Ghost Streets: Mapping the Neighborhoods Erased by Highways

There is a stretch of Interstate 94 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, that carries 115,000 vehicles per day through a corridor of noise walls and exit ramps. If you drive it, you see nothing remarkable – just another piece of postwar American infrastructure, engineered for speed and indifferent to its surroundings. But if you pull up a street map from 1950 and overlay it on a current map of the same area, something appears that the highway erased: a neighborhood.

It was called Rondo. It was the center of Saint Paul’s African American community – a dense grid of homes, churches, barbershops, and gathering places that had evolved over nearly a century. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the state of Minnesota drove Interstate 94 directly through it. The grid was cut. The houses were demolished. The community was scattered. Today, the highway sits in a trench where the neighborhood used to be, and the only map that remembers Rondo is the old one.

This is cartography as forensic history. And Rondo is one of hundreds of such cases.

The Anatomy of Erasure

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized 41,000 miles of interstate highway, and the routes through American cities were, with remarkable consistency, drawn through Black and low-income neighborhoods. This was not accidental. It was policy.

Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker (1974) documented the pattern with devastating specificity through the career of Robert Moses, the New York infrastructure czar who built, among many other things, the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses’s highway, completed in 1963, required the demolition of 1,530 apartments and the displacement of more than 5,000 people in the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx. Caro’s account of the route selection makes clear that alternative alignments existed – routes that would have displaced fewer people or passed through less populated areas – but Moses chose the path through the dense residential neighborhood because its residents lacked the political power to stop him.

The historian N.D.B. Connolly, in A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (2014), extended this analysis to show how highway construction, urban renewal, and real estate speculation worked as an integrated system of racial dispossession. Highways were not just infrastructure projects; they were instruments of a real estate logic that treated Black neighborhoods as land banks for future development. The highway justified the demolition. The demolition cleared the land. The cleared land attracted new investment that benefited different populations.

The street grid tells this story with brutal clarity. Where a neighborhood’s grid once formed a continuous fabric of intersections and blocks, the highway leaves a void – a wide, impermeable barrier that severs the connections the grid once made. The streets that used to cross the highway’s path now dead-end into sound walls or loop back on themselves in cul-de-sacs that were never part of the original plan.

Mapping Inequality

The University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab created “Mapping Inequality,” an online project that digitized and georeferenced the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps from the 1930s. These are the infamous “redlining” maps – color-coded assessments of neighborhood creditworthiness that graded areas from A (“Best,” colored green) to D (“Hazardous,” colored red). The D-graded areas were overwhelmingly Black, immigrant, or low-income, and they were systematically denied access to mortgage lending.

When scholars began overlaying HOLC maps with postwar highway routes, the correlation was staggering. A 2020 study published in the journal Race and Social Problems by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that highway construction was disproportionately concentrated in neighborhoods that HOLC had graded C or D. The redlined map, drawn in the 1930s, effectively became the highway map of the 1950s and 1960s. The neighborhoods marked as disposable on paper were subsequently disposed of in concrete.

This is why cartographic comparison – the layering of historical maps over current ones – is such a powerful tool for understanding urban injustice. The old map shows the grid as it was. The new map shows the void where the grid was removed. The difference between the two is measured in demolished homes, displaced families, and severed communities.

The Ghost Grid

The technical term for streets that no longer exist is “vacated rights-of-way,” and they are recorded in municipal archives with bureaucratic precision – ordinances that formally extinguish the public’s right to use a particular street corridor. But the colloquial term is more evocative: ghost streets.

Ghost streets are visible in several ways. Sometimes the original street alignment persists as a property boundary, an alley, or a change in lot orientation on either side of the highway. Sometimes the street name survives, attached to a fragment – a one-block stub that dead-ends where it used to continue. In some cities, the old street grid is literally buried: the highway was built at grade or in a cut, and the pavement sits on top of compacted rubble that includes the foundations of the demolished buildings.

In Syracuse, New York, where Interstate 81 was built through the 15th Ward – a historically Black neighborhood – the city has spent years planning the highway’s removal. The “community grid” alternative, which would replace the elevated highway with a surface boulevard, explicitly invokes the pre-highway street network. The goal is to reconnect the grid – to restore the connectivity that was severed sixty years ago. The ghost streets, in this case, may become real streets again.

San Francisco offers a completed example. The Embarcadero Freeway, a double-deck elevated highway built in 1959 along the city’s waterfront, was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and subsequently demolished. In its place, the city built a surface boulevard with streetcar tracks, reconnecting the street grid to the waterfront for the first time in three decades. The removal was transformative: property values along the Embarcadero corridor increased dramatically, and the waterfront became one of the city’s most desirable public spaces. The ghost grid was resurrected, and it turned out to be worth more than the highway that replaced it.

Cartography as Evidence

There is a growing practice among urban historians, planners, and community advocates of using map overlay analysis as a form of evidence – not just to document what was lost, but to argue for what should be restored. The Rondo community in Saint Paul has used historical maps as the foundation for the “ReConnect Rondo” initiative, which proposes building a land bridge over the interstate to restore physical connections between the neighborhoods that I-94 divided. The maps are not just illustrations in this context; they are legal and moral documents that establish what existed before the highway and what was taken.

The cartographer and designer Eric Fischer has produced some of the most striking visualizations of this phenomenon, using historical map data to show how American cities’ street networks have been reshaped – and in many places, reduced – over the past century. Fischer’s work makes visible what is otherwise easy to forget: that every highway through a city is a subtraction from the city’s connective tissue.

What the Map Remembers

At streetgrid.art, we render the street network as it exists now. Our maps are present-tense documents – they show the city as it is, not as it was. But every map of an American city that includes an interstate highway is also, inevitably, a map of what was erased. The wide, blank corridor of the highway is a scar in the grid, and it is visible in every poster we produce of cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Miami, or the Bronx.

We do not annotate these scars. We do not label them with the names of the neighborhoods that once occupied those corridors. But they are there, in the negative space – in the place where the grid suddenly stops, replaced by the sweeping curves and merging lanes of an expressway that was designed for cars moving at sixty miles an hour through spaces that once belonged to people moving at three.

The ghost streets are invisible on our maps. But the voids they left behind are among the most visually distinctive features of any American city seen from above. The grid is honest, even when the history it records is not. Where the lines stop, something was taken. The map does not editorialize. It simply shows the absence, and lets the viewer wonder what used to be there.