People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making

by Karilyn Crockett

In 1948, inspired by changes to federal law, Massachusetts government officials started hatching a plan to build multiple highways circling and cutting through the heart of Boston, making steady progress through the 1950s. But when officials began to hold public hearings in 1960, as it became clear what this plan would entail―including a disproportionate impact on poor communities of color―the people pushed back. Activists, many with experience in the civil rights and antiwar protests, began to organize.

Linking archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and oral history, Karilyn Crockett in People before Highways offers ground-level analysis of the social, political, and environmental significance of a local anti-highway protest and its lasting national implications. The story of how an unlikely multiracial coalition of urban and suburban residents, planners, and activists emerged to stop an interstate highway is one full of suspenseful twists and surprises, including for the actors themselves. And yet, the victory and its aftermath are federally funded mass transit expansion, a linear central city park, and a highway-less urban corridor that serves as a daily reminder of the power and efficacy of citizen-led city making.

Genres: History, Urban Planning, Nonfiction, Urbanism, Politics, Cities, Urban Studies

224 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2018

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Bostonian who lives a block from SW Corridor Park (and has always enjoyed walking along it) and someone who heard a lot about the anti-highway movement when organizing against the city's 2024 Olympic bid, I was immediately intrigued by this book. Crockett does a great job at showing the power of an organized citizenry and deconstructing the self-professed neutrality of disciplines like urban planning. The book serves as an always timely reminder that urban space is a place of contestation and that activists should never assume that bureaucratic experts inherently have more knowledge than the community their projects will be affecting. She also shows how important it is for activists to forge coalitions across neighborhoods and demographic groups, and the value of making opportunity costs clear to the public (and how to radicalize and organize new constituencies).

That said, my biggest complaint is one that may seem small but is quite big in context: there are very few maps. To fully explain a battle about urban space, you need maps. Lots of them. It makes the story far more real.

Building on this point, I was struck by the lack of discussion about the politics around rerouting the Orange Line. I know people who remember well when it used to run to Dudley Square and how residents were promised that their old station would be replaced by something at least as good when the Line was rerouted (to now go through Roxbury Crossing). Telling that story would help flesh out the themes Crockett discusses. Beyond that, the chapter that was written in first person was weak as it veered from the tone and authorial voice in the other chapters (although it was certainly still enlightening to read).

All that being said, this is a great read for Bostonians looking to learn more about their city, activists seeking to organize around the use of public space (a friend of mine once said, in a simplistic but not untrue way, that all urban politics come to real estate--and the rest is commentary), and scholars interested in social movements, urban politics, and the politics of space and the built environment.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a fascinating read! I've lived right off of the Southwest Corridor for the past 15 years, first by Stonybrook (where we moved to due to rising rents in Mission Hill in college) and for the past 12 years near Jackson Square. I loosely knew the history of the eight-lane highway that was planned to rip through the neighborhood before activists put a stop to it, but this book - part oral history, part ethnography, and part archival research - detailed the antihighway movement from start to finish in a very effective way. I kept going back to the maps of the proposed Southwest Expressway and Inner Belt, imagining what might have been! I took one star off my rating because I did fall asleep while reading this once or twice, and I wish there were more maps and images. Regardless, I loved reading about the history of the movement, the activists and planners, Mildred Hailey and Anna Mae Cole (the namesake of the community center that graciously houses our neighborhood's free COVID-19 test site), and the origins of things like the Wake Up the Earth festival I attend every year, Roxbury Community College, and even the community farm across the street.

I walk and/or bike and/or take the Orange Line along the Corridor Park almost every day, and I am so grateful to be able to do so. Cities (and streets) are for PEOPLE! So glad to now know some of the stories of the people who made it possible. I hope I can afford to stay here another 15+ years!

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very academic and dry. What could have been a wonderfully woven tale of communities and government moving from protests to cooperation loses any feeling and emotion in this book. Would love to see this subject matter approached with more flair and storytelling.

[Leslie (updates on SG) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've lived in the Boston area since the mid-1990's and this book illuminated some unknown history for me. What will stick with me are the following: (1) how information about the highways (e.g., use of street-level maps) were effectively communicated to communities; and (2) grassroots organizing vs. "experts" in planning highways (e.g., whom do they benefit?). The book may not be as actor-driven as other social science books I've been reading, but it isn't dry either. Now, I want to bike along the Southwest Corridor.

[sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

felt very poignant to read this book while on the orange line! i found this book while looking for reads about the history of public transit in boston and was very pleasantly surprised by how this was instead more of a story about community organizing and activism

[Charles Denison IV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book about the anti-highway movement in the Boston area, and how it led to the cancellation of the Inner Belt and extension of I-95 into Boston, and the first ever flex of Federal highway funds to public transit. The author does a great job discussing how people from all of the affected communities banded together to fight that state's plans and ultimately won. This series of events largely changed the conversation around transportation planning to be more locally focused.

My only criticism of the book is that it would have been great to have more photos and illustrations of the area, before during and after the highway was proposed and the Orange Line and Southwest Corridor Park were built.

[Liam Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything about the highways seemed inevitable.  The 1948 Master Highway Plan for Metropolitan Area laid out the arterial routes for expressways entering Boston from every direction, connected by circumferential routes. The future of New Boston depended on increasing the capacity for motor vehicles in order to prevent traffic congestion.  There's just one problem - those highways would cut through neighborhoods where people lived and worked.  By the early 1960s, people in Boston and Cambridge were beginning to ask why their homes should be sacrificed for the highways, or should their property be spared, why they should live next to noisy, polluting cars speeding by.

Karilyn Crockett provides an in-depth account of the neighborhood activists, civil rights leaders, priests and pastors, civic-minded college students, and a new generation of urban designers and engineers who came together to oppose the Southwest Expressway and the Inner Belt. While initially coming together with modest proposals to reroute the highways, more and more people became determined that the highways should not be built at all.  While Boston was not the site of America's first highway revolt, it was perhaps the most successful and one that had nationwide ramifications.  In 1970, Governor Francis W. Sargent ordered a review of highway plans that lead to the cancellation of all the expressway plans within the 128 beltway.

This wouldn't have been possible without the work and activism of hundreds of people, and Crockett does a great job of finding and interviewing many of these people for their stories.  She also discovered that many people kept personal and community archives of their antihighway work which provide valuable records for her research.  The organization of numerous groups and individuals to stop the highways was a monumental task, but not the end of the story.  Crockett documents the transformation of the Southwest Corridor over two decades into newly-aligned public transportation routes, an 8-mile long linear path connecting three neighborhoods, as well as more localized  resources ranging from community gardens to a community college.

I've been knowledgeable of a lot of details of the highway revolt in Boston for some time, and indeed I've lived adjacent to the still-evolving Southwest Corridor for 18 years.  Nevertheless, this book provided a lot of details and connections regarding the history of the movement that fascinate me.  Did you know that the Police Headquarters in Roxbury stands on land once used by the Black Panthers outreach trailer? The book is a vital work for anyone studying Boston history for learning how we got to we are now.  It is also an excellent work on community organizing, citizen-led planning, and the efficacy of popular democracy at its best.

Favorite Passages:

"For civil rights groups and militant Black organizations alike, the anti-highway fight served as an ideological accelerator for a politics that had evolved through voter registration drives, lunch counter sit-ins, and rallies protesting police brutality.  Honed in the North and the South, these tactics and their philosophical underpinnings now coalesced to yield a mature toolkit for battling state power and highways." - p. 40

"More than fights for military withdrawal abroad and racial integration at home, these social movements called for a new democratic order recommitted to the fulfillment of citizen-defined needs.  Urban Planning Aid contributed to this activist agenda by bringing grassroots attention and leadership to the democratic use, development, and control of physical space." - p. 71

"When I learned the survival story surrounding these records, I was struck by yet another type of antihighway activism: the efforts of antihighway actors themselves to save materials documenting their story.  Their attics, basements, personal address books introduced me to actions and actors that would have otherwise been virtually unknowable." - p. 78

"And, significantly, local control, once a controversial political idea brandished by white southern segregationists, emerged as Black nationalist creed and multiracial, region-spanning resident response to absent and abusive government authority."

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to read (like multiple starts and restarts since June of 2018), but despite its adjacency to my professional work, I think I needed to read it now.

While it has the word “highways” in the title, this book is not so much about the roadway designs or the trains that came later, this book is about multiracial collation building, cross-class community building, neighborhood collaboration, finding unexpected allies, and understanding just how long it takes to build a great city when you’re trying to change the underlying status quo assumptions.

Whether you focus on stopping the construction of the Inner Belt through Cambridge (mid-1960’s) or altering the design of the turnpike realignment in Allston (today’s bad MassDOT decision), it’s so very hard to convince the people in power that the better future does not mean more space for cars, that transit isn’t some trivial second-class option, that progress is not about speed for suburbanites.

I was inspired by so many people and actions documented in this book (many of whom I know), but I was most excited to read/learn about the Black United Front and their bold move to build an information house on cleared land to reclaim it for their community (p. 74).

Most recommended for Bostonians who fear a lack of imagination is stifling the creation of a more equitable and climate sensitive future for our city. Also recommended for urban planning nerds and interested space-shaping advocates nationwide.

Full disclosure: I know and admire Karilyn and her civil service and academic work.

[Meghan Schroeder]

a very interesting and detailed history of the antihighway fight in Boston (thank god) and the development of the Southwest Corridor into a mass transit hub and park! i commute down the Corridor every day and am very grateful to the communities of the 60s, 70s, and 80s who advocated for a different, community-centered vision for Boston. growing up with a plethora of highways in california and little mass transit is one of the reasons why i love living in Boston. it's also cool to see the growth of urban planning from very detached from communities to working directly with them to create a space that benefits the people who live there.

[Camilacamposherrera · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was as described, history of highway building in Boston. It’s probably very good for a college or graduate student, but too dry for a casual reader. I suspected this but a friend gave it to me so I thought I’d finish it.

[Nadav David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a brilliant and humbling book to read as a Boston-based organizer. Reminds me how much we have to learn from the past about building multiracial, cross class movements.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating subject; dry and sometimes clumsy writing.

[Allegra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down - really fascinating subject, but fairly dry writing

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was wonderful. For a long time, I’ve been looking forward to reading Dr. Crockett’s work on the Boston anti-highway activists and the people (“People”) behind the park and transit system I use several times a week to commute and recreate. This is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in public policy in the Boston region. I learned a ton about my community, and am grateful for it.

The book vacillates a bit between scholarly literature review and more direct fieldwork. Gets way better toward the end.

[Harneen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history of urban development in Bosotn -- and the power of fighting back.
Very relevant to all urban struggles today.