Have we learned anything since 1961?
In the early 1960s, the construction of I-45 along the western edge of Downtown literally destroyed a neighborhood. Freedman’s town — the oldest African-American neighborhood in Houston — was divided by the new freeway and its ramps, leaving the old business district to the east to be taken over by office buildings (the only survivor is Antioch Baptist Church, in the shadow of the former Enron building) and sending the residential areas to the west on a long decline that ended with wholesale demolitions for townhouse construction in the past 10 years.
Now a real estate executive and an architect, lamenting how freeways divide neighborhoods, propose to move I-45 into the middle of neighborhoods in the old First and Sixth Wards, places that somehow survived being surrounded by I-45, I-10, and Memorial Drive. I will grant them that a depressed freeway is less harmful to the neighborhoods around it than an elevated one. But it is definitely more harmful than no freeway at all.
The purpose of this proposal appears to be to re-connect the street grid and to build a new park around Buffalo Bayou. These are good goals. But the idea of harming a residential neighborhood to build a park — especially a park primarily intended for people who do not live in that neighborhood — is straight out of the day of Robert Moses. Worse yet, we can achieve much of that goal without the damage. Our fact sheet notes a Downtown District proposal to move the freeway slightly west — onto city courts property — and realign ramps to pull it off the bayou and relink streets. That would address the freeway’s owrst impact on Downtown — the structures that shadow Buffalo Bayou just behind Bayou Place and the Hobby Center and form a visual barrier between City Hall and Eleanor Tinsley Park — and it would not destroy a historic neighborhood. Or, given the funds, we could tunnel under the bayou.
You’re welcome to elevate the discussion in our forums.
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