Emily Lieb's "Road to Nowhere"

Emily Lieb is an historian of U.S. cities, schools, and segregation. She has a PhD from Columbia and an AB from Brown, and she taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than 10 years. She is also a writer at Derfner & Sons.

Lieb applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, with the following results:

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore is, as the subtitle says, a book about the power of a mid-20th–century highway map—not necessarily the highway itself—to wreck a city, and in particular a Black homeowners’ neighborhood in West Baltimore called Rosemont. So, it’s lucky that page 99 of the book is itself a map. It’s a page from a 1968 report from a group of city planners and engineers that shows just how much harm a proposed expressway route through Rosemont was set to cause: “bisection of residential area,” “isolation of housing by traffic,” the loss of nearly 1,000 homes and businesses.

(You can find the image, which comes from the Urban Design Concept Team’s Rosemont Area Studies(February 1968), at the University of Baltimore’s Baltimore Studies Archives here; the pages aren’t numbered but it’s page 11 of the PDF.)

It would be easy for any reader who flipped to this page of the book to see the damage the proposed expressway would do to Rosemont if policymakers ever built it. But they wouldn’t understand what led up to it, nor why the neighborhood’s story matters so much.

The story Road to Nowhere tells goes like this: Very deliberately, the people who had the power in Baltimore created a Black neighborhood in the early 1950s, robbed that Black neighborhood, labeled that Black neighborhood “blighted,” and then drew an expressway map to destroy it in the name of “renewing” it. That’s where the Urban Design Concept Team came in. By the late 1960s, people who did not live in Rosemont were starting to see the harm the highway would cause to the neighborhood and to the whole city. In the end, officials never built the road they wanted through Rosemont.

It's important to say that this was a good thing. But just not building the highway was not the answer, because the map itself had already caused so much harm. And then, instead of making amends, powerful people in Baltimore compounded the problem, targeting the neighborhood for exploitation once again.

So, as I write on page 11 of the book:

When officials in the 1970s looked around Rosemont, they saw what they called “deteriorated, neglected properties” and “a lack of interest or pride in the home and community.” In other words, they saw the “blight” they’d always expected to see. What they did not see were the consequences of their own actions. In the official version of events, policymakers had tried their best to “renew” Rosemont, but Rosemont would not be renewed. Thus [they wrote]: “We have spent a lot of money on a lot of blocks that have turned out to be unsalvageable.”

But as I say in the book, that’s a lie. “Turned out to be” is exactly the wrong way to explain what happened here. If Rosemont was unsalvageable, Baltimore had made it so.

Visit Emily Lieb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue