An Evening with Emily Lieb at Huxley & Hiro

Huxley & Hiro and the Delaware Historical Society are thrilled to host author Emily Lieb for a conversation about her new novel, Road to Nowhere, which tells the story of how a never-built highway devastated Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood. This event will be moderated by University of Delaware professor Nina David, whose research has explored the impacts of I-95 construction in Wilmington.

The conversation will highlight how highway construction, whether in Baltimore, Wilmington, or beyond, has been a tool of systemic racism, destroying thriving Black middle-class communities through discriminatory housing, education, and transportation policies across the country.

About the Author:

Emily Lieb is a Seattle-based writer and historian. Her work focuses on the making, remaking, and unmaking of American cities, schools, and neighborhoods in the 20th century. Road to Nowhere: How A Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore is her first book.

Book Description:

Road to Nowhere traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore.

In the mid-1950s Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctor’s offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern.

That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In telling the history of the neighborhood and the notional East–West Expressway, Emily Lieb shows the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which had also laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some nine hundred homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals.

Drawing on land records, oral history, media coverage, and policy documents, Lieb demystifies blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. The result is an absorbing story about the deliberate decisions that produced racial inequalities in housing, jobs, health, and wealth—as well as a testament to the ingenuity of the residents who fought to stay in their homes, down to today.

About the Moderator:

Nina David is an associate professor in the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration. She has an undergraduate degree in Architecture from India, graduate degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Environmental Science from the Ohio State University, and a doctoral degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan. Her research interests are at the nexus of public policy and urban planning in the broad areas of public/community engagement, land use and environmental planning, climate adaptation, regional planning and cooperation, growth management, and sustainability. She is currently working on projects exploring the impacts of the I-95 on Wilmington; how coastal local governments respond to flooding risk and plan to manage development pressure in sensitive environmental areas; community engagement in decision making; and the role of plans and ordinances in shaping the built environment.

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

All Ages

Free Entrance, Registration Required