LOS ANGELES: HARBOR FREEWAY
"Across Southern California, freeways that paved over Black and Latino neighborhoods—such as the 5, 10 & 110—were completed; while those proposed to cross whiter, more affluent areas were stopped," writes the Los Angeles Times (1). The Harbor Freeway (I-110), seen here, cut through primarily Black and Latino Downtown and South Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s, displacing tens of thousands. Even more residents were removed for simultaneous “urban renewal” projects that cleared vast swaths of the city. Two of LA’s most prominent urban renewal projects are visible in this animation. First the clearance and paving over of the Mexican-American community in Chavez Ravine for the construction of Dodger Stadium (a complex consisting mostly of parking lots). Next the demolition of racially-diverse Bunker Hill and its redevelopment into a financial district. These two projects displaced 12,000 residents, Mike Davis notes in “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (2). More on both these projects to come. “City of Quartz” discusses how the freeways were built following existing racial lines: “Redevelopment massively reproduced spatial apartheid. The moat of the Harbor Freeway [110] and the regraded palisades of Bunker Hill cut off the new financial core from the poor immigrant neighborhoods that surround it on every side” (Davis, 230). These new highways cut through existing, racially-diverse neighborhoods and supercharged suburban development on what had previously been the periphery of the city. Due to the ubiquity of racial deed restrictions (aka restrictive covenants), the vast majority of this new housing was closed to anybody considered “non-white.” Similar to other cities, these practices facilitated and encouraged white flight to the suburbs, precipitating the spatial notions of the racially-diverse “inner city” vs. sprawling white suburbia.
Endnotes:
Dillon, Liam. Poston, Ben. “Freeways Force Out Residents in Communities of Color—Again.” Los Angeles Times, 2021. https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/ (accessed 1/19/2024).
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, 1990.