My family has been based in the South Bay of LA since the 50s. Living in my grandparents old house here in Torrance for the last decade, it became obvious to me that the freeway creates a boundary line. It sickens me to learn this was done purposely. It’s going to take a while for me to fully digest this. Every Angeleno needs to see this vid!
@@teslashark Boston's big dig too. Black, Italian, Irish, Polish, etc. Just acres and acres of working class neighborhoods demolished and the city split.
Caveat: don't tear them down to then strengthen other walls. The I-45 realignment project in Houston will tear down an urban freeway separating Downtown from the now-gentrifiying west and southwest, but will demolish another block of the poorer east side, resulting in a highway box 2-3 blocks wide.
Makes me nauseous. Thanks for the video. Black people in this country have just been screwed over and over and over again from every direction, and then get blamed for being poor.
i agree with you, @@billyodamit8709 , but in a different way; how i frame it is this: we should work on to fix injustice, not wallow in grief over it. - mico
There is a great story about how South Philly residents successfully stopped the creation of a highway along South St. through the neighborhood in the 70s. Alas, the Vine St. Expressway, which opened in 1991, bifurcated the Chinatown neighborhood.
So if this expressway divided the Chinese community, did they get angry and decide to turn their area into a violent, crime ridden neighborhood? Or did they adapt and make lemonade out of lemons?
@@thiccum2668 This kind of stuff is even more impactful if it tells a story about somewhere you think of as your home nowadays. Makes you think deeply about your surroundings instead of simply accepting it. I'm sure most cities in the US could make a great video like this one about one of their neighborhoods
We need a wider movement to remove urban freeways and reconnect neighborhoods. This would also help with the housing crisis as it would open up thousands of acres for affordable housing development.
The fact that they built it as a half sunken freeway too makes me puke the most, cause at least with an elevated freeway, it would've been still possible to keep the original road networks or at least easily rebuild them with development bellow them, to at least insure the neighborhood would remain somewhat connected together rather than create a unpassible "car filled moat".
@@jamesparson there are literally endless possibilities. Bikes, busses, trains, ride shares, taxis, subsidized taxi's, horses, rickshaws. The most obvious is right under your nose. Also it's closer to 73%.
That bird's eye view from 4:00 onwards is so damning. Just an ugly scar cutting through the city. Fantastic work here, my hometown of Charlotte is no stranger to such freeway projects and the ramifications for our communities have been dire
Same here in Cincinnati. They completely demolished the West End, causing black owned grocery stores, banks, barber shops, theaters, funeral homes etc. etc to close. It broke the community up, separated friends, families, congregations and organizations. Then, after they completely devastated the black community they had the gall to say "look at those people and their broken communities. Why can't they be like us?" White, European, Colonialist mentality.
So what stopped black people from moving their businesses to other parts of their neighborhood and rebuilding and reopening? That's what people do all the time when they have to move whether it be because of government infrastructure projects or because of rising rent/lease prices that they can no longer afford and so they move and reopen elsewhere.
@UzumakiNaruto_ oh my, I didn't realize it would have been so simple. But since you're obviously such a simple person, I'm not going to waste my time explaining such a complicated concept to you.
@@claudermiller Sometimes it REALLY IS that simple. Someone just mentioned elsewhere in this comment section that one of Philadelphia's Chinese communities was partially torn down to build the Vine Street Expressway through their neighborhood back in the 1960s. Did the Chinese community there end up turning their area into a poor and dangerous place to go to? Or did they adapt and build a thriving community that tourists still travel and visit to this day? So if the Chinese people there could adapt to their community being partially torn down, why can't other people do the same?
Brilliant video-- thanks for doing this important work to raise awareness. Absurd and shameful that in 2024 Nikki Haley has the audacity to claim that America "‘has never been a racist country" and sadly, she is far from being the only politician to present such a false narrative. Love how this project states the simple, ugly facts of institutionalized racism though real estate practices and "urban renewal," devoid of emotion or political bias. America has a lot of healing, reconciliation and reflection to do.
It's kind of unbelievable, in a really bleak way, to realize that every major city in the US has at least one, if not many stories pretty similar to this
It’s even more unbelievable when the majority of whites will blame blacks for their own downfall instead of acknowledging that no group can stand against the US government
1:28 Wow, US racism knows no bounds, especially pre civil rights. Even the verbiage“Hebrew, Negro, colored, & Mongolian race” sounds very pseudoscience phrenology categorization from WWII ‘knot-seas’.
Meh, negro just means black and Asian isn't as descriptive as Mongolian when discussing east Asians. Because Indians, Turks, Persian and Israelis all fall under the broad term of Asian.
i was just driving through there last weekend google routed me through those neighborhoods because of traffic and I tend to forget just how beautiful the houses that are still remaining are.
Thank you for sharing. You thought me so much today in this mini short video. I always enjoy looking at old footage of Los Angeles and hearing stories that most of Los Angeles have attempted to forget. Thank you again.
oh im soooo glad to have found youre also doing RU-vid content. thank you for covering my hometown LA so fantastically. -a long time instagram follower
The main characters in Apple TV’s Lessons in Chemistry live in Sugar Hill and the show covers this subject. I’m from LA and didn’t know about Sugar Hill.
Wow, you know I often hear people say that the freeways destroyed and displaced communities but I never really understood what that truly meant until I saw it visualized in this video. Especially the sequence at 3:54 really puts it into perspective.
I learned about this from a NotJustBikes video. I had never really thought about segregation by design, it's just a powerful tool. Thanks for providing educative content.
So much political narrative revolves around erasure of racist history and that the phrase ‘systemic racism’ doesn’t exist in America this proves that it’s so interwound in our legal system and still exists in a lot of communities today. This was extremely enlightening and dare I say (in a complimentary way) WOKE!
I NEVER knew this. Thanks for sharing this story. Please share more stories like this about Black Los Angeles. It's fascinating. Along with the tragedy that was the erasure of Black-owned Bruce's Beach in Manhattan Beach (also seized by imminent domain), I also read about a neighborhood in Venice called Dogtown that was set aside for Black residents by the land developer of "Venice of America" Abbott Kenny (along the street where Abbot Kenny Boulevard is today) would be great to hear about that story too. Thanks!
Hopefully the future will result in many large lanes and freeways getting reclaimed for bikes, tramways, light rail, and pedestrian use. This would repair SOME of the racialized development over the years, though not all, and it will help everyone by making greener more accessible cities. This is what I hope we can start being focused on now.
We had a 1890 Victorian Home in Bunker Hill Downtown Los Angeles. Unfortunately our ranch was illegal destroyed by the Orsini Apartment Developer in 2003-2004. When it’s in the best interest for the city, they take what they want by eminent domain. No matter the race , corruption will win .
You gotta do a video on the East LA interchange, the busiest interchange in the world, and how it made life for the Mexican Americans in the neighborhood difficult.
Just made a video touching on another neighborhood the 10 destroyed and briefly glanced at Sugar Hill! Great to see other channels touching on the destruction LA's freeways caused and the racisim rooted in!
videos like this make me more enlighten but its a bitter sweet moment at the end. you realize this still goes on. in every city you see who gets catered to the most. sadly us who are"poor" or live bad areas have so much going on just trying to live, we forget to stick up for ourselves by using the LAW. something wealthy ppl always throw in your face.
Here in Lansing, Michigan a highway called I-496 was built in the early 1960’s and finished by 1970 or so. It was built through what was a predominantly black neighborhood. 600 houses were destroyed. I only found out about this recently from a video of the history published by a local station.
This happened in Detroit's Black neighborhood called, 'Black Bottom.' Boxer, Joe Louis lived there, before the lodge freeway destroyed the neighborhood
A shocking and visceral documentary. However, it was impossible for no one to "lose out". The freeways had to be built. Perhaps the biggest fault was that the city didn't plan for those freeways ahead enough. If you look at the freeways, they are pretty much straight shots from downtown. The 10 and 110 in particular. Can't get much straighter. Every city has freeways.
These videos are so well made but so painful to watch. We destroyed so many great neighborhoods, not to mention the immense impact on the resident’s lives
Dont forget the Japanese Americans and Caucasians that suffered from imminent domain crimes. We all bleed red. The government sucks the same when you are targeted. Power to the people.
Same happened in NE Denver for construction of Stapleton International Airport . . . all blacks whom had homes of planned North/South runway were involuntarily moved . . . thru Eminant Domain ! 😖 🇺🇸 💀
Ok big brain idea here, if you have two 4 Lane Roads running relativly parallel in the city, couldnt you turn them into one way roads and "improve" the signals in favor of that road, this way you have a 8 Lane defacto freeway that doesnt destroy the entire neighbourhodd.
