Free Press Flashback: The life cycle of Detroit's freeways

Freeways cutting through American cities are an endangered species these days, as the movement picks up steam to remove urban highways and replace them with people-friendly features.

Even in Detroit, Interstate 375 downtown appears doomed, likely to be filled in and replaced by a grade-level boulevard.

It is difficult to imagine the Motor City without freeways: Two million residents crowding on streetcars and buses; city officials constantly tweaking streets to alleviate traffic jams. Driving from Dearborn to Grosse Pointe? Before the ditches, motorists had no alternative but to spend an hour or more in crosstown traffic.

You might remember those days — if you’re pushing 90. In 1942, the first freeway, tiny Davison, opened in the hope it would relieve traffic congestion in central Detroit.

The big push for freeways came after World War II. Rejecting streetcars and plans for subways, officials decided that making Detroit hospitable for automobiles would be, not surprisingly, a top priority.

In 1944, a slick city publication told residents: “Of all the various projects now under consideration, perhaps none is of greater importance to Detroiters than the proposed system of expressways, wider and straighter streets, and the elimination of traffic bottlenecks.”

Detroit was a pioneer in freeway construction, even before the federal government began paying much of the cost. The John C. Lodge and the Edsel Ford opened in stages during the 1950s.

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Robert Moses, the controversial planner who designed much of the modern road system around New York City, advised Detroit officials to sink the roadways below street level. The design that evolved was a 300-foot-wide gash in the city topography with a roadway lined by grassy embankments and trees.

The public works project that produced the freeways was like a local version of the moon shot, taking 12 years, complex planning and $2 billion, adjusted for inflation. Residents were intrigued.

‘Never back up’

They marveled at the tangle of towering ramps in the interchange where the Lodge and Ford intersected — as big as 50 football fields! People showed so much interest in construction that authorities in the late 1940s erected 10 rows of bleachers at Milwaukee Avenue to make it easier to observe the building of the Lodge.

Construction milestones were festive celebrations. In 1957, after the dedication of the Lodge-Davison interchange, more than 800 people assembled for a banquet and heard state Highway Commissioner John Mackie announce a 10-year freeway construction blueprint to make metro Detroit “the most accessible city in America.”

In December 1959, the grande dame of Detroit society, Eleanor Clay Ford, snipped the ribbon during the opening ceremony for the Ford Expressway, named after her late husband.

Drivers listened, some with apprehension, as AAA taught the skills they would need on the newfangled roads, like the proper way to merge.

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“NEVER STOP,” AAA advised. “Never, under any circumstances, back up.”

The auto club warned: “Driving on an expressway is a special art. You must learn new skills — or possibly pay with your life.”

The first fatality on the Ford was not a motorist or passenger, but an 83-year-old Detroit pedestrian. He was killed in 1952 when trying to cross the freeway on foot.

Despite the dangers, many people saw freeways as a smart step into the future and a solution to the city’s numerous chokepoints.

“At long last Detroit is modernizing itself,” the Free Press declared.

Freeway orphans

Freeways, though, proved to be both beneficial and destructive. They expanded the city’s circulatory system and provided drivers with the All-American freedom to ride. But the new roads also cut up neighborhoods, especially where African Americans lived, encouraged sprawl and privileged the car over public transit, which further disadvantaged poor people.

Many Detroiters, particularly white Detroiters, also discovered the expansion of the freeways meant you no longer had to live in the city to reach your job in a timely manner. That helped lead to the spread of suburbia, as in other cities across the country. In the 1950s, Detroit’s white population declined by more than 350,000.

The place where freeways had their worse impact was in Black neighborhoods. Under Mayor Albert Cobo, the Chrysler Freeway took out Hastings Street on the eastern flank of downtown and almost everything else that Cobo had failed to tear down in 1950-51, when clearing land for Lafayette Park.

By 1963, Detroit had demolished or was scheduled to demolish 10,000 structures for urban renewal and freeway construction, according to historian Sidney Fine. While fewer than four in 10 Detroiters were Black in 1963, seven in 10 displaced persons were African Americans.

Newspapers called people evicted for road construction “freeway orphans.” Testifying before Congress in 1954, a national Catholic charities official slammed the city for its callous treatment of dislocated residents.

“A few days ago, I saw hundreds of houses being torn down in Detroit for a new expressway,” said Monsignor John Grady. “Thousands of families were being forced out of their homes.”

Responding to Grady, Cobo acknowledged “some inconveniences” but said, “In the long run, more people will benefit. That’s the price of progress.”

Citizens fought city hall over routes. Small cities like Highland Park and Harper Woods held up freeway construction for years. One of the biggest fights took place over the James Couzens extension of the Lodge Freeway through a prosperous and white section of northwest Detroit. Public officials bent over backward to address citizen concerns — mainly about the road’s effect on property values — in contrast to the summary declarations they handed down in Black neighborhoods.

Going for a dip

In 1958, Minoru Yamasaki, the famed architect, produced a double-decked roadway plan for the Couzens stretch and dissed rival designs that would “make James Couzens look like Grand River, and that’s pretty awful,” he said. Officials rejected his brainstorm and instead built today’s sunken highway with cement walls.

Freeways evolved over the years. Motorists at first encountered the Lodge and Ford with soft shoulders and stairways descending from surface streets for city buses that were to run on special expressway routes. Eventually the shoulders were paved and the stairways torn down as the bus plan never took hold.

Another major change was the center islands: the freeways were built with no guardrails. After some serious head-on crashes, engineers installed rails, which more recently were replaced with chest-high cement walls.

By the 21st century, Detroit had 135 miles of freeways within the city limits. In Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, there are 646 miles of superhighway, according to the Michigan Department of Transportation.

A vision of today’s limited-access roadway system and culture would have astounded old-timers in 1942, on the dawn of the freeway age.

Especially the downsides: rush-hour traffic jams, potholes, gawkers, construction. The increasing number of yahoos who treat expressway driving like a real-life video game, tailgating, speeding, weaving in and out and periodically firing guns.

As the roads got older, flooding became a summertime hazard. In a famous photo in 2021, people were shown swimming along I-94, near Trumbull, despite the dirty roadway and rancid water.

State Police Lt. Mike Shaw told a reporter he never thought he would have to say it, but he felt the need to issue a warning: “Don’t swim in the Ford Freeway.”

Bill McGraw is the editor of Free Press Flashback.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Push for freeway construction in metro Detroit came after WWII