Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore

Lieb, Emily

Hardcover

Series: Historical Studies of Urban America

Black American HistoryAutomobiles20th Century United States History

ISBN10: 0226844366
ISBN13: 9780226844367
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Nov 6 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore.

In the mid-1950s Baltimore's Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctor's offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern.

That highway was never built, but it didn't matter--even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In telling the history of the neighborhood and the notional East-West Expressway, Emily Lieb shows the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore's Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into colored ones, which had also laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some nine hundred homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals.

Drawing on land records, oral history, media coverage, and policy documents, Lieb demystifies blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. The result is an absorbing story about the deliberate decisions that produced racial inequalities in housing, jobs, health, and wealth--as well as a testament to the ingenuity of the residents who fought to stay in their homes, down to today.

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