But in West Baltimore, the damage had already been done. The city’s larger highway expansion project was scrapped in 1979, thanks to staunch opposition from environmental and neighborhood activists. In the end, only 1.4 of the slated 2.3 miles of I-170 were ever built. “They called it a ghetto, but that wasn’t the case,” said Smith.
In Baltimore, this meant neighborhoods that had long been the epicenter of Black life. Generous federal funding for these projects - as much as 90 cents on the dollar - encouraged officials to go big, opening up large tracts of land for redevelopment by clearing out so-called slums - areas where a disproportionate number of Black residents lived. That year, Smith’s family was informed their house would be demolished to make way for Interstate Highway 170 that would connect downtown Baltimore with its expanding ring of suburbs.ĭuring the middle of the last century, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans received similar eviction notices, as city planners around the country began plotting out new highway systems to cater to the car-centric, suburban lifestyle growing in popularity with middle-class white people. “It was a Norman Rockwell existence,” he said.īut in 1974, when Smith was 19 years old and living at home, that existence came to an abrupt end. Growing up in Rosemont, a once vibrant Black neighborhood on Baltimore’s West Side, Glenn Smith remembers “having everything you needed” - parks, markets and even a movie theater - within walking distance of the home he shared with his parents and seven siblings.
This story is co-published with Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.
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