Urban History (2019), 1–24 doi:10.1017/S0963926819000956 RESEARCH ARTICLE Persistent pedestrianism: urban walking in motor age America, 1920s–1960s Peter Norton*† Department of Engineering and Society, University of Virginia, PO Box 400744, Charlottesville VA 22904, USA *Corresponding author. Email: norton@virginia.edu Abstract Generalizations about ‘car culture’ in the United States, and about American’s ‘love affair with the automobile’, have concealed persistent values and practices among millions of Americans that do not suit such stereotypes. Car culture and the car’s attractions are not denied. American society, however, is a complex of numerous subcultures, including many that resented and resisted the automobile’s growing priority during the twentieth century. Such groups’ resistance to automobile domination has been neglected. Persistent advocacy for pedestrians’ interests is illustrated through numerous examples from the 1920s to the 1960s, the decades when ‘car culture’ rose to its apogee. ‘Statistics show that Americans prefer their automobiles to all other forms of trans- portation.’ This strangely commonplace statement appeared in an otherwise sophis- ticated report issued in 1993 by the US Federal Highway Administration.1 Routine claims such as this are based on statistics of mode usage, not mode preference, and the leap from the one measure to the other is fatal to validity. True, Americans’ reli- ance on automobiles grew throughout the twentieth century; by mid-century driv- ing predominated even in most large US cities. But we cannot know what people prefer if they do not have good choices. Where the alternatives are unequal, practices tell us nothing about preferences. The ubiquity of driving in twentieth-century America has too easily been con- fused for a pervasive preference for driving, and for driving under all circumstances, for all needs. The driving majority has also distracted us from the many who sel- dom or never drove, whether because of circumstances or preferences. It is not wrong to call the US a ‘car culture’, but like all nationalities, Americans have always † Most of the research and writing of this article were conducted while the author was a visiting faculty member at Technical University Eindhoven with the support of Stichting Historie der Technik and Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, which institutions are hereby gratefully acknowl- edged, with special thanks to Professor Ruth Oldenziel of TUE and to Frank Schipper. I am also deeply grateful to Colin Pooley of Lancaster University for the opportunity to contribute to this special section on pedestrians. 1 Federal Highway Administration, National Bicycling and Walking Study, Measures to Overcome Impediments to Bicycling and Walking (FHWA Case Study 4; Washington, Aug. 1993), 5. © Cambridge University Press 2019 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  2 Peter Norton been a diverse people. The twentieth-century US included many subcultures, among them persistent pedestrians: people who walked even in circumstances hos- tile to walking. Any account of car culture that excludes these subcultures risks mis- leading through omission. In 1925, Los Angeles adopted a traffic ordinance that subordinated pedestrians to motor vehicles in city streets. It became a model for the nation.2 In 1961, Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was pub- lished, accelerating an already growing appeal for a renewed appreciation of cities as places where people walk.3 These events make convenient milestones bounding an era in which urban walking was at its lowest ebb in esteem, relative to the high confidence in the feasibility and desirability of the motor age city. But of course pedestrianism persisted in this era. Advocacy for pedestrianism found expression from heterodox transportation insiders; from newspaper editors, columnists and other people of influence; and from pedestrians themselves. It was expressed in popular fiction, in isolated acts of individual rebellion and in organized collective efforts. These advocates’ voices have gone almost unheard amid the din of the era’s automobile enthusiasm. Acclaim of all things automotive reflected real opti- mism about the automobile’s promise, but it was also much more audible because it was promoted and amplified by powerful interest groups with much at stake in it. The era’s persistent pedestrianism, therefore, is hardly known at all. Walking as a primary means of transport fell sharply as driving proliferated. Though this fact tells us nothing about preferences, it matters. Even people who turn to driving reluctantly, or as a last resort, must inevitably adopt the perspective and assume many of the interests of drivers. But despite conditions that grew increasingly hostile to walking, pedestrianism persisted. The persistence is impos- sible to quantify with any precision, because large-scale studies typically omitted pedestrians entirely – a practice that both reflected and reinforced the tendency to consider walking unimportant. The persistence is unquantifiable also because it was generally surreptitious. To manage conditions hostile to walking, pedestrians improvised, disregarding rules as needed. Ubiquitous evasions of this kind left only the scantest traces in the histor- ical record. Occasionally, however, the resistance was more organized, and calcu- lated to attract attention. Such occasions of defiant pedestrianism yield press reports that offer evidence of enduring hardships and resentments. These in turn give us cause to conclude that many pedestrians regarded motor vehicles’ suprem- acy in streets was as an injustice to be resisted, more often by individual acts of eva- sion than by organized protests. Where defiance won local support and sympathetic press coverage, it could com- pel official concessions. The most successful model proliferated in the 1950s amid ubiquitous car culture. In dense urban neighbourhoods that also accommodated fast driving, residents organized illegal blockades of hazardous streets or intersec- tions. Such protests were often organized immediately after the injury or death of a child. At most blockades, most of the protesters were women, especially 2 See P.D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 164, 190–3. 3 J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 3 mothers who feared for the safety of their young children. Their demands were usu- ally modest: lower speed limits, stop signs or a traffic light. In the typical blockade, residents, some bearing handmade signs, collectively made themselves into human traffic barriers, sitting in chairs or standing across the roadway, or picketing around an intersection. At many such blockades, the obstructions included baby carriages (prams), occupied or not. They captured reporters’ attention, to the advantage of the protes- ters. The press called such protests ‘baby carriage blockades’.4 These not only blocked traffic but rhetorically associated the protests with motherhood, with all its connotations. Spoken words, signs and imagery evoked the cause of child safety, but individual participants sometimes noted their personal grievances as pedes- trians. One picketer at a 1959 baby carriage blockade in Queens told a reporter ‘sometimes it takes almost 10 minutes to cross the street’.5 Hence, baby carriage blockades could be more than appeals for children’s safe access to streets, but for pedestrians’ rights generally. Baby carriage blockades were a volatile compound of reactive elements – at a minimum, they combined defiance of authority with the sanctity of motherhood. Among white women, flagrant lawbreaking in the name of motherhood and child safety was relatively safe and often won concessions from officialdom. Indeed, white blockades were in certain respects reminiscent of white protests in urban neighbourhoods to defend residential segregation. In both kinds of protests, participants thought of themselves as defending their local communities, and both causes receded with white flight to car-dependent suburbs. People of colour had no such advantages in protests. Black and Latino people participated in and led some of the earliest and largest blockades, but apparently only in big northern cities where there was safety in numbers and a black press to cover the story. Even there, demands for pedestrian safety could be risky. In 1963, a black Chicagoan noted disparate responses to pedestrians’ needs outside his butcher shop. When he asked police to address a hazard from trucks violating parking rules that were intended to protect pedestrians, the response was begrudging – indeed, police told truck drivers unhappy with enforcement to ‘see the butcher in the store. He wrote to the Superintendent of Police.’ He concluded sarcastically ‘maybe their con- venience is more important than the lives of the Negro pedestrians whom they endanger’.6 Non-white populations were disproportionately carless and hence exposed to the hazards and hardships of car domination. They had ample cause to demand better street conditions. But compared to white parents, most stood little chance of getting sympathetic press coverage or concessions from officialdom. 4 The term was an apparent variant on the older baby carriage brigade, in circulation especially in the years preceding ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), for mothers marching for woman suffrage or for other causes, or in parades. Indeed, in the 1950s, the press sometimes used baby carriage brigade and baby carriage blockade interchangeably. Both terms could suggest condescension, but participants in such protests sometimes used similar terms themselves, and the deliberate use of baby carriages at blockades suggests that protesters embraced their symbolic value. 5 ‘Blockade continues in Jamaica’, New York Amsterdam News, 7 Feb. 1959, 19; statement of Dorothy Mitchell. 6 H. Miller, letter to editor (‘Racial privilege’), Chicago Defender, 14 Mar. 1963, 14. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  4 Peter Norton In 1969 and 1970, at the apogee of car culture, the US Census Bureau conducted major national surveys of transportation practices. Though most of the surveys neglected pedestrians, a few gave them some attention. The findings indicate that while walking indeed ceased to be a primary mobility mode for most Americans, it survived as a minority practice. Walking remained particularly important to peo- ple with fewer opportunities to drive, notably the poor, people of colour, women, the disabled and children. In 1970, 1 in 20 of all employed Americans walked to work. The rate among residents of cities was certainly much higher.7 Naturally, for some populations walking to work was much more common. Among 16- to 17-year-old workers, 15 per cent walked to work.8 One of five US households had no car. Though the median household income was then $7,700 a year, and the poverty threshold was about half that, 10.7 million households earned less than $3,000 a year. Among them, 63 per cent had no car.9 In 1970, women were still much less likely to drive than men, and women drivers drove less. Among men aged 16 and over, 87 per cent had a driver’s licence; 62 per cent of women had one. About 56 per cent of all licensed drivers were men, and 73 per cent of all miles driven were driven by men. According to drivers’ own estimates, men drove more than twice the total annual miles (11,352) that women drove (5,411).10 People of colour were much less likely to drive than whites. Whites made 52 per cent of their trips as car drivers, non-whites 37 per cent.11 Among school children in 1970, 42 per cent walked or bicycled, compared to 38 per cent who rode a school bus, and 16 per cent who were driven to school.12 ‘Car culture’, even at its height, cannot offer a complete account of American mobility. Though by 1970 walking as a practical mobility mode was indeed marginal, it remained essential among several populations, and important to others. To some degree, even the most committed motorists were also sometimes pedestrians. Given their neglect among the profusion of histories of car culture, and the renewed interest in walkability as a corrective for the excesses of the motor age, the persistent pedestrianism of twentieth-century America warrants more attention. Indeed, a major impediment to a more walkable future in urban America is the notion that Americans not only do not walk, but will not walk, because they ‘prefer their automobiles to all other forms of transportation’. The untold history of per- sistent pedestrianism gives us reason to doubt this common but historically naïve perspective. 7 Survey conducted 1969–70 by the US Census Bureau for the FHWA, in P.V. Svercl and R.H. Asin, ‘Home-to-work trips and travel’, Nationwide Personal Transportation Study, report 8 (Washington, 1973), table A-16, p. 67. 8 Ibid., table A-17, p. 68. 9 Ibid., table A-32, p. 83. 10 R.E. Gish, ‘Characteristics of licensed drivers’, Nationwide Personal Transportation Study, report 6 (Washington, 1973), p. 3, table 1 p. 8, p. 23, table 9 p. 24, table 10 p. 25, p. 27. 11 A. Randill, H. Greenhalgh and E. Samson, ‘Mode of transportation and personal characteristics of tripmakers’, Nationwide Personal Transportation Study, report 9 (Washington, 1973), p. 1, table F p. 14, table 9 p. 39. 12 D.A. Beschen, Jr, ‘Transportation characteristics of school children’, Nationwide Personal Transportation Study, report 4 (Washington, 1972), p. 1, fig. 1 p. 8, table 1 p. 9. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 5 In most respects, motorists had achieved priority consideration in American city streets by about 1930. This precedence has not been seriously challenged since then, although voices of dissent grew more audible following the excesses of urban high- way projects in the 1960s, the new environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s and the energy crises of the 1970s. From about 1930 to 1970, then, the automobile was ascendant. In retrospect, the 1950s and 1960s have been particularly conspicuous as the pre-eminent decades of ‘car culture’. But the car’s real attractions and its favoured consideration in these decades has been a distraction from other import- ant social forces. Throughout the motor age, pedestrianism persisted. Part 1: 1920s–1940s The marginalization of walking in the American cities originates in the marginal- ization of driving. Automobiles had all the well-known attractions in their favour; the car’s mass appeal is not in question. But these attractions were not sufficient to explain cars’ ultimate predominance in American cities. Cars faced enormous resistance in cities. They confronted physical, institutional and cultural obstacles that tended to grow in response to the proliferation of cars. Cars demanded sub- stantial scarce street space, even when parked. Authorities, including judges, police, municipal engineers and (to some extent) chambers of commerce, generally responded to the car less as a blessing to be accommodated than as a curse to be controlled. Above all, the non-motoring majority tended to respond to motorists in cities as dangerous intruders who interfered with other street users and who bore chief responsibility for the rising affliction of traffic injuries and deaths. In the early 1920s, when sales of automobiles in cities fell short of expectations, some in the industry blamed such attitudes. They organized to change them. In 1922, Engineering News-Record, the readership of which included road builders, editorialized that ‘the obvious solution…lies only in a radical revision of our con- ception of what a city street is for’.13 Charles Hayes, president of the Chicago Motor Club, put his constituents’ position plainly: ‘The streets were made for vehicles to run upon.’14 Automaker George Graham explained to his colleagues in motordom that ‘Pedestrians must be educated to know that automobiles have rights.’15 Automotive interest groups, which sometimes called themselves ‘motordom’, were already organizing to promote such a change. This effort to win place and priority for automobiles in American cities was complex, prodigious and largely successful.16 Motordom sponsored the new profes- sion of traffic engineering, and in so doing influenced its early development to favour driving. In 1925, Studebaker established the Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research, housing it at Harvard University. Through the bureau, Studebaker financed the training of the first generation of professional traffic engi- neers. In 1925, local motordom in Los Angeles succeeded in inducing the city to 13 ‘Motor killings and the engineer’ (editorial), Engineering News-Record, 89 (9 Nov. 1922), 775. 14 C. Hayes, ‘Auto accidents are not always due to drivers’, Chicago Tribune, 11 Jan. 1920, part 8, p. 11. 15 Graham, address to the Society of Automotive Engineers, Washington, 15 Dec. 1924, published as ‘Cause (and prevention) of accidents’, Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers, 16 (Jan. 1925), 12–13, at 12. 16 See Norton, Fighting Traffic. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  6 Peter Norton adopt a traffic ordinance that gave vehicles priority over pedestrians, relegating them to crossings. National motordom backed a version of it as a model traffic ordinance for American cities. By 1930, the ordinance and variations on it had been widely adopted.17 The gasoline tax, non-existent until 1919, was ubiquitous by August 1929, when every state had such a tax. Resistant at first, motordom soon backed the gas tax on condition that the revenues be committed to roads. State gas taxes initially funded rural roads, but soon state motor highways pene- trated cities. Motordom fought to shift some of the blame for pedestrian casualties from dri- vers to the pedestrians themselves. ‘Jaywalking’, still a controversial word in 1920, was a normalized term by 1930; it cast doubt on pedestrians’ legitimacy as street users. The American Automobile Association became the leading sponsor of school safety education in the 1920s. Its safety materials trained children to be responsible for their own safety, in part by conceding the street to motorists.18 The attractions and rising popularity of motoring were necessary to its success, but not sufficient. Motordom itself found that extraordinary efforts were needed. Motordom’s success was never complete or unchallenged. Objections to pedes- trians’ loss of unrestricted rights to the street came early and from diverse quarters. Among experts, dissent was common. In 1924, as motordom’s campaign to shift presumed responsibility for pedestrian casualties from motorists to ‘jaywalkers’ reached full speed, New York City’s traffic magistrate, Bruce Cobb, cried foul.19 In defending the interests of walkers, experts sometimes invoked the absurdity of the marginalization of walking among a species that evolved to walk. To expert critics, the marginalization of walking was a threat to health, safety and social equity. In the 1920s, Harriet Beard was one of the leading safety education experts in the US. She was independent in her views, and was uninfluenced by AAA’s safety agenda. In her 1924 book Safety First for School and Home, a standard reference, Beard argued that children must be free to walk in safety. ‘Viewed from the stand- point of health, a normal, growing child needs the exercise of walking’, Beard wrote. ‘The habit of walking, acquired in youth, is of lifelong value to health and to the use of leisure time.’ She warned: ‘If we Americans continue to ride constantly and never walk anywhere, who knows whether in a few generations our descendants may be born without legs?’20 Similar objections were offered on grounds of safety. In 1925, Michigan introduced a gasoline tax (2 cents a gallon), fuelling a road construction boom. The new roads were designed to serve drivers’ needs; sidewalks remained a local responsibility. Miles of roads, including many in the Detroit vicinity, had none. Pedestrians were compelled to walk on the roadway, with catastrophic con- sequences for safety. In 1930, John Reid, Detroit’s commissioner of public works, demanded sidewalks. Like Beard, Reid sarcastically invoked natural selection: ‘Mankind is still created with feet rather than with rubber tires.’21 17 Ibid., 165–9, 190–3. 18 P.D. Norton, ‘Street rivals: jaywalking and the invention of the motor age street’, Technology and Culture, 48 (2007), 331–59; Norton, Fighting Traffic, 71–9, 225–30. 19 W.B. Cobb, ‘Nation roused against motor killings’, New York Times, 23 Nov. 1924, 5. 20 H. Beard, Safety First for School and Home (New York, 1925), 82. 21 ‘Reid demands walks on road’, Detroit Free Press, 20 Mar. 1930, 12. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 7 The disappearing legs warning took extraordinary form in a work of science fic- tion. It appeared in 1928 in Hugo Gernsback’s pioneering monthly, Amazing Stories. In ‘The revolt of the pedestrians’, David H. Keller foretold a ghastly distant future of utter car dependency, in which a small minority of pedestrians survives like hunted animals. Their predators are permanent motorists whose legs have withered to mere stubs.22 The editor’s introduction provocatively billed the story not as fantastical but rather as a timely warning: ‘What will happen to us, the author must have asked himself, if we continue to ride in cars for centuries to come? You may laugh at the idea that we will lose the use of our legs entirely, but the idea is not as foolish as it may sound.’ Though set in the future, the story was a warning for the present: ‘Many of the things of which the author speaks are gradually coming about. There was a time when pedestrians had certain rights. In our large cities, however, these rights are practically lost even now.’23 Popular opposition to the marginalization of the pedestrian was also common. Pedestrians never successfully organized, but several attempts indicate a persistent interest. These include the Walkers’ League (Los Angeles, 1922), the Pedestrians’ Protective League (Los Angeles, 1924), the Pedestrians’ Mutual Protective Association (Baltimore, 1927) and the Association for Protection to Pedestrians (Chicago, 1930).24 Defences of pedestrians’ rights were perennial among letters to newspaper editors. Some pedestrians resorted to acts of defiance and threats, which newspapers generally reported without condemnation, and sometimes with sympathy. In 1926, there were reports of ‘traffic fanatics’ in New York City: ‘otherwise peaceful citizens who are weary of being chased from curb to curb by careless motorists’. They ‘stand in sullen defiance and make heedless drivers slow down to a stop’.25 An anonymous resident of Knoxville, Tennessee, signing off only as ‘A Citizen’, warned the city’s safety director: ‘If you can’t fix it so a person can walk across the streets…without going into a deep run from being hit by autos, I’m going to sprinkle tacks over Gay Street at Church, Clinch, Wall, Union and Commerce.’ Newspapers that ran the story practically endorsed the threat: ‘This thoughtless running down of innocent pedestrians by automobiles has to stop. And it will stop, if everyone does as an ired “Citizen” of this city threatens to do.’26 In communities of colour, such criticism had to be more discrete, and has left a much fainter trace. Among the more visible examples was a meeting in the Jamaica neighbourhood of Queens (New York City) in 1933. When a black minister was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a ministerial union appealed to the police for traffic enforcement and better lighting, and Jamaica residents held ‘a protest meeting against the poor traffic laws’ and ‘violations of city ordinances in the thickly popu- lated Negro sections of Jamaica’ at a local church. According to the New York Amsterdam News, one of the metropolis’s black newspapers, ‘many persons 22 D.H. Keller, ‘The revolt of the pedestrians’, Amazing Stories, 2, 11 (Feb. 1928), 1048–59. 23 Ibid., 1049. 24 ‘Walkers’ league is born in California’ (AP), Owensboro [Ky.] Inquirer, 8 Sep. 1922, 8; ‘Pedestrians to fight speeders’, Los Angeles Times, 18 Aug. 1924, part II, 1; ‘Pedestrians form protective society’, Baltimore Sun, 7 Jan. 1927, 3; ‘Pedestrians organize for their protection’, Daily Journal-Gazette and Commercial-Star, Mattoon, IL, 8 Feb. 1930, 6. 25 O.O. McIntyre, ‘New York day by day’ (column), Indianapolis Star, 18 Sep. 1926, 6. 26 ‘Pedestrian vows to set tacks for car drivers’, Capital Times (Madison, WI), 4 Mar. 1928, 13. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  8 Peter Norton affiliated with clubs, civic organizations and churches attended’. There is no indi- cation that they achieved any reforms.27 By the 1930s, the automobile’s pre-eminence in city streets was well established, but never unchallenged. The leading national authority on traffic engineering remained the Bureau for Street Traffic Research. In the 1930s, it moved from Harvard to Yale, and its funding source shifted from the struggling Studebaker to the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (via the industry’s Automotive Safety Foundation), supplemented by a personal gift of $50,000 from GM’s Alfred P. Sloan.28 In 1941, the Bureau’s associate director, Maxwell Halsey, pro- duced a textbook, Traffic Accidents and Congestion, that defined the field’s ortho- doxy. In it, Halsey propounded the doctrine that the preference for driving was an independent variable to be used as a governing axiom. He contended that critics of lavish construction projects to accommodate automobiles in cities ‘completely ignore the highly practical point of how people want to go downtown. If people pre- fer to drive downtown and can afford it, then facilities must be built for them up to their ability to pay. The choice of mode of travel is their own.’29 This radical pos- ition treated highly diverse street users as if they were all alike, and treated responses to circumstances as if they were essential preferences. Nevertheless, this was already traffic engineering orthodoxy when Halsey’s book was published. The position prevailed practically unchallenged for at least the next 30 years. Despite growing dissent since the 1960s and 1970s, it remains predominant today among transportation experts.30 This orthodoxy sheltered widespread blaming of pedestrians for their own woes. In 1938, Burton Marsh of the American Automobile Association explained that ‘the greatest cause of pedestrian fatalities is ignorance on the part of the pedestrian, who does not know he is nearly invisible to motorists and that it is much more difficult to control an automobile than his own actions’.31 In 1939, Denver’s safety manager likened the average pedestrian to ‘a spoiled and pampered child’.32 But a few experts, with the support from some journalists, dissented. In 1932, a civil engineer warned that efforts to accommodate automobiles everywhere in cities caused ‘enormous waste of street space’.33 Meanwhile, Providence, Rhode Island, earned a national reputation for its impressive safety record. Delegations from other cities learned that Providence’s success was not due to blaming or restricting pedestrians, but to giving them priority consideration, while imposing a citywide 25 27 ‘Minister killed by reckless motorist’, New York Amsterdam News, 26 Jul. 1933, 11. 28 ‘Yale to open bureau on traffic research’, New York Times, 12 Apr. 1938, 13; ‘$25,000 Sloan gift aids auto safety’, New York Times, 14 Jan. 1938, 25; ‘Sloan again dives $25,000 for safety’, New York Times, 22 Mar. 1939, 26. 29 M. Halsey, Traffic Accidents and Congestion (New York, 1941), 16. 30 The frequent conflation of circumstantial practices with essential preferences is exemplified in the City and County of Denver’s 2008 Strategic Transportation Plan. On page 10, the plan reports that ‘55% of Americans would prefer to drive less and walk more’; three pages later, the plan contends that, in a city crossed and encircled by interstate highways, ‘our behavior illustrates a continued preference to drive’. City and County of Denver, Moving People: Denver Strategic Transportation Plan (Oct. 2008), 10, 13. 31 ‘Safety seminar to close today after three-day meeting’, Daily Clintonian (Clinton, IN), 19 Oct. 1938, 1. 32 William E. Gunther quoted in ‘Assert pedestrian is “spoiled child”’ (AP), Evening State Journal (Lincoln, NB), 17 Oct. 1939, 9. 33 W.D. Johnson, ‘Street cars or traffic jams?’, Cincinnati Enquirer, 16 Jun. 1932. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 9 mph speed limit on motorists.34 To a mass audience, journalist Myron Stearns explained that ‘with pedestrian traffic regulated, cars travel at greater speed, and are harder to stop’.35 In 1938, writer J. George Frederick argued that rebuilding cit- ies for cars was madness; ‘it would only invite more floods of cars into places where cars have no business at all – where only pedestrians, trees, air, light, and quiet should be’.36 Part 2: 1940s–1960s The official subordination of the pedestrian continued unabated in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. A 1957 statement by the American Association of State Highway Officials captures the bias: ‘In and near downtown districts, pedestrian–vehicular conflicts at intersections may be so great as to seriously impede arterial traffic.’37 No corresponding impediment to pedestrian traffic seems even to have been ima- gined. Such bias pervaded the period, and was particularly apparent in safety cam- paigns. In 1952, Cincinnati’s police department, safety council and Kiwanis Club wanted to reduce traffic casualties among pedestrians. They arranged to have boy scouts and police distribute 80,000 cards to pedestrians they considered jaywalkers. The cards read: ‘I AM A JAYWALKER: When I am injured or killed, please send me to one of the following hospitals.’ Checkboxes were provided for seven hospitals plus the ‘city morgue’. On the back of the card, a ‘pedestrian scoreboard’ could be used to keep track of injuries and deaths to jaywalkers.38 From the perspective that predominated among authorities, blame for pedestrian casualties lay with pedes- trians themselves. Motordom promoted this perspective. In 1952, the Inter-Industry Highway Safety Committee, composed of automotive industry groups, issued a pamphlet called ‘Wacky walkers’. The National Automobile Dealers Association, a member of the committee, urged car dealerships to distribute it. Calling injuries and fatal- ities to pedestrians a ‘menace to motorists and automobile sales’, NADA explained that they ‘always lead to a continuing discouragement of the use of the automobile and are a deterrent to automobile sales and service’.39 Through safety campaigns, classroom education and publicity aimed at drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, the American Automobile Association also promoted pedestrian safety from drivers’ perspective. Although the total annual pedestrian death toll remained high throughout the period, the trend showed a very gradual decline in the late 1940s and 1950s. So when motor traffic killed 7,950 pedestrians in 1956, AAA character- ized the number as relatively good news. ‘Pedestrian programs are paying off’, it 34 R. Elliott, ‘Safest city envies pedestrian control in Rochester’, Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), 20 Feb. 1940, 12. 35 M. Stearns, ‘Your right to cross the street’, Outlook and Independent, 155 (14 May 1930), 50–3, 80. 36 J.G. Frederick, ‘Too many automobiles’, Forum and Century, 100, 6 (Dec. 1938), 275–9, at 277. 37 American Association of State Highway Officials, A Policy on Arterial Highways in Urban Areas (Washington, 1957), 181. 38 ‘Jaywalk card is ringer!’ Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 Oct. 1952, 1. 39 ‘Wacky walkers: menace to motorists and to automobile sales’, NADA Magazine, 25, 2 (Dec. 1952), 46–7. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  10 Peter Norton claimed.40 But incomplete data make other causes plausible. With the proliferation of cars and driving, had walking become so much more unpleasant that there were now fewer pedestrians on the streets to kill? As these examples indicate, official expertise and motordom’s agendas were so intermingled as to be impossible to distinguish. A case in point was the Automotive Safety Foundation (ASF), the leading traffic safety organization of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Established by the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association in 1937, the foundation tirelessly promoted express highways on traffic safety grounds. It even promoted the spread of parking lots and garages in cities, though their relation to safety was unclear. In a 1955 report called What Parking Means to Business, ASF contended that ‘parkers don’t like to walk’.41 The observa- tion might have supported transit, density or walkability, but instead ASF called for ‘adequate off street facilities’ for parking cars. But heterodox expertise persisted. In 1946, as conventional traffic planners pur- sued the elusive goal of a car-friendly, congestion-free city, some experts questioned prevailing doctrine. According to civil engineer Jacob Field, ‘The very basis of city existence is congestion.’ To design cities for delay-free driving at peak demand ‘would be a tremendous waste of the facilities for practically 99% of the time’.42 Sam Baldock, Oregon’s state highway engineer, warned that cities cannot accom- modate every motorist’s demand. ‘It may be impossible to build the requisite expressways, and certainly it is impossible to construct the required terminal facil- ities’ (parking).43 P.Y.K. Howat of the District of Columbia Parking Authority agreed. ‘To me it is doubtful if the demand for parking space in the modern city can ever be practically met in the congested areas’, he wrote. To try to expand park- ing so as to serve all existing demand would only ‘create new demand’, plus ‘uncon- trollable traffic congestion in the area’.44 Such criticisms bore implicit defences of pedestrians’ place in the urban mobility mix, but in 1947 traffic engineer Ernest Bailey was explicit. ‘We generally assume that the motorist’s time is invaluable’, Bailey wrote, ‘while that of the pedestrian is utterly worthless.’ Consequently, authorities were ‘trying to make roads safe and expeditious for the motorist at the expense of added hazards to the pedestrian’, who was compelled to cross more dangerous streets.45 Meanwhile, excessive zeal in fighting delay to motorists only induced them to drive more. In 1956, traffic authority Wilfred Owen offered an enduring diagnosis of the consequence: ‘The helter-skelter of today’s urban sprawl has us moving on a treadmill. We are attempting at great cost to increase the speed at which we move.’ But the benefit of speed was ‘nullified’ by greater distances between destinations.46 Practically 40 Foundation for Traffic Safety, American Automobile Association, Planned Pedestrian Program (Washington, 1958), 3. 41 Automotive Safety Foundation, What Parking Means to Business (Washington, 1955), 31. 42 J. Field, untitled commentary, Nov. 1946, in J. Barnett, Express Highway Planning in Metropolitan Areas (New York, 1946), 34–7, at 34. 43 S. Baldock, untitled commentary, Sep. 1946, in ibid., 31–4, at 33. 44 P.Y.K. Howat, ‘Traffic and parking problems’, in Chamber of Commerce of the United States, City Rebuilding Is Tomorrow’s Business (Washington, 1946), 12–15, at 15. 45 E.L. Bailey, ‘The pedestrian in traffic’, Traffic Quarterly, 1, 1 (Jan. 1947), 83–8, at 87. 46 W. Owen, The Metropolitan Transportation Problem (Washington, 1956). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 11 unknown before 1956, the term ‘urban sprawl’ would eventually become a mainstay of the vocabulary of urban transportation debates. It was not just that highways per- mitted lower density. As some experts admitted, they compelled lower density, with disastrous effects wherever density was already high. Speaking to the Highway Research Board in 1957, planner J. Douglas Carroll argued that by using highways to serve central Chicago, planners were subjecting the area to contradictory stresses. You can have density, or you can have ‘highways and parking’, Carroll argued. But ‘you cannot have both’.47 In the late 1950s, at the apex of the motor age, some of these heterodox experts managed to introduce some modest compromises. Architect and planner Victor Gruen designed pioneering shopping malls that cultivated walking between shops, though shoppers arrived at such malls by car. Meanwhile, Gruen lamented the excesses of conventional traffic engineering. He assailed ‘the insane arrange- ment by which hordes of mechanical monsters fight for every square inch of space with others of their own kind and with human beings on foot’.48 Such scorn for traffic engineering orthodoxy was not rare. Strict enforcement of pedes- trian regulations invited ridicule from newspapers, merchants and pedestrians. In 1953, a Los Angeles executive told the Pittsburgh chamber of commerce that to relieve traffic congestion the city should fine jaywalkers 5 dollars each. The offended editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette were sarcastic: ‘Why bother? The pedestrian nuisance will eventually disappear. However, the city could speed matters by offer- ing a bounty for each skin, instead of just letting ’em die out.’49 Pedestrians were inconspicuous in popular culture during the mid-twentieth century, as road fiction featuring car travel became a genre of its own. The rare exceptions afford some insight into pedestrians’ survival as a marginalized popula- tion, worthy of readers’ empathy. Two works of popular fiction, and two transitory news sensations, make useful examples. The golden age of comic books survived into the 1950s, and as the decade began the publisher Quality Comics introduced Broadway Romances. The inaugural 1950 issue included ‘Yesterday’s darling’, the story of a Broadway sensation’s emotional return to New York five years after her fleeting fairy tale of fame had ended.50 Once ‘the darling of Broadway’, Darla Manners has been forgotten – even by her former leading man, Harold Bancroft. The anonymous writer and author team wanted to prove beyond doubt that Harold was loathsome, a vile, cold-hearted brute. For this, they chose a frame in which Darla, walking along the street, sees Harold at the wheel of car, about to pull away from the curb. An unidentified young woman is in the passenger seat. As Darla approaches the parked car, Harold pulls away from the curb, forcing Darla back. Without pausing long enough to recognize Darla, Harold shouts to her: ‘Watch out, sister! Streets are for cars, you know!’ In this frame, Darla and Harold exemplify their respective modes. Pedestrian 47 J.D. Carroll, ‘Implications of highway improvement to mass transit’, in Highway Research Board, Economic Impact of Highway Improvement: Conference Proceedings, March 18–19, 1957 (Washington, 1957), 51–2, at 51. 48 Gruen, address to the National Citizens Planning Conference ‘Main Street 1969’, Little Rock, June 1957, in American Planning and Civic Annual (Washington, 1957), 16–21, at 18. 49 ‘Traffic solution’ (editorial), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6 Jun. 1953, Daily Magazine section, p. 1. 50 ‘Yesterday’s darling’, Broadway Romances, 1 (Jan. 1950), 1–9. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  12 Peter Norton Darla Manners is polite, naïve and vulnerable; motorist Harold Bancroft is rude, self-important and aggressive. By casting Darla and Harold in these roles, the authors instantly established their respective characters and their relationship. As pedestrians’ status has fallen, Darla’s star has dimmed. But readers literally share Darla’s perspective, and their sympathies are with her. A far more developed and much better-known treatment of the pedestrian in popular fiction appeared months later, when Ray Bradbury’s very short story ‘The pedestrian’ was published.51 Bradbury later developed the story into his novel Fahrenheit 451. In 1949, he was walking at night in Los Angeles when a police officer in a squad car stopped him. Apparently, the policeman thought walking in Los Angeles at night was unusual enough to warrant suspicion. Bradbury found the experience unsettling, and turned his bewilderment at the denormalization of walk- ing into dystopian science fiction.52 Published in 1951, ‘The pedestrian’ describes a future in which no one walks. Everyone stays indoors, entertained by their ‘screens’. In the story, a man ventures out, only to be stopped (as Bradbury was) by the police. In ‘The pedestrian’, the police car is a driverless vehicle. Neither ‘The pedestrian’ nor ‘Yesterday’s darling’ was unusually popular, and certainly neither was an expression of the American zeitgeist of 1950. Both stories, however, worked by tacitly applying perceptions already familiar to their readers: that walking is normal but now marginalized, that those who still walked (in 1950) are somehow naïve and therefore vulnerable, that the supremacy of the auto- mobile is a triumph of might over right. That is, the stories reflected a shared per- ception that the marginalization of walking was a denormalization of the normal. Consistent with this perception, minor acts of resistance occurred and news- paper coverage reflects some sympathy for them. The age of YouTube has called attention to one apparently new form of resistance, sometimes called ‘hoodwalk- ing’. If a motorist who has stopped at an intersection blocks the crosswalk with the car, a hoodwalker crosses in the crosswalk undeterred, stepping coolly onto the car’s hood along the way. But hoodwalking is decades older than YouTube. Newspapers reported such cases as amusing ‘man-bites-dog’ stories, but in their wording they suggest that pedestrians were recognized as marginalized street users awaiting their champion. The act required a tall pedestrian, but as hoods gradually lowered in the 1950s the height requirement eased. In all known cases from the 1950s, the hoodwalker was a man. In 1953, a Florida man, Charles W. Jones, ‘climbed upon the hood of the car and jumped up and down’. The reporter called the act a ‘brief campaign for pedestrian rights’. As a United Press item the story appeared in numerous newspapers. The city of Tampa fined Jones 32 dollars.53 Jones was not the typical hoodwalker. Most stepped on the hood (Jones ‘climbed’); most stepped off on the other side without further ado. But anyone big enough for hoodwalking was big enough to cause damage. In October 1954, Curtis F. Maxwell strode across the hood of a car blocking a crosswalk in 51 R. Bradbury, ‘The pedestrian’, The Reporter, 5, 3 (7 Aug. 1951), 39–40. 52 See J.R. Eller, ‘The story of Fahrenheit 451’, in R. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (60th anniversary edn, New York, 2012), 167–87, at 172. 53 ‘Pedestrian assaults auto, pays $32’ (United Press), Wilmington (DE), News-Journal, 20 Jan. 1953, 25. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 13 Houston. Maxwell dented the driver’s hood and was arrested.54 When the judge dismissed the charges against him, a Denver Post columnist celebrated, suggesting that Maxwell belonged in the ‘Pedestrian Hall of Fame’.55 Reporters covering the story introduced the term ‘hood-walker’.56 In 1956, James Joseph Clyne ‘walked across the hood’ of an offending driver’s car in Inglewood, California. According to the Associated Press reporter, Clyne’s purpose was ‘to champion the cause of the long-suffering pedestrians’, and told arresting officers that the car ‘was infrin- ging on his rights’. He was arrested ‘on suspicion of drunkenness’.57 Such spontaneous rebellions were not always the work of pedestrians acting alone. In Miami at about noon on 5 February 1955, pedestrians defied control in what reporters called a ‘mass revolt’. At the busy intersection of Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue, ‘a handful of pedestrians took their lives in their hands and crossed on a red light. Others cheered, in a moment there was a steady stream by foot regardless of the stop and go light.’ Police needed 40 minutes to resume control of the intersection.58 The owners of shops and other businesses along streets could be zealous advocates for the pedestrians they depended upon. Two years after its pedestrian rebellion, Miami tried fining jaywalkers 5 dollars. Merchants complained that in enforcement areas the campaign sharply reduced sales. ‘We should take care of pedestrians first’, one of them told reporters. ‘If neces- sary, we should ban automobiles entirely from the downtown area.’ Another said, ‘We should encourage people to come downtown, rather than create more parking spaces and add to the traffic problem.’59 Some individual rebellions were more carefully planned. Dentist Louis J. Friedman of Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley north-west of Los Angeles, was also unhappy about authorities’ neglect of pedestrians. His patients complained that they could not cross the street to enter his practice. In a two-year effort, Friedman got the owners of neighbouring businesses to sign two petitions for a crosswalk, with no result, so in 1959 he hand painted one, using a broom. He was fined, but local and national press attention was extensive and the coverage was sympathetic to him.60 Finally, some rebellions were collective and organized. In October 1941, ‘more than a score of mothers with arms linked together’ formed ‘a human chain’ across a Los Angeles street, ‘purposely blocking traffic’. They were protecting their chil- dren’s journey to school and attracting attention to hazards they wanted remed- ied.61 The incident was a glimpse of things to come after World War II. The baby boom that followed the war was the era of baby carriage blockades and similar 54 ‘Well, he made it across the street’ (AP), Austin Statesman, 2 Oct. 1954, 3. 55 H. Farrar, Denver Post; reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 Mar. 1955, as ‘For the pedestrian hall of fame’, part 3, p. 2. 56 The Dayton Daily News ran Farrar’s column under the title ‘Hood-walkers’ hall of fame’, 24 Sep. 1955, 4. 57 ‘Man tramps over auto in crosswalk’, Los Angeles Times, 26 Mar. 1956, 1. 58 ‘Pedestrians revolt, tie up traffic 40 minutes’ (AP), Tampa Tribune, 6 Feb. 1955, 1. 59 ‘Miami merchants blast jaywalking drive’ (AP), Fort Lauderdale Daily News, 18 Jan. 1957, 9-A. 60 ‘Man of action’, Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 1959, part 3, p. 1; ‘“Crusading” dentist paints Ventura Blvd. crosswalks’, Van Nuys News, 1 Dec. 1959, 1, 7; ‘Crosswalk removed; dentist billed $63.55’, Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 1959, 2. 61 ‘Irate mothers block street to guard children’, Fresno Bee, 15 Oct. 1941, 10. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  14 Peter Norton demonstrations. The suburban San Fernando Valley, where Friedman later had his dental practice, was the scene of several protests. In June 1946, women there picketed dangerous intersections, demanding safer crossings for pedestrians. The Los Angeles Times quoted picketers: ‘They are killing people nearly every day’, said one. ‘The time has come for drastic measures’, said another.62 Ten miles west, a small 1952 picket in Reseda for traffic signals was unusual in having spon- sorship from the local chamber of commerce, which supplied professionally printed signs. At a hazardous intersection, posts for traffic signals had been erected long before, but residents had no word on when the signals themselves would be installed. Accompanied by children, women picketers called on motorists to drive carefully.63 By contrast, a 1958 protest in Pacoima, in the north of the San Fernando Valley, was an entirely home-made response to two families’ terrible losses. In the 1950s, Pacoima was a majority Latino community with a significant African American population. The quickly growing area was known for wide streets lacking sidewalks and other amenities. In May 1956, Ernest Apodach, a 13-year-old Latino boy, was walking along busy Glenoaks Boulevard when he was struck and killed by a motor- ist. Locals petitioned for safety measures. Then in December 1958, a nine-year-old African American boy, Frank Derby, Jr, was struck and killed two blocks north of the site of Ernest’s death. He was on his way to school and in a marked crosswalk. A motorist had yielded to Frank so he could cross, then another ran him down. Ernest’s mother and Frank’s father quickly organized a large protest at the site of Frank’s death. On the day following Frank’s death, according to a reporter, ‘more than 200 parents…formed a human barrier’ to block cars and demand traffic sig- nals. The numerous signs were home made. Ernest’s mother carried a sign reading ‘We want lights’; Frank’s father’s sign asked ‘How many children have to die[?]’ (Figure 1). The Los Angeles Department of Public Works installed a push-button pedestrian signal at Glenoaks and Vaughan days later.64 In 1951, residents of Rankin and Whitaker, in western Pennsylvania’s steel coun- try, were dismayed to find that a new bridge connecting the two towns had no side- walks. Adapting the organized labour technique of the sit-down strike, women, with some men and children, lined chairs across a bridge approach and sat down (Figure 2). ‘No sidewalks, no traffic’, they said. ‘We don’t want our children to get killed’, one mother explained. After hours of negotiation in a local home, authorities, bridge builders and residents reached an agreement. ‘We won’t railroad traffic through these people’, a contractor said. Later that day, workers laid railroad ties to form a temporary walkway, promising a permanent sidewalk within 10 days.65 62 ‘Women battle traffic deaths’, Los Angeles Times, 2 Jun. 1946, part 2, p. 8; ‘Mothers “strike” against criminally lax driving’, Los Angeles Times, 7 Jun. 1946, part 2, p. 2. 63 ‘Safety “posse” protests lack of traffic signals’, Los Angeles Times, 4 May 1952, part 2, p. 1; ‘White Oak villagers stage intersection demonstration’, Van Nuys News, 5 May 1952, 1. 64 ‘Two men and boy, 13, killed in accidents’, Valley News (Van Nuys, CA), 15 May 1956, 1; ‘Pacoima boy, 9, hit by auto, dies’, Los Angeles Times, 5 Dec. 1958, part 1, p. 2; ‘200 bar cars where 2 children lost lives’, Los Angeles Times, 6 Dec. 1958, part 3, p. 1; ‘Signal installed’, Valley Times (Van Nuys, CA), 10 Dec. 1958, Valley Times Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library. 65 ‘Mothers’ “sitdown” holds up opening of Rankin Bridge’, Pittsburgh Press, 30 Apr. 1951, 1; ‘Human blockade halts opening of Rankin span; wins sidewalks’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 May 1951, 1. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 15 Figure 1. A blockade in Pacoima, Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley), 5 December 1958. The blockade’s leaders are in the foreground: Frank Derby, senior (centre) and Mrs Fausto Apodach (right). Both lost sons on Glenoaks Boulevard. (Los Angeles Times, 6 Dec. 1958. Los Angeles Times Staff; copyright 1958 Los Angeles Times. Used with permission.) Though this response was unusually solicitous, white mothers could usually expect officialdom to react to their protests, including illegal blockades, with tact. In Brooklyn in 1949, mothers blocked a busy street where a motorist had killed a child, demanding safer conditions. The police response was again diplomatic.66 But there were exceptions, particularly in the early blockades. In June 1950, a Philadelphia blockade triggered immediate arrests. Hellerman Street was a busy thoroughfare in the city’s predominantly white north-east. Fearing for their chil- dren’s safety, about 35 residents blocked one of the street’s busiest intersections, a site of frequent collisions. Most of the picketers were parents; some bore signs demanding a traffic light. Four picketers, all white, were arrested and charged with ‘disorderly conduct and inciting to riot’.67 The city’s traffic engineer, Robert Mitchell, was hostile too; he did not even pretend to give the protesters’ plea a 66 ‘Mothers block street where car killed boy’, Brooklyn Eagle, 19 Jun. 1949, 3. 67 ‘4 seized in rally for traffic light’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 Jun. 1950, 3; ‘Demonstrators for traffic light fined as disorderly’, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 5 Jun. 1950, George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Collection, Temple University Libraries. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  16 Peter Norton Figure 2. On 30 April 1951, residents near the just-finished Rankin Bridge, spanning the Monongahela River between Whitaker and Rankin, Pennsylvania, sat down across the roadway to prevent it from open- ing. ‘No sidewalks, no traffic’, they said. (Courtesy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Archives.) hearing. According to a reporter’s summary, Mitchell declared ‘the city would not be high-pressured into installing traffic lights’. ‘Neighborhood opinion’, he said, was no substitute for ‘careful study’.68 But time proved the parents right: Hellerman Street was deadly. A mile and a half south-east of the 1950 protest, in a residential area, Hellerman lacked centre- lines, crosswalks, signals or even stop signs. According to residents, some motorists sped along Hellerman to avoid heavy traffic and traffic lights elsewhere. At one intersection alone, Hellerman and Walker Streets, there were six vehicle collisions in a year. The sixth occurred on a Friday evening in July 1953. It killed a 57-year- old local woman who was a front-seat passenger in one of the cars; she was a half mile from home.69 A playground formed one corner of the intersection; a second was nearby. The next morning and all weekend, mothers, children, and a few fathers picketed the intersection. A press photo shows about 80 people (all white) forming a square sealing off all four crossings; many have linked hands. Someone has chalked ‘STOP’ on the pavement where vehicles enter the intersec- tion. On a telephone pole, about where a stop sign should be, a home-made sign reads ‘WE WANT A STOP SIGN’ (Figure 3). Though the occasion was the death of a vehicle occupant, the protest took pedestrians’ (especially children’s) per- spective: they blocked all motor vehicle traffic to protect people on foot, and parents 68 ‘Traffic light pressure hit’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 Jun. 1950, 33. 69 ‘Crash kills housewife on way from market’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 Jul. 1953, 1. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 17 Figure 3. On the weekend of 11–12 July 1953, residents blocked the intersection of Hellerman and Walker Streets in Philadelphia, demanding stop signs. Stop signs were installed Monday afternoon, 13 July. (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 12 July 1953. Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.) told reporters their concern was for local children’s safety.70 This time, the official response was prompt and favourable. Philadelphia’s street commissioner, Paul MacMurray, welcomed 12 women from the protest in his office in the city hall annex that Monday morning. By afternoon, stop signs were erected at the intersec- tion of Hellerman and Walker Streets, and the commissioner promised to consider additional safety measures.71 In 1957, mothers in and near Binghamton, New York, organized to demand an official goal of zero traffic fatalities among the county’s school children, to be achieved in part through better pedestrian protection. One of their leaders, Doris Rosboom Treyz, used her hands to form a zero shape for the press photographer’s camera. It was in effect an articulation of ‘Vision Zero’ four decades before Swedes reinvented the zero fatalities aspiration under this name.72 Traffic blockades were probably scarcer in communities of colour, where resi- dents had less cause to hope for favourable press attention or restraint from law enforcement. But the 1958 Pocoima demonstration in the San Fernando Valley was far from the first. In big north-eastern cities, especially New York, black and Hispanic people did stage blockades, including one that seems to have been the 70 ‘Scores block street after fatal crash’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 Jul. 1953; ‘Women block intersection in campaign for traffic light’ (photograph), Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 13 Apr. 1956, George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Collection, Temple University Libraries. 71 ‘Official backs stop signs at fatality scene’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 Jul. 1953, 17; ‘Mayfair wins cross- ing fight’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 Jul. 1953, 19. 72 ‘May need pupil right-of-way law, safety unit told’, Binghamton Press, 19 Sep. 1957, 23. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  18 Peter Norton Figure 4. After a coal truck killed two 10-year-old girls in East Harlem in February 1949, mothers blocked the street at two points. The New York Daily News dubbed this a ‘baby carriage blockade’. (Ossie Leviness, New York Daily News, 16 Feb. 1949. Used with permission.) first to be dubbed a ‘baby carriage blockade’ by the press. New York designated some streets as ‘play streets’, where children could roam freely. These were cor- doned off to motor traffic, but trucks were permitted in to make local deliveries. On Valentine’s Day 1949, a truck driver who had beaten a charge of vehicular homicide 14 years earlier drove his truck into a play street in largely Hispanic East Harlem to make an early afternoon coal delivery. Two girls, both 10 years old, Carmelita Rodriguez and Maria Rodriguez (unrelated), on their lunch hour from Public School 121, strode out of a store with the candy they just purchased, confident in the safety of the play street. The truck driver struck them with his vehicle, killing both girls. Maria’s nine-year-old sister witnessed the girls’ deaths.73 The next day, local residents formed a ‘parent and baby carriage blockade’, stopping and turning back all delivery vehicles. According to a reporter, 100 women were out to protect the children. New York Daily News photos show an ethnically diverse population of protesters (Figure 4). Mary di Stefano, president of the Parents’ Association of PS 121, spoke to the press for the blockaders, making their position clear: ‘They’ll have to kill us to get through here.’74 On the following day, parents set up a second picket one block north.75 Parents extracted a concession: the city would close the play street to delivery vehicles weekdays at the hours when children were walking to and from school, including the lunch hour.76 73 ‘Two 10 yr. old girls on a candy buying trip killed by truck’, Chicago Tribune, 14 Feb. 1949, 15; G. Robinson, ‘Death on play street: truck kills two girls’, New York Daily News, 15 Feb. 1949, 3. 74 R. Doherty, ‘Mothers block fatal play street’, New York Daily News, 16 Feb. 1949, 3. 75 ‘Mothers set up 2d barricade’, New York Daily News, 17 Feb. 1949, 17. 76 ‘Funeral joins girls killed by same truck’, New York Daily News, 20 Feb. 1949, 8. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 19 At new public housing projects where high-volume traffic arteries surrounded dense populations of carless families, hazards and hardships intensified. Favoured designs offered residents grassy, tree-shaded spaces within the confines of the project, but to meet daily needs residents had to cross the busy streets. In New York City, at least two major baby carriage blockades occurred at public hous- ing projects in the 1950s. In July 1952, around east Brooklyn’s Brownsville Housing Project, residents, long vexed by traffic dangers, were outraged when a seven-year-old boy was struck by a motorist, fracturing the boy’s skull. About 60 mothers and their children, demanding a traffic light, ‘blocked traffic…with massed baby carriages’.77 Seven miles east, in the mixed but predominantly black neighbourhood of South Jamaica in Queens, residents organized perhaps the largest and longest local ped- estrian protest of the century. Despite its scale and ultimate success, it attracted very little attention in the daily newspapers, but New York’s leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, covered the story. Over the summer of 1957, near the inte- grated South Jamaica Houses (known locally as the ‘40 Projects’), five children were injured on poorly marked busy streets, particularly 160th Street and South Road. Residents claimed that without traffic lights, these routes attracted motorists from signalled thoroughfares nearby to use as ‘speedways’.78 Residents revived the dormant South Jamaica Civic Association to demand better conditions. In response, the traffic department installed new, more visible stop signs.79 Residents counted this a minor success, but no victory; the protesters wanted other modifications, above all a traffic light at the ‘hot corner’ of 160th and South Road. In December 1958, the Civic Association threatened a baby carriage blockade, but the traffic department was unmoved.80 Finally, on 23 January 1959, association members inaugurated circular rush-hour pickets at 160th and South (Figure 5). Twice each weekday, at the morning and evening peaks, protes- ters, most of them mothers, walked all four crossings at the intersection in a con- tinuous loop. They marched once a day on Saturdays. Some picketers pushed baby carriages. According to the Amsterdam News, marchers sometimes numbered about 150. One picketer asked a reporter: ‘Does someone have to get killed before something is done?’81 An informal leader emerged: Ruth Neals told a reporter ‘the baby carriage block- ade will be repeated daily until we get some satisfaction’.82 There were ugly scenes. In the second week of the protest, a motorist drove into a 28-year-old man walking in the blockade. The victim’s leg injury was minor; police questioned and released the driver.83 On the next day, as a policeman walked past Neals, he elbowed her in 77 ‘Baby carriage brigade stresses parent’s ire’, New York Amsterdam News, 12 Jul. 1952, 21. 78 ‘Battle for new stop signs won by Jamaica Civic Assn.’, New York Amsterdam News, 2 Nov 1957, 17, 30; ‘Traffic-light demand flares toward crisis ’, New York Daily News, 4 Dec. 1958. 79 ‘Battle for new stop signs won’. 80 ‘Traffic-light demand flares toward crisis’, New York Daily News, 4 Dec. 1958, Queens section, 3. 81 ‘Blockade continues in Jamaica’, New York Amsterdam News, 7 Feb. 1959, 19, statement of Dorothy Mitchell; ‘UNer hurt in traffic riot’, New York Daily News, 12 Feb. 1959, 5. 82 ‘Blockade continues in Jamaica’, New York Amsterdam News, 7 Feb. 1959, 19. 83 ‘Bulletin’, New York Amsterdam News, 7 Feb. 1959, 19; ‘Bitter pain’, New York Amsterdam News, 21 Feb. 1959, 19. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  20 Peter Norton Figure 5. Residents of South Jamaica, Queens (New York City), demanding a traffic light, block the dan- gerous intersection of 160th Street and South Road in January 1959. The protest continued for weeks, with occasional truces. The city installed a traffic light 19 months later. (New York Amsterdam News, 31 Jan. 1959. Courtesy New York Amsterdam News.) the stomach. A day later, a block away from the blockade, a motorist struck down a six-year-old boy. The child was hospitalized in ‘fair’ condition; the driver was not charged.84 After three weeks of twice-daily blockades, a city councilman arranged a meeting between members of the South Jamaica Civic Association and the assistant to the traffic commissioner. As negotiations commenced, a motorist struck two protesters at the blockade with his car, including Ruth Neals. The injuries were not serious, but the incident angered locals. Two days later, when another motorist tried to press his way through the blockade, some of the protesters, to avenge the recent affront, stopped the vehicle, rocked it up and down, and then collectively turned it over onto its top, trapping its occupant inside. The driver was secretary to Haiti’s delegate to the United Nations; he lived a mile away. He escaped with minor injuries, and did not press charges against the three men who were detained in the episode. Nevertheless, negotiators agreed to a two-week truce as the traffic department studied remedies.85 The struggle continued intermittently for another year and a half, but finally, in September 1960, the traffic department installed 84 ‘Blockade continues in Jamaica’, New York Amsterdam News, 7 Feb. 1959, 19. 85 ‘Diplomat’s car is overturned’, New York Amsterdam News, 21 Feb. 1959, 19; ‘Diplomat’s car flipped at blockaded corner’, New York Age, 21 Feb. 1959, 2; ‘UNer hurt in traffic riot’, New York Daily News, 12 Feb. 1959, 5. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 21 traffic lights at 160th Street and South Road.86 In the 1960s, residents of the South Jamaica Houses continued to picket for traffic lights at other local intersections.87 Even at the zenith of car culture, a few US cities experimented with pedestrian- izing segments of their downtown shopping districts. In 1957, Fort Worth, Texas, began implementing an ambitious design by Victor Gruen for a pedestrian-only shopping district, though most of the plan was never realized. The full project would have supplied ample parking for the car-dependent pedestrians.88 More suc- cessful projects were far more modest. On 3 August 1959, Toledo (Ohio) tempor- arily closed four blocks to cars along two parallel streets. The favourable response from merchants and shoppers led the city to extend the closure for a total of 18 weeks. The following summer, the city repeated the experiment at another down- town location, this time for 20 weeks. According to press accounts, the malls were popular: ‘persons visiting the malls voted strongly for retention’. But they were cri- ticized by some merchants – ‘especially those whose stores were not on the mall’.89 The experiments apparently were not repeated. On 19 August 1959, Kalamazoo (Michigan) drastically scaled back a proposal by Victor Gruen, closing off just two blocks of central Burdick Street. The plan was a success and a year later the city extended the mall another block. Unlike Toledo’s mall, Kalamazoo’s endured, though in 1998 the city reopened the mall to cars.90 According to a reporter, Toledo’s experiment ‘unleashed a volcano of interest in scores of other cities’.91 Indianapolis Star correspondent Corbin Patrick used sar- casm to express his approval: ‘Why must this happen just when practically the entire nation is motorized and we finally have begun to see the dream come true, the hope realized that people will never have to walk again?’ But Patrick had sincere criticism for Toledo too. ‘We find some aspects of the Toledo plan con- fusing’, he wrote. ‘“City officials hope the public will return to public transporta- tion,” the UPI report said. Private citizens, we might add, hope public transportation will return to the public.’ This was a direct attack on the official fic- tion that authorities merely responded to public preferences. Patrick disagreed: ‘Many of these unwanted automobiles jamming traffic…are driven by people who are forced to drive them because shrinking transportation left them stranded in their neighbourhoods.’92 In government agencies and among engineers, the anti-pedestrian orthodoxy persisted undiminished in the 1960s. In 1962, in an unscripted comment at a meet- ing of the Highway Research Board, Guilford P. St Clair, chief of the National Highway Planning Division of the US Bureau of Public Roads, explained that the 86 ‘The battle is won’, New York Amsterdam News, 10 Sep. 1960, 17. 87 ‘7 pickets get the stop sign’, New York Daily News, 30 Jun. 1964, 2. In 1969, black residents of a public housing project in east side Bridgeport, Connecticut, blocked traffic days after a motorist killed nine-year-old James Smith; see ‘Parents push traffic demands, plan East Side school boycott’, Bridgeport Post, 28 Oct. 1969, 1. 88 L.Z. Marchi, ‘Victor Gruen: the environmental heart’, Journal of Public Space, 2, 2 (2017), 75–84, at 77–8. 89 ‘Another mall succumbs’, Wilmington [Ohio] News-Journal, 23 Dec. 1960, 4. 90 M. Cheyne, ‘No better way? The Kalamazoo Mall and the legacy of pedestrian malls’, Michigan Historical Review, 36 (2010), 103–28. 91 B. Newkirk, ‘Toledo’s shopping mall spurs national interest’, Orlando Evening Star, 2 Oct. 1959, 3. 92 C. Patrick, ‘Shady side of the street is for pedestrians’, Indianapolis Star, 5 Aug. 1959, 16. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  22 Peter Norton bureau served motorists, not the general public. ‘There is no real conflict between broad benefits to the economy and the benefits to the motor vehicle user’, St Clair explained. ‘In serving the motor vehicle, we will serve the community.’93 Yet pressure from critical outsiders did not go unnoticed. Motordom responded above all by invoking the doctrine that driving patterns somehow reflected an abso- lute preference, not a response to conditions. According to the American Automobile Association, ‘basic to the problem is the question whether planning should be in the direction of providing facilities that people want or whether people should be forced or coerced into a pattern regarded as ideal. Our way of life, our free economy is based upon a free choice in the market place.’ Even in and near cities, driving, too, was merely ‘an expression of freedom of choice’.94 But as critics such as Corbin Patrick had already noted, choice was exactly what cities were failing to offer. Addressing AAA executives, John Dykstra, president of the Ford Motor Company, concurred. ‘The critics ignore the obvious fact that people want to drive their cars.’95 He warned that limiting cars in cities, as Toledo had already tried, ‘is like effectively barring blood from the heart’.96 Karl Moskowitz, an engin- eer for the California Division of Highways, even contended that walking was obso- lete. He compared ‘the days when people had to walk’ unfavourably against ‘the automobile age’, using the point to defend ‘1/4 to 1/2-mile-long blocks’ that make walking more difficult. Where was the loss? After all, ‘when the auto-oriented housewife wants to exercise’, she just ‘gets in the car and drives to the golf course’.97 Such defensive comments are indications that the critics were vocal and getting a hearing. The best-known examples were Lewis Mumford, William H. Whyte and above all Jane Jacobs. Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a defence of walking and of cityscapes that favour it. Architect James Marston Fitch joined in such defences of walking. ‘There’s a mortal dichotomy between wheel and pedestrian traffic’, he told a Cincinnati audience, ‘and only pedestrian traffic makes cities’. Fitch attributed the ubiquity of driving in cities not to essential preferences but to public policy. ‘The automobile has had the greatest subsidy of any form of transportation.’ With comparable public support, it would be ‘as streamlined and popular as automobiles and jet planes’.98 Some influential city power brokers in cities concurred. On a one-day stop in St Louis in 1964, Robert Jenney, chairman of the transportation committee of the Greater Boston chamber of commerce, answered local reporters’ questions about urban transportation needs. ‘We have had the mistaken conviction that by attempting to provide acces- sibility of the automobile we would also be providing mobility for people’, he 93 Highway Research Board, Planning in Highway Administration: Proceedings of a Conference Held March 26–27, 1962 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences – National Research Council, 1962), 52. 94 American Automobile Association, Metro: Toward a Brighter Traffic Future for Cities and Suburbs (Washington, 1961), 1. 95 J.C. Ingraham, ‘Curbs upon autos hit by Ford head’, New York Times, 11 Oct. 1962, 79; ‘Auto spokes- men gripe despite being subsidized’ (editorial), Decatur Herald, 12 Oct. 1962, 10. 96 ‘Ford president defends auto’s city role’, Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct. 1962, part 3, p. 9. 97 K. Moskowitz, ‘Living and travel patterns in auto-oriented cities’, California Highways and Public Works, 43, 7–8 (1964), 47–54, at 52. 98 J.M. Fitch, ‘City is still important, even to suburbanites’, Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 Dec. 1961, 13. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  Urban History 23 answered. But this ‘one-dimensional approach…is now in open conflict with mobility’.99 Walkers had no real lobby to advocate for them. In 1959, Joan Vickies and Leo Wilensky of New York established the Pedestrian League of America. It issued a newsletter, and within months reported having 150 members in 10 states. But it appears to have had no influence.100 The National Shoe Institute, representing shoe manufacturers, was not entirely absent. In 1962, it spoke up for children walk- ing to school.101 But as interstate highways invaded cities, dumping thousands of cars in them, and as buildings and parks made way for parking lots, mainstream criticism grew. In 1961, Leonard Rowe used his guest column in the Cincinnati Enquirer to attack the trends. Although the news that East Germany was sealing off West Berlin had just broken, the Enquirer ran the item on its front page, head- line above the fold, next to the news from Berlin. ‘What were once fair cities have now become urban nightmares: gasoline wastelands of many-laned expressways, ramps, freeways, viaducts, clover leaf labyrinths, tunnels, throughways, underpasses, overpasses, garages and parking lots. Right in the very core of the city, one block after another is partially disemboweled to become open-air shrines of the automobile.’102 And making room for the automobile meant depriving pedestrians of room. When New York commissioners announced proposals to narrow some of the city’s sidewalks,103 Inez Robb assailed the idea in her syndicated column. ‘As it must come to all pedestrians sooner or later, we in New York have been declared a nuisance. We are an expendable because we use the sidewalks. The sidewalks are a waste because they take up valuable space that could and should be used by motorized man.’ ‘Why is it’, she asked, ‘that great cities are always hiring experts in traffic to straighten out motor problems? Why doesn’t some metropolis show the same loving care for pedestrians?’104 In Harlem, George Gregory Jr, a former bas- ketball legend and then chairman of the local Community Planning Board, defended sidewalks as many children’s only playgrounds. He denounced proposals to take such space for motor traffic: ‘We don’t propose to stand around and let commissioners – and I’m a commissioner – legislate for things instead of people.’105 Two weeks before Random House released The Death and Life of Great American Cities, NBC Television presented an hour-long documentary about the rise of the automobile in America. First aired in primetime on 22 October 1961, ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ was an episode of the Sunday evening programme The DuPont Show of 99 ‘Rail system urged here for rapid transit’, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 23 Dec. 1964, 3A. 100 S. Lardner and J. Updike, ‘The right to walk’, New Yorker, 27 Aug. 1960, 22; L. Scandur, ‘Pedestrians strike back’, Daily News (New York), 17 Jul. 1960, 30; K. Segrave, America on Foot: Walking and Pedestrianism in the 20th Century (Jefferson, NC, 2006), 69–70. 101 ‘Walking is great exercise but it’s sadly neglected’, Janesville (WI) Daily Gazette, 12 Apr. 1962, part 3, p. 11. 102 L. Rowe, ‘Onslaught of autos prostrating metropolis’, Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 Aug. 1961, 1. 103 B. Stengren, ‘Street widening is urged for city’, New York Times, 26 Aug. 1963, 27. 104 I. Robb, ‘Up, up, up’, Pittsburgh Press, 20 Sep. 1963, 25. 105 E.E. Asbury, ‘Residents assail street widening’, New York Times, 13 Dec. 1963, 37. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956  24 Peter Norton the Week. At the time, DuPont owned a 23 per cent share of General Motors, and the programme was a paean to car culture. It presumed the ubiquity of driving was due exclusively to a mass preference for driving, and introduced the ‘love affair’ the- sis to millions: Americans drive everywhere because of ‘Americans’ love affair with the automobile’.106 The thesis has proved remarkably tenacious, in part because so many Americans have indeed been enthusiastic about automobility, and in part because so many more depend on their car because the alternatives are often poor. But despite its limited validity, the claim, like most half-truths, is deceptive. It conceals the persistent pedestrianism that expressed itself in official dissent, popular criticism, individual acts of rebellion and organized protests. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a revolutionary book. In retro- spect, it can appear to have emerged from nowhere, as an entirely new perspective. But its success was due to the eloquent voice it gave to persistent values that were hard to hear above the din of motordom ballyhoo extolling car culture. In a favour- able review, George McCue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that the book’s condemnation of invasive urban reconstruction ‘is not a new accusation’, but Jacobs made it ‘with particular force’.107 Motordom’s resources gave it a stage from which it celebrated car culture and propagated the specious doctrine of an absolute preference for driving. But circumstantial practices tell us nothing about essential preferences. Such stories left unexpressed the perspectives of persistent pedestrians: those who continued to walk in a world substantially rebuilt to serve drivers. 106 P.D. Norton, ‘Of love affairs and other stories’, in S. Zavestoski and J. Agyeman (eds.), Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities (London, 2015), 17–35. 107 G. McCue, ‘Death and life of American cities’ (review), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7 Jan. 1962, sec. E, p. 5. Cite this article: Norton P (2019). Persistent pedestrianism: urban walking in motor age America, 1920s– 1960s. Urban History 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Virginia Libraries, on 14 Nov 2019 at 12:13:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926819000956