Entire communities were displaced and once-thriving districts wiped out: so much so that this became known as the "Kansas City blitz."
Ironically, this breakneck pursuit of efficiency sacrificed what would today be some of the city's most profitable real estate. Those downtown buildings would be worth around $655 million today.
This happened all across America. This is Cincinnati, where 25,000 people were displaced to build an interstate and surrounding parking lots.
And this was the site of the new I-35W which gutted Minneapolis. It was decided in the 1950s that new highways must "go right through cities and not around them."
521,000 people lived in Minneapolis in 1950. The interstate hastened a major shift out to the suburbs, cratering the population - and it never caught back up again (425,000 today).
The dream of European-style cities in America was all but eradicated. Suburban sprawl meant cities lost significant chunks of their tax bases, and inner cities fell into spirals of decline. One more: Hastings Street in Detroit, before and after:
There are some modern-day efforts to reprioritize how inner cities are built in America. Boston pushed its highway underground in 2003, albeit at very significant cost.
But some places are retaliating in cheaper ways: Lancaster, CA transformed its main street into a tree-lined boulevard. It took 8 months and cost $11.5m - generating around $273m in economic output since 2010.
Perhaps that old vision of the American city is still possible. If we design streets around people, and demand more beauty of the public realm, we might be surprised at the result - economic and otherwise...
@srijandeep @Culture_Crit America needs to build around people again. And not cars 😔 great thread from an account I normally stay clear of