The age of the American expressway ended in the same place it began: Mary Rosemond’s backyard.

In 1926, the year she was born in Jacksonville, Florida, her parents bought a brand-new house for their growing family: a Sears foursquare with a wide front porch on Moncrief Road, not far from the city’s downtown. Moncrief was part of Sugar Hill, a booming streetcar suburb connected to downtown by the “Colored Man’s Railroad,” the Black-owned North Jacksonville Street Railway, Town and Improvement Company.

Five-and-dimes, bakeries and confectioners lined Davis and Ashley Streets. Fancy dress and hat shops flaunted furs and feathers behind enormous plate-glass windows. Bluesmen and jazz singers browsed the Hollywood Music Store, and stars from the nearby Norman Film Studios posed and peacocked in hotel lobbies. At night, neon signs winked in the muggy darkness.

In the public realm, too, Sugar Hill was someplace special. In 1927, the city opened the Wilder Park Library, the Jacksonville Public Library’s busiest branch. The 30 acres of green space surrounding the library became Wilder Park, Jacksonville’s largest “colored” park. It had a track, a baseball diamond, a football stadium and a sleek community center whose Saturday-night dances would be legendary.

In sum: Sugar Hill was a nice place to grow up, a nice place to live, and a nice place to be from. In fact, historian Ennis Davis writes, “perhaps Sugar Hill was a little too nice for Jim Crow era Jacksonville.” And so Jim Crow Jacksonville struck back.

It started with a map.

In 1936, the city mothballed the last of its streetcars, replacing them with buses. It was the first of Florida’s big cities to do so, and it did because, at least according to the 1931 City Plan: “as the town grew, its colored areas grew likewise, adjacent to the white areas. As a result, the several separate and distinct colored areas came into being. But now with the advent of business and industry into some of those old areas, the residents there are being forced farther and farther from their places of labor.”

In other words, the city was growing, white residents were moving into new suburban neighborhoods, and now their nannies and housekeepers might (planners fretted) “consume 40–45 minutes in continuous riding time in going from her home to the site of her day’s work.” This was “not only unfair to the negro element but” — and here was the main point, as far as planners were concerned — “likewise unfair to those dependent upon them for domestic service.”

In theory, buses were the solution to this problem, but this was only true if they weren’t stuck in traffic. So, planners argued that the only way to guarantee the buses wouldn’t be delayed was to build a system of high-speed roads to sweep them around the city.

What seemed a simple solution to a straightforward problem soon twisted into a way to reimagine the city itself. In the mid-1940s, when the Chamber of Commerce drew a map for a 22-mile snare of highways and connectors across Jacksonville, they shot one right through Sugar Hill. That expressway, now part of I-95, suffocated the businesses on Davis Street, the Wilder Park Community Center, the park, the library, the hospital, the Y, and hundreds of homes under a heavy cover of concrete and asphalt.

The highway builders “just broke up the neighborhood, but my mama wouldn’t sell,” Mary Rosemond said later. So her family home kept standing where it stands today, with two lanes of traffic shrieking past its garden at 50 miles per hour.

While bulldozers chewed through her childhood neighborhood, she graduated from college and got a job as a schoolteacher in West Baltimore. In 1954, she and her first husband bought a home of their own: a bright, stocky rowhouse at the corner of Presstman and Rosedale Streets on what had once been Baltimore’s far-western edge.

Around the time the couple moved there, the neighborhood got a name: Rosemont. It hadn’t always had one, because the developers who built its houses in the 1920s and ’30s did so patchwork-style, block by block, on scraps of land carved out of old horse farms and summer estates. They had vied with one another to sell the most amenities, like all-electric kitchens, bright tiled bathrooms and Eastlake woodwork, for the lowest price, and their ads appealed “to the family desiring the best in environment with close proximity to downtown.”

“Everything up to the minute,” they promised. “Let your rent buy a beautiful new home.”

Those first ads were aimed at working-class white people: butchers and bookkeepers and salesclerks and police officers who had enough for the mortgage but not much more. Black people stayed away, not because they wanted to but because they had to.

Like Jacksonville, Baltimore was a Jim Crow city, and its politics aimed to define and defend white people’s property. In particular, in the older parts of the city and in newer “suburban” places like Rosemont, legally-segregated schools blocked and steered Black migration and branded the neighborhoods over which the schools stood sentry.

The result: no schools for Black pupils in Rosemont, nor anywhere near it. And since most people would not choose to live where their children could not go to school, through the 1940s you could count the Black residents in that part of West Baltimore on the fingers of one hand.

In 1951, though, the city’s school board had initiated a spasm of what bureaucrats called “school conversions,” turning officially “white” schools between Fulton Avenue and the Gwynns Falls Park into schools for Black students. These conversions opened a pressure valve out of the older parts of West Baltimore for those who could afford to take advantage of it.

By the time school started that fall, so many middle-class Black families had moved west into Rosemont and the surrounding neighborhoods that school officials called it “the most unprecedented, the most historic population movement in Baltimore.”

“Professional Blacks were moving into peaceful, clean, safe, attractive areas,” Mary Rosemond later wrote. “We were buying our homes! We were happy in our homes! We cared for our homes and our families!” A new community was born. But as soon as Rosemont became a Black neighborhood, it also became a target. In 1957, policymakers aimed an expressway right at it.

The ruins of a once-great city

Urban history illustrates “how white terrorism gets both abstracted and focused through wrecking balls and bulldozer blades,” as N. D. B. Connolly writes in his afterword to a recent reprinting of Arnold R. Hirsch’s classic “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960.”

It also shows how white terrorism needs only the idea of those tools to do its job. Since Hirsch first published his book in 1983, historians have been working to explain the many ways cities’ segregated “second ghettoes” were, as Hirsch put it, “continually … renewed, reinforced, and reshaped.”

Some have explained how policymakers at every level redefined local housing markets and consecrated the connection between white Americans’ ideas about race and the politics of property ownership. Others have shown how these same toxic ideas built and buoyed entire economies of exploitation around Black property and its owners, and how they shaped the infrastructures that made that exploitation look natural, even inevitable.

In the 2017 book “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education,” the scholar Noliwe Rooks coined the term segrenomics: “the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation.” When the school board branded Rosemont a Black neighborhood, it started a vicious “segrenomic” cycle that kept spinning for generations.

The amount of money at stake made good-faith city planning unimaginable. Public policy that treated Rosemont’s Black homeowners as if they were white, that protected their property instead of sacking it, would not have so efficiently reproduced the political and material inequalities that made the city work, at least for the people it worked for.

And as far as the City of Baltimore was concerned, those people were the only ones who mattered. Whatever powerful white Baltimoreans said they thought their city should be or serve or do, their ideology boiled down to this: Everything you have belongs to us.

One of their weapons was a word: “blight.” What it meant could be anybody’s guess, and that was the point. Take the brain-twisting definition the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Authority (BURHA) presented in a 1964 report.

“There are probably almost as many definitions of blight as there are people knowledgeable in urban problems,” BURHA said. “However, underlying all these different definitions is a common theme. This theme is that many attributes are associated with a blighted area that are not ordinarily found in unblighted areas.”

But as they had been in Jacksonville, those many attributes were often just one: Did Black people call a place home, or didn’t they?

In fact, almost every policymaker in every city used this same formula to give ballast to their prejudices and explain the choices they made about where to feed and where to starve. “Blight” was a fiction that had the power, literally and figuratively, to condemn. In fact, the work the word did was eugenic. It argued for its own annihilation, for its own good and (more important) everyone else’s.

And although Rosemont would not fit into this way of thinking about what a Black neighborhood should look like — insofar as “blight” was an aesthetic, Rosemont was self-evidently its opposite — this fiction proved more powerful than any fact.

Baltimore’s planners saw a Black neighborhood, and they mapped an expressway to destroy it.

In the end, that expressway was never finished. It dead ends on Rosemont’s eastern shoulder, which is how it got its nickname: the “road to nowhere.” But as Sun reporter James Dilts wrote in 1968, “plans for highways, if they are around long enough, become self-fulfilling prophecies.” To scar a city, you don’t need to build a thing. You need only make a map.

Three swindles

In Baltimore, planners, policymakers and businessmen acted in tandem to preserve and reproduce white supremacy in space, to buoy it by public subsidy and vindicate it by private profit. In Rosemont, that meant three separate but overlapping bonanzas: first the birth of Black Rosemont, then its destruction, and finally its scavenging.

For the first half of the 20th century, segregated schools were Baltimore’s most reliable tool for sorting and maintaining formally “white” neighborhoods. And from the 1920s until the 1950s, those schools established and held what sociologist Samuel Joseph Rice called a “border line and barrier, separating the Negro and white population” in West Baltimore along Fulton Avenue, a north-south arterial that was roughly contiguous with the city’s earliest western border.

As a result, a 1935 National Urban League report calculated that Black Baltimoreans were about 20% of the city’s population yet occupied just 2% of its housing. Most of these homes were in “Old” West Baltimore between the city center and the Fulton Avenue color line, where most of the city’s Black schools clustered, too.

In the early 1950s, Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners pushed the color line west by “converting” white schools beyond it into “colored” ones. When they did, they created Black Rosemont. They also created a captive market. “SELECT COLORED HOMES” ads in the “City” section of the real estate pages blared. “EASY TERMS. WILL HELP FINANCE. FIRST CLASS CONDITION.” Real estate men known as blockbusters bought low from white sellers they urged to flee and sold high to determined Black buyers. They made more money, ruinous money, by financing those costly purchases, too.

In Rosemont, the result was Black buyers stuck paying more for less. City records that document blockbusting are hard to find, but where they exist they clearly show that real estate companies bought low from white sellers and sold high — very high — to Black families with many fewer options. The loans they and their financial partners provided were pricier and more exploitative than the ones any similarly situated white family would have received.

There’s no doubt that these financial instruments and real estate practices, and the public policies that made them possible, were predatory. They made life harder, more expensive and more unpleasant for Mary Rosemond and her neighbors in Rosemont. But they did not make it impossible.

During the 1950s and ’60s, the Black newcomers to the neighborhood built a community that was radiant with promise and full of joy. Blockbusting had strained their pocketbooks, but later studies would show that Black Rosemonters were 50% more likely to own their homes than the average Baltimorean. They spent thousands of dollars every year on upkeep and renovations. And in spite of the exploitative home loans they’d been forced to take, many did end up owning their homes outright. They worried about appearances, fussed with lawns and shrubs and paint and porch furniture, because they had to — and because they wanted to.

In sum: Rosemont was a nice middle-class place occupied by nice middle-class families. It was everything mid-century America was supposed to be.

Except that Black people lived there. And that made it vulnerable.

In 1944, Baltimore’s planners had invited New York City Parks Commissioner and master builder Robert Moses to design a freeway system that would carry the 19-century city into its future. Moses’s Baltimore Arterial Report was published that October.

In its wake, planners would map more than a dozen highway systems through and around Charm City over the next decades. One would have carved a ring around the central business district, with radial highways extending outward like spokes from the hub of a gigantic wheel. One kept the ring road and dumped the radials. One dumped the ring and added a disjointed north-south segment that flowed with the Jones Falls to the Inner Harbor.

The details of these plans bleed together now. They often bled together then, too. Of those thousands of blurry details, here are the key ones.

First, from the Baltimore Arterial Report on, every expressway system planners proposed included some version of an “East-West Expressway” across the city’s midsection. Second, before Rosemont became a Black neighborhood, every version of that East-West Expressway gave the place a wide berth. Third, after Rosemont became a Black neighborhood, every version of that East-West Expressway (save one) would have gutted the neighborhood from stem to stern.

A 1969 article about the expressway in Architectural Forum summed it up: “Obviously, the highway would never have been routed through Rosemont if it had been a white neighborhood.”

In 1967, Baltimore’s city council formally voted to condemn some 900 houses in Rosemont for the East-West Expressway, then also known as Interstate 170. Appraisers from the Maryland State Highway Administration’s Interstate Division swarmed into the neighborhood to set prices for the condemned houses. Those prices were high enough to make the blockbusting lenders whole, and high enough to enable Rosemont’s homeowners to make down payments on new houses to those same lenders, but no higher. In the taking zone and alongside it, Rosemont’s homeowners lost virtually everything.

Still, they and their neighbors fought back; and on paper, they won their fight. In 1968, a multiracial, cross-class coalition of Baltimoreans against the expressway persuaded the roadbuilders to adopt a new route, one that dipped the highway underneath Rosemont and through mostly vacant industrial land and a cemetery that had been there all along. But this display of community power and solidarity was no match for a city determined to flex its own.

The city council refused to lift the condemnation lines through Rosemont, and state highway officials refused to sell the houses they no longer needed there back to their owners. Many of these owners were pushed out to Baltimore’s western suburbs, where familiar blockbusting real estate firms started the familiar extractive cycle all over again.

Some Rosemonters who lived outside the condemnation corridor left, too. Others, like Mary Rosemond, stayed behind and tried to resuscitate the community they’d worked so hard to build. But despite the neighbors’ efforts, “in Rosemont, the state has created chaos,” activists wrote. Highway or no, a “viable area” had become a “blighted scar.”

And so Rosemont became a target for exploitation once again. As part of the federal Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, Congress had created a lending program known as Section 235 that used mortgage-backed securities (which the law had also created) to finance home loans for poor people. These loans were supposed to be different — fairer, more equitable, less exploitative — from the ones the blockbusters had given to that first generation of Rosemonters.

However, as the historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” different did not mean better.

The Section 235 program promised to repay lenders in full if a buyer defaulted, which meant that “real estate and mortgage bankers valued these [new borrowers] because of the likelihood they would fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure.” With each foreclosure, companies recovered the capital to offer another risky mortgage.

The result was something Taylor calls “predatory inclusion,” in which lenders once again had every incentive to make unconscionable loans and vulnerable buyers paid the price.

It didn’t take long for the municipal Department of Housing and Community Development to announce a campaign to use this federal money to recreate that “normal city residential environment” Rosemont had been just a few years before.

The campaign promised to restore hundreds of city-owned houses for sale — not back to their previous owners, who were long gone by now, but to anybody with $200 for a down payment. Buyers paid for the rest using those predatory loans that came, this time, not from blockbusters but from ordinary mortgage banks. For those banks, the new market for “subprime” mortgages in formerly middle-class Rosemont was another gold mine. They got paid when a buyer initiated a loan. They got paid if that buyer defaulted. And they got paid when the next buyer started the whole process over from the beginning.

Ads for the Section 235 program in Rosemont promised that the “rehabilitated” houses in the highway corridor would be a good investment for their buyers, most of whom were young families and many of whom were moving to the neighborhood from the city’s public housing projects. The city was selling the houses for six and eight times what it had paid for them, a price ostensibly justified by the “cellar to roof” renovations officials promised. The problem was, the contractors who were supposed to be renovating the houses were not actually renovating much at all.

In 1972, the Afro-American newspaper and West Baltimore Congressman Parren Mitchell launched “a good, critical look at houses being offered for sale in the Rosemont area” and were horrified by the conditions their investigation revealed. Mitchell noted that the supposedly top-of-the-line appliances in the remodeled homes were “the cheapest models you can get,” and a child could knock a hole in the flimsy walls “in no time.” The newcomers were in real danger, he said, of buying “a home with a 30-year mortgage only to have it fall apart in 10.”

When officials in the mid-1970s looked around Rosemont, they saw what they called “deteriorated, neglected properties” and a “lack of interest or pride in the home and community.” In other words, they saw the “blight” they’d always expected to see. What they did not see were the consequences of their own actions.

In the official version of events, policymakers had tried their best to “renew” Rosemont, but Rosemont would not be renewed. Thus: “We have spent a lot of money on a lot of blocks that have turned out to be unsalvageable.”

Yet the new Rosemont homeowners, saddled now with houses they couldn’t afford, couldn’t sell, and could barely live in, did all they could to salvage them.

Though they were stretched too thin to begin with, city mortgage records show they would spend years and decades digging deeper into debt to keep their homes and make them livable: subprime second mortgages, subprime home-improvement loans, sketchy loans from roofing companies, plumbing companies, and construction companies. Those mortgage records also show that long before the subprime crisis made headlines in the 2000s, many people in the neighborhood had lost their homes to one lender or another.

“It seems,” Mary Rosemond told a reporter in 2004, “as though we are seeing ourselves deteriorate.”

That the expressway did not go through Rosemont mattered far less, in the end, than the maps that put it there in the first place.

Adapted and excerpted from Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore by Emily Lieb. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This post was originally published on Next City.