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The Creation of America's Car Culture, Part 2
The Creation of America's Car Culture, Part 2
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About this episode
Exploring the origins and impacts of America's interstate highway system, this episode highlights how highways like New Orleans' Claiborne Expressway and Syracuse's I-81 devastated historically Black neighborhoods, displacing residents and causing lasting social, environmental, and health issues. Featuring voices like urban planner Amy Stelly and activist Richard Levy, it reveals the racial and class biases in highway planning driven by car industry interests and Cold War defense fears. Despite community resistance, many highways were built, leaving legacies of blight and pollution. The episode also touches on recent efforts to reconnect and revitalize these divided neighborhoods.
Topics:
interstate highway system
urban displacement
racial and class impacts
community activism
environmental pollution
historical highway planning
car culture origins
public health effects
infrastructure policy
neighborhood revitalization
Cars:
Buick Century
Signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, otherwise known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, ushered in an unprecedented era of roadbuilding in the United States, becoming the largest public works project in the country's history. Designed to spread freedom and prosperity — and, as the name implies, provide for the national defense — these highways tore through urban neighborhoods, destroying once-thriving communities and displacing countless citizens, many of them people of color. In this special report, we examine just what inspired this massive project and the effects it had on two communities, one in New Orleans and one in Syracuse.
This episode was produced with the generous support of the Helen & William Mazer Foundation.
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This episode was produced with the generous support of the William and Helen Mazer Foundation.
This is the War on Cars.
I'm Doug Gordon.
In this episode, part two of a series on the creation of America's car culture, it's
from producer Alana Strauss, who explores the origins and history of the interstate highway
system and the devastating effects the nation's highway building program had on two neighborhoods,
one in New Orleans and the other in Syracuse.
Our hope is that after you listen, you'll have a new perspective on how and why US cities
were carved up by highways, the lingering effects of such projects, and how, as the
great American writer William Faulkner once wrote, the past is never dead.
It's not even past.
As a reminder, we are on Patreon at Patreon.com slash the War on Cars pod.
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Now enjoy the episode.
Amy Stelly is an artist, designer and urban planner who researches the health, environmental
and social impacts of city infrastructure.
A New Orleans native, she lives in the Tremay neighborhood in the same house where she grew
up.
My children are the fourth generation to live in this house.
I'm the third.
Yeah, I know.
We've been here a long time.
Tremay is one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans and one of the oldest and
most historic African-American neighborhoods in the United States.
As Stelly remembers, when she was a kid in the 1950s and 60s, the streets of Tremay were
beautiful, none more so than Claybourne Avenue, which featured a stunning 100-foot-wide median.
It was like a really giant park, a huge parkway because it was wide enough for the boys
to play football.
One of the most beautiful and broadest boulevards in New Orleans, heavily treed with oak trees.
Claybourne was also lined with theaters and bars where some of the city's top musicians
would play, as well as plenty of black-owned businesses, all of which catered to the
local community.
Claybourne at one time in its heyday was really a black wall street.
We had all kinds of services, all kinds of professionals, doctors, lawyers, lots of street
activity because you only have two lanes of traffic on each side.
So the traffic moved slowly enough along the boulevard for the businesses to really
capture those potential shoppers.
So it was the ideal urban design mix in terms of size and scale.
But when Steli was just nine years old, all of that changed.
In 1966, construction began on a section of the Interstate 10 called the Claybourne Expressway.
This massive six-lane highway spanned more than 18 blocks, building it required removing
Claybourne Avenue's beautiful oak trees.
And the trees were just the start.
Crews demolished over 500 homes and businesses.
The expressway cut off from May from other neighborhoods.
Over time, even many of the people whose homes were spared moved out.
A lot of the businesses that avoided the racking ball in Bulldozer, they eventually
shut down.
Quality of life decreased, crime went up.
The expressway made the space beneath it dark and dirty, turning it into a kind of underworld
that most people try to avoid at all costs, if they can.
Though this neighborhood once built wealth, after the expressway went up, Tremay experienced
decades of economic decline.
Today, you can still see the fallout.
Nearly 40% of Tremay's residents live below the poverty line.
More than 70% of the homes are rentals and about a third of the homes are vacant.
This neighborhood is not really seen as desirable to raise a family because of the social ills
and public health ills that come with living near a highway.
And when I would travel to other parts of the city, it was really astounding to me
how dismal my neighborhood was as a result of the highway.
New Orleans is a really pretty city, you know, there's lots of eye candy here.
So when there's a big contrast in character, it's very noticeable.
What happened in Tremay wasn't just about Tremay.
It was part of a vision that car manufacturers had concocted decades before.
In 1939 at the World's Fair in New York, General Motors sponsored a pavilion called Futurama,
designed by the American theatrical and industrial designer Norman Belgettis.
The exhibit presented fairgoers with a vision of their country as it might look in the
then distant future of 1960, when automated expressways would whisk muters from city
to city and every space in between.
For hundreds of miles around, the motorway continues through the mountains.
Without tedious travel, the advantages of living in a small town are within easy reach, bringing
the people who live there into closer relations with all the world around.
In their space, man has begun to win victory.
Twenty years ago, the population of this city was approximately a million persons.
It is much larger.
Residential, commercial and industrial areas all have been separated for greater efficiency
and greater convenience.
Suburbs had existed in one form or another for millennia.
The Romans even had a word for them, suburbium, the districts immediately beyond a city's
walls.
In the US, before the advent of the automobile, streetcar suburbs, which as the name suggests
were centered around electric streetcars and trolleys, allowed people to spread
beyond urban cores.
Think of Philadelphia's mainline suburbs or places like Brookline, just over the
border from Boston, and Shaker Heights, right outside of Cleveland.
Those are streetcar suburbs.
But in the mid-20th century, car manufacturers began dreaming of a new kind of suburb, one
where everyone would get around by car and access city centers on Futurama inspired
traffic free highways.
In other words, pretty much the America we have today, only without the traffic
free part.
Many factors influenced America's journey to becoming a car dependent nation.
From automobile manufacturers pursuit of profits, to a general sense that cars were the natural
next step on the timeline of technological progress.
But there's one that few people think about today when they're stuck in traffic.
The fear of nuclear war.
In the 1930s, a transportation researcher named Miller McClintock traveled to Germany.
McClintock, who had helped found a traffic research center at the University of California,
which later moved to Harvard University, was there to attend a conference.
According to Tom McClintock, Miller's grandson, as his grandfather toured Germany, he
was shocked by what he saw.
He tells a story of stopping along one of the auto bonds and actually measuring the depth
of the concrete and getting back in the car very disturbed and saying, these roads were
not built for automobiles.
These roads were built for heavy tanks.
And my dad said he went back and reported that to the State Department when he returned
to that observation.
After World War II, as the Allies occupied part of Germany, the US tapped the same general
who led the D-Day invasion to oversee the American controlled zone, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Just like McClintock, Eisenhower was fascinated by the German autobahn, especially given
his experience back home.
In the summer of 1919, as Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, Eisenhower participated
in the first transcontinental military convoy, traveling from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco,
a distance of some 3,200 miles.
It was on this journey that Eisenhower experienced for himself just how difficult it was for
anyone in the country to travel long distances by motor vehicle.
Some roads were nearly impassable because of poor maintenance, narrow widths, muddy
conditions, and bridges that couldn't carry the weight of heavy military trucks.
The 81 vehicles in the convoy experienced a reported 230 incidents, including running off
the road, overturning, and even sinking in quicksand.
So when Eisenhower took command of the American zone in Germany in 1945, he couldn't help
noticing the quality and efficiency of its autobahns.
I think he'd been very much impressed by the network that had been built in Germany,
for example.
It's General Lucius Clay, who is the chairman of Eisenhower's advisory committee on a national
highway program.
He was interviewed in 1967.
I'm sure that he realized what a very important contribution it had made to the national
defense and security of Germany.
The autobahns were very impressive.
Later, as president of the United States, Eisenhower, along with members of Congress,
decided that the country needed a highway system of its own, especially as the Cold War
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union began, and the threat of nuclear war loomed large.
So Eisenhower put forth a proposal for an interstate highway system.
Here's Senator Prescott Bush, father of President George H. W. Bush and grandfather
of George W. Bush, making the case for Eisenhower's interstate highway plan
in 1966.
There had to be more and better highways in case of national defense, in case we had to
move large bodies of people, large bodies of troops.
The existing system was totally inadequate to deal with it under emergency circumstances.
As part of the proposal, the federal government would chip in 90% of the funding, $24.8 billion
for 41,000 miles of new highways to be built over 13 years.
Even though many proponents argued that a standardized network of quality highways would
also create economic growth and reduce congestion, some members of Congress balked at the high
price.
But Eisenhower knew he could overcome such opposition by focusing on the need to defend
the U.S. from a potential invasion, evacuate cities, or move military convoys at a
rapid clip.
Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act into law, with federal
money now available to fund one of the biggest public works projects in U.S. history automakers
and real estate developers saw an opening.
They had spent decades looking for ways to boost car sales, but as long as American
cities stayed dense and transit heavy, there was only so much driving people would do.
But now, a race was on to determine where new highways would be built.
And automotive-related special interest groups lobbied city and state governments hard to
have their say.
While many European cities steered highways around their city centers, these groups pushed
for the opposite.
They wanted to make it incredibly easy to drive into city centers.
So that's exactly what planners did.
And the neighborhoods they chose to run those highways through?
Well, for people like Steli and the residents of historically black neighborhoods like Tremay,
it was pretty obvious what the decision-making process was.
There is a very distinct and strong correlation between where these highways landed and people
of color and poor people, and the goal was to get wealthier suburbanites into downtown
which meant going through, you know, we became the shortcuts.
Black voices, really, we had no seat at the table, so we were just buzzard meat.
Steli and other longtime Tremay residents have a term for the Claiborne Expressway.
We call the highway a monument to racism and, you know, in some cases probably classism,
too.
So these things need to be removed.
As the interstate highway system grew throughout the post-war period, some communities fought
back, like the residents of the 15th Ward in Syracuse, New York.
The 15th Ward actually has a long history.
It was once an area where a lot of the Jewish immigrants went.
That's Richard Levy, professor emeritus of biology at Syracuse University.
He's lived in Syracuse since the 1960s.
Then they were at least partially supplanted by African-Americans.
The houses were, you know, they weren't particularly nice houses, but there were houses that were
shops.
In the 1950s and 60s, a plan was put forth to build Interstate 81 through the 15th Ward.
To make room for the new highway, 1,300 families would have to be displaced.
Many locals, including Levy, thought demolishing people's homes for the convenience of motorists
was unjust, so he decided to see what he could do.
What sort of got you interested in social justice?
Well, there's a couple of things.
I'm a Holocaust survivor.
I came over here and I eventually married an African-American woman, so my interest in
social justice, I guess, was initially formed by those experiences.
Levy joined the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which was
originally formed in Chicago and became a driving force in the use of nonviolent direct
action during the civil rights era.
CORE Syracuse chapter was headed by Richard Levy's friend, fellow university professor,
and civil rights organizer, George Wiley.
George Wiley was a very interesting and quite charismatic man.
He was the first African-American hired by the chemistry department here.
He was an excellent chemist.
Incidentally, his wife was white, so we were both interracial marriages, so we became friends.
The idea of stopping a highway from destroying a largely black neighborhood and displacing
its residents fit right in with the goals of the civil rights movement.
It was not long after Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, and the country
was in an uproar, and it was finally coming to Syracuse, too.
Levy remembers the atmosphere in the meetings where Wiley and his fellow activists would
discuss their plans to stop the construction of I-81.
George Wiley and the people who worked with him were very good at whipping up emotions
in a crowd.
We had lots of people that supported us, and those of us who were participated in
this were on fire.
We really thought we were doing something important.
Levy recalls Wiley asking for volunteers to agree to stand in the way of the trucks and
other equipment to stop crews from demolishing the homes and businesses of the 15th ward.
When word got out about what the protesters were planning to do, those who worked for
the university found themselves at risk of losing their jobs.
The chancellor of the university made a statement that anybody who participated in those
demonstrations would have to pay for the consequences.
I mean, I just arrived in Syracuse.
I had just started my job.
I was certainly not tenured.
I was a non-tenured faculty member, new to this department.
The chairman of my department was not at all sympathetic.
But I didn't even think about that it might be a problem for my career or something.
I just did it.
But then afterwards I thought about it, that was really something.
One morning, Levy went with a group of volunteers to the I-81 construction site.
There would be maybe 15 or 20 of us, and we would march up and down first in front
of this equipment.
Some of us would climb on the crane.
Some of us would climb on the trucks or whatever.
It didn't take long before the police were on the scene to arrest the protesters,
including Levy.
What was being in jail like?
Not very nice.
You have a sort of a slab.
You have a hole in the floor that you can pee in.
And my wife came a little later and brought me an overcoat because we didn't
have any blankets.
People were singing during the night.
Do you remember any what songs people were singing?
We Shall Overcome is the one that we sang most.
You're very casual about having been arrested.
But I feel like that would be kind of scary your first time.
It was.
It was, it was.
Still, Levy's fear was tempered by the knowledge that he and his fellow
organizers were standing up for justice.
I think the thing that made it not scary is one became part of a community
that was on a mission.
I think it was very exciting to be part of that and to think that you might
be doing something important for an important cause.
It was a very small thing in a very large movement.
But I think a large movement is made up of lots of little small things.
Eventually, Corp was successful in getting a meeting with the city
to express their demands.
But in the end, the effort to stop I-81 failed.
The 15th Ward was demolished.
Its residents displaced and scattered.
Syracuse, like most cities at that time, was highly segregated.
And it was going to be virtually impossible for people who lived
in the 15th Ward, most of whom were not very affluent,
to find housing in the rest of the city.
So some new housing was put up.
People were relocated.
But it was a mess.
Like the residents of the 15th Ward,
many communities fought back against highways.
Most failed.
Though in some wealthier places, like Greenwich Village
in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
highway plans were either stopped or changed
thanks to local advocacy.
Still, those were the exceptions.
Today, the dream of car-dependent suburbs
as places of progress and prosperity
is, at best, debatable.
They certainly aren't the shining monuments
envisioned by Norman Belgettis, General Motors,
or the people who experienced the Futurama exhibit in 1939.
The suburbs these highways enabled
are expensive to maintain.
They're places where people feel isolated,
where community life continues to be eroded,
and where those who are dependent on cars,
which is to say just about everyone,
must deal with an array of health problems
from asthma to diabetes.
Not to mention the most obvious public health crisis
caused by cars, fatalities.
It's ironic.
This massive public works project
that was originally motivated by a desire
to keep Americans safe from war
has contributed to a death toll that,
since the 1950s, now numbers in the millions.
But even before embargoing on this giant public works
project, Eisenhower thought highways
were a solution to traffic crashes.
Here he is in 1954 talking about the epidemic.
When any particular activity in the United States
takes 38,000 American lives in one year,
it becomes a national problem of the first important.
We have a great organization working effectively
and supported by the government
to seek ways and means of promoting
feats in the world.
In order to ease great tragedies,
and may be prevented or at least minimized in the future,
that we live every day with this problem
that costs us so many lives.
And not only those lives, but the grief and suffering
in the families from which those victims came
to say nothing of the disablement
that so many other citizens must bear all through their lives,
either through their own or someone else's carelessness.
Today, the communities that were destroyed by highways
like the Claiborne Expressway, New Orleans,
and I-81 in Syracuse are left not merely with blight
and crime, but also noise pollution
and environmental toxins.
Here's Steli again.
So on any given day, let's say just outside of rush hour,
the noise level is at 80 decibels or above,
and that's dangerous to your hearing.
I live a block and a half away from the elevated deck,
and on any given night, I can lie in bed
and the decibel meter will read at 50,
which is chatter in an office building,
and most people want quiet when it's time to go to bed,
not the noise level that's like chatter
in an office building.
Steli worked with a professor
at the Louisiana State University School of Public Health,
who measured lead levels in the soil of playgrounds
near the Claiborne Expressway
and found that they were dangerously high,
much higher than playgrounds located elsewhere in the city.
She looks at me and says, you've got to change this.
It's too much lead.
You've got to do something about this.
Steli says that most likely these high lead levels
were caused by the highway.
She points out that Louisiana State University students
have been measuring lead levels in playgrounds
around the city and found higher levels of lead
in playgrounds adjacent to the highway.
Their readings show that playgrounds
under multiple spans of the highway
have the highest levels of lead.
In 2012, totally by chance,
Steli seized an opportunity to get word out
about the harmful effects of the highway.
That year, the city decided to demolish
an old hotel near the Expressway.
Steli says the place had been full of crime.
I was cheering actually the demise of the building
because my cousins had stayed there
and one of them, one of my favorite cousins,
called me crying hysterically about coming to get her
to just take her out of the hotel
because she couldn't take all of the shenanigans
that were going on.
On the day of the demolition, Steli went out to watch.
Ooh, there it goes.
Woo!
All right!
Woo!
A local reporter walked up to Steli
and that was her moment.
The reporter talked to me about my enthusiasm for the demolition
and I pointed to the highway and said,
that's the next big thing that's going to go into Orleans
and people regard me as crazy
but they did play it on the news.
For nearly 10 years, she and other community organizers
attended community meetings.
They called their elected officials,
they wrote op-eds on the subject.
Then, one morning in 2021,
Steli and her husband were sitting on the balcony of their home
in view of the highway when her phone rang.
And it turned out to be the Washington Post
asking me what I thought about the president calling Claymore
and out in his, you know, roll out of the infrastructure bill
and that was the first I heard of it.
The Biden administration was announcing
its Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
That bill included a $1 billion reconnecting communities grant
allocated to neighborhoods that have been torn apart by highways.
The president recognized what was going on in New Orleans
so for that I'm very grateful.
Ultimately, the Department of Transportation
granted the city and state a $500,000 planning grant
to upgrade the I-10 overpass
and remove some of the on-ramps and off-ramps.
But in 2025, the Trump administration
eliminated the Reconstructing Communities Grant program.
The cuts canceled dozens of projects,
including a $61 million grant
for other pedestrian bridges
and safety improvements in New Orleans.
Despite the setback,
Amy remains determined to get rid of the highway.
And she envisions a Claybourne Avenue
a lot like the one of her childhood.
I think we can rebuild Claybourne
really the way the community wants it to be built
as a Black Wall Street again.
We have quite a bit of historic building stock that's left.
The bones of the Boulevard are still intact.
You can see where the median is.
So if we could cut down what was plopped down upon us,
actually the bones of the street are still there.
That's it for this episode of The War on Cars.
Many thanks to producer Alana Strauss for her work on this one.
Remember, you can go back and listen to part one,
which we released in November.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Thanks also to the Helen and William Mazer Foundation
for their generous support that makes episodes like this
and everything we do at The War on Cars possible.
You can support the podcast on Patreon
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This episode was produced by Alana Strauss,
executive producer and supervising story producer,
was me, Doug Gordon.
Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear.
Transcripts are by Russell Grad.
Our logo is by Danny Finkel.
And on behalf of my co-host, Sarah Goodyear,
this is The War on Cars.
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