In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law, making possible a “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.” Since then, the interstates—with their ubiquitous red-white-and-blue shield-shaped signs—have dominated public consciousness and everyday experience of limited-access, high-speed motorways in the United States. Nowhere is their impact more apparent than in U.S. cities still dealing with the consequences of a fraught trifecta of interstates, urban renewal, and racial segregation. New York’s Cross Bronx Expressway (I-95) and New Orleans’s Claiborne Expressway (I-10) are two notorious midcentury interstates whose social and environmental devastations were obvious from the moment the roads opened. Boston’s John F. Fitzgerald Expressway (I-93), constructed from 1951 to 1959 and better known as the Central Artery, is another high-profile example. Kevin Lynch analyzed the Central Artery in The Image of the City (1960), Helen Leavitt attacked it in Superhighway—Superhoax (1970), and Tom Lewis offered a measured...

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