Concrete Decisions: When Race Determined Routes

What do Rondo, Hayti, Storyville, and Humboldt Park have in common? They were thriving minority communities – until the U.S. built highways through them. In this episode, we look at how a 1950s infrastructure project tore through Black and immigrant neighborhoods, and what’s being done to make things right. Then we chat with Comedian Natasha Samreny.

Samreny is a third culture comedian who identifies with anyone who treats garlic as a food group. Natasha’s performed at The Laugh Factory, Mortified Chicago, and these festivals: Boston Comedy Arts, Latina Comedy, Detroit Women of Comedy, and Edinburgh’s Fringe. She hosts a bilingual LatinX storytelling show with Rhode Island Latino Arts.

There’s a moment in Pixar’s Cars that hits harder than most people expect. Sally, the Porsche, tells Lightning McQueen how her town, Radiator Springs, was bypassed by the interstate. Business dried up. People moved away. The town was forgotten. It’s framed as a kind of nostalgic tragedy, wrapped in a Disneyfied bow.

But what happened to Radiator Springs wasn’t just make-believe. It happened in hundreds of American cities – only instead of quirky cartoon towns, the places that got erased were vibrant Black and immigrant neighborhoods. And instead of a detour, it was a demolition.

This is a story about the United States Interstate Highway System. But not the side we hear about in road trip songs or driver’s ed classes. It’s about the communities – mostly poor, mostly minority – that were flattened to make way for it.

Let’s start in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the mid-20th century, the Rondo neighborhood was the heart of the city’s Black population. Roughly 80 percent of Black residents lived there. It was home to doctors, churches, jazz clubs, barbershops, schools – a place where Black families could actually own homes and build generational wealth. The community thrived in spite of redlining and discrimination.

Then came Interstate 94.

After the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed by President Eisenhower, planners needed to figure out where to route the new roads. The interstate system would span 41,000 miles and connect every major city – it had to go somewhere. In city after city, the same pattern emerged: when choosing where to lay down ten lanes of concrete, they picked the path of least resistance. That usually meant minority communities that had the fewest resources to fight back.

Rondo was gutted. Over 600 Black families were displaced. Homes were seized. More than 300 businesses vanished. What had been a thriving cultural center was split in half by a wall of traffic. Residents lost more than houses – they lost proximity to each other. Walking to church or to school now meant detouring around a six-lane chasm. The neighborhood fabric – one built over decades – was shredded.

Reverend George Davis, a former resident, later said, “It wasn’t a road. It was a blade. It cut the heart out of our community.”

The same thing happened again and again.

In Durham, North Carolina, the Hayti neighborhood had been a self-sufficient, post-Civil War Black community. At one point, it was home to the largest Black-owned insurance company in the country. Interstate 147 wiped out more than 4,000 residents and shattered Hayti’s economy.

In Miami, Overtown had been known as the “Harlem of the South” – full of theaters, restaurants, hotels, and jazz clubs. Black performers like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway stayed in Overtown because they weren’t allowed in the white hotels where they performed. Then I-95 came through. Entire blocks disappeared. More than 10,000 people were forced out.

In Los Angeles, Boyle Heights was one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the country. Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, and Black families lived there together. It wasn’t hit by one freeway – it was carved up by five. Entire streets are now defined by on-ramps and overpasses.

This wasn’t incidental. It was deliberate. The term “urban renewal” became a euphemism for destruction. Planners used words like “blighted” or “undesirable” to justify displacing people who had been historically denied public investment in the first place.

James Baldwin put it plainly in a 1963 interview. He said: “Urban renewal…means Negro removal.”

He wasn’t being hyperbolic. In city after city, freeway construction served as a tool for reshaping who got to live where. It was economic, yes – but it was also racial.

One of the most infamous figures in this movement was Robert Moses, the New York City planner who built roads, parks, and bridges that restructured the entire metro area. He refused to build bridges high enough for buses to access Long Island beaches, effectively locking out the poor and non-white populations who relied on public transit. When his expressways plowed through the Bronx, they decimated entire communities.

Jane Jacobs, one of his fiercest critics, wrote: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

But they weren’t being created by everybody. They were being destroyed by a few. 

After the roads came through, what was left behind wasn’t a new future – it was a kind of urban graveyard. The people who stayed behind lived with the sound of traffic, the stench of exhaust, and the slow rot of divestment. Homes near freeways became the cheapest on the market. Rates of asthma, lead poisoning, and heart disease climbed. Property values cratered. The local businesses never came back.

One example of this legacy is Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, New York. Once a beautiful tree-lined boulevard designed by Frederick Law Olmsted – the father of American landscape architecture – Humboldt was meant to connect two city parks with a wide, green promenade. It was especially important for working-class Black families who had few other public spaces to enjoy. Then came the Kensington Expressway. In the 1960s, the entire parkway was dug up. A trench was blasted through the city. And just like that, the community lost its lungs.

But here’s where something different is happening. In 2022, Buffalo received federal funding to begin planning for a land bridge to cap part of the highway. The goal is to restore green space, reconnect the neighborhood, and heal the environmental and cultural wound. It won’t undo the damage – but it’s a step toward recognition, and hopefully, reconciliation.

We can also look back at communities that were lost long before the highway era, like St. Malo, Louisiana. It was a village of Filipino shrimpers and settlers – probably the first permanent Asian-American settlement in the continental U.S. They lived in homes on stilts, out in the bayous, forming a self-sufficient society that dated back to the 1700s. After a hurricane destroyed the town in 1915, it was never rebuilt. And when Louisiana’s infrastructure boom came, St. Malo was already gone – erased without a trace. The highways paved over what little remained.

And then there’s Storyville, the historic New Orleans red-light district. Known for its jazz clubs and colorful history, it was also a working-class Black neighborhood filled with local businesses and families. The district was shut down after World War I, but even the remnants were eventually severed when the Claiborne Expressway was built directly over Claiborne Avenue. That avenue had once been the Black cultural artery of the city – lined with oak trees and shops. Those trees were chopped down to make way for concrete pillars.

The same thing happened to Tremé, one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in America, just blocks away. Today, murals and performances happen in the shadow of the highway. People still gather beneath it to try and reclaim something of what was taken.

And here’s the part we don’t always talk about: communities weren’t just destroyed – they were gaslit. Residents were told this was progress. That highways would bring economic development and jobs. But the new stores and office parks didn’t move in. The promises never came true.

Despite all this, the people who lived there didn’t give up.

In Rondo, a group of community leaders is fighting to build a land bridge that reconnects the two halves of the neighborhood. It would include parks, housing, and memorials. One of those leaders, Marvin Anderson, told The New York Times: “We’re not trying to turn back time. We’re trying to make it right. We’re trying to heal.”

And that healing is happening slowly. Federal initiatives like “Reconnecting Communities” are helping cities remove or cap highways that never should have been built the way they were. Syracuse is dismantling a stretch of I-81. Rochester and Detroit are exploring the same. In some places, activists are using art, oral histories, and festivals to revive cultural identity.

In Buffalo, they’re not just restoring green space – they’re naming the harm. In New Orleans, people gather under the overpass with brass bands and dancing, reclaiming the echo of what Storyville once was.

None of this undoes the pain. But it acknowledges it. And it dares to imagine something better.

We can’t reverse the past. But we can decide what kind of cities we want to live in next. The highways may have cut through steel and brick, but they didn’t destroy the soul of these places. That still survives. And the internet says it’s true.

Learn about Natasha Samreny at: https://www.natashasamreny.com/

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