President Biden's infrastructure legislation includes efforts to address and correct so-called urban renewal projects in the United States that had the opposite effect of their stated intentions by turning vibrant city neighborhoods into urban wastelands, mainly with multilane express highways. And while coming from New Jersey may make me qualified to talk about the damage Interstate 280 in Essex County did to Newark and neighboring East Orange, the Exhibit A of wrong-headed highway development in the national media right now appears to be the Tremé neighborhood in New Orleans.
Tremé was and is a black neighborhood and the focus of black Creole culture in New Orleans where jazz is said to have first taken root in the city. It was the commercial center of the city's black population. Between the World Wars it had a thriving black middle class and become renowned for the rows of oak trees and azalea bushes that grew proudly along the wide median that ran down the neighborhood's main drag, Claiborne Avenue.
Thanks to a lamebrained compromise on transportation legislation in the 1950s that provided highway transportation funding to big cities with no mass transit funding available, the Interstate Highway System was developed with the idea to run the highways directly through cities - over the objections of President Eisenhower, who championed the Interstate Highway System but, taking a page from the autobahns built in Germany, wanted the highways to go around, not through, the cities. New Orleans's Tremé neighborhood bore the brunt of urban freeway development when construction on Interstate 10 - called the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans - began in February 1968. Many of Tremé's historic houses, as well as all of the oak trees on Claiborne Avenue, were brutally taken out and replaced with the new highway, which runs on a viaduct over the landscape.
The result was a loss of ratables, the loss of prosperous businesses and many middle-class households, devalued real estate properties, and sharply decreased investment in the area that turned Tremé into a slum. The slumscape also begat a pathological ghetto culture that was once damned by mainstream America but is now perversely celebrated as "hip-hop."
Urbanist Amy Stelly, a resident of Tremé and a community activist, was pleased to hear that President Biden's plan to repair urban-development inequities cited Interstate 10 in Tremé as an example of what he hopes to fix by reconnecting urban neighborhoods affected by expressways. Stelly says that not only has the highway generated social dislocation in Tremé, it's also an environmental hazard, with heavy rain collecting on I-10 and running off into the neighborhood below, carrying with it dirt and road salts thanks to the wearing-out of the original waterproofing. Not to mention the noise pollution from the vehicles passing over the neighborhood. As Stelly herself has said, New Orleans is a destination city, and it's pointless to have a highway go through it. Which is precisely why crosstown highways proposed by Robert Moses in Manhattan were never built.
Stelly would like nothing better than to tear out the Claiborne Expressway and bring about a true reconnection of the Tremé neighborhood. But that might be too costly, so mitigation efforts that preserve the expressway are more likely in order, which would involve taking out entrance and exit ramps for the highway in Tremé and, possibly later, sound barriers along the viaduct to shield the residents below from highway noise. Another reason the highway may stay in place is this - the local business establishment (that is, the white business establishment) is afraid of the backup of commercial vehicles in New Orleans trying to access the city's port (though rail access would involve less land use and be more energy-efficient).
No, I think taking out I-10 - as well as I-610, one of those three-digit local spurs that go through or around cities - can be done. Interstate 610 in New Orleans (there's another one in Houston) not only goes through similar neighborhoods, it also cuts through New Orleans City Park. (Can you imagine a freeway going through New York's Central Park? Not two-lane transverse roads, which were part of Central Park's original design to accommodate horse-drawn vehicles, but a goddamned six-lane freeway?)
Below is a map of southern Louisiana as it is today.
As you can see (click on the map to get a closer view), Interstate 10 diverts from its general east-west trajectory across the nation's southern tier between Baton Rouge and Slidell in order to go through New Orleans; the interstate highway connecting Baton Rouge and Slidell directly on the northern side of Lake Pontchartrain is Interstate 12. Two mainline north-south interstates, Interstates 55 and 59, approach New Orleans but stop short of it. In addition to Interstate 10 through New Orleans and its spur Interstate 610, there are two north-south spurs, Interstates 310 and 510. And in addition to all that. there is the Pontchartrain Expressway (not to be confused with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway that goes across the lake itself) that connects I-10 with the Port of New Orleans in the Mississippi River (indicated by the red dot on the map).
Below is my proposal of how to redo the highway system in southern Louisiana:
- First, do the obvious. Tear down the Claiborne Expressway and the rest of I-10 within the New Orleans city limits. Keep the stretch of I-10 between the city's western boundary and LaPlace, where I-10 meets I-55. Since I-10 is a white man's freeway, I'm sure the lily-white suburban communities in Kenner and Metairie will be pleased.
- Renumber I-12 as I-10.
- Make the part of I-10 from New Orleans' western boundary to LaPlace part of I-55.
- Tear up I-610; no one should have a freeway going through their municipal park. The railroad line that goes through it is hardly a nuisance, since its right of way is narrower and because trains don't run every minute of the day.
- Tear up I-310; it's only twelve miles long and connects the New Orleans suburbs to rural St. Charles Parish. Where's the rationale for that? Besides, it was supposed to be part of a southerly beltway around the city that never got built. Well, keep the Hale Boggs Bridge across the river, because people still have to cross the river from time to time.
- Keep I-510 in place, but make it and the stretch of I-10 that goes from New Orleans' eastern boundary to Slidell part of I-59.
- The stretch of I-10 between Baton Rouge and LaPlace? Tear out the whole damn thing. Good grief, part of it goes through ecologically sensitive wetlands! Motorists coming from the west can always access New Orleans by getting on I-55 south at Hammond. If there must be a direct link between Baton Rouge and LaPlace, give it a new three-digit interstate number signifying it as a spur of I-10.
- Finally, replace the decked Pontchartrain Expressway with a street-level boulevard so that trucks can access the port. Keep the speed limits low, and provide easy access across the boulevard for pedestrians and cyclists. Make it similar to the transformation of the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx into Sheridan Boulevard.
And this is the result of my suggestions: the map of southern Louisiana as it should be - and should always have been! (Again, the Port of New Orleans is indicated by a red dot. Click on the map to make it bigger.)
I kept the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, if only because . . . well, it must be pretty cool to cross a large lake like that in your car!
As for all of my changes, well . . . I know full well that such a radical redo of the highway network in southern Louisiana is never going to happen. But in the unlikely event that we start contracting the Interstate Highway System and focus more on a transportation network that serves people instead of disrupting their lives (*cough cough*, Amtrak, *cough cough*), Amy Stelly's call for tearing down I-10 through Tremé would be an excellent start.
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