‘Statistics show that Americans prefer their automobiles to all other forms of transportation.’ This strangely commonplace statement appeared in an otherwise sophisticated report issued in 1993 by the US Federal Highway Administration.Footnote 1 Routine claims such as this are based on statistics of mode usage, not mode preference, and the leap from the one measure to the other is fatal to validity. True, Americans’ reliance on automobiles grew throughout the twentieth century; by mid-century driving predominated even in most large US cities. But we cannot know what people prefer if they do not have good choices. Where the alternatives are unequal, practices tell us nothing about preferences.
The ubiquity of driving in twentieth-century America has too easily been confused for a pervasive preference for driving, and for driving under all circumstances, for all needs. The driving majority has also distracted us from the many who seldom or never drove, whether because of circumstances or preferences. It is not wrong to call the US a ‘car culture’, but like all nationalities, Americans have always been a diverse people. The twentieth-century US included many subcultures, among them persistent pedestrians: people who walked even in circumstances hostile to walking. Any account of car culture that excludes these subcultures risks misleading through omission.
In 1925, Los Angeles adopted a traffic ordinance that subordinated pedestrians to motor vehicles in city streets. It became a model for the nation.Footnote 2 In 1961, Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was published, accelerating an already growing appeal for a renewed appreciation of cities as places where people walk.Footnote 3 These events make convenient milestones bounding an era in which urban walking was at its lowest ebb in esteem, relative to the high confidence in the feasibility and desirability of the motor age city. But of course pedestrianism persisted in this era. Advocacy for pedestrianism found expression from heterodox transportation insiders; from newspaper editors, columnists and other people of influence; and from pedestrians themselves. It was expressed in popular fiction, in isolated acts of individual rebellion and in organized collective efforts. These advocates’ voices have gone almost unheard amid the din of the era's automobile enthusiasm. Acclaim of all things automotive reflected real optimism about the automobile's promise, but it was also much more audible because it was promoted and amplified by powerful interest groups with much at stake in it. The era's persistent pedestrianism, therefore, is hardly known at all.
Walking as a primary means of transport fell sharply as driving proliferated. Though this fact tells us nothing about preferences, it matters. Even people who turn to driving reluctantly, or as a last resort, must inevitably adopt the perspective and assume many of the interests of drivers. But despite conditions that grew increasingly hostile to walking, pedestrianism persisted. The persistence is impossible to quantify with any precision, because large-scale studies typically omitted pedestrians entirely – a practice that both reflected and reinforced the tendency to consider walking unimportant.
The persistence is unquantifiable also because it was generally surreptitious. To manage conditions hostile to walking, pedestrians improvised, disregarding rules as needed. Ubiquitous evasions of this kind left only the scantest traces in the historical record. Occasionally, however, the resistance was more organized, and calculated to attract attention. Such occasions of defiant pedestrianism yield press reports that offer evidence of enduring hardships and resentments. These in turn give us cause to conclude that many pedestrians regarded motor vehicles’ supremacy in streets was as an injustice to be resisted, more often by individual acts of evasion than by organized protests.
Where defiance won local support and sympathetic press coverage, it could compel official concessions. The most successful model proliferated in the 1950s amid ubiquitous car culture. In dense urban neighbourhoods that also accommodated fast driving, residents organized illegal blockades of hazardous streets or intersections. Such protests were often organized immediately after the injury or death of a child. At most blockades, most of the protesters were women, especially mothers who feared for the safety of their young children. Their demands were usually modest: lower speed limits, stop signs or a traffic light. In the typical blockade, residents, some bearing handmade signs, collectively made themselves into human traffic barriers, sitting in chairs or standing across the roadway, or picketing around an intersection.
At many such blockades, the obstructions included baby carriages (prams), occupied or not. They captured reporters’ attention, to the advantage of the protesters. The press called such protests ‘baby carriage blockades’.Footnote 4 These not only blocked traffic but rhetorically associated the protests with motherhood, with all its connotations. Spoken words, signs and imagery evoked the cause of child safety, but individual participants sometimes noted their personal grievances as pedestrians. One picketer at a 1959 baby carriage blockade in Queens told a reporter ‘sometimes it takes almost 10 minutes to cross the street’.Footnote 5 Hence, baby carriage blockades could be more than appeals for children's safe access to streets, but for pedestrians’ rights generally.
Baby carriage blockades were a volatile compound of reactive elements – at a minimum, they combined defiance of authority with the sanctity of motherhood. Among white women, flagrant lawbreaking in the name of motherhood and child safety was relatively safe and often won concessions from officialdom. Indeed, white blockades were in certain respects reminiscent of white protests in urban neighbourhoods to defend residential segregation. In both kinds of protests, participants thought of themselves as defending their local communities, and both causes receded with white flight to car-dependent suburbs. People of colour had no such advantages in protests. Black and Latino people participated in and led some of the earliest and largest blockades, but apparently only in big northern cities where there was safety in numbers and a black press to cover the story. Even there, demands for pedestrian safety could be risky. In 1963, a black Chicagoan noted disparate responses to pedestrians’ needs outside his butcher shop. When he asked police to address a hazard from trucks violating parking rules that were intended to protect pedestrians, the response was begrudging – indeed, police told truck drivers unhappy with enforcement to ‘see the butcher in the store. He wrote to the Superintendent of Police.’ He concluded sarcastically ‘maybe their convenience is more important than the lives of the Negro pedestrians whom they endanger’.Footnote 6 Non-white populations were disproportionately carless and hence exposed to the hazards and hardships of car domination. They had ample cause to demand better street conditions. But compared to white parents, most stood little chance of getting sympathetic press coverage or concessions from officialdom.
In 1969 and 1970, at the apogee of car culture, the US Census Bureau conducted major national surveys of transportation practices. Though most of the surveys neglected pedestrians, a few gave them some attention. The findings indicate that while walking indeed ceased to be a primary mobility mode for most Americans, it survived as a minority practice. Walking remained particularly important to people with fewer opportunities to drive, notably the poor, people of colour, women, the disabled and children. In 1970, 1 in 20 of all employed Americans walked to work. The rate among residents of cities was certainly much higher.Footnote 7 Naturally, for some populations walking to work was much more common. Among 16- to 17-year-old workers, 15 per cent walked to work.Footnote 8 One of five US households had no car. Though the median household income was then $7,700 a year, and the poverty threshold was about half that, 10.7 million households earned less than $3,000 a year. Among them, 63 per cent had no car.Footnote 9 In 1970, women were still much less likely to drive than men, and women drivers drove less. Among men aged 16 and over, 87 per cent had a driver's licence; 62 per cent of women had one. About 56 per cent of all licensed drivers were men, and 73 per cent of all miles driven were driven by men. According to drivers’ own estimates, men drove more than twice the total annual miles (11,352) that women drove (5,411).Footnote 10 People of colour were much less likely to drive than whites. Whites made 52 per cent of their trips as car drivers, non-whites 37 per cent.Footnote 11 Among school children in 1970, 42 per cent walked or bicycled, compared to 38 per cent who rode a school bus, and 16 per cent who were driven to school.Footnote 12 ‘Car culture’, even at its height, cannot offer a complete account of American mobility.
Though by 1970 walking as a practical mobility mode was indeed marginal, it remained essential among several populations, and important to others. To some degree, even the most committed motorists were also sometimes pedestrians. Given their neglect among the profusion of histories of car culture, and the renewed interest in walkability as a corrective for the excesses of the motor age, the persistent pedestrianism of twentieth-century America warrants more attention. Indeed, a major impediment to a more walkable future in urban America is the notion that Americans not only do not walk, but will not walk, because they ‘prefer their automobiles to all other forms of transportation’. The untold history of persistent pedestrianism gives us reason to doubt this common but historically naïve perspective.
In most respects, motorists had achieved priority consideration in American city streets by about 1930. This precedence has not been seriously challenged since then, although voices of dissent grew more audible following the excesses of urban highway projects in the 1960s, the new environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s and the energy crises of the 1970s. From about 1930 to 1970, then, the automobile was ascendant. In retrospect, the 1950s and 1960s have been particularly conspicuous as the pre-eminent decades of ‘car culture’. But the car's real attractions and its favoured consideration in these decades has been a distraction from other important social forces. Throughout the motor age, pedestrianism persisted.
Part 1: 1920s–1940s
The marginalization of walking in the American cities originates in the marginalization of driving. Automobiles had all the well-known attractions in their favour; the car's mass appeal is not in question. But these attractions were not sufficient to explain cars’ ultimate predominance in American cities. Cars faced enormous resistance in cities. They confronted physical, institutional and cultural obstacles that tended to grow in response to the proliferation of cars. Cars demanded substantial scarce street space, even when parked. Authorities, including judges, police, municipal engineers and (to some extent) chambers of commerce, generally responded to the car less as a blessing to be accommodated than as a curse to be controlled. Above all, the non-motoring majority tended to respond to motorists in cities as dangerous intruders who interfered with other street users and who bore chief responsibility for the rising affliction of traffic injuries and deaths.
In the early 1920s, when sales of automobiles in cities fell short of expectations, some in the industry blamed such attitudes. They organized to change them. In 1922, Engineering News-Record, the readership of which included road builders, editorialized that ‘the obvious solution…lies only in a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for’.Footnote 13 Charles Hayes, president of the Chicago Motor Club, put his constituents’ position plainly: ‘The streets were made for vehicles to run upon.’Footnote 14 Automaker George Graham explained to his colleagues in motordom that ‘Pedestrians must be educated to know that automobiles have rights.’Footnote 15 Automotive interest groups, which sometimes called themselves ‘motordom’, were already organizing to promote such a change.
This effort to win place and priority for automobiles in American cities was complex, prodigious and largely successful.Footnote 16 Motordom sponsored the new profession of traffic engineering, and in so doing influenced its early development to favour driving. In 1925, Studebaker established the Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research, housing it at Harvard University. Through the bureau, Studebaker financed the training of the first generation of professional traffic engineers. In 1925, local motordom in Los Angeles succeeded in inducing the city to adopt a traffic ordinance that gave vehicles priority over pedestrians, relegating them to crossings. National motordom backed a version of it as a model traffic ordinance for American cities. By 1930, the ordinance and variations on it had been widely adopted.Footnote 17 The gasoline tax, non-existent until 1919, was ubiquitous by August 1929, when every state had such a tax. Resistant at first, motordom soon backed the gas tax on condition that the revenues be committed to roads. State gas taxes initially funded rural roads, but soon state motor highways penetrated cities.
Motordom fought to shift some of the blame for pedestrian casualties from drivers to the pedestrians themselves. ‘Jaywalking’, still a controversial word in 1920, was a normalized term by 1930; it cast doubt on pedestrians’ legitimacy as street users. The American Automobile Association became the leading sponsor of school safety education in the 1920s. Its safety materials trained children to be responsible for their own safety, in part by conceding the street to motorists.Footnote 18 The attractions and rising popularity of motoring were necessary to its success, but not sufficient. Motordom itself found that extraordinary efforts were needed.
Motordom's success was never complete or unchallenged. Objections to pedestrians’ loss of unrestricted rights to the street came early and from diverse quarters. Among experts, dissent was common. In 1924, as motordom's campaign to shift presumed responsibility for pedestrian casualties from motorists to ‘jaywalkers’ reached full speed, New York City's traffic magistrate, Bruce Cobb, cried foul.Footnote 19 In defending the interests of walkers, experts sometimes invoked the absurdity of the marginalization of walking among a species that evolved to walk. To expert critics, the marginalization of walking was a threat to health, safety and social equity. In the 1920s, Harriet Beard was one of the leading safety education experts in the US. She was independent in her views, and was uninfluenced by AAA's safety agenda. In her 1924 book Safety First for School and Home, a standard reference, Beard argued that children must be free to walk in safety. ‘Viewed from the standpoint of health, a normal, growing child needs the exercise of walking’, Beard wrote. ‘The habit of walking, acquired in youth, is of lifelong value to health and to the use of leisure time.’ She warned: ‘If we Americans continue to ride constantly and never walk anywhere, who knows whether in a few generations our descendants may be born without legs?’Footnote 20 Similar objections were offered on grounds of safety. In 1925, Michigan introduced a gasoline tax (2 cents a gallon), fuelling a road construction boom. The new roads were designed to serve drivers’ needs; sidewalks remained a local responsibility. Miles of roads, including many in the Detroit vicinity, had none. Pedestrians were compelled to walk on the roadway, with catastrophic consequences for safety. In 1930, John Reid, Detroit's commissioner of public works, demanded sidewalks. Like Beard, Reid sarcastically invoked natural selection: ‘Mankind is still created with feet rather than with rubber tires.’Footnote 21
The disappearing legs warning took extraordinary form in a work of science fiction. It appeared in 1928 in Hugo Gernsback's pioneering monthly, Amazing Stories. In ‘The revolt of the pedestrians’, David H. Keller foretold a ghastly distant future of utter car dependency, in which a small minority of pedestrians survives like hunted animals. Their predators are permanent motorists whose legs have withered to mere stubs.Footnote 22 The editor's introduction provocatively billed the story not as fantastical but rather as a timely warning: ‘What will happen to us, the author must have asked himself, if we continue to ride in cars for centuries to come? You may laugh at the idea that we will lose the use of our legs entirely, but the idea is not as foolish as it may sound.’ Though set in the future, the story was a warning for the present: ‘Many of the things of which the author speaks are gradually coming about. There was a time when pedestrians had certain rights. In our large cities, however, these rights are practically lost even now.’Footnote 23
Popular opposition to the marginalization of the pedestrian was also common. Pedestrians never successfully organized, but several attempts indicate a persistent interest. These include the Walkers’ League (Los Angeles, 1922), the Pedestrians’ Protective League (Los Angeles, 1924), the Pedestrians’ Mutual Protective Association (Baltimore, 1927) and the Association for Protection to Pedestrians (Chicago, 1930).Footnote 24 Defences of pedestrians’ rights were perennial among letters to newspaper editors. Some pedestrians resorted to acts of defiance and threats, which newspapers generally reported without condemnation, and sometimes with sympathy. In 1926, there were reports of ‘traffic fanatics’ in New York City: ‘otherwise peaceful citizens who are weary of being chased from curb to curb by careless motorists’. They ‘stand in sullen defiance and make heedless drivers slow down to a stop’.Footnote 25 An anonymous resident of Knoxville, Tennessee, signing off only as ‘A Citizen’, warned the city's safety director: ‘If you can't fix it so a person can walk across the streets…without going into a deep run from being hit by autos, I'm going to sprinkle tacks over Gay Street at Church, Clinch, Wall, Union and Commerce.’ Newspapers that ran the story practically endorsed the threat: ‘This thoughtless running down of innocent pedestrians by automobiles has to stop. And it will stop, if everyone does as an ired “Citizen” of this city threatens to do.’Footnote 26
In communities of colour, such criticism had to be more discrete, and has left a much fainter trace. Among the more visible examples was a meeting in the Jamaica neighbourhood of Queens (New York City) in 1933. When a black minister was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a ministerial union appealed to the police for traffic enforcement and better lighting, and Jamaica residents held ‘a protest meeting against the poor traffic laws’ and ‘violations of city ordinances in the thickly populated Negro sections of Jamaica’ at a local church. According to the New York Amsterdam News, one of the metropolis's black newspapers, ‘many persons affiliated with clubs, civic organizations and churches attended’. There is no indication that they achieved any reforms.Footnote 27
By the 1930s, the automobile's pre-eminence in city streets was well established, but never unchallenged. The leading national authority on traffic engineering remained the Bureau for Street Traffic Research. In the 1930s, it moved from Harvard to Yale, and its funding source shifted from the struggling Studebaker to the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (via the industry's Automotive Safety Foundation), supplemented by a personal gift of $50,000 from GM's Alfred P. Sloan.Footnote 28 In 1941, the Bureau's associate director, Maxwell Halsey, produced a textbook, Traffic Accidents and Congestion, that defined the field's orthodoxy. In it, Halsey propounded the doctrine that the preference for driving was an independent variable to be used as a governing axiom. He contended that critics of lavish construction projects to accommodate automobiles in cities ‘completely ignore the highly practical point of how people want to go downtown. If people prefer to drive downtown and can afford it, then facilities must be built for them up to their ability to pay. The choice of mode of travel is their own.’Footnote 29 This radical position treated highly diverse street users as if they were all alike, and treated responses to circumstances as if they were essential preferences. Nevertheless, this was already traffic engineering orthodoxy when Halsey's book was published. The position prevailed practically unchallenged for at least the next 30 years. Despite growing dissent since the 1960s and 1970s, it remains predominant today among transportation experts.Footnote 30
This orthodoxy sheltered widespread blaming of pedestrians for their own woes. In 1938, Burton Marsh of the American Automobile Association explained that ‘the greatest cause of pedestrian fatalities is ignorance on the part of the pedestrian, who does not know he is nearly invisible to motorists and that it is much more difficult to control an automobile than his own actions’.Footnote 31 In 1939, Denver's safety manager likened the average pedestrian to ‘a spoiled and pampered child’.Footnote 32
But a few experts, with the support from some journalists, dissented. In 1932, a civil engineer warned that efforts to accommodate automobiles everywhere in cities caused ‘enormous waste of street space’.Footnote 33 Meanwhile, Providence, Rhode Island, earned a national reputation for its impressive safety record. Delegations from other cities learned that Providence's success was not due to blaming or restricting pedestrians, but to giving them priority consideration, while imposing a citywide 25 mph speed limit on motorists.Footnote 34 To a mass audience, journalist Myron Stearns explained that ‘with pedestrian traffic regulated, cars travel at greater speed, and are harder to stop’.Footnote 35 In 1938, writer J. George Frederick argued that rebuilding cities for cars was madness; ‘it would only invite more floods of cars into places where cars have no business at all – where only pedestrians, trees, air, light, and quiet should be’.Footnote 36
Part 2: 1940s–1960s
The official subordination of the pedestrian continued unabated in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. A 1957 statement by the American Association of State Highway Officials captures the bias: ‘In and near downtown districts, pedestrian–vehicular conflicts at intersections may be so great as to seriously impede arterial traffic.’Footnote 37 No corresponding impediment to pedestrian traffic seems even to have been imagined. Such bias pervaded the period, and was particularly apparent in safety campaigns. In 1952, Cincinnati's police department, safety council and Kiwanis Club wanted to reduce traffic casualties among pedestrians. They arranged to have boy scouts and police distribute 80,000 cards to pedestrians they considered jaywalkers. The cards read: ‘I AM A JAYWALKER: When I am injured or killed, please send me to one of the following hospitals.’ Checkboxes were provided for seven hospitals plus the ‘city morgue’. On the back of the card, a ‘pedestrian scoreboard’ could be used to keep track of injuries and deaths to jaywalkers.Footnote 38 From the perspective that predominated among authorities, blame for pedestrian casualties lay with pedestrians themselves.
Motordom promoted this perspective. In 1952, the Inter-Industry Highway Safety Committee, composed of automotive industry groups, issued a pamphlet called ‘Wacky walkers’. The National Automobile Dealers Association, a member of the committee, urged car dealerships to distribute it. Calling injuries and fatalities to pedestrians a ‘menace to motorists and automobile sales’, NADA explained that they ‘always lead to a continuing discouragement of the use of the automobile and are a deterrent to automobile sales and service’.Footnote 39 Through safety campaigns, classroom education and publicity aimed at drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, the American Automobile Association also promoted pedestrian safety from drivers’ perspective. Although the total annual pedestrian death toll remained high throughout the period, the trend showed a very gradual decline in the late 1940s and 1950s. So when motor traffic killed 7,950 pedestrians in 1956, AAA characterized the number as relatively good news. ‘Pedestrian programs are paying off’, it claimed.Footnote 40 But incomplete data make other causes plausible. With the proliferation of cars and driving, had walking become so much more unpleasant that there were now fewer pedestrians on the streets to kill?
As these examples indicate, official expertise and motordom's agendas were so intermingled as to be impossible to distinguish. A case in point was the Automotive Safety Foundation (ASF), the leading traffic safety organization of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Established by the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association in 1937, the foundation tirelessly promoted express highways on traffic safety grounds. It even promoted the spread of parking lots and garages in cities, though their relation to safety was unclear. In a 1955 report called What Parking Means to Business, ASF contended that ‘parkers don't like to walk’.Footnote 41 The observation might have supported transit, density or walkability, but instead ASF called for ‘adequate off street facilities’ for parking cars.
But heterodox expertise persisted. In 1946, as conventional traffic planners pursued the elusive goal of a car-friendly, congestion-free city, some experts questioned prevailing doctrine. According to civil engineer Jacob Field, ‘The very basis of city existence is congestion.’ To design cities for delay-free driving at peak demand ‘would be a tremendous waste of the facilities for practically 99% of the time’.Footnote 42 Sam Baldock, Oregon's state highway engineer, warned that cities cannot accommodate every motorist's demand. ‘It may be impossible to build the requisite expressways, and certainly it is impossible to construct the required terminal facilities’ (parking).Footnote 43 P.Y.K. Howat of the District of Columbia Parking Authority agreed. ‘To me it is doubtful if the demand for parking space in the modern city can ever be practically met in the congested areas’, he wrote. To try to expand parking so as to serve all existing demand would only ‘create new demand’, plus ‘uncontrollable traffic congestion in the area’.Footnote 44
Such criticisms bore implicit defences of pedestrians’ place in the urban mobility mix, but in 1947 traffic engineer Ernest Bailey was explicit. ‘We generally assume that the motorist's time is invaluable’, Bailey wrote, ‘while that of the pedestrian is utterly worthless.’ Consequently, authorities were ‘trying to make roads safe and expeditious for the motorist at the expense of added hazards to the pedestrian’, who was compelled to cross more dangerous streets.Footnote 45 Meanwhile, excessive zeal in fighting delay to motorists only induced them to drive more. In 1956, traffic authority Wilfred Owen offered an enduring diagnosis of the consequence: ‘The helter-skelter of today's urban sprawl has us moving on a treadmill. We are attempting at great cost to increase the speed at which we move.’ But the benefit of speed was ‘nullified’ by greater distances between destinations.Footnote 46 Practically unknown before 1956, the term ‘urban sprawl’ would eventually become a mainstay of the vocabulary of urban transportation debates. It was not just that highways permitted lower density. As some experts admitted, they compelled lower density, with disastrous effects wherever density was already high. Speaking to the Highway Research Board in 1957, planner J. Douglas Carroll argued that by using highways to serve central Chicago, planners were subjecting the area to contradictory stresses. You can have density, or you can have ‘highways and parking’, Carroll argued. But ‘you cannot have both’.Footnote 47
In the late 1950s, at the apex of the motor age, some of these heterodox experts managed to introduce some modest compromises. Architect and planner Victor Gruen designed pioneering shopping malls that cultivated walking between shops, though shoppers arrived at such malls by car. Meanwhile, Gruen lamented the excesses of conventional traffic engineering. He assailed ‘the insane arrangement by which hordes of mechanical monsters fight for every square inch of space with others of their own kind and with human beings on foot’.Footnote 48 Such scorn for traffic engineering orthodoxy was not rare. Strict enforcement of pedestrian regulations invited ridicule from newspapers, merchants and pedestrians. In 1953, a Los Angeles executive told the Pittsburgh chamber of commerce that to relieve traffic congestion the city should fine jaywalkers 5 dollars each. The offended editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette were sarcastic: ‘Why bother? The pedestrian nuisance will eventually disappear. However, the city could speed matters by offering a bounty for each skin, instead of just letting ’em die out.’Footnote 49
Pedestrians were inconspicuous in popular culture during the mid-twentieth century, as road fiction featuring car travel became a genre of its own. The rare exceptions afford some insight into pedestrians’ survival as a marginalized population, worthy of readers’ empathy. Two works of popular fiction, and two transitory news sensations, make useful examples.
The golden age of comic books survived into the 1950s, and as the decade began the publisher Quality Comics introduced Broadway Romances. The inaugural 1950 issue included ‘Yesterday's darling’, the story of a Broadway sensation's emotional return to New York five years after her fleeting fairy tale of fame had ended.Footnote 50 Once ‘the darling of Broadway’, Darla Manners has been forgotten – even by her former leading man, Harold Bancroft. The anonymous writer and author team wanted to prove beyond doubt that Harold was loathsome, a vile, cold-hearted brute. For this, they chose a frame in which Darla, walking along the street, sees Harold at the wheel of car, about to pull away from the curb. An unidentified young woman is in the passenger seat. As Darla approaches the parked car, Harold pulls away from the curb, forcing Darla back. Without pausing long enough to recognize Darla, Harold shouts to her: ‘Watch out, sister! Streets are for cars, you know!’ In this frame, Darla and Harold exemplify their respective modes. Pedestrian Darla Manners is polite, naïve and vulnerable; motorist Harold Bancroft is rude, self-important and aggressive. By casting Darla and Harold in these roles, the authors instantly established their respective characters and their relationship. As pedestrians’ status has fallen, Darla's star has dimmed. But readers literally share Darla's perspective, and their sympathies are with her.
A far more developed and much better-known treatment of the pedestrian in popular fiction appeared months later, when Ray Bradbury's very short story ‘The pedestrian’ was published.Footnote 51 Bradbury later developed the story into his novel Fahrenheit 451. In 1949, he was walking at night in Los Angeles when a police officer in a squad car stopped him. Apparently, the policeman thought walking in Los Angeles at night was unusual enough to warrant suspicion. Bradbury found the experience unsettling, and turned his bewilderment at the denormalization of walking into dystopian science fiction.Footnote 52 Published in 1951, ‘The pedestrian’ describes a future in which no one walks. Everyone stays indoors, entertained by their ‘screens’. In the story, a man ventures out, only to be stopped (as Bradbury was) by the police. In ‘The pedestrian’, the police car is a driverless vehicle.
Neither ‘The pedestrian’ nor ‘Yesterday's darling’ was unusually popular, and certainly neither was an expression of the American zeitgeist of 1950. Both stories, however, worked by tacitly applying perceptions already familiar to their readers: that walking is normal but now marginalized, that those who still walked (in 1950) are somehow naïve and therefore vulnerable, that the supremacy of the automobile is a triumph of might over right. That is, the stories reflected a shared perception that the marginalization of walking was a denormalization of the normal.
Consistent with this perception, minor acts of resistance occurred and newspaper coverage reflects some sympathy for them. The age of YouTube has called attention to one apparently new form of resistance, sometimes called ‘hoodwalking’. If a motorist who has stopped at an intersection blocks the crosswalk with the car, a hoodwalker crosses in the crosswalk undeterred, stepping coolly onto the car's hood along the way. But hoodwalking is decades older than YouTube. Newspapers reported such cases as amusing ‘man-bites-dog’ stories, but in their wording they suggest that pedestrians were recognized as marginalized street users awaiting their champion. The act required a tall pedestrian, but as hoods gradually lowered in the 1950s the height requirement eased. In all known cases from the 1950s, the hoodwalker was a man. In 1953, a Florida man, Charles W. Jones, ‘climbed upon the hood of the car and jumped up and down’. The reporter called the act a ‘brief campaign for pedestrian rights’. As a United Press item the story appeared in numerous newspapers. The city of Tampa fined Jones 32 dollars.Footnote 53
Jones was not the typical hoodwalker. Most stepped on the hood (Jones ‘climbed’); most stepped off on the other side without further ado. But anyone big enough for hoodwalking was big enough to cause damage. In October 1954, Curtis F. Maxwell strode across the hood of a car blocking a crosswalk in Houston. Maxwell dented the driver's hood and was arrested.Footnote 54 When the judge dismissed the charges against him, a Denver Post columnist celebrated, suggesting that Maxwell belonged in the ‘Pedestrian Hall of Fame’.Footnote 55 Reporters covering the story introduced the term ‘hood-walker’.Footnote 56 In 1956, James Joseph Clyne ‘walked across the hood’ of an offending driver's car in Inglewood, California. According to the Associated Press reporter, Clyne's purpose was ‘to champion the cause of the long-suffering pedestrians’, and told arresting officers that the car ‘was infringing on his rights’. He was arrested ‘on suspicion of drunkenness’.Footnote 57
Such spontaneous rebellions were not always the work of pedestrians acting alone. In Miami at about noon on 5 February 1955, pedestrians defied control in what reporters called a ‘mass revolt’. At the busy intersection of Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue, ‘a handful of pedestrians took their lives in their hands and crossed on a red light. Others cheered, in a moment there was a steady stream by foot regardless of the stop and go light.’ Police needed 40 minutes to resume control of the intersection.Footnote 58 The owners of shops and other businesses along streets could be zealous advocates for the pedestrians they depended upon. Two years after its pedestrian rebellion, Miami tried fining jaywalkers 5 dollars. Merchants complained that in enforcement areas the campaign sharply reduced sales. ‘We should take care of pedestrians first’, one of them told reporters. ‘If necessary, we should ban automobiles entirely from the downtown area.’ Another said, ‘We should encourage people to come downtown, rather than create more parking spaces and add to the traffic problem.’Footnote 59
Some individual rebellions were more carefully planned. Dentist Louis J. Friedman of Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley north-west of Los Angeles, was also unhappy about authorities’ neglect of pedestrians. His patients complained that they could not cross the street to enter his practice. In a two-year effort, Friedman got the owners of neighbouring businesses to sign two petitions for a crosswalk, with no result, so in 1959 he hand painted one, using a broom. He was fined, but local and national press attention was extensive and the coverage was sympathetic to him.Footnote 60
Finally, some rebellions were collective and organized. In October 1941, ‘more than a score of mothers with arms linked together’ formed ‘a human chain’ across a Los Angeles street, ‘purposely blocking traffic’. They were protecting their children's journey to school and attracting attention to hazards they wanted remedied.Footnote 61 The incident was a glimpse of things to come after World War II. The baby boom that followed the war was the era of baby carriage blockades and similar demonstrations. The suburban San Fernando Valley, where Friedman later had his dental practice, was the scene of several protests. In June 1946, women there picketed dangerous intersections, demanding safer crossings for pedestrians. The Los Angeles Times quoted picketers: ‘They are killing people nearly every day’, said one. ‘The time has come for drastic measures’, said another.Footnote 62 Ten miles west, a small 1952 picket in Reseda for traffic signals was unusual in having sponsorship from the local chamber of commerce, which supplied professionally printed signs. At a hazardous intersection, posts for traffic signals had been erected long before, but residents had no word on when the signals themselves would be installed. Accompanied by children, women picketers called on motorists to drive carefully.Footnote 63
By contrast, a 1958 protest in Pacoima, in the north of the San Fernando Valley, was an entirely home-made response to two families’ terrible losses. In the 1950s, Pacoima was a majority Latino community with a significant African American population. The quickly growing area was known for wide streets lacking sidewalks and other amenities. In May 1956, Ernest Apodach, a 13-year-old Latino boy, was walking along busy Glenoaks Boulevard when he was struck and killed by a motorist. Locals petitioned for safety measures. Then in December 1958, a nine-year-old African American boy, Frank Derby, Jr, was struck and killed two blocks north of the site of Ernest's death. He was on his way to school and in a marked crosswalk. A motorist had yielded to Frank so he could cross, then another ran him down. Ernest's mother and Frank's father quickly organized a large protest at the site of Frank's death. On the day following Frank's death, according to a reporter, ‘more than 200 parents…formed a human barrier’ to block cars and demand traffic signals. The numerous signs were home made. Ernest's mother carried a sign reading ‘We want lights’; Frank's father's sign asked ‘How many children have to die[?]’ (Figure 1). The Los Angeles Department of Public Works installed a push-button pedestrian signal at Glenoaks and Vaughan days later.Footnote 64
A blockade in Pacoima, Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley), 5 December 1958. The blockade's leaders are in the foreground: Frank Derby, senior (centre) and Mrs Fausto Apodach (right). Both lost sons on Glenoaks Boulevard. (Los Angeles Times, 6 Dec. 1958. Los Angeles Times Staff; copyright 1958 Los Angeles Times. Used with permission.)
In 1951, residents of Rankin and Whitaker, in western Pennsylvania's steel country, were dismayed to find that a new bridge connecting the two towns had no sidewalks. Adapting the organized labour technique of the sit-down strike, women, with some men and children, lined chairs across a bridge approach and sat down (Figure 2). ‘No sidewalks, no traffic’, they said. ‘We don't want our children to get killed’, one mother explained. After hours of negotiation in a local home, authorities, bridge builders and residents reached an agreement. ‘We won't railroad traffic through these people’, a contractor said. Later that day, workers laid railroad ties to form a temporary walkway, promising a permanent sidewalk within 10 days.Footnote 65
On 30 April 1951, residents near the just-finished Rankin Bridge, spanning the Monongahela River between Whitaker and Rankin, Pennsylvania, sat down across the roadway to prevent it from opening. ‘No sidewalks, no traffic’, they said. (Courtesy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Archives.)
Though this response was unusually solicitous, white mothers could usually expect officialdom to react to their protests, including illegal blockades, with tact. In Brooklyn in 1949, mothers blocked a busy street where a motorist had killed a child, demanding safer conditions. The police response was again diplomatic.Footnote 66 But there were exceptions, particularly in the early blockades. In June 1950, a Philadelphia blockade triggered immediate arrests. Hellerman Street was a busy thoroughfare in the city's predominantly white north-east. Fearing for their children's safety, about 35 residents blocked one of the street's busiest intersections, a site of frequent collisions. Most of the picketers were parents; some bore signs demanding a traffic light. Four picketers, all white, were arrested and charged with ‘disorderly conduct and inciting to riot’.Footnote 67 The city's traffic engineer, Robert Mitchell, was hostile too; he did not even pretend to give the protesters’ plea a hearing. According to a reporter's summary, Mitchell declared ‘the city would not be high-pressured into installing traffic lights’. ‘Neighborhood opinion’, he said, was no substitute for ‘careful study’.Footnote 68
But time proved the parents right: Hellerman Street was deadly. A mile and a half south-east of the 1950 protest, in a residential area, Hellerman lacked centrelines, crosswalks, signals or even stop signs. According to residents, some motorists sped along Hellerman to avoid heavy traffic and traffic lights elsewhere. At one intersection alone, Hellerman and Walker Streets, there were six vehicle collisions in a year. The sixth occurred on a Friday evening in July 1953. It killed a 57-year-old local woman who was a front-seat passenger in one of the cars; she was a half mile from home.Footnote 69 A playground formed one corner of the intersection; a second was nearby. The next morning and all weekend, mothers, children, and a few fathers picketed the intersection. A press photo shows about 80 people (all white) forming a square sealing off all four crossings; many have linked hands. Someone has chalked ‘STOP’ on the pavement where vehicles enter the intersection. On a telephone pole, about where a stop sign should be, a home-made sign reads ‘WE WANT A STOP SIGN’ (Figure 3). Though the occasion was the death of a vehicle occupant, the protest took pedestrians’ (especially children's) perspective: they blocked all motor vehicle traffic to protect people on foot, and parents told reporters their concern was for local children's safety.Footnote 70 This time, the official response was prompt and favourable. Philadelphia's street commissioner, Paul MacMurray, welcomed 12 women from the protest in his office in the city hall annex that Monday morning. By afternoon, stop signs were erected at the intersection of Hellerman and Walker Streets, and the commissioner promised to consider additional safety measures.Footnote 71
On the weekend of 11–12 July 1953, residents blocked the intersection of Hellerman and Walker Streets in Philadelphia, demanding stop signs. Stop signs were installed Monday afternoon, 13 July. (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 12 July 1953. Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.)
In 1957, mothers in and near Binghamton, New York, organized to demand an official goal of zero traffic fatalities among the county's school children, to be achieved in part through better pedestrian protection. One of their leaders, Doris Rosboom Treyz, used her hands to form a zero shape for the press photographer's camera. It was in effect an articulation of ‘Vision Zero’ four decades before Swedes reinvented the zero fatalities aspiration under this name.Footnote 72
Traffic blockades were probably scarcer in communities of colour, where residents had less cause to hope for favourable press attention or restraint from law enforcement. But the 1958 Pocoima demonstration in the San Fernando Valley was far from the first. In big north-eastern cities, especially New York, black and Hispanic people did stage blockades, including one that seems to have been the first to be dubbed a ‘baby carriage blockade’ by the press. New York designated some streets as ‘play streets’, where children could roam freely. These were cordoned off to motor traffic, but trucks were permitted in to make local deliveries. On Valentine's Day 1949, a truck driver who had beaten a charge of vehicular homicide 14 years earlier drove his truck into a play street in largely Hispanic East Harlem to make an early afternoon coal delivery. Two girls, both 10 years old, Carmelita Rodriguez and Maria Rodriguez (unrelated), on their lunch hour from Public School 121, strode out of a store with the candy they just purchased, confident in the safety of the play street. The truck driver struck them with his vehicle, killing both girls. Maria's nine-year-old sister witnessed the girls’ deaths.Footnote 73 The next day, local residents formed a ‘parent and baby carriage blockade’, stopping and turning back all delivery vehicles. According to a reporter, 100 women were out to protect the children. New York Daily News photos show an ethnically diverse population of protesters (Figure 4). Mary di Stefano, president of the Parents’ Association of PS 121, spoke to the press for the blockaders, making their position clear: ‘They'll have to kill us to get through here.’Footnote 74 On the following day, parents set up a second picket one block north.Footnote 75 Parents extracted a concession: the city would close the play street to delivery vehicles weekdays at the hours when children were walking to and from school, including the lunch hour.Footnote 76
After a coal truck killed two 10-year-old girls in East Harlem in February 1949, mothers blocked the street at two points. The New York Daily News dubbed this a ‘baby carriage blockade’. (Ossie Leviness, New York Daily News, 16 Feb. 1949. Used with permission.)
At new public housing projects where high-volume traffic arteries surrounded dense populations of carless families, hazards and hardships intensified. Favoured designs offered residents grassy, tree-shaded spaces within the confines of the project, but to meet daily needs residents had to cross the busy streets. In New York City, at least two major baby carriage blockades occurred at public housing projects in the 1950s. In July 1952, around east Brooklyn's Brownsville Housing Project, residents, long vexed by traffic dangers, were outraged when a seven-year-old boy was struck by a motorist, fracturing the boy's skull. About 60 mothers and their children, demanding a traffic light, ‘blocked traffic…with massed baby carriages’.Footnote 77
Seven miles east, in the mixed but predominantly black neighbourhood of South Jamaica in Queens, residents organized perhaps the largest and longest local pedestrian protest of the century. Despite its scale and ultimate success, it attracted very little attention in the daily newspapers, but New York's leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, covered the story. Over the summer of 1957, near the integrated South Jamaica Houses (known locally as the ‘40 Projects’), five children were injured on poorly marked busy streets, particularly 160th Street and South Road. Residents claimed that without traffic lights, these routes attracted motorists from signalled thoroughfares nearby to use as ‘speedways’.Footnote 78 Residents revived the dormant South Jamaica Civic Association to demand better conditions. In response, the traffic department installed new, more visible stop signs.Footnote 79
Residents counted this a minor success, but no victory; the protesters wanted other modifications, above all a traffic light at the ‘hot corner’ of 160th and South Road. In December 1958, the Civic Association threatened a baby carriage blockade, but the traffic department was unmoved.Footnote 80 Finally, on 23 January 1959, association members inaugurated circular rush-hour pickets at 160th and South (Figure 5). Twice each weekday, at the morning and evening peaks, protesters, most of them mothers, walked all four crossings at the intersection in a continuous loop. They marched once a day on Saturdays. Some picketers pushed baby carriages. According to the Amsterdam News, marchers sometimes numbered about 150. One picketer asked a reporter: ‘Does someone have to get killed before something is done?’Footnote 81
Residents of South Jamaica, Queens (New York City), demanding a traffic light, block the dangerous intersection of 160th Street and South Road in January 1959. The protest continued for weeks, with occasional truces. The city installed a traffic light 19 months later. (New York Amsterdam News, 31 Jan. 1959. Courtesy New York Amsterdam News.)
An informal leader emerged: Ruth Neals told a reporter ‘the baby carriage blockade will be repeated daily until we get some satisfaction’.Footnote 82 There were ugly scenes. In the second week of the protest, a motorist drove into a 28-year-old man walking in the blockade. The victim's leg injury was minor; police questioned and released the driver.Footnote 83 On the next day, as a policeman walked past Neals, he elbowed her in the stomach. A day later, a block away from the blockade, a motorist struck down a six-year-old boy. The child was hospitalized in ‘fair’ condition; the driver was not charged.Footnote 84
After three weeks of twice-daily blockades, a city councilman arranged a meeting between members of the South Jamaica Civic Association and the assistant to the traffic commissioner. As negotiations commenced, a motorist struck two protesters at the blockade with his car, including Ruth Neals. The injuries were not serious, but the incident angered locals. Two days later, when another motorist tried to press his way through the blockade, some of the protesters, to avenge the recent affront, stopped the vehicle, rocked it up and down, and then collectively turned it over onto its top, trapping its occupant inside. The driver was secretary to Haiti's delegate to the United Nations; he lived a mile away. He escaped with minor injuries, and did not press charges against the three men who were detained in the episode. Nevertheless, negotiators agreed to a two-week truce as the traffic department studied remedies.Footnote 85 The struggle continued intermittently for another year and a half, but finally, in September 1960, the traffic department installed traffic lights at 160th Street and South Road.Footnote 86 In the 1960s, residents of the South Jamaica Houses continued to picket for traffic lights at other local intersections.Footnote 87
Even at the zenith of car culture, a few US cities experimented with pedestrianizing segments of their downtown shopping districts. In 1957, Fort Worth, Texas, began implementing an ambitious design by Victor Gruen for a pedestrian-only shopping district, though most of the plan was never realized. The full project would have supplied ample parking for the car-dependent pedestrians.Footnote 88 More successful projects were far more modest. On 3 August 1959, Toledo (Ohio) temporarily closed four blocks to cars along two parallel streets. The favourable response from merchants and shoppers led the city to extend the closure for a total of 18 weeks. The following summer, the city repeated the experiment at another downtown location, this time for 20 weeks. According to press accounts, the malls were popular: ‘persons visiting the malls voted strongly for retention’. But they were criticized by some merchants – ‘especially those whose stores were not on the mall’.Footnote 89 The experiments apparently were not repeated. On 19 August 1959, Kalamazoo (Michigan) drastically scaled back a proposal by Victor Gruen, closing off just two blocks of central Burdick Street. The plan was a success and a year later the city extended the mall another block. Unlike Toledo's mall, Kalamazoo's endured, though in 1998 the city reopened the mall to cars.Footnote 90
According to a reporter, Toledo's experiment ‘unleashed a volcano of interest in scores of other cities’.Footnote 91 Indianapolis Star correspondent Corbin Patrick used sarcasm to express his approval: ‘Why must this happen just when practically the entire nation is motorized and we finally have begun to see the dream come true, the hope realized that people will never have to walk again?’ But Patrick had sincere criticism for Toledo too. ‘We find some aspects of the Toledo plan confusing’, he wrote. ‘“City officials hope the public will return to public transportation,” the UPI report said. Private citizens, we might add, hope public transportation will return to the public.’ This was a direct attack on the official fiction that authorities merely responded to public preferences. Patrick disagreed: ‘Many of these unwanted automobiles jamming traffic…are driven by people who are forced to drive them because shrinking transportation left them stranded in their neighbourhoods.’Footnote 92
In government agencies and among engineers, the anti-pedestrian orthodoxy persisted undiminished in the 1960s. In 1962, in an unscripted comment at a meeting of the Highway Research Board, Guilford P. St Clair, chief of the National Highway Planning Division of the US Bureau of Public Roads, explained that the bureau served motorists, not the general public. ‘There is no real conflict between broad benefits to the economy and the benefits to the motor vehicle user’, St Clair explained. ‘In serving the motor vehicle, we will serve the community.’Footnote 93
Yet pressure from critical outsiders did not go unnoticed. Motordom responded above all by invoking the doctrine that driving patterns somehow reflected an absolute preference, not a response to conditions. According to the American Automobile Association, ‘basic to the problem is the question whether planning should be in the direction of providing facilities that people want or whether people should be forced or coerced into a pattern regarded as ideal. Our way of life, our free economy is based upon a free choice in the market place.’ Even in and near cities, driving, too, was merely ‘an expression of freedom of choice’.Footnote 94 But as critics such as Corbin Patrick had already noted, choice was exactly what cities were failing to offer.
Addressing AAA executives, John Dykstra, president of the Ford Motor Company, concurred. ‘The critics ignore the obvious fact that people want to drive their cars.’Footnote 95 He warned that limiting cars in cities, as Toledo had already tried, ‘is like effectively barring blood from the heart’.Footnote 96 Karl Moskowitz, an engineer for the California Division of Highways, even contended that walking was obsolete. He compared ‘the days when people had to walk’ unfavourably against ‘the automobile age’, using the point to defend ‘1/4 to 1/2-mile-long blocks’ that make walking more difficult. Where was the loss? After all, ‘when the auto-oriented housewife wants to exercise’, she just ‘gets in the car and drives to the golf course’.Footnote 97
Such defensive comments are indications that the critics were vocal and getting a hearing. The best-known examples were Lewis Mumford, William H. Whyte and above all Jane Jacobs. Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a defence of walking and of cityscapes that favour it. Architect James Marston Fitch joined in such defences of walking. ‘There's a mortal dichotomy between wheel and pedestrian traffic’, he told a Cincinnati audience, ‘and only pedestrian traffic makes cities’. Fitch attributed the ubiquity of driving in cities not to essential preferences but to public policy. ‘The automobile has had the greatest subsidy of any form of transportation.’ With comparable public support, it would be ‘as streamlined and popular as automobiles and jet planes’.Footnote 98 Some influential city power brokers in cities concurred. On a one-day stop in St Louis in 1964, Robert Jenney, chairman of the transportation committee of the Greater Boston chamber of commerce, answered local reporters’ questions about urban transportation needs. ‘We have had the mistaken conviction that by attempting to provide accessibility of the automobile we would also be providing mobility for people’, he answered. But this ‘one-dimensional approach…is now in open conflict with mobility’.Footnote 99
Walkers had no real lobby to advocate for them. In 1959, Joan Vickies and Leo Wilensky of New York established the Pedestrian League of America. It issued a newsletter, and within months reported having 150 members in 10 states. But it appears to have had no influence.Footnote 100 The National Shoe Institute, representing shoe manufacturers, was not entirely absent. In 1962, it spoke up for children walking to school.Footnote 101 But as interstate highways invaded cities, dumping thousands of cars in them, and as buildings and parks made way for parking lots, mainstream criticism grew. In 1961, Leonard Rowe used his guest column in the Cincinnati Enquirer to attack the trends. Although the news that East Germany was sealing off West Berlin had just broken, the Enquirer ran the item on its front page, headline above the fold, next to the news from Berlin. ‘What were once fair cities have now become urban nightmares: gasoline wastelands of many-laned expressways, ramps, freeways, viaducts, clover leaf labyrinths, tunnels, throughways, underpasses, overpasses, garages and parking lots. Right in the very core of the city, one block after another is partially disemboweled to become open-air shrines of the automobile.’Footnote 102
And making room for the automobile meant depriving pedestrians of room. When New York commissioners announced proposals to narrow some of the city's sidewalks,Footnote 103 Inez Robb assailed the idea in her syndicated column. ‘As it must come to all pedestrians sooner or later, we in New York have been declared a nuisance. We are an expendable because we use the sidewalks. The sidewalks are a waste because they take up valuable space that could and should be used by motorized man.’ ‘Why is it’, she asked, ‘that great cities are always hiring experts in traffic to straighten out motor problems? Why doesn't some metropolis show the same loving care for pedestrians?’Footnote 104 In Harlem, George Gregory Jr, a former basketball legend and then chairman of the local Community Planning Board, defended sidewalks as many children's only playgrounds. He denounced proposals to take such space for motor traffic: ‘We don't propose to stand around and let commissioners – and I'm a commissioner – legislate for things instead of people.’Footnote 105
Two weeks before Random House released The Death and Life of Great American Cities, NBC Television presented an hour-long documentary about the rise of the automobile in America. First aired in primetime on 22 October 1961, ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ was an episode of the Sunday evening programme The DuPont Show of the Week. At the time, DuPont owned a 23 per cent share of General Motors, and the programme was a paean to car culture. It presumed the ubiquity of driving was due exclusively to a mass preference for driving, and introduced the ‘love affair’ thesis to millions: Americans drive everywhere because of ‘Americans’ love affair with the automobile’.Footnote 106 The thesis has proved remarkably tenacious, in part because so many Americans have indeed been enthusiastic about automobility, and in part because so many more depend on their car because the alternatives are often poor. But despite its limited validity, the claim, like most half-truths, is deceptive. It conceals the persistent pedestrianism that expressed itself in official dissent, popular criticism, individual acts of rebellion and organized protests.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a revolutionary book. In retrospect, it can appear to have emerged from nowhere, as an entirely new perspective. But its success was due to the eloquent voice it gave to persistent values that were hard to hear above the din of motordom ballyhoo extolling car culture. In a favourable review, George McCue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that the book's condemnation of invasive urban reconstruction ‘is not a new accusation’, but Jacobs made it ‘with particular force’.Footnote 107 Motordom's resources gave it a stage from which it celebrated car culture and propagated the specious doctrine of an absolute preference for driving. But circumstantial practices tell us nothing about essential preferences. Such stories left unexpressed the perspectives of persistent pedestrians: those who continued to walk in a world substantially rebuilt to serve drivers.
