How a South Dallas Neighborhood Wrecked by a Freeway Can Become Whole Again

The Road to Disinvestment: How Highways Divided the Metropolis and Destroyed Neighborhoods

.

A couple of years agone, some of my architecture students at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) participated in the Tenth Street Sweep, a survey of the 10th Street National Register Historic District organized by Activating Vacancy, a buildingcommunityWORKSHOP project. Their job was to catalog vacant houses, missing curbs, cleaved sidewalks, illegal dumping, boarded-up windows—every symptom of fail and decay they could find. Equally we talked together in class, their concern and defoliation was palpable: How did the neighborhood get this way?

10th Street is one of Dallas' oldest neighborhoods, and information technology is deeply important to the history of African-American civilization and life in the city. It is one of the urban center's Freedman's towns, established later on the Civil War when freed slaves founded their own neighborhoods. The nucleus of the Tenth Street neighborhood formed in the 1880s and 1890s south of the floodplains of the Trinity River and on the eastern side of Oak Cliff—a place where the black customs could actually ain property during Reconstruction and its aftermath. Across generations, the neighborhood grew and nurtured business leaders, artists, and families.

But back to that original question. What happened to the neighborhood?

That'south a complicated question and one key chapter in the story is the structure of R.L. Thornton Expressway directly through the middle of the neighborhood in the early 1950s. The highway construction did several things. First, information technology demolished thriving businesses, undercutting its economic heart. 2d, it cut Oak Cliff in half, destroying homes and separating neighbors from each other, disrupting the social networks that make neighborhoods thrive. Third, those who lost businesses and homes scattered to new neighborhoods, farther destabilizing the community.

The construction of the R.Fifty. Thornton Superhighway (I-35E) cut straight through the eye of the Tenth Street neighborhood, demolishing homes and businesses. This view facing south shows that by 1959 construction had proceeded as far as the intersection with Marsalis Avenue, severing connections to Oak Cliff to the east and isolating the neighborhood between the Thornton and South freeways (I-35E and I-45). (Photograph by Squire Haskins Photography, courtesy Special Collections, the University of Texas at Arlington.)

In an era in Dallas history with a huge shortage of housing for African-Americans who were unwelcome in white neighborhoods, these forced moves magnified the detrimental effects of segregation and mid-century racism. As the urban center'due south black population grew and homes were lost to state highway construction in the 1940s, a series of bombings targeted black families that moved to traditionally white neighborhoods. In 1950 and 1951, at least 12 new bombings again targeted the homes of blackness families in South Dallas who had moved into formerly white blocks. No i was killed and no one was ever convicted for the crimes. These bombings sowed fright and amplified mistrust, leaving African-Americans with extremely limited choices about where they could safely live in the urban center. All of these deportment together created a massive disinvestment in Tenth Street that went, and remains, un-redressed.

Dallas Morning News front end folio, Oct ii, 1940

Tenth Street is just 1 of many Dallas neighborhoods eviscerated by highway and infrastructure structure in the 1950s and 1960s. The Freedman's boondocks of North Dallas—of which just St. Paul United Methodist Church, Moorland YMCA/Dallas Blackness Trip the light fantastic, and remnants of Booker T. Washington High School remain today—was bulldozed during the construction of Central Expressway in the 1940s, Woodall Rodgers Freeway start in the 1960s, and I-345 in the 1970s. The construction of the southern portions of Central Superhighway and C.F. Hawn Freeway bisected Lincoln Estate and Bonton, leaving the neighborhoods, which had been contiguous, continued but by Bexar Street. Hundreds of families lost homes and businesses and churches closed. Listings in the 1956 edition of the Negro Traveler'due south Green Book for Dallas businesses hospitable to traveling African-Americans prove clusters of backdrop that were all in the shadows of this urban surgery: the Howard, Lewis, and Powell Hotels; the Palm Café; and the Shalimar Restaurant all disappeared.

To Coffin a Cemetery

The construction of Central Superhighway likewise cached the historic Freedman'southward Cemetery beneath its concrete in the 1940s. It was rediscovered 50 years later amidst anguished public controversy over a plan to aggrandize the expressway in the 1990s. After an archeological survey documented more than i,000 unmarked graves, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDoT) altered its plans for the expansion. The Freedman'southward Cemetery Memorial, dedicated on Juneteenth in 1999, became a powerful reminder of that forgotten by. Continuing at its gates, surrounded by the rush of throughway noise, is a potent reminder of the destruction that highways brought to African-American history and neighborhoods.

The planning and construction of Woodall Rodgers Freeway through parts of Petty United mexican states and North Dallas began in the 1950s and continued until it opened for traffic in 1983. This photograph shows cleared land for the loop, with demolitions continuing to erase the heart of what had been African-American Dallas' largest customs. (Photograph by Squire Haskins Photography, courtesy Special Collections, the Academy of Texas at Arlington.)

To the w of downtown in the early 1940s, the expansion of Turney Avenue into the Northwest Highway Connectedness began a decades-long process of demolition in Little Mexico. Local and state funding turned what had been a neighborhood commercial strip into a four-lane highway with a median connecting Dallas to Denton. Although terms like "borough adornment" flew around the projection, Little Mexico's dilapidated housing was the real target.

Rather than investing in the paved streets and water and sewer infrastructure that Piffling United mexican states needed, redevelopment like the highway connexion, shortly renamed Harry Hines Boulevard, focused on wiping the slate clean and starting over. By the middle of the 1960s, the Dallas North Tollway bulldozed through Piffling Mexico's center, repeating the patterns that destroyed businesses and dislocated families and extended social networks.

Intentional Demolition

Ane of the issues that is difficult for contemporary observers to grapple with is how intentional these demolitions in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods were. It is disquisitional to sympathise that they were indeed intentionally targeted for demolition, both through racist national policies established by agencies like the National Highway Administration and discriminatory state and local policies that targeted the poorest and well-nigh disenfranchised populations. Highway development proceeded in parallel with housing policies created past the Federal Housing Administration to undermine the economic viability of minority neighborhoods.

Discussions of urban blight and "undesirable" populations may have partially sanitized the language of the planning process, but in the eras of Jim Crow and the postwar civil rights movements, these huge infrastructure projects played a central role in creating and enforcing an urban geography that privileged the priorities of borough elites at the expense of minority populations. This was the case not just in Dallas, but in cities across the country that used federally and state funded highway construction to enact local policies of discriminatory urban renewal.

These stories should matter to usa today because they helped create the foundation of the city that nosotros live in together. The city is not a level playing field. Constellations of federal, state, and local policy targeted minority and depression-income neighborhoods for disinvestment for decades and the consequences of those choices and policies remain with usa today. While the modern highway and interstate system was undeniably a vehicle for economical expansion, it spread the advantages of that expansion unevenly. The historian Raymond Mohl has called attending to the "devastating human and social consequences of urban throughway structure" because of its lopsided bear upon on the communities of color information technology displaced and the white middle-class suburban populations information technology served.

Acknowledging and understanding that our shared urban history contains both utopian optimism and structural inequality is a necessary first step in considering how to movement forward.

The issues raised hither are far too complex to sum up in 1,000 words and I would hope, to a higher place all, that anybody in Dallas takes the time to grapple with them in a serious way. As a historian, I am all likewise aware of the desire for quick conclusions, easy reads, and audio bites. Our lives are decorated, complicated, and total, and history takes fourth dimension and effort to unravel and unfold. If this essay encourages us to exercise anything, I hope information technology is to reflect on, to read nigh, and to visit places and neighborhoods that are outside of our daily routines and engage more fully in the shared story of the city we all telephone call home.

Kathryn Holliday, Ph.D. is director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture in the College of Compages, Planning, and Public Affairs (CAPPA) at the University of Texas at Arlington.

For More on Dallas Neighborhoods and Federal Highway Policy

Marsha Prior and Robert V. Kemper, "From Freedman'due south Boondocks to Uptown: Community Transformation and Gentrification in Dallas, Texas" Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and Globe Economical Evolution 34, No. 2/three, (Summer-Fall, 2005), 177-216.

Hardy Heck Moore, "Tenth Street Historic Commune," National Register nomination form, 1994.
https://atlas.thc.state.tx.u.s.a./NatReg/NR/nr_listed/pdfs/94000604/94000604.pdf

Sol Villasana, Dallas'south Piddling Mexico. Arcadia Publishing, 2011.

W. Marvin Dulaney, "Whatever Happened to the Ceremonious Rights Movement in Dallas?" in John Dittmer, ed., Essays on the American Civil Rights Movement. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993.

Robert B. Fairbanks, The State of war on Slums in the Southwest: Public Housing and Slum Clearance in Texas, Arizona, and New United mexican states, 1935-1965. Philadelphia: Temple University Printing, 2014.

Mark Rose and Raymond Mohl, Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy Since 1939. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012.

William H. Wilson, Hamilton Park: A Planned Blackness Community in Dallas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

joneschither.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.aiadallas.org/v/blog-detail/The-Road-to-Disinvestment-How-Highways-Divided-the-City-and-Destroyed-Neighborhoods/pt/

Share this post