<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/undividing"></a>Sarah JacobsThe Sheridan Expressway starts as an elevated highway in Hunts Point.<ul><li>The Sheridan Expressway is a six-lane highway that cuts through the South Bronx in New York City, depriving neighborhoods of access to basic amenities.</li><li>It's just one of many highways built in the mid-20th century that have isolated low-income communities of color while ferrying white suburbanites in and out of city centers.</li><li>After decades of activism, the Sheridan may be the nation's next highway torn apart as states shift their priorities to consider the role infrastructure plays in shaping communities.</li></ul>It's six lanes wide and just over a mile long, an unfinished stub symbolizing the larger ambitions of ruthless 20th-century city planners. When it opened to cars in 1963, the Sheridan Expressway helped whisk white, middle-class suburbanites into and out of Manhattan without having to linger in the Bronx along the way.But neighborhoods along the Sheridan have suffered. The massive expressway helped drive out thousands of longtime residents who had the means to leave, and several businesses in its path were torn down.Today, an auto-body shop can be found on almost every block, and trucks clog the streets near the expressway, coming and going from the wholesale food market that serves much of New York City. It has served as a literal barrier, preventing residents from accessing the Bronx River, parks, grocery stores, subway stations, and schools.Hunts Point, a once vibrant jazz community, is now defined by the Sheridan. Roads are clogged by trucks exiting the Sheridan, and blocks are lined with chain-link fences, auto-salvage yards, and warehouses. The community suffers from abnormally high rates of asthma from vehicle exhaust."It's isolated a whole population of Hunts Point," Maria Torres, a 46-year-old Hunts Point resident, said in an interview. Torres has lived in Hunts Point for 20 years.For years, decades even, residents like Torres have entertained a fantasy: What would happen if the Sheridan just disappeared? Would it bring back clean air and reconnect Hunts Point - a peninsula with a picturesque Bronx River waterfront - to the rest of the borough?More than half a century after it went up, we could soon find out. The Sheridan is likely to join a number of highways that once isolated lower-income neighborhoods in cities across the US but are being torn apart as states shift their priorities and consider the role infrastructure plays in shaping communities.<h2>Hunts Point</h2><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARobert_Moses_with_Battery_Bridge_model.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>Robert Moses is a controversial urban planner known for shaping modern-day New York.You can still see some signs of what Hunts Point was like before the Sheridan was built.Prewar row houses with peeling paint hint at a time when Hunts Point was a suburban village with some farmland.But the state officials in the mid-20th century thought little about this neighborhood's residents."Having to cross a six-lane highway to get to a train station or to shopping … is difficult," Torres said.You can blame Robert Moses for that. The controversial New York urban planner was behind most of the New York region's urban-renewal projects in the 20th century, from the creation of Lincoln Center to public pools and the building of the Triborough Bridge (now known as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge).And while Moses had outsize power in New York, he wasn't alone. The Sheridan is an example of one of several infrastructure projects constructed in the 20th century, including the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco and Harbor Drive in Portland, with little regard for the communities they were directly affecting.Yet what happened to Hunts Point is more complicated.After decades of community activism, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York is setting aside $1.8 billion to turn it into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard.At a time when the national dialogue has centered on a proposed $1 trillion investment for new infrastructure nationally, Cuomo's Sheridan proposal is about paring down - and giving previously neglected communities a chance to come back together.But over the past half a century, Hunts Point has adapted in a way. As much as the expressway has made life harder for residents, it has also spawned businesses and industry. Trucks go on and off the Sheridan all day and night, heading to wholesalers and other businesses.<h2>A border vacuum</h2>Sarah JacobsAuto shops line the Sheridan Expressway, servicing the 30,000 vehicles that drive on the highway daily.Take a stroll along the outskirts of the Sheridan Expressway and you will primarily see two things: food markets and auto-body repair shops.It's a mini economy that has developed out of the construction of the Sheridan.Hunts Point is now an industrial neighborhood that has been shaped and influenced by the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. The Center is composed of more than 150 public and private wholesalers, the biggest being the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market, the Cooperative Meat Market, and the New Fulton Fish Market.The Center takes up 329 acres in Hunts Point - nearly half of the 690-acre peninsula. It is the largest wholesale market in North America, providing food to 22 million people in New York and the larger Northeast while employing tens of thousands of people.The Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market opened in 1967, a few years after the Sheridan opened to traffic. The meat and fish markets would follow later.The primary vehicles crossing the Sheridan Expressway are trucks hauling food into and out of the center. The auto shops and salvage yards that have popped up along the way all rely on those customers coming from the freeway.It wasn't always like this. At one point, Hunts Point was considered an epicenter of Latin music.Manida Street, once occupied by a colony of jazz musicians and artists, is now lined with chain-link fences and red-brick warehouses. Major establishments like Hunts Point Palace, once home to live music and salsa dancing, are long gone.Sarah JacobsThe start of the Sheridan in Hunts Point is regularly congested with vehicles coming from the Bruckner Expressway.Moses' highways - not just the Sheridan, but also the Bruckner Expressway and the Cross Bronx - contributed to the industrialization of Hunts Points. From 1970 to 1985, Hunts Point lost two-thirds of its residential population. Neighborhoods next door saw similar declines.The Sheridan serves as a "border vacuum," a term coined by urban activist Jane Jacobs, referring to the role infrastructure can play in blocking access to public spaces and depriving growth in the area.And yet, the Sheridan itself is largely underused, with roughly 35,000 vehicles crossing the freeway on a daily basis. It also fails to provide direct access to the Food Distribution Center, forcing trucks to navigate local streets to get to their final destination.Sarah JacobsMaria Torres, 46, has lived in Hunts Point for 20 years."There's a tremendous concentration of truck traffic in this neighborhood," Elena Conte, the director of policy at the Pratt Center, said in an interview. "Streets are unsafe, and having the trucks travel on local streets creates conflicts for people, creates unnecessary congestion, worsens air quality, and makes it harder to walk around."The Pratt Center is part of an activist coalition, the South Bronx Watershed Alliance, that has been rallying for the Sheridan's removal since the late 1990s. The SWBA is composed of six other community groups, like the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice.Torres said the Sheridan made walking so difficult that she had seen elderly community members take buses to cross the Sheridan and complete everyday tasks like grocery shopping.But Torres tries to avoid the roundabout bus routes, preferring to run errands by foot, which poses its own challenges.There are parts of Hunts Point, like Torres' neighborhood, where the Sheridan is elevated.She said trying to cross under it felt unsafe because of the number of lanes and low lighting."It is hard," she said. "I still feel the DOT needs to get the timing down right for the lights. You still find yourself running those last couple of steps to get across."Sarah JacobsThe Hunts Point 6 subway station sits right next to the Sheridan Expressway.The intersection of Hunts Point Avenue and the Sheridan, right near a subway stop, is "one of the most dangerous intersections in all of the Bronx," Conte said."People unfortunately do regularly get killed there," Conte said.David Shuffler, the executive director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, grew up near an at-grade portion of the Sheridan Expressway, at the intersection of Bronx River Avenue and the Bruckner Expressway. Shuffler said he knew someone in his neighborhood who was hit by a car while trying to cross the street near the highway."What motivated me to get involved was survival," Shuffler said in an interview. "It was really about if folks are going to be able to live and survive."<h2>'A country shaped by cars'</h2><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/1916_Ford_Model_T_Speedster%2C_March_26%2C_1916%2C_California_%285643782311%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons/ William Creswell</a>A 1916 Ford Model T.Moses originally intended for the Sheridan to extend to the New England Thruway, cutting right through the Bronx Zoo. But community opposition led Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to cancel the extension in 1971."This is a highway that is underused, was never fully built to its full scope," Tovar said.Roadways like the Sheridan were built for the benefit of drivers at the expense of city dwellers, a priority that can be traced all the way back to Henry Ford's Model T in the early 1900s. Public transit was no longer the primary mode of transportation; cars were seen as the future."We have a country shaped by cars like no other: drive-ins, motels, you name it," John Baick, a history professor at Western New England University, told Business Insider. "Certainly, car ownership is a very American characteristic. It's something that matches the idea of Americans as individuals, and our cars define who we are."Though mass production spurred by the Model T's assembly line helped transform the car from a luxurious ideal to an attainable goal ($895, or about $20,000 today), widespread financing of vehicles also triggered mass adoption."Cars in America were mass produced and made massively available through financing, but you see infrastructure following pretty quickly," Baick said. "It certainly matches into American patterns of consumerism - we are what we buy."<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Futurama_city.jpg">Wikimedia Commons/ Norman Bel Geddes</a>A shot of the Futurama exhibit at the 1939/40 New York World's Fair.American Highway Users Alliance, which GM founded in 1932, lobbied for tax breaks that would lead to sustained highway funding over time. GM even presented an idea for a massive highway system, dubbed Futurama, that showed interlocking highways that allowed cars to zip right through cities' cores, an idea that looked a lot like Moses' later plans.In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Interstate Highway Act, which allocated $25 billion over 10 years toward 41,000 miles of interstate highways that often went straight through neighborhoods."It's as if the car comes to dominate," Lance Freeman, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, told Business Insider. "So it makes for a much more decentralized city … and you see certain urban design innovations that are definitely designed to [make] things more accessible for cars."<h2>Removing the Sheridan</h2>Sarah JacobsFew footpaths allow residents to cross the Sheridan. Some are dark and lined with trash.Moses' projects were born out of the notion that it was perfectly natural to build a highway straight through a city. The plight of residents wasn't a big consideration."He put down highways through communities that were politically weak, that had no means of resisting," Baick said.At one point in the 1920s, Moses was so powerful that he held different government positions simultaneously, including head of the State Parks Council and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, according to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1218.html">the New York Times obituary for Moses</a> published in 1981."He acquired a lot of power, power that was not very accountable," Freeman said.Low-income communities of color, like the South Bronx, succumbed to Moses' grand visions."His priority was, in a way, very much prefiguring the Manhattan of today," Baick said. "One that very much catered toward upper middle class and wealthy."And when the middle class and wealthy were threatened by his plans, they fought back and won.Moses, for example, tried to build highway projects through middle-class white neighborhoods, like a proposed freeway through Washington Square Park, the center of wealthy downtown Manhattan.Community opposition scuttled the plans.Sarah JacobsHunts Point community members look at proposals for the Sheridan transformation project.The Sheridan could have consumed a lot more of the Bronx, but because it was never complete, vehicles are constantly spilling out on the streets of neighborhoods like Hunts Point.It's enough of a headache that the South Bronx has been calling for change since 1997, when New York's Department of Transportation proposed extending the Sheridan."To recommend putting more highways or expanded highways in our neighborhoods was something we were up in arms about," Shuffler said. "These highways were set up to transport people through our neighborhoods, and that's problematic for us."<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A30_years_of_progress%2C_1934-1964_-_Sheridan_Expressway_01.jpg">Wikimedia Commons/ Department of Parks</a>The Sheridan (green) was originally supposed to extend to the New England Thruway, cutting through the Bronx Zoo. The proposed extension is highlighted in red in this 1964 NYC Parks Department map.Cuomo is now budgeting for a plan that will allocate $697 million toward the first-phase of a $1.8 billion project to transform the Sheridan into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard that would also add ramps, allowing trucks to drive directly to the Food Distribution Center without cutting through the neighborhood. Some say that doesn't go far enough."Because we were calling for the full removal, that was something that we had to grapple with because it wasn't necessarily, entirely what we wanted," said Angela Tovar, director of community development at The Point, a nonprofit dedicated to the economic revitalization of Hunts Point. "But then we realized that we could still advance most of the priorities that the community had asked for through the city's process.""Since then we have been trying to make sure that that plan survives," Tovar continued.If everything goes accordingly, the Sheridan could be a success story like the Embarcadero Freeway - a roughly 1-mile, double-decker highway that was turned into a boulevard in 1990.Though many feared that the Embarcadero Freeway's removal would result in an increase in traffic, the opposite happened: It led to a revitalized neighborhood with a ferry service, pedestrians, and commercial and housing development.The same goes for Portland's Harbor Drive, a six-lane freeway removed in 1974, providing access to parks and a riverfront.The removal of the Sheridan would allow people from across the borough to access parks along the Bronx River, a once heavily polluted waterway now thriving with wildlife like herring and turtles. The hope is it would also lead to commercial development and further economic revitalization."If the Sheridan expressway were a boulevard rather than an expressway … you could possibly find a boom or boomlet in housing construction in that area," Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, said in an interview. "It would open up access to parks in that area, which would make it more desirable."But community members are trying not to get their hopes up. It's unclear whether Cuomo's plan will result in the removal of lanes, which members of the South Bronx Watershed Alliance say is crucial to transforming the Sheridan into an accessible boulevard."If he does it right," Conte of the Pratt Center said, "it will be a tremendous benefit, and he will deserve all the credit that comes along with it." <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tuscaloosa-alabama-central-high-school-resegregation-undividing-america-2017-6">An Alabama high school 'resegregated' after years of being a model of integration - here's what happened after</a></h3> Please enable Javascript to watch this video

A hated, mile-long highway shows an overlooked problem with America's infrastructure - but it could soon come crumbling down

WASHINGTON (AP) - It was supposed to be a joke. "Are you still president?" comedian Stephen Colbert asked Barack Obama earlier this month.
But the question seemed to speak to growing weariness with the president and skepticism that anything will change in Washington during his final two years in office. Democrats already are checking out Obama's potential successors. Emboldened Republicans are trying to push aside his agenda in favor of their own.
At times this year, Obama seemed ready to move on as well. He rebelled against the White House security "bubble," telling his Secret Service detail to give him more space. He chafed at being sidelined by his party during midterm elections and having to adjust his agenda to fit the political interests of vulnerable Democrats who lost anyway.
Yet the election that was a disaster for the president's party may have had a rejuvenating effect on Obama. The morning after the midterms, Obama told senior aides, "If I see you moping, you will answer to me."
People close to Obama say he is energized at not having to worry about helping - or hurting - Democrats in another congressional election on his watch. He has become more comfortable with his executive powers, moving unilaterally on immigration, Internet neutrality and climate change in the last two months. And he sees legacy-building opportunities on the international stage, from an elusive nuclear deal with Iran to normalizing relations with Cuba after a half-century freeze."He gained some clarity for the next two years that is liberating," said Jay Carney, who served as Obama's press secretary until this spring. "He doesn't have as much responsibility for others."
Still, pillars of Obama's second-term agenda - gun control, raising the federal minimum wage, universal pre-school- seem destined to stand unfulfilled. Wrapping up the Iraq and Afghanistan wars isn't turning out to be nearly the tidy success story Obama once envisioned. Even supporters say one of the president's top remaining priorities may have to be simply preventing Republicans from dismantling his earlier accomplishments, including the health care law.
The Yes-We-Can man is entering a twilight of maybes, his presidency still driven by high ambitions but his power to achieve them running out.

Before the midterm election results arrived, Obama's advisers say, the president realized he would finish his presidency with Republicans running Capitol Hill.
Whatever message the Democrats' defeat sent about the president's own standing, Obama concluded the status quo meant more gridlock.
Indeed, 2014 had been another year of fits and starts for a White House that has struggled to find its footing in Obama's second term.
The feeble HealthCare.gov website stabilized, but scandal enveloped the Department of Veterans Affairs. Syria got rid of its chemical weapons, but a violent extremist group pulled the U.S. back into military conflict in the Middle East. The unemployment rate fell, but so did Obama's approval ratings - to the lowest levels of his presidency, worse than the second-term averages for most recent presidents.
"I don't care who you are, after eight years or six years of the presidency, your influence has eroded," said Robert Dallek, a historian who has met periodically with Obama. "Even someone like Eisenhower or Reagan, you just can't sustain it."
While White House officials acknowledge the presidency has challenges in its waning years, they say recent economic gains and executive actions on immigration and climate change show Obama still can exert considerable influence.
"This year the president's policy successes vastly outstripped his political successes," said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser.
Nearly two dozen White House officials, former Obama aides, presidential historians and political analysts discussed Obama's standing as he closes his sixth year in office, some on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss their conversations with the president or his top advisers.
For much of the year, Obama appeared to struggle with the realization that his political standing had slipped.
He publicly complained about criticism of his foreign policy by pundits in Washington and New York (his private gripes were more colorful and profane). Despite Democratic pleas to stay out of November's elections, he said his policies were indeed on the ballot. He desperately sought to break free of the confines of the White House.
One afternoon in June, he joined his chief of staff in making an impromptu Starbucks run on foot, leaving aides and reporters sprinting to catch up.
"Bear on the loose," the president's advisers jokingly said. They said it was good for his mood to break free from the bubble.
But there were also real concerns in the West Wing about his behavior. Not only was he trying to escape the ever-present press, but Obama was ordering his Secret Service detail to keep its distance.
In 2014, Obama also went back to war in the Middle East. Less than three years after the last American troops left Iraq, Obama sent U.S. forces back to train and assist the country's security forces in fighting Islamic State extremists. By fall, the U.S. was launching airstrikes against the militants in Iraq and Syria.
As he announced the strikes, Obama promised Americans this time would be different from the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No U.S. combat troops would on the ground, he said.
But he seemed to be trying to reassure himself as much as anyone else.
In public and in private, Obama appears to understand his presidency may end on a war footing. He's been reading "Redeployment," a collection of short stories about the Iraq war by former Marine Phil Klay. Shortly before Christmas, he made an unusual visit to a military base in New Jersey to thank troops and their families - and pledge to preserve hard-fought military gains abroad.

Obama is realistically optimistic about what he can get done over the next two years, advisers say. He wants to try tax reform and sees opportunities to accelerate growth and job creation with the economy on firmer footing. Aides have reached out to historians and political scientists to solicit ideas for Obama's next State of the Union address, including fresh ways to address income inequality.
"They have reasonable expectations," said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who spoke with White House aides about income inequality before the election. "It is the sixth year, after all."
A big question hanging over the White House is how much Obama, whose charisma once charmed the world, can still shape the national debate.
"There's almost always a point of diminishing returns on a president's words," said Jeff Shesol, a former presidential speechwriter for Bill Clinton.
Indeed, the president is forging ahead as something of an isolated figure.
December's debate over keeping money flowing to the government showed Democrats in Congress won't hesitate to go their own way. In recent weeks, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York has questioned the timing of Obama's 2010 health care law. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi pronounced herself "enormously disappointed" that Obama embraced a spending bill she saw as a GOP attempt at blackmail. And Sen. Bob Menendez, the outgoing Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, began work with Republicans on new penalties against Iran - against Obama's wishes.
Inside the White House, Obama's tight inner circle of loyal advisers keeps shrinking.
The trio of political gurus who helped run his presidential campaigns - David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs and David Plouffe - have long since moved on. As has onetime chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago. Other longtime aides, including Pfeiffer and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, are said to be eyeing exits. Bringing in fresh talent is becoming a greater challenge. Obama may have to navigate this challenging phase of his presidency without a full stable of trusted advisers with whom he's comfortable.
Many Democratic operatives are also more interested in spots on Hillary Rodham Clinton's potential presidential campaign than joining an administration entering its twilight. In some instances, it has been hard for the White House to get prominent Democrats to publicly back Obama's policy decisions, particularly on foreign affairs, until they know Clinton's position. Clinton is widely expected to announce a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Obama is trying to branch out. He started keeping his version of a bucket list: the names of authors, business leaders, innovators and others he wants to bring to the White House for a private lunch or dinner. Some who have visited: inventor and business tycoon Elon Musk, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and AT&amp;T CEO Randall Stephenson, a major Republican donor.
Obama has opened up his social circle beyond a core group of friends from Chicago and his childhood in Hawaii.
He's become close to former NBA basketball player Alonzo Mourning, who has hosted fundraisers for Obama's presidential campaign. Former football player Ahmad Rashad, who dated senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett earlier this year, worked his way into the president's golf outings and joined the first family on vacation in the Florida Keys and Martha's Vineyard.
ESPN host Michael Wilbon, an occasional golf partner, said Obama displayed an astounding "ability to compartmentalize" amid the past year's frustrations.
"A lot of successful people have to have that, but not like the president," Wilbon said.
Obama admits to being distracted at times. Asked how much sports he watches on TV, the president told ESPN this month, "There are times I will admit at night, when I've got a really fat briefing book, where I might have the game on with the sound off."

Less than halfway through his presidency, Obama reflected on how being in office had left him "all dinged up."
The vaunted "hope" posters from his 2008 campaign are "all dog-eared and faded," he said at a fundraiser three years later.
He was searching for ways to re-create the energy of 2008. Heading into his final two years in the White House, that challenge is greater.
While Obama and his team talk a good game about opportunities ahead, they've been here before: Plunging into a new year full of energy and ideas, only to run smack into Washington gridlock.
Signs that Obama's presidency is closing are all around.
Within weeks, the race to replace him will begin in earnest. Democrats are lining up to endorse Clinton, though she's yet to declare her candidacy.
By spring, a committee of Obama friends and advisers will announce which city will host his presidential library. Honolulu, Chicago and New York are in contention.
People close to Obama say he is weighing what he will do when he leaves the White House at the relatively young age of 55. He is studying the paths his predecessors have taken and has expressed interest in working on both domestic and international issues. He is considering ways to expand mentoring programs he started for young black men in the U.S. and emerging leaders in Africa and Asia.
"He's going to have a very unique opportunity and ability to reach young people not only here but in other countries," said Jon Favreau, Obama's longtime speechwriter who left the White House last year.
It is less clear where Obama and his family will go after their time in the White House ends. They own a red-brick, Georgian-style home in Kenwood, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Their oldest daughter, Malia, graduates from high school soon and has been looking at colleges in California. The president is said to be drawn to the idea that he could blend in more easily in bustling New York.
Obama is already imagining life with fewer restrictions.
Asked in a New Yorker interview earlier this year whether he would want to be a judge, Obama said that sounded a bit "too monastic."
"Particularly after having spent six years and what will be eight years in this bubble, I think I need to get outside a little bit more."
___
On Twitter, follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Nancy Benac at http://twitter.com/nbenac
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The Yes-We-Can President Faces A Twilight Of Maybes

On August 3rd, 1900, Charles Yerkes, an American financier and ex-convict, gazed across London from the top of Hampstead Heath.
His journey through the capital in a horse-drawn carriage had already begun to persuade him that it was a fine place to invest.
The streets heaved with people; Yerkes had never travelled through such a densely populated city. But the view from one of its highest points clinched his interest.
To the south lay spires, crowded terraced houses and congested streets. To the north were pastures, stretches of farmland and a few sleepy villages.
Within two decades that landscape was transformed--thanks to Yerkes. By 1907 elegant redbrick Underground stations had been built to the north at Archway, near Highgate village, and to the north-west at Golders Green, on a site previously dominated by a pig farm and a crematorium. Land values surged. A photograph of Golders Green from 1920 shows an elegant high street lined with four-storey buildings and bustling with cars and buses.
The story of how London expanded so swiftly at the turn of the 20th century is one of financial ingenuity, bold risk-taking and low skulduggery. It is also the tale of one dauntless American who, though notorious in his time, is today unknown in the city he helped shape.
<h3>There are second acts in American lives</h3>
America was full of men on the make in the second half of the 19th century. As John Franch observes in "Robber Baron", a biography of Yerkes, he numbered among the "gilded generation" that also included Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Born in 1837, Yerkes grew up in an age of big business, when railways were stretching across the country like arteries and large enterprises springing up along them. By 1851, as Mr Franch enumerates, even the fairly rundown part of Philadelphia where the young Yerkes lived boasted three textile factories, a malt house, a machine shop and a sawmill.
A child who did not care much for books--but had a head for numbers--Yerkes thrived in this atmosphere. He was born into a reasonably well-to-do Quaker family; his father was president of a bank. An indifferent student, he finished his education at 17 to work for a brokerage, and by the age of 28 had set up his own bank and was acquiring a reputation as a canny businessman. Then, in 1871, a fire in Chicago and the ensuing stockmarket collapse undid him: Yerkes was found to have embezzled funds that he was holding for the city of Philadelphia. He was sent to prison for two years and four months, serving seven months.
"By the time I was 35 I had accumulated a fortune of some $1m," he later told an English journalist. "Then, by a stroke of ill luck, I lost it all...This, of course, is nothing extraordinary for Americans." He rebuilt his fortune by investing in the burgeoning tram (or "streetcar") business in Chicago in the late 1880s. His business methods were purposefully obscure: Yerkes would borrow cash, acquire leases and create networks of construction companies, operating companies and holding companies before issuing diluted stock. Bribery of officials was rife, as was the badmouthing of competitors. In one particularly Machiavellian move, described by Sidney Roberts, a historian, Yerkes constructed a tram line in the dead of night--and in four hours--so that fractious Chicago property-owners wouldn't be able to stop him.
Eventually he controlled hundreds of miles of tramway and railway. But his luck ran out again. Infuriated by Yerkes's badly lit trams and occasionally shoddy service, the citizens of Chicago revolted when he tried to renew his franchises. Club-wielding men protested. Local newspapers ran angry editorials: Yerkes was portrayed as a monopolising robber baron who had little regard for his passengers' comfort. Spurned, in 1899 he decided to leave the Midwest. He sold his shares for an inflated $20m and moved to New York, packing up his growing art collection (which included the first Rodin sculpture bought by an American, a sword that once belonged to Oliver Cromwell, and a few flashy portraits of Yerkes himself); he installed it, along with his second wife, in a mansion overlooking Central Park. To the delight of New York gossip columnists, he also set up his 19-year-old mistress, Emilie Grigsby, in a flat two blocks away.
Yerkes could have led an easy life in New York. He was 62 when he arrived, and admitted that he needed a rest. Photographs from the period show a sturdy, rather short man, with white whiskers and fashionably slicked hair, glaring at the camera. He looks fearsome, but also rather tired. His house in the city was magnificent: it had a two-storey conservatory full of rare birds, a penthouse theatre and a marble-clad hallway ornamented with a bust of Nero. It was far more fun to spend money in New York than in Chicago, he once quipped. But Yerkes could never settle anywhere for long. He soon decided to invest in London's transport network; he would spend the next five years travelling back and forth between America and Britain.
The move would help ruin him financially. It would also be the finest idea of his life.
<h3>Baron versus baron</h3>
In 1900 London was the world's largest city, with 6.5m inhabitants and streets thronged with omnibuses, hackney cabs and horse-drawn carriages. By the time Yerkes visited Hampstead Heath, three Underground lines were already dug and running: the Metropolitan, the District, and the City and South London line, which shuttled businessmen from Stockwell to King William Street in uncomfortable carriages known as "padded cells". But a series of plans for further lines--stretching up from Charing Cross in central London to Hampstead in the north, or from Elephant and Castle in the south-east to Regent's Park in the north-west--had stalled for lack of cash.
Yerkes's decision to invest was not driven by anglophilia. The government's tendency to meddle and the interminable parliamentary processes annoyed him. An "obsolete past" hung over the city like smog, he thought. Compared with Americans, Britons seemed sluggish. They took far too long to board a train, as if they "had a hundred years to do it in", Yerkes huffed. To a man known to work 18-hour days--getting up at five o'clock to cycle 12 miles in his knickerbockers--the locals could seem lazy. In 1903 he told a reporter at the New York Times: "The trouble with the British workman is that he does not work enough. If you pass through London or adjacent places on a Saturday afternoon you will be perfectly amazed by the number of men playing ball." He was willing to concede that "this is an enjoyable way to live. But it is a bit startling to a busy, hustling American." That sort of indolence helped give this particular hustling American his opportunity.
In New York Yerkes had met Thomas Reeves and H.H. Montague Smith, English businessmen who were looking for funding for the Charing Cross to Hampstead railway. Now part of the Underground's Northern line, this had been given parliamentary approval in 1893; a construction contract had been signed in 1897, but finance proved elusive. After his visit to Hampstead in August 1900 Yerkes paid £100,000 to the railway company and became its chairman. A new contract was signed, and two new bills put before Parliament to extend the line farther north to Golders Green and Archway.
As politicians pondered these proposals, and those submitted by rivals, Yerkes took over three other lines, actual and planned, among them the Great Northern, Brompton and Piccadilly railway, a proposed route from west London to Finsbury Park in the north-east (see map).
Altogether these projects would cost £16m. To raise the cash Yerkes created a new company, the Underground Electric Railways Company (UERL), enlisting a bank to help through the issuing of "profit-sharing secured notes".
Most investors were American, but Yerkes persuaded some wary Britons to chip in too. Before he built anything, however, Yerkes would have to see off an even grander American financier: John Pierpoint Morgan.
Morgan's son, J. Pierpoint Morgan junior, had wired his father details of a proposed underground line to run from Piccadilly to north-east London, tracing a similar route to Yerkes's Brompton and Piccadilly railway. Meanwhile London United Tramways (LUT), a separate outfit that operated trams, put a bid into Parliament to create a line serving two tram termini in west London. Morgan and the LUT joined forces to build a line that would stretch under the city from Hammersmith in the west to Tottenham in the north-east.
In 1902 Yerkes won parliamentary approval for his extension up to Golders Green and Archway, as well as for his Brompton and Piccadilly line. Oddly (since the two schemes were so similar) Morgan's plans were also approved; perhaps the MPs thought one of them was bound to collapse--an outcome that, inadvertently, they helped bring about. The politicians were concerned that only the lucrative, central part of Morgan's line would be built, so insisted that the whole thing, from Hammersmith to Tottenham, must be constructed. Still, when Parliament went into recess, it seemed that both the Yerkes and Morgan projects were viable.
But when Parliament returned Yerkes had acquired a majority interest in the LUT. This meant he could prevent it building its part of the Morgan line. The whole proposal promptly fell through. J.P. Morgan described Yerkes's manoeuvres as "the greatest rascality and conspiracy I have ever heard of." Scandalised politicians huffed about this "very dirty transaction".
<h3>Paradise by way of Golders Green</h3>
In the event Tottenham did not join the Underground network until the 1960s. All the same, Yerkes's cunning and determination were a boon to his adopted city. They meant work on his Underground lines began even as Parliament prevaricated and NIMBYs in Hampstead fretted that the Tube (as the system was soon known) would drain the Heath of moisture. If plans had been left to fester for ten more years, the rise of the motorbus would have made tunnelling under crowded streets seem even less worthwhile. As Christian Wolmar, a railway expert, points out, another deep-level Tube line did not open in London until 1968.
And the monopolistic instinct that got Yerkes booted out of Chicago served a better purpose in London. By the time of the first world war his firm, the UERL, then known as the Underground Group and run by Alfred Stanley (later Lord Ashfield), controlled all but one of the city's Tube lines, all three tram companies and the main bus operator. Its elegant roundel logo is still in use today. London's transport network became a comprehensive system, not a fractured, chaotic one. Rather than leaving stations to switch lines, passengers could zip down escalators to do so instead. This changed the way people got around the city. It also changed the way the city itself developed.
In 1900 Yerkes told a sceptical American journalist that "a generation hence London will be completely transformed...people will think nothing of living 20 miles or more from town, owing to electrified trains." This had started to happen in parts of the city where railway lines had already been built. Large Victorian houses clustered in places such as Clapham Junction, a south London neighbourhood home to a railway terminus since 1863. But Tube lines would encourage more people to move farther out. At a board meeting in 1903 (reported in The Economist), Yerkes asserted: "Cheap fares to the suburban districts is the only thing that will solve the problem [of overcrowding], and other Londons must be built up on the outskirts of London."
Other Londons were indeed built. Land values in Golders Green more than doubled between 1903 and 1904 alone. By 1908 the Underground Group put up posters showing a couple in their garden in Golders Green: a man in a waistcoat, his sleeves rolled up, waters sunflowers; his wife reclines in a deckchair as their child plays nearby. Below are lines from William Cowper's 1784 poem, "The Task", describing how pleasant it is to be at a "safe distance" from "the great Babel". The image is a precursor of the famous adverts that, after the first world war, touted "Metro-Land" as the bucolic domain of aspiring middle-class families.
<h3>Mind the gap</h3>
The three new lines that Yerkes championed all opened between March 1906 and June 1907. He did not live long enough to see any of them in operation. When he became ill with kidney disease in 1905 he defied his doctor's orders and kept a telephone by his bed. He also chaired meetings of his company, and gave newspaper interviews in which he yet again berated Londoners for being slow moving. But in November of that year he returned to America to die in the Waldorf Astoria hotel, with Miss Grigsby, his mistress, by his side.
British newspapers were generous towards the man "who revolutionised our old-fashioned methods of going to and fro". Americans were more scathing about his rakish behaviour: a serial philanderer, Yerkes cheated repeatedly on both his wives and on Miss Grigsby. His behaviour so outraged his contemporaries that when the journalist Theodore Dreiser based a trilogy of novels on Yerkes's life, he depicted him as a swarthy businessman who seduces female stenographers in his oak-panelled office, and has to break down his wife's door when she tries to strangle one of his mistresses.
Americans were also unimpressed by his apparent lack of philanthropy, which seems mostly to have consisted of splashing out $23,000 on an electric fountain in Chicago in 1890 and, two years later, giving just over $300,000 to fund what was then the world's largest telescope. (As a result, a crater on the moon is named after him.) Yerkes was startlingly blunt about his motives: "Whatever I do, I do not from any sense of duty, but to satisfy myself."
Yet, in a paradox characteristic of many voracious tycoons, he also wanted to leave a legacy. Initially, that seemed unlikely. Many of his other business schemes were ditched. Angry creditors contested his will. Proposals for his mansion in New York to become a museum fell through, and it was sold off along with his art collection. In the 1930s the mansion was bulldozed and replaced with a modern apartment block. Plans to establish a hospital in his name were also scuppered. Yerkes once told his shareholders that the Underground would be "the crowning success" of his life. But, when his lines eventually opened, passenger numbers disappointed, and even that hope looked forlorn.
After his death, though, the concern was saved from bankruptcy by Lord Ashfield, who ploughed money into advertisements, boosting the Tube's popularity. Yerkes's attention to details, such as the decor of his tile-clad stations, survived him, as did his vision of a city surrounded by densely packed suburbs. And, these days, his method for realising that vision is back in fashion.
One of Yerkes's lines is currently being extended; meanwhile Crossrail, a completely new project that scythes through London, is scheduled to open in 2016. Both of these schemes are funded partly by private capital: austerity has made it near-impossible to fund big infrastructure projects with public money alone. The city is coming full circle, suggests Isabel Dedring, London's deputy mayor for transport: back to a model of development based more on Yerkes-style independent finance.
Unlike J.P. Morgan, Yerkes's feted arch rival, today few know of this strange, extravagant individual. His only real monument does not bear his name. At Golders Green station--which still looks much the same as when Yerkes's team built it in 1907--a small brown plaque near the electronic ticket gates notes the date the building opened, and that some original features remain, such as ornate timber handrails in the stairwells. But it does not mention the man who ensured that the station, along with the suburb that blossomed around it, got built.
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