Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America by Amy D. Finstein (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America by Amy D. Finstein Robin B. Williams (bio) Amy D. Finstein Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020 xi + 289 pages, 114 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9781439919187, $29.95 PB ISBN: 9781439919170, $115.50 HB ISBN: 9781439919194, $29.95 EB Amy D. Finstein’s Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the impact of automobiles on the American built environment that includes suburbanization and large-scale highway systems.1 Instead of the broad national scope of most studies, Finstein offers a doubly focused approach, analyzing a specific type of automobile infrastructure—the elevated urban highway—through three early examples: Wacker Drive in Chicago, the West Side (or Miller) [End Page 153] Highway in New York, and the Central Artery in Boston. Her sharper focus allows her to unpack the complexities of urban highway construction at the local level. Yet, by exploring the topic across three different cities spanning roughly sixty years, she adeptly reveals the diversity of challenges and responses to accommodating the automobile. Most refreshing is her analysis of the highways as built form and their relationship to contemporaneous trends in architecture. Finstein draws on the methodology employed by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, which analyzed how the intrusion of the railroad onto the American frontier served as an expression of modernity that shaped the public’s view and use of the American landscape. As she notes, “This book builds on Marx’s pivotal model by positioning the rise of the automobile and its representation of machined progress as the twentieth-century equivalent of his paradigm” (11). Her study enriches the understanding of elevated urban highways as more than engineering projects to address their civic and social objectives and ramifications. Organized into three sections, the book achieves a successful balance between surveying the broader context of the emerging technologies reshaping cities, including automobiles, and providing a focused analysis of the three elevated highway case studies. The first section involves a thorough discussion of “three innovations that radically and successively altered the basis of urban life and urban form”—the railroad, the skyscraper, and the automobile—and that responded to the growing desire for technology, speed, and privatization (15). Finstein insightfully connects the desire for speed in nineteenth-century rail-based transit systems to the rapid evolution of technologies relating to business recordkeeping, telecommunications, and commerce that drove demand for office buildings. Facilitating their upward growth and more rapid internal movement, the elevator allowed skyscrapers to dominate urban skylines, a visible expression of the privatization of the public realm that anticipated the impact of the private automobile. Of the various forms of new technology addressed in the first chapter, her discussion of automobiles, surprisingly, was most problematic in oversimplifying the degree to which private property owners controlled street pavement work and in neglecting to mention the impact of street-use legislation such as jay-walking laws that set an important precedent for the exclusive use of elevated highways by private vehicles. Those omissions are amply compensated by her highly detailed second chapter examining the range of proposed solutions to the growing crisis of automobile congestion that emerged by the 1920s. Here Finstein provides a fascinating back history on four categories of proposals, ranging from stop-gap regulatory practices (such as one-way streets and parking bans) and small-scale engineering solutions to large-scale engineering and beautification plans and utopian visions of futuristic car-based urbanism, with elevated highways drawing from all four. With this last topic of utopian visions, Finstein establishes the linkages between architects and automobility—addressing Le Corbusier, Hugh Ferriss, Harvey Wiley Corbett, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Norman Bel Geddes—that distinguish her book from other studies of highways and roads. With its focus on the technological challenges facing cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this first section offers great value and perspective on topics far broader than the declared topic of the book and could easily...