About this Item
Oblong folio. 15.5 x 11 in. 151, [1] pp. With maps, colour maps, diagrams, 5 colour mylar overlays, civil highway engineering elevation drawings, tables, charts. Original tan softcovers, plastic-comb binding as issued (wear, bumping, creasing to text block, some soiling & tidemark to back cover, edgewear, front cover retained and affixed w/ paper tape repair), still a good reference copy, from the library of A. Rodney Eckerson (1930-2024), former purchasing agent for the Port of Portland. First edition of this groundbreaking highway engineering, urban planning, and "blight" redevelopment plan released the year before funding began flowing to underwrite 90% of the eventual 42,500 mile interstate freeway "Expressway" system. Oregon leaders had contracted with New York urban planner Robert Moses" in 1943 to develop a public works program and highway building plan for the state, which included a series of core recommendations reflected in this later 1955 Traffic Engineering Technical Report prepared by Baldock & Williams, who pitched in the report that Portland be carved up by a series of freeways, and cleared of blighted urban neighborhoods. The Banfield Freeway which later became I-84 through East Portland was completed first in 1958, and largely was built over the remnants of a vast shanty town in Sullivan Gulch, but the construction of I-5 through North Portland began in earnest in 1962, directly demolishing 300 homes, and bisecting the African-American Lower Albina neighborhood, which at the time was the heart of the city's only majority black neighborhood. The original colour mylar overlays depict the projected growth of the city, and the increasing demand for roads as the interurban and electric railway system was either decommissioned, or condemned, and automobiles were the focus of transport into and around the city. Also included here is the proposed route for the Mount Hood Freeway, which was to run through East Portland all the way to Mt. Hood, and by 1969 had received the necessary funding, but by then considerable residential backlash had built, primarily due to the fact that the proposed Stadium Freeway I-405 ended up bisecting and leveling the former neighborhoods North & West of downtown Portland, near Goose Hollow, increasing removal of houses in North Portland along the I-5 construction was particularly bitter, and the introduction of the early plans for I-205 set off a revolt in Lake Oswego that would have as planned divided the community separating the schools from their community. Eventually after the election of Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, the Mount Hood Freeway project would finally be canceled, and the Federal money poured into mass transit projects. Although 11 copies are located in Worldcat, privately owned copies for sale in the trade are quite scarce; See: Val Ballestrem, "In the Shadow of a Concrete Forest:" Transportation Politics in Portland, Oregon, and the Revolt Against the Mount Hood Freeway, 1955-1976 (2009); Cortright, How a Freeway Destroyed a Neighborhood, and May Again (2019); Raymond Mohl, The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt (2002).
Seller Inventory # 62224
Contact seller
Report this item
