Looking out onto the six-lane stretch of highway that separates one West Baltimore neighborhood from another, Glenn Smith remembers what used to be.
“50 years ago, you would see a bustling neighborhood. And where we’re standing at, you had a real community,” he said. “It was like a Norman Rockwell painting. Now there’s a void.”
Smith was a teenager when the notice came to the door of The Fort, his beloved family rowhome on Lauretta Avenue: his family and about 1,500 of their neighbors would have to vacate their predominantly Black community so that workers could build an extension of Interstate 70.
But after the Smiths and their neighbors moved out in 1969, and 971 homes and 62 businesses were destroyed to make way for the highway, the partially-constructed project was cancelled. Workers left something behind: a sunken, 1.39 mile highway with a series of overpasses that stand in place of once-vibrant blocks. To Smith, it’s “a monument to what happened to our community.”
Now Smith and other former residents have a shot at closure: President Biden’s infrastructure bill, which would be the largest federal investment into infrastructure projects in more than a decade, may provide funding to Baltimore to redevelop the Highway to Nowhere.
Read more (and listen) at WYPR.
