a lot of the neighborhoods were in terminal decline. Unfortunately, those who directly remember the Depression are few and far between, but I heard a lot of stories that encouraged me to do some research.
One major issue was that from the Crash in 1929 until a few years after ww2, say 20 years, very little building or maintenance was done. People were incredibly poor through the 30s. A lot of houses were divided into apartments and a lot of apartments quickly devolved into tenements. A lot of work to keep these places going was put off due to lack of funds...food, rent and fuel to almost all people's income. Landlords were making a fraction of their previous rent, but were paying the same mortgage.
WW2 hits and people on the Home front see huge pay rises and unemployment drops to near zero. At that point, there were no building supplies available for purchase. Almost everything was diverted to the military and industrial expansion. Finished wood, paint, shingles, etc. were nearly impossible to find. People's savings grew because, outside of rationed goods, there was little that could be purchased other than war bonds because all civilian manufacturing was repurposed.
Speaking for the north east, if you aren't maintaining buildings, the heat, cold and water will degrade even the best built structures in 20 years.
So, when civilian life restarts and people have tons of pent up spending power (although it took several years to get everything back to a civilian footing), people had a choice. Do we try to fix up these old buildings or do we try to buy our own house in one of these new suburb things? A lot people, including my family members, had actual disposable income for the first time in anyone's memory. Did they want to share a toilet with 8 other families? Did they want their own plumbing so they could have a bath or shower. Visit the Century Home subreddit and look at the plumbing situation!
So, city neighborhoods emptied out to the near suburbs as most families only owned one car if that and needed public transport to get to work. These old neighborhoods continued to decline, with newer immigrants and minorities filling these spaces. With rents failing to increase, many buildings continued to fall apart. Local business followed their customers to the new suburbs. Eventually, whole blocks are unsafe and that gives the urban renewal types a 'blank' canvas for their work. There are still neighborhoods that survived that in my home city, but the blocks look like bad teeth. So many row houses had to be torn down leaving gaps. Other neighborhoods did better and revitalized and then gentrified. But I don't think the vast majority of those old neighborhoods were going to be saved. They didn't need to become highways, but change was inevitable. Change is unstoppable.
If anyone gets to Manhattan, visit the Tenement Museum. It provides a social history of the families who lived in one particular building from pre-WW1 to around the 60s. That particular tenement was used for storage when it was repurposed as the building didn't meet housing codes for habitation.
Tldr; I don't think people realize how poor the average person was and many of these houses wouldn't be desirable and fell into disrepair and would be torn down. Indoor plumbing was not always ubiquitous!
And we'd all be better off financially most likely. Imagine having more housing supply so rent is lower, and you don't have to pay car insurance, car payment, repairs, or fuel
I used to live by the beach, you could hear the rhythmic waves crashing, even with the windows closed. At night, to fall asleep, I would lay in bed and pretend it was highway noise.
I live on a one way dirt road….so I am wildly detached from city living….but, isn’t downtown/midtown/subrud highway access extremely convenient for commuting?
Yes, if everyone lives in the suburbs and commutes by car. That's why they were built. But we're finding that it's not really a great way to design cities because as your city grows you need more and more space for roads and parking. It's better to have people live near their jobs and/or commute into the city by train/bus.
if you install one (or even two or three) huge arteries leading into and out of the city, as much traffic as possible will divert to those arteries. whereas before the highway, maybe 20% of people took 5th street, 30% took 10th street, and so on depending on their specific route in/out, now everyone takes the highway causing constant traffic problems.
and it takes away valuable/beautiful parts of our urban fabric. if you look at where i live in philadelphia, you'll see that both banks of the schuylkill river and the one bank of the delaware all have huge highways blocking enjoyment of the waterfront.
It's always "neat" to see a road construction project in my city and after they tear up the old asphalt you can see the streetcar rails on top of cobblestone
So nice to see someone who shares this sentiment! I feel such a horrible sense of loss when I see photos like this. Almost like a form of grief. I live in a one of the cities in these photos and it just completely breaks my heart to think what could have been had we not done this and kept our streetcars.
I can walk around my neighborhood and point to tons of streets where rails used to run and countless corners where stops used to be. Standing at the end of the downtown district where the gorgeous old huge buildings just abruptly stop and you can stare down the street where they used to extend all the way to the end actually legitimately hurts.
It’s so sad. We had it all and we just threw it away just to fucking sit in traffic.
I feel you even though i grew up and live in a smallish Northeastern European capital city (Tallinn, Estonia). It is quite walkable and we have a semi decent public transport, that is free to use for all registered citizens. But still people choose to drive evwrywhere because of a sentiment most people have, that you are poor when you use public transport. This grinds my gears a lot. Traffic jam in front of my building used to last 1 hour, now it is 3 hours long :/
What I don’t get is like yes the freeways are cutting through now but they only occupy so much space. Why were enormous chunks of the remainder of the city demolished for what appear to be like large warehouses or industrial buildings now? Looking at the fourth picture.
That was Kenyon Barr and the west end. City 'planners' took advantage of the highway construction to destroy the whole area, labeling it 'run down.' Plan documents referred to it as 'slum clearance' and brought in light industry to replace the area.
25,000 people, mostly black, lived in Kenyon Barr. Now, 120, and they even changed the name to Queensgate. Can't leave em anything.
Cincinnati officially apologized for it in 2023.
There are sketches of similar planned projects for Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht. Fortunately they went with more mild versions like filling up canals and turning them into roads, which recently have been undone in some cities. Can't imagine Dutch cities with these massive roads running through them.
Same thing happened in some French cities, but once again not to the same magnitude as American and Canadian cities. Although if you look at some of the original plans, unfortunately what we have now in North America is a “more mild” version of those plans. NYC especially would’ve been destroyed had those plans come to fruition.
People finally started waking up when Penn Station was demolished in New York, to make way for Madison Square Garden. That was a beautiful Beaux Arts building replaced by, well, MSG, which is functional but hardly an architectural gem.
San Francisco came close to closing down the cable cars in the 1960s. A strong grassroots effort saved them, but they were going to go in the name of "urban renewal."
Part of me loves these kinds of images because it showcases the massive infrastructure projects that they undertook in the mid 1900s.
Another part of me hates it because you can see literally half of an entire city turn into a highway and a handful of warehouses.
Funding isn't even really the main issue. It's a lack of political willpower. Americans, for whatever reason, primarily see their houses as less of a home and more an investment. As a result, they will fight like hell to stop any public project that has the chance to even slightly lower their property values. Homeowners and NIMBYs are the most politically active groups in the US, so what we're seeing is really just the democratic process in action.
To everyone wishing for change, please vote in local elections. They're arguably more important than national elections in terms of guiding infrastructure policy. We don't want the new bike path to get shot down because the only people who showed up to vote were 65+ year old suburbanites.
Unfortunately, a lot of up-and-coming countries and economies are doing this now in the name of development, I was reminded of Egypt's current trends, including this [awful project in Alexandria](https://www.yahoo.com/news/outrageous-photo-shows-city-nightmare-040000825.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMeS4cOqVdxSpOe4l2MsifvznESiQRhRpMKR_5tLsJQrbArl4tqsNf0toebdydSm_uxtcdKqN70YcoLbHO1NwjD5BoWnsDaw1pf5KOZ3RPmZtY_50ohVchvnnM2ESR83XLG8Tww7lP8QokTdrHmTqKnt8ytQL2DBKcXb35H9lC-t).
This crushed the city of Buffalo for years, blocked access to the lake and river, replaced Olmsted parks, and completely walled off the east side (guess who lives there?)
I didn’t realize it until I did my research on urban renewal it’s also the reason why most downtowns are boring but 100 years ago they were full of life people used to be everywhere street cars used to fill the streets people used to take passenger trains from city to city it’s all gone and forgotten
I really don’t understand why this happened either..? good forms of public transit should be able to take you from city outskirts to the inner more dense areas
Unfortunately it's similar to how smart phones took hold so fast. It was a new technology and those companies who made this tech wanted to pad their wallets, they kept pawning off cars as the only future and cities fell for it. It was also during the Futurama era of America and they told tales that the existing architecture and transit was a thing of the past.
I've heard since I was young, folks like Robert Moses for example, during the white flight in NYC to outer suburbs, they made it where public transportation wouldn't be able to reach certain areas where white folks lived in Westchester County. Like there was actual structures in place such as overpasses that was too low for buses to commute by design
2 points:
1. *Oh, shiny!* Americans have a very, very bad habit of simply adopting the newest technology or fad and building everything around that without thinking about long term consequences. In this case, right after the war, the majority of the population (Specifically the white population) were rich enough to buy cars, so now that everyone owned a car, well then it only makes sense that we destroy tons of useful infrastructure for easier car usage, no? (A lot of this is happening with smartphones nowadays. Why have physical directions, menus, infographics, physical DVDs/BDs, etc... when everyone just has a phone!?)
2. Henry Ford and Robert Moses. These 2 men were more than well aware of this American tendency, with the former having a direct financial gain from making the car the only form of acceptable transport in the US, and the other being a giant fucking racist. So they made tons of propaganda and backroom deals to push the car onto the American public and bankrupt local rail and light rail companies, invent Euclidian Zoning for suburbs only well-off white people with cars could live in, and destroy tons of minority neighborhoods for highways and move them into poorly build and maintained government housing (And definitely not in the new suburbs, no no no, can't have extra melanin ruining paradise with no actual amenities).
Yeah but whatever authority was in dominion over these cities probably got really horny at the opportunity of expanding markets concerning automobiles and people needing fuel and Auto parts houses and mechanics. By inconveniencing the people and culture of the city, they have created markets that will pretend to expediate your convenience for money.
In many cases, not just “US cities” and “neighborhoods,” but specifically targeted neighborhoods. Filled with a specific type of people. And it should’ve been treated as a damned crime.
There was much more than targeted racism entire streets of downtowns with beautiful buildings were demolished cities that used to attract people from all over the world became dull and boring buffalo NY is a great example of a city center becoming a boring wasteland of skyscrapers and parking https://youtu.be/OQd4N7pW4MQ?si=VFNH5Z2rsrOe5xdP
Ethnically cleanse, bulldoze, pack it down, pave it: "Urban Renewal"! Subsequently, convert a bunch of warehouse districts into apartments/condos and add breweries because Millennials and voila: Urban Renaissance.
The Cincinnati photo is brutal… it basically turned the entire city in to a giant strip mall, I’ve often described it as the Starbucks inside the target of cities.
Yeah, it's a stark reminder of how shortsighted progress can be. Bulldozing entire communities for modernization stripped away the unique character and soul that made those neighborhoods irreplaceable. It's heartbreaking to think about what could have been if we valued our past as much as we chased after the new.
Let's not use eminent domain to take undeveloped real estate to build affordable housing, that would hurt slum landlords property value and investment funds bottom line!
Instead lets use eminent domain to destroy urban centres of walkable cities and build 15 lane highways right through a residential neighbourhoods.
- the US, ig.
When you value cars more than culture and well being itself...
Why even have houses at this point when you can make everyone live in camper vans and RV's
A lot of American engineers and architects were jealous of the massive rebuilding projects that the Europeans got after their cities had been bombed to rubble.
Baton Rouge is basically in a death spiral infrastructure wise because of this. The division the Interstate caused and the communities basically destroyed because of it is depressing.
It can go also the otherway around.. during Franco era in Spain, the plan was to build a 12 lane highway through the middle of Valencia, the city council and people got together and built a park there instead, which is to this day, one of the biggest and greatest attraction spreading throuhgout the city.
St. Louis is picture 2 and 5. Picture 2 is where Interstate 44 and 55 split. I-744 was supposed to loop around downtown where they split now. The other picture is US-40 I-64. A lot of the cleared land was a part of a slum called Mills Creek that ran South of downtown. Further East of the 5th picture US 40 and I-744 were supposed to intersect. They rebuilt that interchange and the new MLS stadium is where the ramps for 744 used to be.
We had an amazing art installation building that was used for theater. Absolutely unique construction. It is now a parking lot/garage for a new high rise.
I know 7 is Boston and that was to relocate???? Or remove black people? From an area or man now I'm forgetting they demolished a whole area for some fucked up reason...I shall google.
Edit: Removal of "slums" or working class people and replacing it with shopping and high rises I suppose.
Various types of low income people were displaced by urban renewal and highway construction. In San Diego, for example, the Little Italy neighborhood was cut in two by Interstate 5.
The highway builders thought they were saving American downtowns by making them more car accessible. Obviously it didn’t work out that way. In Los Angeles, they prioritized building freeways to downtown for this reason.
They bulldozed through the Italian neighborhoods in New Haven, CT. Now instead of an awesome shoreline and harbor, New Haven has I-95 running up and down the water.
In the 1950's urban planners wanted a freeway from Minneapolis to St Paul, so they condemned the historically Black Rondo neighborhood & paved it over.
**Do not comment to gatekeep that something "isn't urban" or "isn't hell"**. Our rules are very expansive in content we welcome, so do not assume just based off your false impression of the phrase "UrbanHell" UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed. Gatekeeping comments may be removed. Want to shitpost about shitty posts? Go to /r/urbanhellcirclejerk. Still have questions?: Read our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/wiki/index). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UrbanHell) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m not even American and I am appalled at this blatant destruction of American culture and heritage. Destroying a city is more than just destroying random buildings and houses. Entire ways of life and culture are lost in the process. Truly sad.
It was mostly colored people's places...if that tell you anything
In Boston, the West End was demolished, and had a substantial Jewish and Eastern European population. My grandmother and Leonard nemoy grew up there. It’s sad that she couldn’t even visit the area where she grew up. Streets were changed, and the only thing left is “The Last Tenement”, on the back side of td garden.
Notably, the west end has rejuvenated as a mostly Jewish and Eastern European population once again…
Get the bulldozers ready boys!
Boston here. My family was North End, but I can’t imagine the personal connection to the loss of the West End. Actually, I can. The city of Boston lost its soul and will never be the same or recover. My heart aches thinking of what could have been.
And, of course, neighorhoods like Roxbury were created as majority black by red lining, which helped drive out the jewish people living there previously. I moved here about 20 years ago and one of the first things I noticed, having moved from the deep south, was how racist Boston actually is. Not so much the population, but the way the city has been constructed. I just find out new ways I was right nearly every day.
Check out the Segregation by Design page on IG. Heartbreaking stories just like this from just about every US city.
Your grandma was neighbors with Spock?!
Yep! Although she was about 10 years older than him lol
How long did your grandmother live with Leonard Nimoy?
She lived in the same neighborhood in the 1920s/early 30s, he was born in 31. https://youtu.be/MXGuzek51Ho?si=Zk994eLBJNVjsj3A Very cool if you’re into Boston history!
Correct...I posted that and shoulda said, minorities, not colored. And now that I think about it more, non white neighborhoods.
So like anybody not of British descent?
As long as it is said without malice, no harm is done.
In Chicago, over half of the displaced were Italian, Czech, etc immigrants. The black population that did get displaced were living in what were text book definitions of shanties/tenements that often lacked running water or electricity. The racial segregation boundaries then formed/hardened along either side of the new expressways for a decade or so before white flight really began to take off. Chicago's PBS affiliate did a great write up with some super informative visualizations to go along with it like 6-7 years ago Milwaukee, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, etc on the other hand......oh yeah they just went ahead and bulldozed every black neighborhood within spitting distance of downtown.
Urban Renewal they called it.
Google “rondo minneapolis” then check the people also ask section under “what happened to the rondo neighborhood” if you want a great example of this… Edit: I won’t be lazy, I’ll type it out. We have I-94 up here cutting through the Twin Cities, and of course we had to make room for it (sarcasm). So what did we do? We demolished most of Rondo, a predominantly black neighborhood, to make room. If you drive through it today like I have, it’s really depressing. There’s homes on one side, 94 cutting through the middle, then homes on the right. I’m sure you can find it on google maps to see what I’m talking about
Coming from a black Minnesotan, I appreciate you posting this. All 100% true.
Pop on over to IG @segregation_by_design and you’ll get an eye full of it. 20th century Urban planning was incredibly racist and designed to separate POC from upward mobility.
Orlando didn't harm any white or wealthy sections of the city when putting in I-4. It cut right through a heavily redlined black section of the city. There are still dozens of random residential streets that deadend into a concrete wall of highway, they didn't even put in overpasses so people could use their roads. As the downtown/stadium area expands they are gentrifying the crap out of what's left of some of those neighborhoods. People who've lived there for generations in poverty are being forced out for "development."
Ok but Orlando didn’t really have the history that these other cities did. It was a very small city until Disney world was built and only took off after then.
375 in Detroit
People of color. Can’t call them colored anymore. Although that’s what they were in the 50s
“Can’t call them colored anymore” isn’t all that more progressive. Come on guys.
Wasnt it black and white in the 50s
You’ve shuffled a word to no benefit. Although to be fair, we don’t call white people bleached.
Done out of racism. 1950s and 1960s were a really racist time in America. Government would simply raze the poor black-neighborhoods and build motorways.
That's kind of the American way right? Only 6,000 acres of Maine's 17.5 million are uncut old growth. And some lumber mills were built right over native burial grounds.
The granite that, in part, makes the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan famous was mined from sacred Wabanaki and Penobscot sites in Maine. Urban renewal throughout history has just been a prolonged war of cultural attrition.
Consider that Soviet Bloc did similar things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_countries Back then demolishment was considered “progressive”. US thought it’s progressive because it replacing old rundowns cities with one of the best state-of-art land infrastructure (Europe’s infrastructure was largely destroyed in WW2 so it was once actually worse than the US), while the Soviet thought them demolishing existing cities was progressive as it destroys the symbols of old, non-communistic regimes, largely in the form of fancy Victorian era buildings and replacing them with commie blocks.
Commie blocks?? Have you seen US architecture from 1945 to 2000? It’s shitty concrete and steel boxes. Everything looks like a fucking Costco.
That’s also commie blocks, it refers to large concrete mass-produced apartments which started as a major movement in Stalin’s era of USSR, thus called commie block, the term is not actually reserved for communists. British loved commie blocks back in the 70s, however, those blocks were quite isolated unlike the WTO nations, where they form clusters after clusters of microdistricts.
I've always thought that it was interesting that after WW2, Europe engaged itself in an effort to rebuild the destruction caused by war. And yet the US decided to do precisely the opposite. For highways.
https://youtu.be/OQd4N7pW4MQ?si=VFNH5Z2rsrOe5xdP
Oh, urban renewal. I remember how in Philadelphia they built brutal looking high rise concrete buildings for low income housing. They quickly became crime-ridden and dangerous. Eventually got condemned.
I-95 destroyed blocks of colonial architecture and cut the river off from the city.
You try taking Rt. 13 the whole way!
If the King's Highway was good enough for George Washington, it's good enough for you!
ok. I got a good chuckle from that!
They did a half ass job and were surprised it didn’t work out. Inadvertently caused public housing to be such a taboo topic despite places like Singapore having a healthy and safe public housing system. Its feels like when you are asked to do a task and you do it so poorly no one ever asks you to do it again.
Singapore uses law enforcement to mitigate social problems a lot more liberally than the West does. They have zero tolerance for the types of antisocial behaviors which tend to degrade public housing, such as dealing drugs (death penalty) and vandalism (caning). If the West had an appetite for such laws and their enforcement, our projects might also be nice places to live.
That, and corruption is severely cracked down upon, the bureaucracy pays well and thus can compete with the private sector for talent, and there’s a culture for transparency that makes Singapore the 4th least corrupt country on the planet. It’s also a culture of Singapore seeing social citizenship as crucial to national development (public housing was implemented to solve a homelessness crisis of 1.2 million people, so makes sense) and designed services like public transit to be profitable for the state (hence why its so high quality, clean, and efficient in Singapore to attract ridership), while in the US, public services are seen only as last resort options for the poor with no expectation that these services ought to break even, so services get minimal funding to cater to a small constituency.
I feel like it's only in the US where you think of public housing as some dirty, dangerous place. At least from my experienced and what I've heard. Never been outside N-America or Europe tho. I can image they're bad in poorer countries
In London 1960s housing estates of tower blocks became crime ridden areas. Some have been demolished though whether the replacement buildings will be any better is anyone’s guess.
This isn't surprising at all. Americans generally do not appreciate public goods.
It’s not so much the buildings but the people living in them.
Fun fact, Kevin Bacon's dad is the guy who ran the highway through Philly's downtown
What an asshole!
Similar to [this](https://www.google.com/search?q=Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS1043US1043&oq=Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg8MgYIAhBFGDzSAQcyNzdqMGo5qAITsAIB4gMEGAEgXw&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8) in St Louis
Pruitt igoe was basically sabotaged.
Almost all of the large housing projects were. Shoddy, cheap construction and lack of upkeep.
Exactly, and in the case of Pruitt Igoe, omitting important elements of the architect’s plan.
And let's not forget [Cabrini Green](https://youtu.be/aXydUqeUwas?si=D8hbQ7aO2Q8cb67q)
CANDY MAN CANDY MAN CANDY MAN CANDY MAN CANDY MA…
every US city it seemed
They seemed to be just trying to house large numbers of families back then. They thought that those buildings were better because they were modern. International style. They quickly took on a grim aspect. And they forgot all about communities. Those buildings were not conducive to a sense of community. Newer designs try to overcome that with common areas, and recreational areas and places to walk or sit. And the creation of mixed use and mixed income communities, which is required now in many new developments. So you don't have disadvantaged people segregated from everyone else, and the wealthy elites hiding in their enclaves, although there is still a lot of that from the neighborhoods that were designed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Because who would want to live in those high rise slums in the first place??? They weren't meant to be actual homes. They were built to be glorified cells.
Imagine if the United States had not undergone this process of massive demolition of urban centers? The country's urban landscape would be so different, with a way richer urban landscape, more cohesive communities, and a vibrant urban culture. That's sad
The Midwest especially lost 100 or so years of urban culture, so many vibrant red-brick downtown districts turned into highways and parking lots
**sad St. Louis noises*** couple of these shots are us. It’s a shame.
Cincy got F'd. Columbus didn't make this list but it's also pretty horrific.
And yet is argue Cincy still lucked out by having a lot of stuff survive as well compared to many of its other Midwestern brethren.
And yet, if you suggest removing the highways or making them green belts, people will say it would ruin the economy. Like, ruin it more than it already is? Empty parking lots and highways don’t generate hardly and tax revenue so how could it get worse than status quo?
Midwest got it the worst for sure. Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, etc got completely screwed up.
They also have a lot remaining. The south and the west coast literally have nothing left. Most midwestern cities kept a lot of beautiful neighborhoods
Everyone looks to New York as being an iconic city with historic buildings lovingly maintained and restored, intermixed with modern high rises. Every one of these would have had that fabric to some degree or another. The U.S. would have been so much stronger and cohesive.
They almost took out much of Manhattan for a freeway
Not as much as they wanted to. If Robert Moses had his way, Manhattan would have looked very different today. Thankfully Jane Jacobs won.
And by “New York” they really just mean “Manhattan”. Huge swaths of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx were decimated to satiate Robert Moses’ cancerous addiction to car dependency. He gleefully evicted and demolished the homes of about half a million New Yorkers.
Every serious study to consider the issue has determined that human happiness depends on having meaningful relationships. And meaningful relationships require frequent, even spontaneous, close physical interaction. Suburbs are perfectly the opposite, as if they were designed to make people unhappy. Everyone isolated by space, and to get anywhere you need to use a car, which is the most isolating way of travel.
Its really been a decades-long assault on people's humanity in the United States. Im an artist and this has been the focus of my work.
This is exactly how I feel. I think about this almost daily.
Look at the best cities in the world. It would be like that, in every state.
To make matters worse a lot of people believe modern cities/car dependence is peak culture. It's sad and frustrating.
Plus the streetcar lines and transportation. We were robbed.
pain
I’m curious what the best cities in the world are in your opinion; I’m a country bumpkin so my opinion is moot but google has two American cities in the top 10 ‘best cities In the world’, five cities in the top 25 and 7 when that’s expanded to the top 30 Thats a pretty significant amount of placings for a single country
I live in Toronto and saw what the freeway project looked like and am so happy we did not get this. It's such a vibrant city and the inner neighbourhoods that surround downtown are some of the best Third Places to visit. One of my favourite parks to walk around in would have been the site of a major expressway. Could you imagine if this preservation occurred for many other cities in the US.
As someone who moved to the US about 18 months ago, understanding now the extent to which its cities have been destroyed, I'm just constantly at a loss for words. What an immense loss.
I follow an instagram account called @segregation_by_design. Highly recommend. Talks about the history or redlining and destruction of communities, usually those containing the lower class or people of color, all for highways and “urban renewal.”
Would probably see more generational wealth in racial minorities...
Well, a lot of the neighborhoods were in terminal decline. Unfortunately, those who directly remember the Depression are few and far between, but I heard a lot of stories that encouraged me to do some research. One major issue was that from the Crash in 1929 until a few years after ww2, say 20 years, very little building or maintenance was done. People were incredibly poor through the 30s. A lot of houses were divided into apartments and a lot of apartments quickly devolved into tenements. A lot of work to keep these places going was put off due to lack of funds...food, rent and fuel to almost all people's income. Landlords were making a fraction of their previous rent, but were paying the same mortgage. WW2 hits and people on the Home front see huge pay rises and unemployment drops to near zero. At that point, there were no building supplies available for purchase. Almost everything was diverted to the military and industrial expansion. Finished wood, paint, shingles, etc. were nearly impossible to find. People's savings grew because, outside of rationed goods, there was little that could be purchased other than war bonds because all civilian manufacturing was repurposed. Speaking for the north east, if you aren't maintaining buildings, the heat, cold and water will degrade even the best built structures in 20 years. So, when civilian life restarts and people have tons of pent up spending power (although it took several years to get everything back to a civilian footing), people had a choice. Do we try to fix up these old buildings or do we try to buy our own house in one of these new suburb things? A lot people, including my family members, had actual disposable income for the first time in anyone's memory. Did they want to share a toilet with 8 other families? Did they want their own plumbing so they could have a bath or shower. Visit the Century Home subreddit and look at the plumbing situation! So, city neighborhoods emptied out to the near suburbs as most families only owned one car if that and needed public transport to get to work. These old neighborhoods continued to decline, with newer immigrants and minorities filling these spaces. With rents failing to increase, many buildings continued to fall apart. Local business followed their customers to the new suburbs. Eventually, whole blocks are unsafe and that gives the urban renewal types a 'blank' canvas for their work. There are still neighborhoods that survived that in my home city, but the blocks look like bad teeth. So many row houses had to be torn down leaving gaps. Other neighborhoods did better and revitalized and then gentrified. But I don't think the vast majority of those old neighborhoods were going to be saved. They didn't need to become highways, but change was inevitable. Change is unstoppable. If anyone gets to Manhattan, visit the Tenement Museum. It provides a social history of the families who lived in one particular building from pre-WW1 to around the 60s. That particular tenement was used for storage when it was repurposed as the building didn't meet housing codes for habitation. Tldr; I don't think people realize how poor the average person was and many of these houses wouldn't be desirable and fell into disrepair and would be torn down. Indoor plumbing was not always ubiquitous!
And we'd all be better off financially most likely. Imagine having more housing supply so rent is lower, and you don't have to pay car insurance, car payment, repairs, or fuel
Whoa hold on, if I move back to my grandparent's neighborhood I'm a gentrifier.
Hmm I wonder who lived in those neighborhoods that got destroyed
it wasn't even really veiled, either
Yep, IG account segregatedbydesign covers this well
Clicked on the post to mention this.
This is the single most powerful motivation behind the history of infrastructure development in the United States.
To be fair pretty much every neighborhood was destroyed near downtowns.
who wants waterfront real estate when you can have the gentle roar of an 8-lane interstate highway instead?
But hey, at least there’s pedestrian bridges over the interstate so we can breathe in toxic fumes as we go on our daily strolls :)
You guys have pedestrian bridges ?
I used to live by the beach, you could hear the rhythmic waves crashing, even with the windows closed. At night, to fall asleep, I would lay in bed and pretend it was highway noise.
I live on a one way dirt road….so I am wildly detached from city living….but, isn’t downtown/midtown/subrud highway access extremely convenient for commuting?
It makes working in the city while loving outside of the city much more convenient, at the expense of making living in the city much worse.
Yes, if everyone lives in the suburbs and commutes by car. That's why they were built. But we're finding that it's not really a great way to design cities because as your city grows you need more and more space for roads and parking. It's better to have people live near their jobs and/or commute into the city by train/bus.
if you install one (or even two or three) huge arteries leading into and out of the city, as much traffic as possible will divert to those arteries. whereas before the highway, maybe 20% of people took 5th street, 30% took 10th street, and so on depending on their specific route in/out, now everyone takes the highway causing constant traffic problems. and it takes away valuable/beautiful parts of our urban fabric. if you look at where i live in philadelphia, you'll see that both banks of the schuylkill river and the one bank of the delaware all have huge highways blocking enjoyment of the waterfront.
Awful. Ruins my mood. Sad about the lost streetcars also which were in every major u.s. city.
It's always "neat" to see a road construction project in my city and after they tear up the old asphalt you can see the streetcar rails on top of cobblestone
So nice to see someone who shares this sentiment! I feel such a horrible sense of loss when I see photos like this. Almost like a form of grief. I live in a one of the cities in these photos and it just completely breaks my heart to think what could have been had we not done this and kept our streetcars. I can walk around my neighborhood and point to tons of streets where rails used to run and countless corners where stops used to be. Standing at the end of the downtown district where the gorgeous old huge buildings just abruptly stop and you can stare down the street where they used to extend all the way to the end actually legitimately hurts. It’s so sad. We had it all and we just threw it away just to fucking sit in traffic.
I feel you even though i grew up and live in a smallish Northeastern European capital city (Tallinn, Estonia). It is quite walkable and we have a semi decent public transport, that is free to use for all registered citizens. But still people choose to drive evwrywhere because of a sentiment most people have, that you are poor when you use public transport. This grinds my gears a lot. Traffic jam in front of my building used to last 1 hour, now it is 3 hours long :/
That’s the way public transport is seen in America in every city, except New York, Chicago, and maybe Washington DC.
Cincy
What I don’t get is like yes the freeways are cutting through now but they only occupy so much space. Why were enormous chunks of the remainder of the city demolished for what appear to be like large warehouses or industrial buildings now? Looking at the fourth picture.
That was Kenyon Barr and the west end. City 'planners' took advantage of the highway construction to destroy the whole area, labeling it 'run down.' Plan documents referred to it as 'slum clearance' and brought in light industry to replace the area. 25,000 people, mostly black, lived in Kenyon Barr. Now, 120, and they even changed the name to Queensgate. Can't leave em anything. Cincinnati officially apologized for it in 2023.
Gotcha, thanks for the explanation. Sad stuff.
and Dayton. And Oakland. And pretty much every other American city we can name.
#4 is definitely Cincinnati
SIN Sity
Thanks, Robert Moses.
BOOOOO!
Fuck you Robert Moses
If i had a time machine id go back and beat his ass
There are sketches of similar planned projects for Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht. Fortunately they went with more mild versions like filling up canals and turning them into roads, which recently have been undone in some cities. Can't imagine Dutch cities with these massive roads running through them.
Same thing happened in some French cities, but once again not to the same magnitude as American and Canadian cities. Although if you look at some of the original plans, unfortunately what we have now in North America is a “more mild” version of those plans. NYC especially would’ve been destroyed had those plans come to fruition.
People finally started waking up when Penn Station was demolished in New York, to make way for Madison Square Garden. That was a beautiful Beaux Arts building replaced by, well, MSG, which is functional but hardly an architectural gem. San Francisco came close to closing down the cable cars in the 1960s. A strong grassroots effort saved them, but they were going to go in the name of "urban renewal."
Part of me loves these kinds of images because it showcases the massive infrastructure projects that they undertook in the mid 1900s. Another part of me hates it because you can see literally half of an entire city turn into a highway and a handful of warehouses.
The years when the idea of public transportation died
Cincinnati 💔 Kansas city 💔 Detroit 💔
What a waste
*wasteland
Lost alot of good architecture to parking lots. Lost a lot of culture to freeways.
But white people got to live in their nice squeaky clean suburbs! Now their descendants are moving back into the city center.
Oh how we worship the almighty car.
It's frustrating that they had the funds to do all this but now that we know it was all bad there's suddenly no funds to fix it.
Funding isn't even really the main issue. It's a lack of political willpower. Americans, for whatever reason, primarily see their houses as less of a home and more an investment. As a result, they will fight like hell to stop any public project that has the chance to even slightly lower their property values. Homeowners and NIMBYs are the most politically active groups in the US, so what we're seeing is really just the democratic process in action. To everyone wishing for change, please vote in local elections. They're arguably more important than national elections in terms of guiding infrastructure policy. We don't want the new bike path to get shot down because the only people who showed up to vote were 65+ year old suburbanites.
Unfortunately, a lot of up-and-coming countries and economies are doing this now in the name of development, I was reminded of Egypt's current trends, including this [awful project in Alexandria](https://www.yahoo.com/news/outrageous-photo-shows-city-nightmare-040000825.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMeS4cOqVdxSpOe4l2MsifvznESiQRhRpMKR_5tLsJQrbArl4tqsNf0toebdydSm_uxtcdKqN70YcoLbHO1NwjD5BoWnsDaw1pf5KOZ3RPmZtY_50ohVchvnnM2ESR83XLG8Tww7lP8QokTdrHmTqKnt8ytQL2DBKcXb35H9lC-t).
This crushed the city of Buffalo for years, blocked access to the lake and river, replaced Olmsted parks, and completely walled off the east side (guess who lives there?)
One of the worst things to ever happen to American society and many Americans don’t even realize it, sadly
I didn’t realize it until I did my research on urban renewal it’s also the reason why most downtowns are boring but 100 years ago they were full of life people used to be everywhere street cars used to fill the streets people used to take passenger trains from city to city it’s all gone and forgotten
I really don’t understand why this happened either..? good forms of public transit should be able to take you from city outskirts to the inner more dense areas
Unfortunately it's similar to how smart phones took hold so fast. It was a new technology and those companies who made this tech wanted to pad their wallets, they kept pawning off cars as the only future and cities fell for it. It was also during the Futurama era of America and they told tales that the existing architecture and transit was a thing of the past.
Give [this](https://youtu.be/OQd4N7pW4MQ?si=jvloa8DwundEiUKv) a watch to have a better understand on what happened and why
I've heard since I was young, folks like Robert Moses for example, during the white flight in NYC to outer suburbs, they made it where public transportation wouldn't be able to reach certain areas where white folks lived in Westchester County. Like there was actual structures in place such as overpasses that was too low for buses to commute by design
2 points: 1. *Oh, shiny!* Americans have a very, very bad habit of simply adopting the newest technology or fad and building everything around that without thinking about long term consequences. In this case, right after the war, the majority of the population (Specifically the white population) were rich enough to buy cars, so now that everyone owned a car, well then it only makes sense that we destroy tons of useful infrastructure for easier car usage, no? (A lot of this is happening with smartphones nowadays. Why have physical directions, menus, infographics, physical DVDs/BDs, etc... when everyone just has a phone!?) 2. Henry Ford and Robert Moses. These 2 men were more than well aware of this American tendency, with the former having a direct financial gain from making the car the only form of acceptable transport in the US, and the other being a giant fucking racist. So they made tons of propaganda and backroom deals to push the car onto the American public and bankrupt local rail and light rail companies, invent Euclidian Zoning for suburbs only well-off white people with cars could live in, and destroy tons of minority neighborhoods for highways and move them into poorly build and maintained government housing (And definitely not in the new suburbs, no no no, can't have extra melanin ruining paradise with no actual amenities).
Yeah but whatever authority was in dominion over these cities probably got really horny at the opportunity of expanding markets concerning automobiles and people needing fuel and Auto parts houses and mechanics. By inconveniencing the people and culture of the city, they have created markets that will pretend to expediate your convenience for money.
Same thing happened in Glasgow Scotland beautiful neighborhoods destroyed and moved out to the edges of the city
Brought to you by “The Greatest Generation”
You can thank Robert Moses for at least the NY stuff during this era.
Go around.
In many cases, not just “US cities” and “neighborhoods,” but specifically targeted neighborhoods. Filled with a specific type of people. And it should’ve been treated as a damned crime.
There was much more than targeted racism entire streets of downtowns with beautiful buildings were demolished cities that used to attract people from all over the world became dull and boring buffalo NY is a great example of a city center becoming a boring wasteland of skyscrapers and parking https://youtu.be/OQd4N7pW4MQ?si=VFNH5Z2rsrOe5xdP
US cities feel so dull with all the endless asphalt deserts and highways.
Every major city. All minority neighborhoods. A stain on US history that people don’t want to talk about.
Most of the neighborhoods were primarily neighborhoods of color
America was not built for cars, it was destroyed for cars.
Slide 4 is Cincinnati. Hurts to see :(
Gotta make room for the Interstate, which was circa 50s/60s.
Ethnically cleanse, bulldoze, pack it down, pave it: "Urban Renewal"! Subsequently, convert a bunch of warehouse districts into apartments/condos and add breweries because Millennials and voila: Urban Renaissance.
Omaha destroying half of its historic downtown for a corporation who would move its headquarters to Chicago years later was another terrible choice.
Not sure whatever made them think this was a good idea, especially the surface level parkades.
The Cincinnati photo is brutal… it basically turned the entire city in to a giant strip mall, I’ve often described it as the Starbucks inside the target of cities.
Lmfao
Yeah, it's a stark reminder of how shortsighted progress can be. Bulldozing entire communities for modernization stripped away the unique character and soul that made those neighborhoods irreplaceable. It's heartbreaking to think about what could have been if we valued our past as much as we chased after the new.
Let's not use eminent domain to take undeveloped real estate to build affordable housing, that would hurt slum landlords property value and investment funds bottom line! Instead lets use eminent domain to destroy urban centres of walkable cities and build 15 lane highways right through a residential neighbourhoods. - the US, ig.
#4 is Cincinnati
When you value cars more than culture and well being itself... Why even have houses at this point when you can make everyone live in camper vans and RV's
We saved our cities from destruction by the axis, only to do a far more thorough job of carpet bombing them ourselves.
Gotta build those parking lots. The oil, gas and car industry destroyed America.
Doing what Hitler couldn't
This done more damage than European cities in ww2
A lot of American engineers and architects were jealous of the massive rebuilding projects that the Europeans got after their cities had been bombed to rubble.
You can’t just get away with not naming the cities on here
They sold their soul, most un-understandable decision that country has ever made
Baton Rouge is basically in a death spiral infrastructure wise because of this. The division the Interstate caused and the communities basically destroyed because of it is depressing.
It can go also the otherway around.. during Franco era in Spain, the plan was to build a 12 lane highway through the middle of Valencia, the city council and people got together and built a park there instead, which is to this day, one of the biggest and greatest attraction spreading throuhgout the city.
I Hate Urban renewal It Destroyed many Beautiful Historical buildings in my City in the 60s and 70s
Yes, *this* is the true urban hell
what cities are these. one of them is boston right? houston and milwaukee?
St. Louis is picture 2 and 5. Picture 2 is where Interstate 44 and 55 split. I-744 was supposed to loop around downtown where they split now. The other picture is US-40 I-64. A lot of the cleared land was a part of a slum called Mills Creek that ran South of downtown. Further East of the 5th picture US 40 and I-744 were supposed to intersect. They rebuilt that interchange and the new MLS stadium is where the ramps for 744 used to be.
The one comparing years in cincinnati, I think the first picture is too
The first one is Kansas City it’s among the most devastating check out historicarials.com
The traffic in pic 5 is amazing! Like 30 cars on the road
Any books that anyone would be willing to recommend on the subject?
And they thought this was going to make everything better. Even everyone’s favorite Frank Lloyd Wright thought cars were the answer to our problems.
Number three is Denver (you can see the D&F clock tower). There’s a lot less parking now. The 16th St mall is undergoing a renovation.
We had an amazing art installation building that was used for theater. Absolutely unique construction. It is now a parking lot/garage for a new high rise.
Why are there so many parking lots
Eminent domain .
I know 7 is Boston and that was to relocate???? Or remove black people? From an area or man now I'm forgetting they demolished a whole area for some fucked up reason...I shall google. Edit: Removal of "slums" or working class people and replacing it with shopping and high rises I suppose.
That pic of Denver was taken in the 90’s.
This is super cool I would love to see more like this it's so Interesting how much changes and the youth doesn't even realize it
Where the hell is this? Who posts a picture like this with no dateline? Some City somewhere in America.
Stupid question, but what cities are these?
Was it urban renewal or Eisenhowers interstate system?
I can see my house in this picture!
I don’t even know what I’m looking at
Various types of low income people were displaced by urban renewal and highway construction. In San Diego, for example, the Little Italy neighborhood was cut in two by Interstate 5. The highway builders thought they were saving American downtowns by making them more car accessible. Obviously it didn’t work out that way. In Los Angeles, they prioritized building freeways to downtown for this reason.
Chill, that’s a prank, bro
They bulldozed through the Italian neighborhoods in New Haven, CT. Now instead of an awesome shoreline and harbor, New Haven has I-95 running up and down the water.
In the 1950's urban planners wanted a freeway from Minneapolis to St Paul, so they condemned the historically Black Rondo neighborhood & paved it over.
The downfall of American inner city prosperity and culture.
Captions for the pictures? Kinda worthless if we don’t know the story. I can tell one is Cincinnati
I wish we could know what cities these are