"The most important thing is the human beings"

A highway is a moral document

Sep 19, 2024

Hello everyone! I should be returning from vacation today, if all is going as planned. (I’m still writing from the past here—Sunday, Sept. 8). That makes today the last day to take me up on my vacation deal.

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Today we’re talking about highways.

Do you know anyone who lived in Worcester in the 1960s? Who has any memory of the “Worcester Expressway” going in, or of the neighborhoods it displaced? If so, I’d like to hear from them.

Over the next month, I’ll be diving into the archives, researching the fatal decision to put I-290 straight through the middle of our city. Who wanted it? Why? Who didn’t? And why couldn’t they stop it? The project is called “A People’s History of I-290.” With any luck, it will be based on an oral history of folks in the community who remember. In order to find those people, I need your help. This was the 1960s, after all. There aren’t many such people left.

Please send me a line at billshaner@substack.com if you have any leads at all!

Here’s a small taste of what the story will look like:

The most important thing is human beings

“State’s Expressway Plan Blasted At Hearing” read the headline of the Telegram’s A1 lead story on March 13, 1957.

The night before a “hostile crowd” of 500 people stuffed into the Classical High School auditorium for a four-hour meeting on the proposed interstate highway through the heart of the city.

The state’s highway commissioner, Carl Sheridan—a figure who looms large in this story—attempted to placate the crowd: The route hadn’t been “finally determined,” he said. The plan was for a 2.5 mile stretch of six-lane highway from Brosnihan Square (Kelley Square, more or less) to Lincoln Street. Though not “finally determined,” that’s exactly where it would go.

Among the fiercest opponents were members of Polish and Lithuanian social clubs, as well as merchants on Millbury Street. They charged the expressway would “wipe out businesses, clubs, homes and other properties with little chance of relocation.” And they were, of course, right to think that. They said the expressway would encourage motorists to bypass the small businesses in the area. They were right about that. No one they knew wanted the thing, they said.

“The crowd cheered and applauded just about every speaker who tore into the expressway proposal.”

Mayor O’Brien, on the other hand, said the highway “was a must.”

“I’m for a highway that will give us the maximum amount of benefit with a minimum of hardship.”

City Manager McGrath told the public the route was based on “scientific studies by competent engineers.”

Yet, despite these assurances, only two of the 500 residents spoke in favor of the highway. The rest were vehemently opposed.

You can’t build 2.5 miles of highway without taking people’s homes. The way these land takings were described by the Telegram seemed almost cursory. The first time they were mentioned, the highway commissioner was quoted in the very next line saying his engineers have taken into consideration “the economic future of the city.” But he said nothing of the neighborhoods.

But the neighborhoods, naturally, weighed heavily on the minds of those who lived in them. One resident asked, “Why would we pay for our own destruction?” Another compared the highway plan to the Tornado of ‘53. A resident proposed the idea of a belt highway around the city, but that suggestion wasn’t going to receive any serious consideration. The state and city leaders were determined to put it through the urban core. More so, even, than they let on at the time.

This was the very beginning of the implementation of what would come to be I-290. Portions to the south of Kelley Square and north of Lincoln Street hadn’t yet been announced. But already, in its nascent state, it was deeply unpopular among residents and even city councilors. The last speaker of the night delivered a poignant, heartfelt plea of opposition:

“I don’t want to stand in the way of progress, but the most important thing is the human beings...It’s more than I can understand why this has to go through a most congested area.”

The most important thing is the human beings.

On this, the speaker and the planners were in actually in alignment. Human beings were the most important consideration in the path of the expressway—removing them, that is. It was not an accident that the proposed path went through the city’s most diverse and poorest neighborhoods. All across the country, this was no accident.

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, planners across the state and country laid out proposed highway paths in the relative obscurity of state engineering offices. Writing about Boston, author Karilyn Crocket in her 2018 book People Before Highways, said “the words ‘slum,’ ‘ghetto,’ and ‘Chinatown’ peppered planning documents that described which parts of the city needed to be cleared for roads, new housing, or sometimes just parking lots.” A largely statewide initiative, Boston planners were also Worcester planners, and undoubtedly shared the same feelings about the neighborhoods chosen for I-290.

“Within these official documents, the language of blight assumed a pernicious urban bite capable of devouring entire communities,” Crocket writes.

It wouldn’t be until more than a decade later that activists would unearth the obscure maps and land-taking schemes that informed highway projects like the Worcester Expressway. And even then, “the specialized semiotic coding of urban planning renders the field all but impervious to nonprofessionals and their potential critiques.”

The jargon of highway planning gives it the appearance of a dry, apolitical business. But in reality, it was intensely political. Local and state officials worked together to identify the “blighted” areas that they would then demolish with federal highway bill money. In Worcester, in Boston—in every city across America. The grand aims of a federal interstate highway system were invariably used by local officials to indulge their basest impulses.

The Worcester Expressway went on to face steep opposition throughout the first half of 1957. The plan was delayed in April, the city council voted to oppose it, and the public remained heated.

But in the summer, something happened. At a city council meeting on July 2, the “business community” came out in force—a pastoral, even whiter version of the same growth machine that exists today—and pressured the council to soften its opposition. The five-hour meeting was attended by “more than two dozen businessmen, bankers, Industrialists, truckers, Chamber of Commerce officials, city planners and engineers,” all in support of the expressway.

It was almost a polar opposite vision of the public hearing a few months earlier. Where one was stuffed to the brim with angry residents, this meeting featured a veritable who’s who of Worcester power elite. The double-page spread of the bulk of the story is peppered with headshots of the power players in attendance.

“For the future long term growth of the city, an expressway must be constructed,” said Richard Symonds, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and president of a local bank.

Robert Stoddard, the president of the manufacturer Wyman-Gordon, said “our company stands to benefit in no way from the expressway except as all our citizens stand to benefit from it.” In modern parlance we call a statement like that a “lie.”

Despite the best effort of the growth machine, the council didn’t change their position. The city’s power elite only peeled away a few votes.

The mayor, at the end of the meeting—after he saw the council wouldn’t budge, and that he had in front of him a sympathetic crowd of city elites—decided to let the room in on a secret: The deal was already done. It had been, in fact, for months.

“We were told the expressway is going right where the state wants it,” the mayor said. The public, and the council, be damned.

After the meeting, the Telegram reporter on scene asked the mayor what he meant by that. The mayor told the reporter there was no longer a point in “keeping the people in the dark.” He and the city manager had a private meeting with Sheridan months prior, and the three came to an understanding.

"Sheridan said the expressway is going right in where the state has planned it."

What looked like a public process wasn’t a process at all. In a matter of months, construction would begin, and whole neighborhoods would be erased.

None of the desperate pleas from the community did a thing to stop it.

Worcester Sucks and I Love It

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