🚀 go-pugleaf

yoshikami@usuhsb.usuhs.mil writes:
>I have an old map that shews that 70S was supposed to join 495 (just like it
>does today as 270), split off somewhere around Silver Spring, and go downtown 
>along the (former) B&O (Now CSX) tracks to somewhere near Union Station, and 
>join up with that Freeway Extension at H street.  95 was supposed to come down 
>the Northwest Branch Park and (eventually) join with 70S.  There was also 
>another interstate which was supposed to join that H street freeway with all 
>those unfinished bridges at the end of the Whitehurst Freeway, going part way 
>up Rock Creek Park.  Those were supposed to join up with I66 in Virginia with 
>what was supposed to be another bridge across the Potomac.
>But none of this was built.  There are some nice unfinished bridges going
>nowhere, though, as a result.

You are recounting the arrested history of "Urban renewal", which many 
cities took to mean destroying the city in the name of modernization.
Actually, the "interstate" that was supposed to go up Rock Creek Park was
the "Inner Loop" (as opposed to the "Inner Loop" of the Beltway) -- I
don't think it was assigned an Interstate number -- and it was scheduled
to roughly follow Florida Avenue from P Street.  There was to be a K
Street Freeway, not an H street freeway (at least downtown), an E Street
Expressway that went more than its current five blocks -- all the way to
the end of the Inner Loop -- and the I-66 West Potomac Freeway (a 1/4 mi
stub of which now leads from I-66 past the JFK Center to nowhere) was
intended to follow the riverfront, more or less from Canal Road (at the
never-built Three Sisters Bridge from Virginia) along the route of the
Whitehurst Freeway past the JFKC to I-95 (now I-395) and thence to I-295,
paving over the Maine Avenue waterfront.  There would, of course, been an
exit near Georgetown University onto Whitehaven Parkway (now a park named,
oddly, Whitehaven Parkway) leading north to the Wisconsin and Van Ness
area.  For numerous reasons, many of which are very valid, these were
never built.  As a result, the Rock Creek Parkway/Whitehurst Freeway/K
Street/West Potomac Freeway/Virginia Avenue/E Street/Constitution Avenue
connections now defy description.  Seriously, don't even try to give
out-of-towners directions using these commuter routes.  "Bridges to
nowhere" only begins to describe the situation.  Of course, there is the
illogic that the West Potomac Freeway was intended to be I-66 Westbound,
heading Northwest from E Street towards Georgetown, while now it is, in
effect, a stub of I-66 *Eastbound*, given that I-66 was rerouted to the
Roosevelt Bridge and thence onto the stub (and never reaching Georgetown, 
except via the Whitehurst Freeway.. 


>Come to think of it, how many interstates go coast to coast?  I know
>I80 does (From Newark N.J. to San Francisco).  It's billed as "the Main Street
>of the United States" in Indiana.  

>DY 

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