Road to Nowhere - How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore

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.

About the author

Emily Lieb is a writer and historian in Seattle, Washington.

Product details

• Authors: Emily Lieb, Emily Lieb
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.11.2025
• EAN: 9780226844381
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84438-1
• No. of pages: 240
• Series: Historical Studies of Urban America
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Technology > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; USA, 20th Century, Social & cultural history, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, TRANSPORTATION / Automotive / History, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Social and cultural history, United States of America, USA, History of engineering and technology, History of engineering & technology, History of the Americas, Road & motor vehicles: general interest, Road and motor vehicles: general interest, HISTORY / African American & Black, Relating to African American / Black American people