Coming soon to a bookstore near you, Stop the Road, Baltimore’s epic 40-year battle over Interstate Highways, by LAI member Evans Paull. Paull’s Preface frames the story as follows:
“It is fairly astonishing to think that, through most of the 1960’s, the adopted highway plan (known as “10-D,” but rechristened by the author as the “Future Gentrification Prevention Program,”) was going to slash its way across South Baltimore at Montgomery Street, swipe through Federal Hill (taking a large chunk out of Federal Hill Park), cross the Inner Harbor with a 14-lane low level bridge, occupy Harbor East with a colossal 6-level interchange, rip through the heart of Fells Point at Broadway and Thames, and then follow the Canton waterfront all the way to the Canton industrial area, thereby cutting off all of the Southeast neighborhoods from the harbor. If you were of the opinion that Baltimore needed to be protected from the evils lurking behind the words “rejuvenation,” “reinvention,” and the particularly onerous “waterfront renewal,” it would be hard to conjure up a more complete solution – the engineers’ 1961 plan was perfection, the coup de grâce.”
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