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The New + the Next


AMERICA BEGINS CAPPING FREEWAY SCARS OF THE PAST

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The New + the Next


AMERICA BEGINS CAPPING FREEWAY SCARS OF THE PAST

By Brian Martucci

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Interstate 90 dips beneath Mercer Island in Lake Washington, just east of
Seattle.
SourceLaurent GRANDGUILLOT/REA/Redux


WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Communities divided by 20th century freeways may be reunited by a 21st century
vision. 

By Brian Martucci

April 3, 2018

Interstate 5, the West Coast’s main north-south artery, cuts an angry, 12-lane
slash through Seattle, severing upscale residential neighborhoods like Capitol
Hill and First Hill from the central business district.

For now. Citizens are lobbying their elected representatives to take up a plan
for a 45-acre ribbon of public space running atop I-5 for 2 miles. The Seattle
C.A.P.itol Hill Park, envisioned by local architects Patano Studio, would
include as its centerpiece a multiuse arena, part of an existing plan to expand
the Washington State Convention Center and a more aspirational effort to attract
NBA and NHL teams to the state. 

The Seattle project would re-establish pedestrian connections and create badly
needed parkland in the densest part of town. For the first time in 50 years,
locals could walk or bike downtown without taking their lives into their hands
or taking torturous routes.

> The opportunity to create more space in a dense urban environment has a very
> broad constituency.
> 
> Alex Ko, Sound Transit

But the proposed project for what would be America’s most extensive highway lid
project since Boston’s Big Dig, which created 1.5 miles of linear park atop
Interstate 93 in downtown Boston a decade back, is far from alone. Increasingly,
American cities saddled with aging urban highways are eyeing freeway caps – also
known as highway lids and land bridges, depending on geography and design – as
essential tools in their urban renewal toolkits. Most lid projects aim to
re-stitch an urban fabric frayed by questionable road planning decisions while
increasing available public space in densely populated neighborhoods.

 

The benefits of completed lids are visible across the nation. In Dallas, the
5-block Klyde Warren Park has revived a once-faded corner of downtown and forged
connections with up-and-coming uptown. In St. Louis, a block-long lid connects
Gateway Arch National Park with Luther Ely Smith Square, while in Duluth,
Minnesota, a series of caps create grassy pedestrian connections between
downtown and the serene Lake Superior waterfront. Proposed and
under-construction projects are even more ambitious, spanning big cities like
Los Angeles, Denver, Washington, D.C., New York, San Diego and San Francisco,
apart from Seattle.

“Transportation planners once saw lids as a last resort,” says Scott Bonjukian,
co-chair of Lid I-5, a citizen group working to realize the Seattle project.
“We’re now at the point where they’re incorporated into [highway rebuilds] from
the get-go.”

Since 2016, the group has engaged with residents and stakeholders on both sides
of the highway, as well as a supportive city council and planning office. In
April, Seattle’s city council will vote on a $1.5 million citywide feasibility
study, which Washington State Convention Center is expected to fund out of its
expansion budget. To start with, Lid I-5 wants the construction of a
14,000-square-foot lid park at the corner of Pine and Boren streets. Eventually,
Bonjukian hopes, the project will extend north to Denny Way, and south to
Madison Street or even Yesler Terrace, a major public housing community. For
residents around the freeway, health has long been a major concern – with
studies showcasing a significant adverse impact. Now, economics may work for the
project too. Because land prices are rising in downtown Seattle, a lid park is
much cheaper per square foot than providing green spaces down below.

 
        
  

Traffic exits from a section of the highway known as the Big Dig in Boston.

Source Darren McCollester/Getty Images


“The I-5 lid project is being pitched as a solution to challenges stemming from
a lack of available land,” says Alex Ko, Capitol Hill resident and customer
outreach specialist for Sound Transit, the regional public transit authority.
“The opportunity to create more space in a dense urban environment has a very
broad constituency.” Investors are beginning to show interest. Two contributed
$10,000 each last year to Lid I-5, the citizens’ group, and Bonjukian is working
contacts at Amazon, which employs thousands at its nearby headquarters —
including many who walk and bike to work across I-5.

Halfway across the country, an entirely different highway lid experiment is
unfolding.



Set to cap up to five blocks of Interstate 94 in St. Paul’s working-class Rondo
neighborhood, ReConnect Rondo’s (RCR) land bridge proposal takes direct aim at
what many regard as the Interstate Highway System’s original sin: the
evisceration of once-thriving Black and Latino neighborhoods, through which the
U.S. Department of Transportation routed many urban highways. That makes the
project radical, because lid projects disproportionately favor upscale or
densely populated areas with already-elevated land values — including downtown
Seattle.

“Communities of means, with high land values, can more easily justify
lid-building expenses,” says Tom Fisher, director of Minnesota Design Center and
Dayton Hudson Chair in Urban Design at the University of Minnesota.

> We want a seat at the table where transportation decisions are made.
> 
> Marvin Anderson, ReConnect Rondo

Rondo doesn’t fit that bill. In the early 20th century, St. Paul’s
African-American community clustered here, building businesses on old Rondo
Avenue and keeping tidy homes on leafy side streets. Widespread housing
discrimination kept Rondo residents from buying or even renting elsewhere. Then,
in the 1960s, state and federal authorities routed I-94 through Rondo, erasing
Rondo Avenue and severing the community. Locals had no voice in the decision.

“Transportation decisions affect communities,” says Marvin Anderson, RCR board
chair and a leading advocate for the neighborhood. “One of the communities most
affected by adverse transportation decisions was Rondo.” RCR has several designs
in the works, but its goal is a half-mile swath that quite literally reconnects
Rondo’s severed halves with a new beating heart.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation has thrown its support behind RCR —
but the partnership took time, and criticism of the government agency at a 2015
community meeting. “Our goal is not just to build a land bridge; we want a seat
at the table where transportation decisions are made,” says Anderson.

The motivations vary for proposed lid projects. Los Angeles’ Hollywood Central
Park would be a 1-mile, 38-acre park atop U.S. 101 in a diverse, park-deprived
slice of Tinseltown. Denver’s Central 70 reconstruction project will include a
4-acre land bridge topped with trees, grassy lawns and playing fields. Capitol
Crossing in Washington, D.C., is an entirely new mini-neighborhood: a
landscaped, five-structure commercial development on reclaimed land atop
Interstate 395, blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

And while finding funding is a common challenge, it’s a bigger problem for
poorer, minority neighborhoods. Even with significant government support, RCR’s
representatives recognize they will also need substantial private investment
from those who see the project as socially important.

If that happens, it’s about time for the residents of Rondo. “It’s helpful,”
says Fisher of the University of Minnesota, “to view this project essentially as
reparations for something that should never have happened in the first place.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story identified Marvin Anderson as
executive director of RCR, a position he held earlier.

 * Brian Martucci, OZY Author Contact Brian Martucci


April 3, 2018

TOPICS

 * Ahead of the Curve
 * Cities
 * Economics
 * Race and Ethnicity
 * SOCIETY
 * United States



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