The highway that could have destroyed South Street

Imagine South Street, a longtime cradle of creativity, buried under concrete like the Vine Street Expressway.

It almost happened.

Today, the Vine is sunken below grade, a stub of a freeway. Parking lots front blocks above, the thrum of vehicles is constant, and the air reeks of exhaust. On the east end, ramps to I-95 and the Ben Franklin Bridge and speeding cars on surface streets menace pedestrians.

Planners wanted to build a twin, the Crosstown Expressway, 60 years ago — an eight-lane monster that would stretch 2.8 miles from I-76 to I-95 along the southern edge of Center City, bulldozing 6,000 homes, wiping out business districts, and obliterating the historic Black community of Hawthorne.

When the proposed Crosstown was first drawn as dashes on a map in 1947, the idea was the latest in progressive urban planning. With the Vine Street Expressway, I-76, and I-95, Center City would be bound in a rectangle of highways to speed drivers to the central business district.

Edmund N. Bacon, an architect and city planner who stamped modern Center City with his design vision of “form and movement,” pushed for the Crosstown for decades.

But working-class Black residents in Hawthorne, self-described hippies and artists colonizing South Street, Society Hill settlers, and liberal anti-machine Democrats in Center City all stuck together and fought a proposal that kept popping up like a chain saw murderer in a horror movie.

They saved their homes and scored one of the nation’s rare early victories against urban expressways, helping change the focus of planning cities’ built environment toward accommodating people more than cars.

“It was just a stupid idea. Why would you need another eight-lane highway to go 20 or 30 blocks?” said John F. Hunt, a lawyer who represented the neighborhoods. “You were putting a vibrant city in a box of highways and pollution and traffic congestion — all stuff we continue to deal with.”

Neighborhoods in other cities were not able to stop similar projects, and now, federal and state governments are spending billions in places like Detroit and Syracuse, N.Y., to demolish the kind of mistake Philadelphia almost made on South Street, in part with money from the 2021 infrastructure law that included a focus on highways in damaged neighborhoods.

In Philadelphia, two expensive (but partial) fixes are now underway to mitigate damage caused by freeways here: the Chinatown Stitch and the I-95 cap at Penn’s Landing.

The Stitch is a planned $158 million cap across part of the Vine Street Expressway, with a public park built on top, joining northern and southern sections of Chinatown separated by the roadway’s trench.

Construction continues on the $360 million project to cover I-95 between Chestnut and Walnut Streets, bridging Old City and the Delaware River — restoring a connection lost when the expressway and sound barriers blocked a busy port there. An 11.5-acre Park at Penn’s Landing will sit on the cover, sloping down to the riverbank.

But even as Philadelphia reckons with past blunders, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is proceeding with an I-95 expansion.

If the Crosstown Expressway had engulfed South Street, it, too, might be undergoing a makeover today.

The grassroots defeat of that project between 1968 and 1973 kept intact what are now some of the most vital neighborhoods in Philadelphia and, with no concrete moat separating South Philadelphia from the area to the north, set the stage for explosive growth.

One of the great lessons of the Crosstown, according to Paul Levy, an urban planner and former executive director of the Center City District, “is that it shows when you don’t build these huge, oversize infrastructure projects only around the automobile … it reinforces all the great strengths of the city, its walkability, its continuity.”

Following World War II, Detroit was turning out cars again instead of tanks — think V-8s, chrome, and tail fins. The economy was roaring, and America was on the move away from cities.

Two federal policy interventions — subsidized mortgages and the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 — seeded the growth of suburbs filled with new homes. Redlining, the federal government’s practice of labeling neighborhoods as “hazardous” or “declining” based on the race of residents and making them ineligible for federally backed mortgages, reinforced flight from cities.

Philadelphia’s once-robust industrial sector also was shrinking and shedding jobs. The city’s population went into decline, and poverty rates increased.

By the 1950s, many cities’ leaders embraced expressways to give suburbanites quick access to the core for shopping, entertainment, and jobs in office towers, hoping to preserve the prosperity of the city.

And they were a bargain for locals: Washington would pay 90% of the cost of construction for new expressway links in President Dwight Eisenhower‘s interstate system.

City government and political leaders had been discussing the concept of a “ring road” around Center City since the 1930s, when autos began to clog local streets at rush hour.

When Robert B. Mitchell, executive director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission, traced the Crosstown Expressway with his pencil in 1947, the idea was to ease congestion as well as tie the offices and retail stores in the central business district to the burgeoning suburbs.

Construction on the Schuylkill Expressway would begin in 1949. The Delaware Expressway (I-95) and the Vine Street Expressway were in the planning stages.

Mitchell’s proposed Crosstown Expressway along the border between Center City and South Philadelphia was intended to close the loop. A short spur would connect the interstate to another in Grays Ferry, according to the city’s 1962 master plan.

The proposal made a certain amount of sense until the group of people living where the Crosstown was supposed to go resisted, changing Philadelphia and more.

“They’re a vanguard,” said Steven Conn, a professor of urban history at Miami University of Ohio and a former Philadelphian who has written about the Crosstown and other clashes.

Philadelphia’s grassroots resistance was much more than a typical not-in-my-backyard campaign. “I think what you also see there is the first stirrings of people who are committing to being in the city in the midst of all of this ongoing flight out to the suburbs,” Conn said.

“It involved notions of community in a socially diverse kind of environment,” he said. “It involved feeling a connection to the past, in the middle of the 20th century, when everything was supposed to be new, modern, and you tore all the old things down.”

Opposition coalesced in the early to mid-1960s at the east end of South Street, among the hippies and artists taking advantage of rock-bottom rents — and in Hawthorne to the west.

There, people rallied around Alice Lipscomb, a charismatic longshoreman’s wife who had led earlier fights for better housing and against urban renewal, a federal program that marked “slum” areas for demolition and rebuilding.

She wanted the community itself to revitalize Hawthorne’s homes and businesses instead of letting them fall to bulldozers, to be replaced by public-housing towers and new rowhouses that could lead to gentrification and displacement.

As the Crosstown proposal persisted, Lipscomb played a key role in organizing interracial opposition that included the hippies and working-class, mostly white neighborhoods such as Queen Village, Bella Vista, and Devil’s Pocket.

For Philadelphia, it was an unheard-of alliance.

Housing had been Lipscomb’s cause, beginning in the 1950s. Then, as now, Philadelphia had a severe shortage, especially of affordable options, and many of the aging properties in Hawthorne were in disrepair.

Though “urban renewal” and the building of interstates were separate Washington initiatives, they often were developed in tandem in poor and Black neighborhoods.

Later, Lipscomb educated people about the potential impact of the Crosstown Expressway plan on their neighborhood and helped to organize the Citizens Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community. By 1967, it was making a case to the city and the state that construction of the three-block-wide expressway would destroy hundreds of homes in Hawthorne alone.

“I was just determined, no matter what had to be done or who I had to involve, or who I had to go to … we had to stop that expressway to get some help for people," Lipscomb said in the 2001 Miriam Camitta documentary Crosstown.

She also organized resistance to state appraisals and money offered to residents to demolish their homes for the roadway. The housing crisis became a factor in slowing down the project, too, as the city’s redevelopment authority proved unable to find comparable housing for people, as required by law.

“If you put a highway there, it would have been a Mason-Dixon Line. You would cut off the south from the north,” George T. Dukes, a collaborator with Lipscomb, said in the documentary. “And I’m afraid that the community south of the proposed highway would never have been developed.”

Lipscomb also raised environmental concerns, marshaling statistics on the health effects of pollution. She said the Crosstown would be a “curtain of carbon monoxide,” targeting an overlooked and poor community.

“Alice was just a force. People just came to her,” said John Coates, an urban planner hired with federal funds to work with the Crosstown Community. “I mean, she knew everybody, all the politicians. They respected her.”

As the coalition’s political power grew, more elected officials took notice, listened, and aided the cause, including City Council members from the area, state representatives, and others.

Hawthorne had deep roots as one of the oldest Black urban communities in America.

“I think of them as indigenous. They were there many generations and some families could go back to slavery in Philadelphia,” said Marcus Anthony Hunter, professor of sociology and African American studies at UCLA.

W.E.B. Du Bois, a Harvard-trained sociologist, lived in what was known as the Black Seventh Ward as he reported and wrote The Philadelphia Negro, a landmark sociological study published in 1899.

“Communities existing for hundreds of years have deep claims … but how important where they lived to them wasn’t even considered. And that is very, very, very telling about the logic and framework” behind the Crosstown Expressway, Hunter said.

The professor, who grew up at 12th and Christian Streets, wrote about the expressway battle in his 2013 book, Black Citymakers. It was a turning point in the growth of Black political power.

The defeat of the Crosstown occurred amid the Civil Rights Movement and urban unrest.

In 1964 a North Philadelphia uprising sparked by police brutality was still fresh in the city’s collective mind. The Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles erupted in 1965. And in the summer of 1967, riots broke out in largely Black areas of 150 cities, including Detroit and Newark, N.J.

Mitchell, originator of the Crosstown proposal, cited the racial climate in 1967 when he opposed building the highway in a letter to Mayor James H.J. Tate.

“Psychologically, the city cannot afford at this time to have one more symbol of separation between the Black community and City Hall,” wrote Mitchell, by then a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

All of these political forces converged in the 1967 mayor‘s race, with Tate, a Democrat, facing Arlen Specter, the Republican district attorney. Tate switched to opposing the Crosstown, which pleased liberal Democrats who disliked him, as well as many Black voters.

Tate’s victory marked the first reported death of the Crosstown Expressway.

A hit song by a Philly vocal group called the Orlons in 1963 dubbed South Street “the hippest street in town.”

By that point, however, South Street was fading physically and economically. It had been designated for the proposed Crosstown Expressway for over a decade. Real estate values were plunging. Some owners sold businesses and fled, leaving vacant storefronts.

Young artists, entrepreneurs, hippies, and LGTBQ people began moving into cheap properties, bringing countercultural verve to the neighborhood.

Art galleries and studios, natural food stores, and craft shops — and the Theatre of the Living Arts — joined the existing storefront churches, grocers, dressmakers, thrift shops, and junk dealers.

The newcomers formed the South Street Renaissance.

“Some friends and I decided we would take acid (LSD) and stand in the middle of South Street and watch the solar eclipse,” Joel Spivak said in a 2024 interview, describing the group’s unusual origin on March 7, 1970.

“Neighbors started to get together to talk about [how] we didn’t have to move,” said Spivak, who died April 21 at age 85. Conversations grew into a movement, and the Renaissance joined Lipscomb‘s forces opposing the Crosstown.

In 1968, New York artists Isaiah and Julia Zagar, the best-known South Street pioneers, bought a house on the 400 block for $10,000.

It had no plumbing, but plenty of possibilities.

“We lived in the shell and renovated it at the same time,” said Isaiah Zagar, 85, whose best known mosaic creation, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, is a South Street landmark.

Said Julia Zagar, 85, a gallerist and arts educator: “People didn’t believe anyone would want to move in because there was going to be this huge expressway.”

The Zagars, former Peace Corps volunteers, jumped into the South Street Renaissance.

The group’s members held a mock funeral at City Hall, complete with a donkey-cart hearse. Block parties on South Street, a “Hippie House Tour,” art gallery parties, an Easter Promenade, and live music put the fun in protest and helped build community. They fought the on-again, off-again threat of a six-lane concrete canyon obliterating their neighborhood.

“South Street brought us all together,” said Marge Schernecke, 77, a leader of opposition to the Crosstown in the Queen Village neighborhood.

“The South Street Renaissance group had a stake in the neighborhood. They were artists and restaurant owners,” she said. “They were creative, and they taught us how to protest.”

By the early 1970s, growing development and neighborhood economic activity had driven up the cost of acquiring properties for the expressway. Federal officials were impatient with Philadelphia’s dithering.

In 1972, Mayor Frank Rizzo, who had been elected the year before, proposed a second version of the expressway, which he said would combine transportation and community redevelopment. Called “Southbridge,” the $750 million plan would build 10,000 housing units, 14,000 parking spaces, and high-rises on a concrete cap over a depressed six-lane highway.

The mayor’s South Philadelphia base didn’t want this version either, and neither did the South Street groups. Rizzo and Alice Lipscomb respected each other and had a good working relationship, according to Coates and others.

Rizzo promised a community referendum on the project. State authorities said that was unworkable.

By 1974, the expressway was dead.

Yet even after the Crosstown idea was erased, officials made persistent proposals for new on- and off-ramps to feed I-95. South, Lombard, and other local streets would have become corridors linking the interstate to Center City.

Neighbors fought until 1990, when those plans stopped.

“We had Irish, Black, Italian, Polish, artists. Everybody. It was a unique combination of people,” Coates said. There were disagreements, even yelling at some meetings, he recalled, but the coalition didn’t break.

“It was a different time,” Coates said. “People were thinking ‘What’s good for me is good for him or her. What’s not good for him or her is not good for me. So we better bond together.’”

Influential architect Denise Scott Brown, 93, designed an alternative development plan alongside the Crosstown neighborhoods coalition in 1968. Her late husband, architect Robert Venturi, was the son of a South Street fruit and vegetable vendor familiar to older residents.

Their plan was never built.

But Philadelphia “didn’t get that expressway,” Scott Brown said in a recent interview. “South Street is still there.”

So how did an idea opposed so fiercely by so many people linger for so many years?

The Crosstown Expressway was the product of the Great Planner era in American cities — New York power broker Robert Moses, for example, and architect/planner Bacon in Philadelphia.

Unlike some urban designers, Bacon did not want to banish cars. “The automobile must be treated as an honored guest” in the city, he said.

He had a grand vision of a freeway collar around Center City, of which the Crosstown would have been a part. People would park their cars in garages on the edges of the center and then walk or take transit to get around inside.

But Bacon and his fellow planners pursued notions of “progress” in a top-down authoritarian way. We know best. We are the experts. The movers, the shakers, the makers.

Levy interviewed residents of Queen Village for a 1978 oral history in which Crosstown opponents remembered Bacon as condescending and dismissive.

“They said, ‘He looked at us, he patted us on the head, and essentially said — Yes, my children.’ And then went off and did whatever he wanted,‘’ Levy said.

Fights against the Crosstown Expressway and other mega projects fueled a growing public backlash from people who wanted their city streetscapes on a more human scale.

“That’s really when planning as a profession, as an entity, became more democratic,” said Mike Boyer, director of regional planning for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

“It was the powerful, the business interests, who were dictating” the Crosstown plan, Boyer said. “That was really the point where the public started getting a voice.”

Six decades later, Philadelphians are still arguing about traffic congestion and the interstates that slice through the city.

The latest dispute is over PennDot’s plan to reconstruct the southern portion of I-95 from the Ben Franklin Bridge to the Walt Whitman Bridge, part of a multiphase renovation.

“There is a certain kind of political amnesia” about urban highway projects, said Rick Snyderman, who founded Works, an iconic South Street art gallery, in 1965.

Planners want to build new I-95 ramps that have gentler curves but would take up more space, widen travel lanes, and expand the Walt Whitman toll plaza.

South Philadelphia residents are up in arms about it, predicting an increase in traffic that will spill onto neighborhood streets.

Patrick Fitzmaurice, president of the Pennsport Civic Association, grew up hearing his mother’s stories about her family was forced to relocate from the Snyder Avenue home in 1964 to make way for I-95.

“People still feel sting of eminent domain,” he said. “And they are still showing up and telling everyone that we are going to have to deal with the ramifications of their construction.”

Veterans of battles against the Crosstown Expressway, many now in their 80s, are lining up on South Philly’s side.

PennDot says that the proposed changes are about safety. In the South Philly stretch, I-95 has narrow shoulders and lanes that end abruptly near exits, requiring dangerous merges.

“Freeways were largely built with a 50-year lifespan. So now we’re having to go back and rebuild all of those things, and a lot of times that includes bringing them up to modern safety standards,” said Brett Fusco, associate director of comprehensive planning for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

Yet in its written proposal, PennDot also says reconstruction of the southern portion of I-95 is justified by projections of increased traffic generated by growing economic activity at port facilities and distribution centers, the airport, the Navy Yard, and proposed warehouses and other commercial development on the former Sunoco refinery site.

But, according to a law of highway physics called “induced demand,” it doesn’t matter how many lanes you build, traffic always fills the newly available space and then some. Roads become congested again.

A completed segment of I-95 through Port Richmond, Fishtown, and Northern Liberties ended up being 20 feet wider than the original, increasing the barrier between neighborhoods and the Delaware River. New interchange ramps at Girard and Aramingo overspread several city streets.

Marge Schernecke, 77, grew up on Front Street and lives there still, a few blocks north of her childhood home. She witnessed bulldozers sweeping away houses when I-95 rose to block the city from its Delaware River waterfront.

“They robbed us of our heritage. They robbed us of our history,” she said.

So Schernecke and her husband, Alex, are gearing up to resist an I-95 project once again.

“PennDot still hasn’t learned from the Crosstown experience,” Alex Schernecke, 77, said. “It isn’t right.”

This story has been updated to correct the name of the gallery owned by Rick Snyderman.