In his new book, Stop the Road:  Stories from the Trenches of Baltimore’s Road Wars, retired city planner E. Evans Paull tells the story of transportation plans that were overtly racist, and disastrously short-sighted. Had it not been for the tenacious efforts of neighborhood activists, some of Baltimore’s most cherished and beloved historic neighborhoods would be very different places today.

Those activists saved places like Fells Point, the Inner Harbor and Canton. Other, mostly Black neighborhoods didn’t survive the onslaught of highways intended to accommodate white suburbanites. Places like Rosemont on the West Side were destroyed. More than 1,500 residents were displaced. Dozens of businesses, even a school were eliminated in the service of a stretch of highway that was begun, but eventually halted after years of organized opposition.

The stories of the infamous Highway to Nowhere and the planned East-West Expressway are chronicled in Stop the Road.  Author E. Evans Paull joins Tom today in Studio A… 

Klaus Philipsen, an urban planner, community activist and president of the Baltimore architectural firm ArchPlan, Inc., is the author of Baltimore: Reinventing an Industrial Legacy City. He joins us to talk about some of the lessons that can be learned from the mistakes of the past. Klaus Philipsen is with us in Studio A as well.

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Evans Paull discusses Stop the Road and signs copies of his book tonight (Thursday, Dec. 8) from 7-8:30pm at Snug Books in Baltimore. For directions and more information, click here.

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