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Comment by jberryman | Hacker News Reader

My city had one of the first electric streetcar systems in the world. In 1949 they were sort of ceremoniously burned:

https://rvamag.com/politics/local-politics/artists-map-of-ri...

Oh, also imagine a neighborhood known variously as "The Harlem of the South" and "Black Wall Street", and try to guess where they decided to carve out the new freeway a few years before that?

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Hah. Sounds familiar. My neighborhood was originally created to give successful Italian and Jewish folks a place to live since the toniest neighborhood named River Oaks had explicit bylaws that prevented sales to those races. This was the 1930s well before the Civil Rights Act.

Then one very successful black cattleman had his white secretary buy him a house and sell it to him. Within a few years white flight emptied the area (to the point there's a documentary about it) and suddenly TXDOT decided it was a great place for a freeway.

Relatedly, another fun fact is that Cincinnati also had a street car system that was a regional envy and compared favorably to San Francisco's. One hill climb especially was remarked upon at the time as being as scenic if not more so than the scenic cable car lines that have become preserved and enshrined as such tourist destinations in San Francisco. (Some of the historic cars that have been restored and put back into use by San Francisco even originated on that Cincinnati line.)

Possibly more so than just about any other city in the midwest (though they all made mistakes), Cincinnati has possibly the craziest history of paved over and unfinished projects.

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