Destruction in Construction: How I-680 Broke the Grounds of The Lansingville Community
Abstract:
In 1956 under President Eisenhower’s administration, the Federal-Aid Highway Act officially went into effect and marked the beginning of transformation with interstate construction nationally. Planning for Interstate 680 in Youngstown, Ohio began in 1952 and construction lasted until 1976, clearing out ethnic Slovak working class neighborhoods in Lansingville and other important, previously established, community spaces, like Pine Hollow Park, in its path. This Senior Project investigates the destruction done to the Lansingville community leading to decreases in general community connectivity and area population, while also seeking to understand how memories have both aided and failed in immortalizing the importance of a once tight knit neighborhood. This project also focuses on documented accounts of I-680’s construction and how other historians have analyzed the depletion of Lansingville’s community and community memory due to the freeway. This project argues that the construction of I-680 not only destroyed historically significant neighborhoods and places in Lansingville, but also the conceptualization of collective outstanding community memory.