The Dead Freeway Society

Scattered all over Portland are artifacts of a city
that could have been. Bikes rush down a concrete ramp on the west side
of the Hawthorne Bridge that 40 years ago originally connected to an
expressway instead of grass. Tiny Piccolo Park off SE Division was the
site of homes demolished to make way for the pylon of an unbuilt
freeway. These vibrant sites are tombstones. We are a city of dead
freeways.

While other American cities have built, built, built, Portland’s
freeway history is boom and bust: massive road projects were planned,
mapped, and sold as progress by one generation, then killed by another.
When current transit planners visit from exotic Houston and DC to
admire Portland’s progress, what they are really admiring are the roads
not built—freeways erased from the maps decades ago.

“UNCLOUDED VISION”

The offices of Portland City Hall did not always boast bike
maps. The city striving to become the nation’s greenest still bears the
signature of America’s most famous car-centric transit planner.

Sixty-six Septembers ago, a Portland city commissioner invited the
powerful (and, these days, infamous) transportation planner Robert
Moses to come to Rose City and write its road construction plan. Moses,
a freeway mogul whose most lasting legacy is the massive byways slicing
apart New York’s boroughs, brought a team of men and holed up for two
months in a downtown hotel. After exploring the city and crunching
numbers, the men whipped up an 86-page blueprint for Portland’s
future.

It was in this plan that Portland was first divided by the inky
lines that would eventually become I-205, I-84, I-5, I-405, and Highway
26. It was Moses’ men who first drew the Fremont Bridge onto a photo of
Portland. In white ink, they imagined the freeway to be a suspension
bridge running across the river and down into the current Overlook
neighborhood. But they also imagined a lot more.

To modernize and meet the demands of a growing economy and expanding
population, back in 1943 Moses argued that Portland must surround
itself with freeways—an inner ring carrying traffic through the
city with another freeway ring encircling its outer limits.

“Every citizen of Portland has a right to be proud of the fact that
this community is prepared, while there is still time, to face the
future with unclouded vision,” wrote Moses.

In 1956, the US Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act,
promising the federal government would cover 90 percent of the costs of
all new freeway construction, kicking off a freeway construction boom
in Portland and around the nation. The last electric light rail company
in Portland went out of business the day after the region’s first
freeway was built in 1958.

RELOCATION IN ACTION

In late August, just over I-405 from Portland State
University, Shawn Granton stood on an orphaned section of the South
Park Blocks. The measly chunk of lawn and the Southwest neighborhood
around it was cut off from downtown when the freeway plowed through the
area in the mid-’60s. The freeway was part of an urban renewal plan,
Granton explained to a dozen gathered cyclists. It removed an entire
block of high-density apartment complexes—the kind the city now
wants to build downtown under its modern urban renewal policy that
awards developers tax breaks as an incentive.

“Freeways become big walls in cities and divide neighborhoods,” said
Granton, who has led his dead freeways bike tour of the city for three
years. In shorts and sunglasses, he shouted over the thunder of the
freeway. The grassy nub on the south side of the freeway was left
intact as a compromise after neighbors complained about the removal of
a block of parkland.

In 1964, the Oregon State Highway Division put out a helpful
pamphlet on how to remove people whose homes would be demolished by the
construction of I-405. “Relocation in Action” follows one Miss Crosby,
age 63, who lives on a $100 monthly welfare check and whose diverse,
mostly lower-income apartment building is about to be leveled to make
way for the road. Like everyone else in the building, she is nervous
about finding a new home. All turns out well in the end, of course: a
helpful highway employee helps Miss Crosby secure an apartment in the
Northwest Towers, a 13-story “modern, fireproof” building near
downtown.

BOOM!

Jumping on the federal government’s desire to pick up 90
percent of the tab, the city and state tore out a path for I-84 through
the Eastside and for I-5 through North Portland. The Fremont Bridge
went up—white, just like Moses imagined. This was a glorious age
of freeways. Construction rolled forward with few roadblocks.

“The I-5 through North Portland had a huge impact, but the people
had no voice,” says Val Ballestrem, education manager of the
Architectural Heritage Center, who wrote his master’s thesis on
Portland’s anti-freeway movement. “There were some people living in the
path of I-5 who got together, met with city officials, and were told,
‘There’s nothing you can do.’ And they just gave up.”

“There was no requirement at that time to do an environmental impact
study for big projects like this,” explains Metro Planning Director
Andy Cotugno. “City and business thought it was a great idea and the
neighborhoods that got impacted had no rights at that time.” A photo of
the construction shows a street lined solely with empty
porches—the homes behind them had already been razed.

By the time Portland wrote up a (failed) bid to host the 1968
Olympics, planners had built enormously on Moses’ vision for a
freewayed Portland. The map printed inside the glossy yearbook-sized
Olympic sales pitch includes not just the freeways we know today, but
also the Mount Hood Freeway running up SE Division, Laurelhurst Freeway
along 39th Avenue, the Sellwood Freeway, Prescott Freeway, and a
mile-long freeway tunnel running under the West Hills.

BUST!

But 10 years later, everything had changed. The Mount Hood
Freeway, Laurelhurst Freeway, and others were erased from the planned
map of Portland’s future. I-205 had been whittled down from a planned
eight lanes to six—its extra space being designated for a public
transit right-of-way that just last week finally became the
much-celebrated MAX Green Line. Portland had essentially reversed
direction in one short decade, while nearly every other major American
city was still gung ho about the roads ahead.

The first freeway to dissolve was Harbor Drive. Built in 1942, the
wide slab of asphalt ran over what is today Tom McCall Waterfront Park,
now where tourists and idyllic children roam with ice cream, Barack
Obama spoke, and once a year the Oregon Symphony shoots live cannons in
a performance of the 1812 Overture. In the ’50s and ’60s, the freeway,
streaming with big-finned cars, was featured on postcards promoting a
modern Portland. By 1975, it was gone.

“There was a shift in local government in the late-’60s. It went
from a good-old-boy network to a much younger generation of
politicians,” explains Ballestrem. Urban planning historian Gregory L.
Thompson wrote that when one young politician arrived in Portland in
1973, the politico noted that everyone had a copy of anti-freeway
handbook Rites of Way tucked into their hip pocket.

When the state began buying up land next to Harbor Drive to widen
the waterfront freeway in 1968, a citizen alliance against the
expansion found open ears at city hall and the governor’s office.
Old-school traffic engineers said closing the freeway would be a
disaster, but Governor Tom McCall, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, and County
Commissioner Don Clark heard the citizens’ opinion that most car
traffic could be rerouted to the city’s newly built freeways, like the
I-5. Throughout the summer of ’69, Portlanders organized
“consciousness-raising picnics” to rally people against Harbor Drive.
Three years later, a governor’s task force declared that the
low-traffic, 30-year-old road should be ripped out and replaced with a
park.

SAVING SOUTHEAST

Riding high from the Harbor Drive victory, environmentally
minded politicians and Portlanders took on the next freeway foe. Money
was in the bag from the federal government to build a freeway like
North Portland’s I-5, which would cut through Southeast to aid suburban
commuters. This Mount Hood Freeway would have been four city blocks
wide for the entire length of SE Division. The highway commission had
already started buying up the right of way and tearing down old homes
along Division when opposition started picking up steam.

Unlike I-5, though, the neighborhood had legal channels for their
protest. Not only were the freeway planners required to write up an
environmental impact statement for the project, but also Portland was
in the midst of a major downtown revitalization effort.

“You connect the dots. You had a freeway that would create more
sprawl at a time [when] we’re trying to do things to recapture
downtown,” says Metro’s Cotugno. “In the process it would divide a
community. Why should the inner-city neighborhood just roll over to
produce a suburb?”

Neighbors worried about air pollution and the neighborhood filed a
suit against the freeway, using the environmental impact statement to
argue that the freeway’s site was poorly chosen. Meanwhile, Oregon
bigwigs pulled strings in Washington, DC. The alternative
transit-minded politicians scored a big win in August of 1973: Congress
changed national law to allow regions to kill planned highways and put
almost all the federal money set aside for those projects into
non-freeway transit projects instead.

Soon after, a judge decided in favor of the anti-freeway neighbors.
If the state wanted to build the Mount Hood Freeway, the judge said,
they would have to restart the nearly decade-long planning process. In
fall 1974, Governor McCall officially informed the federal government
that his state would be “deleting” the Mount Hood Freeway. Instead, $23
million of the $165 million freeway pricetag would go into building the
region’s public transit system.

THE PRICE OF “PROGRESS”

The Mount Hood Freeway’s $165 million budget looks like
pennies compared to the costs of our current freeway projects. Oregon
and Washington are currently embarking on the largest single
transportation project in the region’s history. If the states’
transportation departments get their way, the current six-lane I-5
bridge to Vancouver will become a 12-lane, $4.2 billion bridge called
the Columbia River Crossing (CRC). Unlike the freeway projects of old,
light rail and a better bike path are included in the CRC design. But
there are many parallels. Modern environmental groups like Coalition
for a Livable Future say the 12-lane bridge will increase traffic and
promote sprawl. Some of the old-time activists who organized the
anti-Harbor Drive picnics are these days attending rallies against the
CRC.

“It’s another one of these roads that’s being espoused as ‘We have
to have it in order to make everybody’s lives easier,'” says
Ballestrem. “But it’s going to do the same thing that all these other
big roads did. Building a bigger road is just going to encourage
driving the automobile.”

Out of the national network of 43,000 miles of interstate freeway
built with federal dollars in the 20th century, Metro’s Andy Cotugno
says only about 25 freeway projects did not get built across the entire
country.

Then and now, Portland’s pioneering spirit has always taken the road
less traveled.

Historic postcards provided courtesy of local know-it-all Dan
Haneckow (cafeunknown.com). Much
of the historic information in this piece is from Gregory L. Thompson’s
article “Taming the Neighborhood Revolution: Planners, Power Brokers,
and the Birth of Neotraditionalism in Portland, Oregon” (Journal of
Planning History).

Download your very own copy of Robert Moses’ 1943 plan for Portland, here.