In 1952, more than 1,500 families in the West Bronx received eviction notices ahead of the construction of a segment of the Cross-Bronx Expressway through their neighborhood. Residents formed the Crotona Park Tenants Committee, lobbied officials, rallied at City Hall and proposed an alternate route for infamous urban planner Robert Moses’ highway. But their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Ultimately, 60,000 people were evicted from their homes through the construction of the interstate, the first built through such a dense urban environment. Constructed in sections between 1948 and 1972, it was among the most complex and costly highway projects of its time. The project also became a national model, showing other cities how to route interstates directly through urban cores while leveraging the 90% federal funding match. And it’s left residents dealing with social, economic and health effects to this day.

Over five decades later, documentary photographer and lifelong Bronx resident Abigail Montes is bringing to the fore the voices of those who have built their lives around this highway. Cross Bronx/ Living Legend focuses not on retelling the infamous story of a highway gone wrong, but of the people who have come to call it home.

“So much of my work is speaking to the history of the effects of the Cross Bronx, on that time of urban blight that the Cross Bronx dominoed, the decade of arson and [disinvestment] that followed… but also the years of resilience and community activism that has sprung up in spite of all of that,” says Montes, who was born and raised near Hunts Point.

Montes says she has spent the majority of her life interacting with the Cross Bronx Highway, whether physically, mentally or artistically. For about six years, she led free photography courses in the South Bronx; now she’s earning her master’s of fine arts at Yale School of Art.

Organized in partnership with Urban Omnibus/The Architectural League of New York and the Department of City Planning, Cross Bronx/Living Legend is on display at the Bronx River Art Center until Sunday, Nov. 9 at 5 p.m.

The free gallery exhibition is presented in English and Spanish, given the majority-Spanish speaking population in the Bronx. It also featured several interactive workshops and neighborhood walking tours over the past six weeks, culminating in a closing event on Saturday.

“The catalyst to the kind of work that I want to make comes from information about what happened to the South Bronx, and it just fueled my desire to be proud of where I’m from and also find out more about what happened, why it happened and some of the problem-solving that was done,” Montes says.

Along the Bronx River Art Center’s left wall, a projector displays archival images of the Bronx before the highway. The perpendicular wall features maps showcasing the extent of the displacement, as well as the heart of the exhibit: Montes’s warm, soft photography of the highway, taken during a seven-mile walk along the highway.

The images, showing the vast scale of the infrastructure in comparison to the residents who surround it, are complimented by audio excerpts from conversations with dozens of Bronx residents who share their own experiences of how this highway has come to be a member of their community – and their visions for a just future.

“The Cross Bronx is not a natural [thing]. It’s not a river,” one resident said during a conversation recorded for the Cross Bronx Storybank, a project by the planning department with organizations across the Cross Bronx corridor. “There was neighborhoods, public transportation, businesses. And to this day, they say that the Bronx has not recovered from what they ripped out of our neighborhoods to put a highway.”

A third wall of the exhibit holds a large bookshelf long lined with books and never-before-seen historic materials showing the history of students and community members who fought against the Cross Bronx Expressway.

There are flyers from Crotona tenants’ meetings; references to the CrossBronx Express, a newspaper started by local student activists that urged residents to come together against policing, high cost of living, and the Vietnam war; and literature cards on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s $2 million investment on the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity program, intended to study how to improve the quality of life for Bronx residents who have built communities around the interstate since it severed the borough.

Montes’s roots in the neighborhood allowed her to become a vector for the community’s stories, consequently granting those who bear witness to this exhibit insight to the intimate and raw truth about this highway: that some Bronx residents have, against all odds, come to see the highway as part of their home, part of their happiest memories — not just its dark history of segregation.

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This post was originally published on Next City.