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Chicago Drew an Invisible Line in a Lake in 1919. By 1962 It Was Concrete. Today It's 30 Years of Life.
In 1919, a Black teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after crossing an invisible segregation line, and the riot that followed killed 38 people. In 1962, the city made that same line physical -- rerouting the Dan Ryan Expressway around a white neighborhood instead of through it, still measurable today as a 30-year life-expectancy gap between two Chicago neighborhoods nine miles apart.
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Where this connects
Lived places displaced by power
A university expands, a highway gets built, a reservoir gets filled -- and a real, lived community disappears from underneath it, sometim...
ExxonMobil Built Baton Rouge Into an Oil City in 1909. A Century Later, It Bought Out and Razed the Neighborhood That Grew Up Beside It.
Standard Oil broke ground on former plantation land along the Mississippi River in 1909, and within a year Baton Rouge had a working refi...
Decay Came in a Few Sharp Years in Newark's Central Ward. The Repair Took Five Institutions and Five Decades.
By the time Newark's Central Ward exploded in July 1967, two separate government projects had already spent years demolishing it. A highw...
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