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Transportation

Federal Grants Aim to Reconnect Communities Divided by Highways

The US Department of Transportation is giving $185 million to 45 projects that redesign or remove 1960s-era freeways — and repair the neighborhoods they displaced. 

The Kensington Expressway in Buffalo, New York, built in the early 1960s, became a barrier that isolated the city’s East Side. 

The Kensington Expressway in Buffalo, New York, built in the early 1960s, became a barrier that isolated the city’s East Side. 

Photo by Joed Viera / AFP via Getty Images

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In 1969, hundreds of Black residents of Baltimore’s West Side received a notice from the city: Their houses were going to be demolished to make room for a new highway. More than 1,000 homes and businesses were in the path of the thoroughfare, which was designed to link up three interstates; nearly 3,000 people were displaced.

But the expressway was never completed as residents of more affluent areas successfully halted construction, and a decade later Baltimore was left with a multilane trench carving a mile-and-a-half gash across several neighborhoods. Known officially as the US 40/Franklin-Mulberry Expressway and unofficially as the Highway to Nowhere, this stub of sunken freeway has been a corrosive presence in the West Side ever since, and a conundrum for city leaders and planners.