Philly’s Nicetown was devastated by highway racism. Can Biden’s $2T plan help? | Will Bunch

Quenton Bowman Sr. was born in Philadelphia’s Nicetown neighborhood on New Year’s Eve 1978 — or about two decades after the Roosevelt Extension expressway stretch of U.S. 1 cut through the heart of what had been a thriving working-class enclave, demolishing not only 300 homes but its intangible sense of community.

To Bowman, now a 42-year-old Marine veteran, businessman, and activist who volunteers with the Nicetown Community Development Corp., or CDC, the overhead expressway is what defined Nicetown during his youth even as it left a void in a divided community, as he recalled kids on the other side of the highway having a nicer park, and a summer camp. “That expressway being there,” he said, “made it feel like there was an other side, instead of one big all-of-us.”

For the last five years or so, Bowman has lobbied aggressively for a nearly $9.4 million plan to help boost Nicetown back toward the middle class, by turning barren, unused land under the Roosevelt Extension into a sports park with skateboarding, five new basketball courts, a natural amphitheater, and a community garden that would be fed by improved drainage. The proposal has wended its way slowly through the government bureaucracy — so the news that President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion-plus infrastructure proposal includes a large pot of money for projects in Black and brown neighborhoods harmed by the mid-20th-century highway boom has Nicetown leaders like Bowman hopeful the park could finally happen sooner rather than later.

The Biden administration’s idea to set aside $20 billion for projects to “reconnect” communities of color in cities from coast to coast that were ripped apart by highway projects or by ill-conceived “slum clearance” urban-renewal projects — largely in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s — has heated up a simmering conversation about the relationship between America’s infrastructure projects of the past and the role of race.

“There is racism physically built into some of our highways,” Biden’s new transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said earlier this month in an interview with Beltway journalist April Ryan for The Grio. The quote was immediately targeted by conservatives such as the right-wing Young America’s Foundation — “This is not parody,” the group screamed on Twitter — and even Rep. Matt Gaetz, who braked from his own eight-lane expressway of ethical troubles to proclaim: “Highways are not racist.” The flap was the latest effort at “owning the libs” from a white supremacist viewpoint that anything short of donning a white hood and burning crosses isn’t racist — and maybe not even that.

Twitter historians responded with a flood of stories about New York City’s master road builder of the 20th century, Robert Moses, who — as documented in Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Power Broker — built low overpasses to Long Island’s Jones Beach so buses carrying lower-income city residents couldn’t get there, and who irrevocably harmed working-class neighborhoods for projects like the Cross Bronx Expressway. There are similar stories from Boston to San Francisco. Here in Philadelphia, residents of the city’s Nicetown section deal with that highway racism as they struggle beneath the traffic jams of the Roosevelt Extension.

The story goes all the way back to the 1940s and ‘50s, when the mostly white flight to the suburbs, fueled by the automobile and postwar prosperity, was starting to accelerate and urban planners were beginning to panic about how to keep shoppers at downtown department stories and white-collar jobs in city offices. Their simple — and, history has taught us, simplistic — and sometimes ill-guided solution was the expressway.

“There were smart people trying to do something to make the city better,” said Elizabeth Greenspan, a senior fellow at Penn Praxis and urban anthropologist who documented the strains on Nicetown from the Roosevelt Extension project in a lengthy 2019 report for Places Journal. The era’s high-profile city planners like Moses and Philadelphia’s Edmund Bacon saw expressways as a scheme to keep people connected to cities and thought displaced residents could somehow find nicer homes. “They didn’t understand community, and what it meant to be attached to the place where you lived,” she said. “... There were huge blind spots ... huge racial blind spots.”

When Bacon announced plans for the 3.5-mile Roosevelt Extension in April 1949, to connect busy Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia with the already under-construction Schuylkill Expressway, his initial scheme would have displaced nearly 400 homes with 1,750 residents. Nicetown was a working-class neighborhood of about 14,000 people, many attached to nearby factories like the Midvale Steel plant. People protested loudly, but city planners had enormous clout in those postwar years that everyday residents lacked. “The highway will benefit all of the citizens,” then-City Council member John Kelly said. “Unfortunately, some must be hurt.”

In 1951, a Nicetown widow named Caroline Rose told the Bulletin newspaper that she’d lived in her paid-off home for more than 30 years and couldn’t handle a mortgage for a new one if the city forced her to move. “My house is worth many times to me what it is actually worth,” she said. But, as chronicled by Greenspan, engineers balked at an alternate route that would have spared the homes but cost $4 million more, although they did agree to narrow the highway to spare 100 homes. When population flight only accelerated after the highway, officials declared six blocks as “blighted” in the late 1960s and tore down scores of additional homes.

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The Nicetown that Quenton Bowman grew up in during the 1980s and ‘90s was overwhelmingly Black and disadvantaged in an era when deep poverty in Philadelphia became the worst among America’s biggest cities. The businesses on Germantown Avenue bisected by the expressway and surrounded by emptied-out blocks have struggled. Since he returned home from his Marine stint at California’s Camp Pendleton, Bowman has worked to launch youth basketball programs that would keep Nicetown’s next generation away from trouble.

Some people in the community initially scoffed a few years ago when a resident suggested building a skate park in the underused land directly under and adjacent to the Roosevelt Extension, but soon the idea caught fire and kept growing in its ambition. Bowman dreams of expanding his basketball program with the new courts. Others proposed that a plan for PennDot to address persistent drainage problems under the expressway could provide water for an interactive rain garden. A nonprofit team of designers called the Community Design Collaborative drafted award-winning renderings for the Nicetown Sports Court.

“The Sports Court would be the missing link to have a smooth connection underneath that overpass,” said Bowman, who said that if local residents could be trained to work on building the park — an idea that is also promoted in Biden’s infrastructure plan — it could also be a game-changer for Nicetown’s economy.

But excitement for the Nicetown park idea was built a lot faster than the park itself. While PennDot is supportive, according to local officials, finishing its multimillion-dollar project to upgrade the highway, slated for completion in 2022, is taking precedence over the park. More important, most of the $9.4 million park project still awaits funding. Critics say that this type of delay is typical and that glitzy projects in central cities or more upscale zip codes — like the $225 million park over I-95 in Center City slated to begin this year — often get priority over poorer neighborhoods like Nicetown.

But all of that was before Biden’s proposal to ask Congress for $20 billion for what it calls “a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.” Majeedah Rashid, executive director of the Nicetown CDC, told me officials were already lobbying Rep. Dwight Evans for federal dollars for the sports park — so the Biden plan has brought new energy and excitement.

“We’ve got our fingers crossed,” Rashid said this week. If the Nicetown CDC can fully fund the sports court, it could even pay for one feature dreamed up by the designers — a towering spire marking the park that would be visible to the thousands of motorists who zip over the neighborhood on the Roosevelt Extension. The spire would feature a downward arrow with the words It’s Nice Down Here.

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