The Automobile and the City

In the 1950s, as new suburbs prospered and spread across postwar America, cities suffered. Rising car and truck ownership made it easier for businesses and middle- and working-class white residents to flee to the suburbs, leaving behind growing poor and minority populations and fiscal crises. Transit systems lost riders and money, and traffic jammed city streets.

Chicago’s leaders worried that white flight, worsening traffic, and a growing ring of slums threatened the future of the Loop, the city’s central business and financial district. Soon after World War II, and years before the federal government funded the interstate system, city planners dusted off a 1940 superhighway planning document. They began construction of a system of expressways that they hoped would accommodate the car and stem the flow of people and investment out of the central city.

Expressways, Congestion, and Urban Renewal

In the 1950s, Chicago built expressways that linked the suburbs with the center of the city. Intended to ease traffic flow, these high-speed corridors instead drove away residents and businesses and tore apart inner-city neighborhoods. The construction of the Congress Expressway involved the demolition of 250 buildings in the Loop alone and displaced thousands of households, at a cost of $6.2 million a mile.

The cars pouring into Chicago had to park somewhere. In the 1950s, the city acquired enough land to build 74 garages that held over 14,000 cars. The number of parking garages grew until 1972. That year the city passed an ordinance banning new parking-garage construction in an effort to discourage people from driving downtown.

African Americans on Chicago’s South Side, Mexicans and other recent immigrants on the West Side, and older immigrant communities on the Northwest Side all lost homes, neighborhoods, and livelihoods to highway construction. Chicago residents were not able to stop the construction of a new highway until 1972, when the city threatened to tear down more than 30,000 housing units to build the Crosstown Expressway.

Urban Renewal

Chicago’s leaders saw expressway building as a way to clear slums. Between 1948 and 1956, more than 6,000 Chicago families lost their homes to “highway takes.” Most of the new expressways went through poor and minority neighborhoods, like this one at 45th and Wentworth, which was demolished for the new 14-lane Southside Expressway (now called the Dan Ryan). Soon dubbed the world’s busiest expressway, the Southside created a barrier between inner-city black and ethnic white neighborhoods.