Interstate 35 roars past you here on the line of old East Avenue, which the 1928 Austin city plan designated as the boundary between white Austin to the west and the designated negro district to the east. The planners of that era understood that a street could do the work of a law. By concentrating services — schools, parks, libraries — exclusively on the east side of this line, and by ensuring that FHA mortgages and deed restrictions in new white suburbs excluded Black and Mexican American buyers, the city engineered a racial geography that persists to this day.
When the federal interstate highway system was built in the 1950s and 1960s, I-35 followed the path of East Avenue, replacing a street with a freeway and transforming a symbolic line into a physical barrier — six lanes of high-speed traffic flanked by sound walls and overpasses. The freeway severed established neighborhoods, destroyed homes, and entrenched the divide. Today Austin is in the early stages of a 'cap and stitch' project that would build park decks over portions of I-35 as it runs through downtown, attempting to reconnect the east and west sides of a city the highway tore apart.
The project is ambitious, expensive, and long overdue. The line it is trying to erase was drawn almost a century ago.