Interstate Highways

Though most African Americans found it extremely difficult to break through the west side race barrier, some blacks did manage to form communities west of the Cuyahoga River.[1] In 1959 the small Westside Village of Linndale saw the emergence of a predominantly black neighborhood; Linndale Park Estates.[2] The forty home “Negro development” comprised of 40 new homes and was located near the manufacturing plants of Ford and Chevrolet.[3] These homes were a far cry from the public housing and tenements many African Americans were living in on the East Side. The Linndale Park Estates neighborhood was, “among the best maintained new neighborhoods in Greater Cleveland…Time had been spent in the careful grooming of lawns and shrubs. Money had been invested in such improvements as awnings, garages and covered patios.”[4] The new houses appealed to Cleveland blacks. At the time, however, few African Americans could flee the city and the poverty therein.[5]

Developers built few homes for African Americans and anti-blockbusting laws prevented the purchase of homes in established West Side communities. West Siders protested that it was not because blacks were not welcome. Indeed, some West Siders insisted that homes were available, but noted that most blacks preferred “to stay east of the Cuyahoga River.”[6] Stuart Wallace, executive head of the Fair Housing Inc, noted that many prospective black buyers seemed “reluctant to go into an area so far removed from the main part of the city’s Negro population.”[7] Though West Siders purportedly welcomed African Americans to purchase homes in their exclusively white neighborhoods, financial barriers kept blacks out because many African Americans were required to pay more for housing than whites.[8]

Shortly after blacks moved into Linndale Park Estates, one of the few west side communities where blacks moved, they faced forced eviction. The Airport Freeway, or I-71, was slated to cut straight through Linndale and Linndale Park Estates sat directly in the highway’s path.[9] Plans called for the demolition of nearly thirty-eight houses, most of them the homes of black residents.[10] I-71 obliterated Linndale Park Estates and shrunk Linndale’s black population down to its former size.[11] Between 1960 and 1970 Linndale lost over half of the village’s African American population and thirty-five percent of the total white population as bulldozers plowed the way for yet another highway.[12]