The Santa Monica Freeway construction 1960s From an LA Times article: It is worth considering the racial lines by which the freeway system was constructed in the first place. The neighborhoods with more wealth, affluence, and political clout, mostly white, were able to halt projects (as Beverly Hills did), or push routing choices toward those with less means of resistance. That process of bringing the freeways and interstates through already developed areas often disproportionately destroyed homes, displaced families and divided neighborhoods that were and often continue to be predominately inhabited by African America communities and people of color in Los Angeles. What the Santa Monica Freeway construction looked like just east of the 110 interchange, displacing households and local businesses. (Image that has been cropped for detail from the Los Angeles Examiner Collection, USC Libraries) This was certainty the case all along the Santa Monica Freeway’s path to the coastline. Including the splicing in half of the Santa Monica Pico Neighborhood where I currently live, which was and remains (although formally more so) the most demographically diverse slice of this 8 ½ sq. mile municipality by the sea. Where many of those bold lines on the maps were drawn, especially the bigger grander 2nd wave of urban freeways, were often chosen by which paths through communities were deemed most expendable. These projects were fueled by state and federal dollars enabling a scale of mass property acquisition, grandiosity and recklessness quite unlike any urban road building that had ever come before. Those homes nearest the freeway that were spared the bulldozers were reduced in property value and their air tainted by a barrage of harmful motoring particulates that continues to harm lungs invisibly downwind even as the era of thick and obvious smog has receded from years past. The history of the urban freeway in America is an ugly legacy, intrinsically tied to housing destruction, displacement and devaluing of neighborhood’s of color and facilitating the convenience of white flight to the then new select commuter suburbs. Although many now give little thought to the concrete they pass through while driving and how and why it got where it is, there are many things about our present that cannot be fully understood without at least a cursory knowledge of that history.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 20:18:02 +0000
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