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Photos from Detroit's freeway building days (1940s/50s)

Hipster Duck

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An impressive collection of photos.

Newly constructed Davison freeway
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Aerial photo of the Lodge freeway, shortly after opening, on the western edge of Downtown Detroit

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Jefferson Avenue entrance to the Chrysler freeway (I-375) u/c. The RenCen obscures the area on the right of this photo from the 1960s.

375chrysler.jpg


A map of East Detroit in the 1950s showing the eventual route of I-94

fordfreeway.jpg


Fisher freeway (I-75) under construction

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Lodge freeway under construction in the 1950s:

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Construction of I-75 on the northern side of downtown Detroit

fisher2.jpg
 
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wow. when i see these all i think about is the fact that in the 1950's a barrel of oil cost $2.75 a barrel on average (or approx. 6.5 cents a gallon).

no wonder so many highways were getting built....
 
To see that and having them call it progress.. and then seeing what it is now... if only they had a crystal ball of some sort to realize what they were doing....
 
davison3.jpg


This photo makes expressways look so quaint and benign that it makes you think "why would anyone oppose freeway construction?".
 
Yep. It was built partly because of the Ford Highland Park plant and the Chrysler Hamtramck operations so close by - the traffic coming out of those two operations was insane.
 
Interesting Detroit freeway pics! Plus some comments...

HD and everyone: Interesting DET freeway construction pics-the first one of the Davison Freeway reminds me of a NY or LI parkway in its design.
The other construction pics show the big all-out swing in the DET area for the automobile instead of dying mass transportation in those days.

Detroit became a metropolitan area where its central city downtown became secondary in favor of the collar suburbs where the majority of the affluent or middle class residents fled to-pronounced even more after the late 60s race riots. The City became primarily a place for predominately black or poor residents because of the "White Flight" phenomonon.

Deep End made that comment about cheap oil-the US and Canada were designed since WWII for the automobile age-dependent naturally on oil's easy availability as well. We have traffic and sprawl today as well as places where a car is a necessity because mass transit is not much of an option or it does not exist at all.

Everyone should have noted that oil is a finite resource-we are finding out these days that our oil dependency is now coming back to hurt us because our economies and ways of life are so dependent on oil-the rising price of fuel is hitting hard everywhere you look and do even if you do not own a car.

Rising gasoline prices is going to change North America in ways that we thought we would never see-if this change is managed correctly we can benefit by having more and expanded mass transit as a good example as well as curbing car-dependent suburban and exurban sprawl-which becomes a vicious circle-auto demand becomes higher and then roads outgrow their design and capacity. I live in one of the best examples of this description-Long Island-one of the USA's largest car-dependent suburban areas.

I sometimes wondered thanks in part to the 70s gas shortages and the recent price spikes today when the era of cheap oil would be over-with the worldwide demand for oil that new expensive era is now here-possibly to stay.

I felt that we would find out the hard way if we let our major cities decline how much better things would be if people improved their cities instead of fleeing them. Detroit is a prime example-perhaps better days lie ahead for all who care about it and live there.

Comments by Long Island Mike
 
LI Mike,

Although Detroit's freeway system dates to the late 1940s (the Davidson freeway) and the early 1950s, the ground was being sown for an auto-centric city decades before that. Woodward Avenue already had the first concrete four lane stretch of "divided highway" by the 1920s and pretty much anything built after the First World War in Detroit I would categorize as suburban sprawl.

1930s Detroit must have seemed eerily reminiscent to the sunbelt sprawlers of the 1980s and 1990s, with its towering office downtown surrounded by vast tracts of single family homes.

It's amazing to see how far "ahead" American cities were compared to their Canadian counterparts in automobile-centred development. For example, the first shopping area designed for travelers by car - Country Club Plaza, in Kansas City, opened in 1923. By 1929, LA had already opened Bullock's Wilshire where the main entrance did not front Wilshire Avenue, but the large dedicated parking lot to the rear. It would be almost three decades before Canadian cities would make similar concessions to the automobile - with some Toronto postwar neighbourhoods, such as Leaside, being thoroughly urban in character.
 
It would be almost three decades before Canadian cities would make similar concessions to the automobile - with some Toronto postwar neighbourhoods, such as Leaside, being thoroughly urban in character.

Though, truth be told, Leaside isn't all that "postwar"; or rather, what's postwar there filled out a pattern already set before the war...
 
Those pics really show how they took and urban environment, created a river for cars, and the river drained the city out to suburbia. The number of businesses and residents that would have been displaced just by the construction alone would have been significant, then add the people whose neighbourhoods were made no longer desirable being less walkable and next to a freeway. The scale of the tear down is amazing.
 
Though as you can tell, the first of them all, the Davison, was little more than a trenched arterial...
 
One of Detroit's mayors once commented on how foolish the town had been by paying for the highways that allowed those with money to easily move out of town thus reducing the towns tax base.
 
1930s Detroit must have seemed eerily reminiscent to the sunbelt sprawlers of the 1980s and 1990s, with its towering office downtown surrounded by vast tracts of single family homes.

That's not really true. Detroit was absolutely packed with apartment houses. You're right that there were a lot of single family homes, but it still had way more muti-residential buildings than, say, Toronto or any newer city. Some of them, especially up the Woodward corridor, are absolutely gorgeous. It's almost a Montreal built form, though with larger single-family homes.
 
Quite true - Detroit's built form in the 1910s and 1920s was actually quite similar to Los Angeles around the same time, except more low and mid rise apartment blocks and two-story houses instead of bungalows. The car was omnipresent by the 1920s, but the main arterials were still built for the streetcar.

But to a point, Hipster's comparison is apt. Chicago also has a variation of this type of built form as well. But not sprawl in the way we know it - that didn't really happen until after the Second World War.

James Couzens, the mayor of Detroit during the First World War and shortly after, took over and modernized Detroit's street railway, as one of the first full municipalization of transit (Toronto in 1921 was also one of the first, a few years later) and pushed hard for subways that never happened.

Some of the road widenings of the 1920s were nothing short of heroic - I've seen pictures of workers moving a church on Woodward back to allow it to be widened to 6-8 lanes all the way down to Grand Circus Park. It was the Motor City.
 

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