The Expressway "Motorists Loved to Hate": Philadelphia and The First Era of Postwar Highway Planning, 1943-1956
AT EXACTLY 12: io P.M. on November 25, 1958, Mayor Richardson Dilworth of Philadelphia radioed the city policemen stationed at the Vine Street entrance ramps to the new $100 million Schuylkill Expressway and ordered the patrol to dismantle the wooden barriers blocking access to the untraveled ribbon of concrete roadway. To the sounds of music provided by the police and firemen's band, a line of traffic rolled across the gleaming Vine Street Bridge and onto the recently finished section of express highway linking downtown Philadelphia to the Valley Forge Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. First started in 1950, the twenty-mile highway had taken eight years to complete. Probably because many of those motorists who braved the expressway that first day found the maze of access ramps confusing, traffic on the new roadway snarled immediately. More was involved than novice confusion. Less than a year later the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin carried a story about the "Schuylkill Clogway," and "Peak-Hour Nightmare." When vehicles were not stalled for hours on what irate commuters complained was the "largest parking lot in the world," they were, according to other critics, careening into walls and up and over unprotected embankments. Very soon the highway "motorists loved to hate," was popularly reviled as the "Surekill Expressway." A decade later, hoping to relieve congestion, planners seriously considered building a