BOSTON: ROXBURY
“This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
-Jane Jacobs on "urban renewal" in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” 1961
Roxbury, officially known as “the heart of black culture in Boston,” was essentially sacked by the government in the 1960s, with nearly half its buildings being razed for either the canceled Southwest Freeway (I-95) or various “urban renewal” schemes. Under the auspices of the Boston Redevelopment Agency (BRA), the government displaced ~5,239 families in the Roxbury and South End neighborhoods (~17,250 people in 1960) during “urban renewal” projects, along with many thousands more for the Southwest Freeway.
While a multi-racial coalition of Roxbury residents and stakeholders from other neighborhoods were able to organize, protest, and ultimately force the government to cancel plans for the Southwest Freeway (more on this to come), it was not before thousands of homes had already been seized through eminent domain and demolished (third image). In fighting against the freeway plans, the Greater Boston Committee (the organization residents created to fight the freeway) had circulated a flier laying out a prescient warning of what was to come:
“Houses are being destroyed with no provision made for replacing the buildings, no provision for consistent rents or mortgage interest rates when occupants are forced to move, and no compensation for being forced to move by eminent domain. All this in the context of a housing crisis in the cities.
Small businesses are being disrupted and many times taken over by bigger developments with no provision for compensation or protection.
Whole neighborhoods will be divided or walled off by wide ribbons of concrete, noise, fumes.
In the future, mobility for all will NOT be achieved. Those without access to cars, such as the young, the eldery, the poor, and housewives without second cars, would be isolated from employment, education, commerce, and recreation by a highway-dominated transportation system.”
Quote from Dr. Karilyn Crockett's “People Before Highways”