5 Questions for Emily Lieb, author of “Road to Nowhere”
In the mid-1950s Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, writer and historian Emily Lieb tells the history of the neighborhood and the notional East–West Expressway. The book reveals the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some nine hundred homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals. Below, Lieb explains how she came to write the book and the national patterns at work in this local story.
How did you become interested in the story of Rosemont?
One day years ago, I was poking around the Baltimore City Archives and I came across a box of old photographs from the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. This was around the time The Wire was on TV, and the photos showed the Baltimore most people would have expected, at that time, to see: rows of houses with broken windows, disintegrating porches, crumbling roofs, just one “vacant” after another. But the photos were taken in 1970 or so, and I could tell that the houses in them were good houses, sunny and sturdy and well-built. And so I wondered: What happened to those houses to make them look that way? Where did the people who lived there go, and why? This book is the answer to that question.
Education policy played a major role in Rosemont’s evolution when several schools there were “converted” to turn officially “white” schools into schools for Black students. Why did the city’s school board make this change, and what was its impact?
It took me awhile to see what an important role Baltimore’s public schools played in Rosemont’s story—but once I did, it changed the way I thought about the whole book. Initially, I thought I was telling a story about a highway that started in the 1950s and ended two decades later. Instead, I was telling a much longer story about a whole city, one that started right after the Civil War and continues through today.
Baltimore was a Jim Crow city, which means that until 1954, its schools were legally segregated. Decisions school officials made about whether a school was going to serve white students or Black ones determined where Baltimoreans could live, since families were unlikely to settle where their children could not go to school. Many people assume segregated neighborhoods made segregated schools; but in Baltimore, it was the other way around.
Through World War II, segregated schools kept most of West Baltimore’s schools for Black students—and, by extension, most of its Black population— concentrated in the older parts of the city. By the early 1950s, though, those old schools and neighborhoods were getting run-down and overcrowded. Rather than desegregating so that families could live and go to school where they liked, officials started to convert white-branded schools in the newer parts of West Baltimore into schools for Black students. And as soon as the city made it possible for their children to go to school in those newer neighborhoods, middle-class Black homeowners started to move in. That’s what created Rosemont.
People may be familiar with the process known as “blockbusting,” but they may not know why it mattered so much. How did blockbusting happen in Rosemont, and what were its consequences?
I often say this book is about three swindles, or three moments when powerful people in Baltimore robbed the Black people who lived in Rosemont. Blockbusting is the first of those.
Segregated schools were good business because they created a captive market. Prospective Black homebuyers had a limited supply of housing to choose from, which inflated its price. And they also could not pay for their housing using the same kinds of affordable, government-insured mortgage loans that banks started offering their white counterparts during the New Deal. Instead, they typically had to get both their houses and their loans from the speculative real-estate companies known as “blockbusters.” That meant they paid more for their homes and they paid more for the money they used to buy them.
Blockbusting leached the wealth of the families who moved to Rosemont during the 1950s and early 1960s, but by itself it didn’t keep the neighborhood from being the kind of place people scrimped and saved for and dreamed about living in. Still, over time, all the little things blockbusting took from Rosemonters started to add up. So, by the time city and state officials were looking for a neighborhood to bulldoze for an expressway, they could point to these things and say that Rosemont was getting to be a “slum” that the city might be better off without.
In the end, that expressway, the “Road to Nowhere” of the book’s title, was never built—but it was in the process of maybe being built for more than a decade. What took so long, and why did an unbuilt highway have such an enormous impact on the neighborhood?
In the early 1940s, New York’s “Master Builder” Robert Moses designed the first of many expressways that ran across Baltimore’s midsection. In the three decades that followed, roadbuilders mapped and re-mapped more than a dozen different expressway systems for Baltimore. Some were dramatically different from their predecessors and some were basically more of the same, but the big takeaway is that before Rosemont became a Black community, every one of the maps roadbuilders drew steered the expressway system far away from it. After Rosemont became a Black community, every one of those maps carved a six- or eight-lane highway right through it.
In the late 1950s, when they tried and failed to build part of a different highway through a gentrifying white community in Mount Vernon, roadbuilders had learned that a small neighborhood could easily become a big problem. After that, the lines planners drew on their expressway maps were meant to be the routes of least resistance, running through communities that seemed like they’d be easier to bully. Once Rosemont became a Black neighborhood they thought they’d found one.
The thing is, they were wrong. For the most part, Rosemont was a middle-class homeowners’ neighborhood whose residents quickly banded together to fight for their community. They mobilized in groups like the Rosemont Neighborhood Improvement Association and the Relocation Action Movement to try and stop the road’s construction—and eventually, alongside anti-road and civil-rights organizations from around the city, they did.
But in the meantime, the roadbuilders condemned more than 1,000 buildings in Rosemont, and hundreds of families lost their houses—and almost all the money they’d invested in them over the years—to the state. This was the second swindle.
Residents in Rosemont fought the construction of the expressway and, on paper, they’re successful. But what happened in its wake?
What most people who know something about Baltimore’s “Road to Nowhere” know is that, in the end, it was never built; activists stopped it. You might think that meant the highway plans were an unfortunate blip, and that the neighborhood was able to come back to what it was in the 1950s and early 60s when Black families started to make their homes there. Unfortunately, that was emphatically not the case. On the contrary (and ironically): in the name of making up for the previous two swindles and building a fairer and more inclusive housing market in Baltimore, Rosemont got plundered once again.
You’ll have to read the book to find out about that third swindle—and learn what happened to Rosemont instead.
Emily Lieb is a writer and historian in Seattle, Washington. Her work focuses on the building, rebuilding, and unbuilding of American cities, schools, and neighborhoods in the 20th century. Road to Nowhere is her first book.
Road to Nowhere is available now. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off at checkout when you order from our website.