Stop the Road Baltimore’s Epic 40-year Battle over Interstate Highways

In praise of Stop the Road:

Stop the Road is a must read for anybody who wants to understand how Baltimore looks today or wants the inspiration gained from understanding how regular citizens with steely spines can save a city.

Johns Hopkins, Executive Director, Baltimore Heritage

Great beach read! Ev Paull’s writing is informative and crisp, with humorous asides, and his historical accounts are exhaustively researched… I enthusiastically recommend “Stop the Road.”

Kirby Fowler, former President, Downtown Partnership of Baltimore

Read Evans Paull’s “Stop the Road,” a superbly detailed account… You’ll be cheered by the hard work, resiliency, and commitment of so many citizens of all races, ethnicities, and incomes.

J. Randall Evans, former Secretary, Maryland Department of Economic & Employment Development

A book that is essential for understanding today’s Baltimore.

Antero Pietila, author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.

Ev Paull masterfully documents the untold story… highlighting individual accounts of “ordinary people doing extraordinary things…”

William F. Zorzi, former journalist, The Baltimore Sun and Writer, The Wire and We Own This City

Evans Paull has found many of these courageous people and made their ‘highway stories’ a compelling human history of the challenges that faced post-war urban America.”

Mark Reutter, Senior Editor, Baltimore Brew and author, Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might.

Paull’s marvelously detailed work provides an instructive example of how different groups, race, ethnicity, and education came together for a common goal…

Philip J. Merrill, Co-founder & EOA, Nanny Jack and Company, LLC and author, Old West Baltimore (Images of America)

Stop the Road is an engrossing saga of Baltimore… History, so significant for our city, enlivened by in person storytelling...

M.J. (“Jay”) Brodie, former Baltimore Housing Commissioner and President of Baltimore Development Corporation.

I highly recommend it… Thoroughly researched and well chronicled… Evans Paull does an amazing job of filling in the behind-the-scenes machinations….

Jody Landers, former Baltimore City Councilperson, and Executive Vice President of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors

“Stop the Road” is a compelling web of personal stories. Paull’s wonderful writing paints a detailed picture of the decades long struggle…

Bob Perciasepe, former Maryland Secretary of Environment and U.S. EPA Deputy Administrator

“Stop the Road” is a great read about Baltimore’s efforts to keep highways from plowing through neighborhoods…I am going to put on my shelf next to Robert Caro’s “Powerbroker.”

Janet-Marie Smith, former Vice President of Planning and Development, Baltimore Orioles

The award-winning book*

Stop the Road, stories from the trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars

by Evans Paull

“If you think about the things that have really changed the face of Baltimore as we know it today, to me there is nothing more important than the road wars.”

Bill Struever, Baltimore developer and urban strategist

Pictures of Fell’s Point and Federal Hill courtesy the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill and Fell’s Point; Highway to Nowhere courtesy Baltimore City Department of Transportation

Introduction to Stop the Road

During a visit to her former neighborhood in 1988, Mercedes Stevens succinctly summed up the aftermath of the Baltimore’s 40-year battle over Interstate Highways. She said, “If the Expressway had been built, you’d say ‘well, who wants to live there anyway?’” Stevens was talking about her family’s former home on South Decker Street in Canton, but she could have been talking about Montgomery Street in South Baltimore, William Street in Federal Hill, Ellamont Street in Rosemont, Aliceanna Street in Harbor East, or Lancaster Street in Fells Point.

That Baltimore is not saddled with expressways barging their way through these historic waterfront communities is a testament to those operating outside of the power structure, a rare victory of the outsiders…