Some may wonder - the schematic plan shown on this page (with the expressway following Pratt Street and crossing the Inner Harbor piers) - who was responsible for that monstrosity? This was Planning Director Phil Darling's 1960 plan. Here is a short excerpt from the book: "To the critics of...
News & Press Releases
Julian “Jack” Lapides and the Robert Long House
As the author of this forth-coming book on Baltimore’s Road Wars, I would like to offer a tribute to Julian "Jack" Lapides, who passed away last week. Jacques Kelly’s fine Baltimore Sun obituary was a great remembrance of one of the most highly principled elected officials of our time. Kelly...
Baltimore on center stage, illustrating transportation inequities
There were no press conferences... no photo ops... nothing on the six o'clock news, but, make no mistake, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx was in Baltimore to make a point. Foxx's target audience for this 2016 workshop was not the electorate or even the local stakeholders; rather, the audience was Foxx's...
Tom Ward, bulldog for the highway opposition in the 1960s
"The Concrete Society"—this is a vintage 1965 WMAR-TV documentary about Baltimore's highway controversies. Tom Ward, the only City Councilman opposed to the expressway at the time, is extensively featured.You could make a good argument that Ward's Road Wars resume is unequaled, even deeper and more consequential than that of Senator...
Art Cohen and “The Road Building Blues”
Art Cohen then (1969) and now (2019). At right, Art Cohen, the Movement Against Destruction's (MAD) second president, holding up a 45 of his self-penned song, the Baltimore Road-building Blues. He performed the song at several hearings, as well as at the Baltimore Board of Estimates. Where other anti-highway activists...
The demise of Baltimore’s streetcar system
Baltimore's streetcar system was dismantled by National City Lines (NCL) in the period of 1948-1965. NCL, a holding company formed by General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum, acquired or controlled 46 transit systems for, as one author put it, “the express purpose of...