Portland’s Minnesota Freeway through North Portland, part of the Interstate 5 system, opened to automobile traffic on December 2, 1964 (The Oregonian, 3 December 1964). Construction of the $22 million, 4.8 mile strip of pavement began in 1959.
The freeway’s opening marked the end of an era for the neon-lit Interstate Avenue.
Traffic raced through North Portland in a trench, three blocks west of the Highway 99W surface route. At service stations, restaurants and motels along “the Avenue,” implications were setting in. The era of interstate travel on Interstate Avenue was over.
Read more at Cafe Unknown: Illuminating Interstate.
Damn, I used to think freeways were great and amazing things.
Something similar happened to Spokane. Interstate 90 was built in 1956 through the mostly-black East Central neighborhood. The district was cut in half, the easy ways to the commercial zones were severed, and Liberty Park lost more than 70-percent of its land.
My aunt’s house was in the same area, but a new freeway is being built now and her house was in the way. They had to move out in approximately 2004, and the contractors for the new freeway destroyed that house and many others. For years I could see the hole where that house once was, but now even the hole is gone, and the North Spokane Corridor is still 10 years from completion.
Travelling along Interstate 90 between the Trent and Freya exits, you can see a ton of empty lots, where in the next decade long, soaring freeway ramps will be.
Freeways are essential when built correctly and with heavy consideration. They can be destroyed if proven ineffective and the land they claimed revamped and revitalized. Such hasn’t happened in Spokane.