u/BasicManufacturer653

Everyone here knows the ditch. Six lanes, 1.39 miles, traffic lights at both ends, and it connects to nothing.

What I did not know until I read the records is the order things happened in. The demolition was not the last step of a decision. It was the first step, and it ran a decade before anyone finished deciding. By the time the road opened in 1979, every expressway it was supposed to connect to had already been cancelled. The houses were gone anyway.

971 homes, 62 businesses, a school. More than 2,800 people moved out of the middle of West Baltimore. Those numbers are from MDOT's own 2024 grant narrative, the one asking for money to study undoing it.

The part that stuck with me: the neighborhoods that fought later, in the southeast and in Rosemont, mostly kept their houses. The corridor that got cleared first never got that chance, and the reason is not a mystery. This city passed the first racial zoning ordinance in the United States in 1910, and forty years of covenants and redlining concentrated Black Baltimore into exactly the place the planners later called the path of least resistance.

I put it together as a documentary with the archival photographs and the planning documents: They Demolished 971 Homes for 1.4 Miles of Freeway That Connects to Nothing

RecentIy I fell down a rabbit hole in the digitized archives - the Cincinnati Museum Center and Library of Congress have hundreds of the city engineer's construction photos from 1920–1925, most of which barely circulate online. I ended up making a 14-minute documentary trying to answer the question that bugged me: not that the subway failed, but why.

The Subway That Never Ran a Train

The short version: the $6M bond was approved in 1916, fixed in dollars, then WWI froze construction for four years while inflation roughly doubled the cost. The city started digging anyway in 1920, knowing the math. What got me is the detail I keep coming back to: there's a finished platform edge at the Race Street station, poured to the exact height of a train floor - for a train that was never ordered.

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The Station That Refused to Die: Cincinnati Demolished Half of America's Grandest Train Station, Then Kept Voting to Save the Rest (2026) [16:56]

The platforms of Cincinnati Union Terminal, overgrown after the last train left in 1972 [OS]

The train concourse of Cincinnati Union Terminal being demolished, 1974. Citizens raised $400,000 to cut the murals out of the walls first; one mural was too large to move and came down with the building

Two girls on a merry-go-round in a downtown Baltimore park, photographed for the EPA's DOCUMERICA project, 1973 [3000x2001]

Abandoned vehicles piling up beside the Baltimore-Washington Parkway under a cigarette billboard, 1973

Cincinnati Union Terminal floodlit on opening night, 1933. The largest half dome in the Western Hemisphere, built for 216 trains a day

A rowhouse in West Baltimore's Black middle-class Franklin-Mulberry corridor, photographed by the federal government in 1969 because it was about to be demolished for a freeway that was never connected to anything. People were still living in it

Baltimore tore down 971 homes for the Highway to Nowhere. I went through the paper trail on how a road nobody could finish got built anyway.

Cincinnati's subway: two miles of tunnel and four stations, built in the 1920s, never opened, still sealed under the city

Cincinnati's subway: two miles of tunnel and four stations, built in the 1920s, never opened, still sealed under the city

Cincinnati's subway: two miles of tunnel and four stations, built in the 1920s, never opened, still sealed under the city

In 1920, Cincinnati started building a subway. Two miles of tunnel and four stations are still sitting under Central Parkway — and no train has ever run through them. I made a short documentary about why, using the city engineer's original photos.

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