To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
The Forgotten History of L.A.'s Failed Freeway Revolt
The story of Boyle Heights reminds us that urban highway teardowns don't always end in victory.
Urbanists love to celebrate the victorious campaigns
that have been waged against city highways over the years. From the
successful crusades against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York
and Inner Belt in Boston and Cambridge decades ago, to those against the
Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and Park East Freeway in Milwaukee more recently—the glory gets toldandretold, often to good purpose. As other cities consider similar efforts, the tales can both inspire and instruct.
But the history of urban highway revolt is far more checkered than this highlight reel suggests. As UCLA historian Eric Avila reminds us, in a recent issue of the Journal of Urban History,
plenty of anti-freeway crusades have failed over the years, leaving
residents to live in the shadows of the roads they never wanted. Such
stories are often "invisible" to us, he writes, because the people
living in these areas too often lack a political or mainstream cultural
voice:
What we don't know, however, is the story of the losers, the urban
men and women who fought the freeway, unsuccessfully, on the
conventional terms of political struggle, who weren't able to pack up
and move on, and who channeled expressive cultural traditions to
register their grievances against the presence of unwanted
infrastructure.
Avila focuses on the diverging fates of Beverly Hills and Boyle
Heights in metro Los Angeles. Armed with all the studies and consulting
reports its wealth could amass, Beverly Hills defeated a highway project
in 1975 that would have run through its center. With no such resources,
the heavily Hispanic area of Boyle Heights watched six freeways slice
through the neighborhood over the years, including two massive
interchanges less than two miles apart.
Despite protests from locals, six major highways cut through Boyle Heights. (Via Google Maps)That's
not to say Boyle Heights residents didn't protest the plans. As early
as 1957, outspoken locals challenged the freeways they saw as set to
"butcher our town." But many residents with means fled to the suburbs
instead of staying to fight. And poorer residents accepted relocation
assistance with a reluctance that highway officials later misinterpreted
as endorsement—even suggesting that these people honorably decided
"that they should not stand in the way of progress."
Avila writes:
There were no dramatic standoffs with bulldozers and sheriffs, no
storming of public hearings with gas masks and megaphones, no
congregations of angry housewives against the work of uber-planners like
Robert Moses, and no national outcry about the destruction of historic
monuments and landscapes. L.A.’s version of the freeway revolt utterly
lacked such drama: no surprise in the fact that a neighborhood in the
throes of racial succession succumbed to the Interstate juggernaut, and
no surprise that Beverly Hills did not.
Over the years, local artists have portrayed the frustration that
Boyle Heights residents still feel toward the L.A. freeways that
crisscross their neighborhood. These aesthetic protests—or "weapons of
the weak," as Avila calls them—lack the coordinated power of more
successful highway revolts. But if nothing else they document a
persistent social dismay and serve as a cautionary tale against the
"spatial injustice" of so many urban transportation projects.
Avila concludes:
Such awareness cannot undo the damage that has been done, but it can
help to end the sustained program of isolating and ignoring the spaces
of racial poverty in urban America.
What the history of Boyle Heights reminds us, above all, is that just
because a highway ended up in part of a city doesn't mean that part of
the city wants it there. If that's a bit obvious in hindsight, it's also
a bit overlooked by the new push for urban highway removal—to that
movement's own detriment. The effort might have even more support than
it realizes.