The history of how cars took over the city is generally accepted, but it’s also a conqueror’s history — the cars won over spaces for people, and the version most people know is the cars’ version.

Often forgotten is just how extensive and pervasive the impact of those changes were as they accumulated over decades. What if you could redraw every sidewalk, replant every tree, rebuild every building lost more-or-less because cars were prioritized over people? You would not likely recognize the place.

Fulton Avenue in Baltimore provides a pretty stark example of the change in character wrought on particular physical places by accommodating cars over all else. As a historic racial dividing line, Fulton Avenue serves particularly to remind us that generally, giving cars priority in our cities was at the expense of an urban, black community and to the benefit of a suburban, auto-dependent, white community.

Apartheid in Baltimore

Fulton Avenue in the 1880s. Image Credit: Not in My Neighborhood by Antero Pietela

Fulton Avenue runs through the heart of West Baltimore. It’s a long boulevard lined with stately Victorian-era rowhomes. In the photo above, note the wide median. You can get a sense for the scale of the street — the amount of space devoted to road as opposed to pedestrian space.

In his book, “Not in My Neighborhood,” author Antero Pietela describes Fulton Avenue’s role as a racial demarcation line in Baltimore. From the time the city enacted the nation’s first racial segregation zoning ordinance in 1910 (inventing a kind of U.S. apartheid copied by other cities), Fulton Avenue served as a barrier dividing whites and blacks — whites on the west side, blacks on the east. This division lasted until 1944.

Before Cars (and Trucks)

Fulton Avenue looking north from Edmondson Avenue — 1951 Image Credit: The Baltimore Book

In the photograph above, Fulton Avenue is shown at what must be considered its peak. In the 60 years since the first photograph, the wide green median is lined with ornamental lights, and a generous tree canopy has grown up on either side of the street. There are two single lanes of travel, north and southbound, with a single lane of parking on both sides. The photo is taken at Fulton Avenue and Edmondson Avenue. Streetcar tracks appear to run along Edmondson, and there are signs banning left turns onto Edmondson and otherwise directing traffic.

A sign designating Fulton Avenue as part of Maryland State Highway Route 1 is also visible. Designation of an urban thoroughfare as a state highway often meant the decline of the surrounding community, as the political impetus mounted to clear more urban territory out of the way of the car trip between the downtown central business district and whatever tony suburban neighborhoods located on new expressways and interstates.

As an aside — there may be times when losing some pedestrian space is necessary or is acceptable. That’s because it’s not the size of pedestrian facilities, but rather the overall quality of street design that matters. (For example, to fix Fulton Avenue from the condition you will see in the last photograph, perhaps a complete streets design with bike lanes would be preferable to returning the wide median or expanding sidewalks). However, loss of pedestrian space simply to allow more cars to travel at higher speeds through residential neighborhoods and main streets creates such drastic debilitating effects that it can rarely, if ever, be justified.

Changes to Fulton Avenue

Soon, Fulton Avenue — now part of black West Baltimore — got hit with an additional misfortune. As traffic of all kinds piled up in the downtown area, one emerging problem was getting heavy truck traffic out of it. At mid-century, a route was sought through Baltimore that would avoid the bottleneck downtown, and Fulton Avenue was among the streets chosen for that route (Pietella mentions this in his book, too).

At the same time, Baltimore was struggling citywide to rebuild its tree canopy that had declined during the war years, when resources were not always available to tend and maintain the trees. Those who wanted to rebuild the canopy would lose to cars and traffic engineers for a few reasons: (1) increased car exhaust killed trees, (2) the engineers were often widening roads and taking sidewalk, median, or other pedestrian space, often eliminating trees as a result, and (3) sometimes engineers would just flat out eliminate trees, which in the context of road design (if speed of automobiles is the singular goal) present a hazard to drivers who may lose control of their careening vehicles and crash into them.

Trees are not just about aesthetics — they reduce the urban heat island effect and provide shade that can literally be the difference between life or death on sweltering summer days. There is even a proven correlation between neighborhoods with tree cover and reduced crime.

The Result

Fulton Ave today with few trees and a much narrower median.

Here is the same intersection today, Fulton Avenue and Edmondson Avenue. The median is drastically reduced. There’s barely a tree in sight (though trees have returned to some stretches of Fulton Avenue, and generally there is citywide progress being made to restore tree canopy).

There are four vehicle travel lanes in addition to two parking lanes. Likely the four travel lanes are even oversized, as urban traffic engineers during the 20th century would famously over-design urban roads to match the “forgiving geometry” of highways (suggesting to the driver, in the process, that highway speeds are appropriate on city residential or commercial main streets).

In short, it’s a far cry from the 1951 photograph, and a reminder that as we fight to restore our urban communities to walkable/livable status, we have plenty of examples not only the successful communities that existed just a few generations ago, but of the toxic thinking that attacked and undermined those communities.