Teach-in weighs pros and cons of I-80 project davisenterprise.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from davisenterprise.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This has been a year like no other, with the coronavirus dominating the news, including our stories in Comstock’s, both in print and online. It was a difficult year for most businesses in the Capital Region, among the most difficult in the 31 years Comstock’s has been publishing, especially for those deemed nonessential and forced to shut down. For Comstock’s, 2020 kicked off with several memorable editions before the pandemic dominated our coverage. The March issue, our annual celebration of women in leadership, was a whopping 152 pages, the largest ever produced by Comstock’s. Despite the surge in COVID-19, our November issue, focusing on the environment, was
“It was a political drive-by shooting.” That is how Jessy McCrary described the effect of a new expressway on his town in the early 1960s. “Overtown was killed, without any concern from those with political powers at the time.”
Later in the same documentary, Divided Highways, an engineer who helped build interstates admits, “I’d be upset if I had to move because of a freeway.” Then he shrugs, and adds, “Some people have to suffer; that’s the way it is sometimes.”
The fact that McCrary is Black and the engineer is white is no coincidence. Divided Highways is a remarkable (and sometimes entertaining) look at the history of this nation’s mid-century highway-building frenzy. The smart engineers and road designers constructing a post-war society “could do no wrong,” and were given a free hand to build what the film calls the biggest infrastructure project in human history: the U.S. interstate system.