Abstract
Amy D. Finstein’s Modern Mobility Aloft offers a historical account of the conception, planning, design, construction, public reception, and eventual outcome of three elevated highway projects in Chicago, New York, and Boston. Using these three projects as case studies, Finstein portrays an era of enthusiasm and faith in modern mobility preceding the massive interstate highway building movement post WWII. The faith was that automobiles and road infrastructure, elevated highways in particular, would offer the ultimate solution to the ills of congested cities during the early 20th century. From the perspective of an architectural historian, Finstein situates elevated highways in larger architectural, urban, and cultural contexts to understand them not just as engineering feats but more as a reflection of the radically changing social and cultural conditions of American urban life brought by the rapid rise of the automobile.
Part One—The Problem of Congestion describes the background for the emergence of elevated highways during the early 20th century as a promising solution to the many challenges associated with the 19th century city. Chapter one identifies three major elements that dominated the landscape of the urban centers of late 19th century and early 20th century American industrial cities: railroad, skyscraper, and automobile. The rapid growth of each element was enabled by technological advancement, driven by the society’s pursuit of speed, and accompanied by the expansion of private interests in the public realm of city centers. The consequence of the increasing concentration of railroad infrastructure, tall buildings, and private cars in the city centers was chaotic congestion with tremendous social and economic costs, threatening the vitality of city centers. This set the stage for innovative solutions aimed at restoring standards of safety, efficiency and urban decorum, among which elevated highways stood out as the most promising option.
Chapter two traces the emergence of elevated highways as the popular solution among engineers, planners, and municipal officials for the ever-aggravating problem of congestion, especially as the number of automobiles rose exponentially after Ford’s introduction of Model T. Early attempts to tame congestion included traffic and parking regulation as well as engineering and infrastructure improvements to separate different kinds of traffic and to accommodate the rapidly growing number of cars. Realizing the limits of such piecemeal interventions, municipal leaders turned to architects and planners to lead comprehensive planning efforts to address existing problems including traffic congestion and to promote growth and revitalization of city centers. Such efforts often resulted in a varied range of utopian projections, all of which prominently featured elevated highways as an efficient, elegant, and modern tool to separate and order different types of traffic. Finstein effectively traces the development and exchange of these utopian ideas by investigating some key personalities whose backgrounds included engineering, statistics, law, traffic management, and architecture, reflecting the complexity and cross-disciplinary nature of urban planning.
Part Two—Elevated Expectations presents abundant details about the planning processes and design characteristics of the three elevated highway projects. Chapter three describes the planning and design processes of Chicago’s Wacker Drive, a double-tiered highway along the riverfront of Chicago’s central business district. The discussion not only details the political struggles and conflicting interests revolving around the project’s physical and financial costs during the planning processes, but also illustrates the Beaux Arts architectural characteristics of the design of Wacker Drive. Notably, the Wacker Drive project was part of a comprehensive planning scheme that covered a larger area and involved several other road projects. This scheme was deemed a superior approach to ad hoc and piecemeal investments—one that could bring order, functionality, and beauty to part of the city plagued by congestion and dilapidated buildings.
Chapter four turns to New York’s West Side Elevated Highway along the Hudson River waterfront and highlights its architectural design which, unlike with Chicago’s Wacker Drive, was an important focus of public discussion. The structure’s initial design, proposed by an engineer, used a simple steel structure clad in cement. Objections associated the negative functional, esthetic, and environmental impacts of existing elevated railroads with the proposed new highway, citing their resemblance. This led to the involvement of an architectural firm that had designed some of Manhattan’s premier Art Deco skyscrapers during that time to shape the design of the new highway. Their architectural treatment used decorative plaques and sculptures to mitigate the negative physical and visual impacts of the new highway for the general public and to enhance the experience of the motorists.
Chapter five recounts the complex and lengthy planning processes and political contestations surrounding Boston’s Central Artery. There is a great level of detail about this project’s destructive impacts on neighborhoods and communities along its route. Unlike in the previous two cases, where the elevated highways ran along preexisting traffic routes, Boston’s proposed new highway would cut through the city’s North End and Chinatown neighborhoods, demolishing many residential and commercial buildings home to long-established, vibrant, and ethnically diverse communities. While both communities fought back to save their neighborhoods, the North End community failed to persuade city officials to adopt an alternative route that ran along existing roads. The Chinatown community was able to reach a compromise with the city by sacrificing part of a building that was central to the community in order to shift the highway route and save many more properties from being demolished.
Part three—Bridges and Divides outlines the implementation of the three projects, traces their later lives, and reflects on their impacts. Chapter six describes the construction of the projects and discusses the public reception of them upon completion. As part of a bigger scheme to redevelop Chicago’s riverfront area, the construction of the Wacker Drive involved demolition of existing buildings that were deemed dilapidated and unfit for the modern image that the city was trying to promote. Upon completion, Wacker Drive lessened street congestion and, together with surrounding developments, helped achieve the city’s vision of a beautified, efficient, and modernized riverfront. But, as noted by Finstein, such “selective editing” of urban form echoed the legacy of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris, where urban fabrics were curated to express city identities.
Different from both the Chicago and Boston cases, the construction of New York’s West Side Highway involved minimal demolition of existing buildings, which might account for a more positive reception from the public. For a long time, this project was deemed a visible solution to the problems of a declining waterfront economy by creating new accessibility and new growth opportunities. The architectural treatment of the highway structure also helped mediate its impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. However, adjacent businesses and residents did grow increasingly frustrated with the highway’s immediate impacts on them, including its noise, pollution, shadow, and its disruption of street level circulation and in particular waterfront access.
Boston’s Central Artery was the most intrusive of the three projects as it involved the most demolition and displacement and, unlike the other two projects, cut through established neighborhoods, which made it the most controversial project of the three. Not long after city officials celebrated the new regional accessibility and economic vitality brought by the new highway project, critics began to scrutinize its blighting effects on the social fabric of the city. Finstein notes that the shifts in stewardship of this project from city, to state, and then federal government meant further and further distance between decision-making power and the local communities, which likely contributed to the neglect of local concerns and damage to these communities.
Chapter seven reflects on the social, transportation, and architectural legacies of these projects. The common theme across the three projects is that road capacity quickly became inadequate due to the continued exponential growth of automobile use which the highway planners and designers did not and probably could not have foreseen. As the conditions of the road structures deteriorated over time, the three highways could no longer serve their purposes and needed reinvestment. Chicago’s Wacker Drive was reconstructed and restored to renew and update its architectural features while the other two highways were demolished due to unpopularity among the public. New York’s West Side Elevated Highway was replaced with an at-grade highway, and Boston’s Central Artery gave way to an underground tunnel system. Finstein notes a few factors like the design and siting of the projects that could help explain the different public reception of the three projects and their eventual fates.
In this final chapter, Finstein also notes the unfortunate resemblance of the Central Artery to freeway construction during the interstate era, as freeway routes cut through more established neighborhoods and displaced many more local residents and businesses, and planners and city officials disregarded local opposition and downplayed the negative impacts in the pursuit of greater automobility. This led to stronger public resistance towards new highway and other infrastructure projects, which played a part in determining the redevelopment of the three elevated highways. Notably, the public, particularly local communities, was involved in redevelopment in all three cases, resulting in designs that reduced community impacts and included features and amenities that catered to pedestrians. Finstein concludes the book by reflecting on the idealistic roots of these elevated highways in early 20th century utopian dreams of an urban landscape reimagined for the automobile. She emphasizes how these early highway projects embodied larger civic aspirations for economic, architectural, and transportation modernity, unlike the interstate freeways which often prioritized regional automobility over local goals.
Throughout the book, Finstein develops a clear and detailed narrative of the history and design of the three elevated highway projects, and presents an impressive amount of information, including numerous images, collected through extensive archival research. This makes the book an enjoyable read. While Finstein writes from an architectural historian’s perspective, the book offers important and relevant insights for urban planning and design professionals. As with many other modernist planning projects, the disparity between the idealistic intent of elevated highways and the legacy of negative physical and social impacts offers valuable lessons for urban planners and designers regarding transportation and land use investments, especially mega projects that could have outsized and long-lasting impacts. The experience of redeveloping the three elevated highways also offers insights on the removal of interstate freeways in cities. While the three were redeveloped in different ways, common to them were the involvement of local communities, the consideration of local contexts, and a shift away from mobility centered on the automobile.
