Not a single length of track has yet been laid for Maryland’s new suburban light rail line, the Purple Line, yet there already are complaints of environmental racism coming from the historically African American Lyttonsville community. Though much of the environmental/social justice and equity concerns about the Purple Line have focused on displacement once the line opens, virtually no attention has been focused on the externalities communities like Lyttonsville are bearing during the construction phase.
Over the past few weeks, the entity selected to build the Purple Line (Purple Line Transit Partners), the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation have been trying to figure out how to mitigate the impacts of closing the Lyttonsville Place Bridge, a structure spanning the new Purple Line corridor (an abandoned former B&O industrial railroad line) connecting Brookville Road and the Lyttonsville community. Lyttonsville has been partially isolated since April 2017 when the Montgomery County DOT declared the historic Talbot Avenue Bridge unsafe and closed it. If the Lyttonsville Place Bridge is closed (for up to six months, according to transportation officials), that will leave Lyttonsville residents and emergency responders with limited options for entering and leaving the community.
The Past is Prologue
Denise Watkins, facilitator, opens the April 3, 2018 Purple Line community meeting.
At an April 3, 2018 meeting, state officials updated the communities affected by Purple Line construction on its status and they took questions from the standing room only crowd inside Rosemary Hills Elementary School. Though the meeting’s focus was on the present-day and conditions anticipated over the next two years as construction proceeds, past environmental racism was not far from the surface.
Patricia Tyson has lived in Lyttonsville her entire life. Her father, Lawrence Tyson, was a community leader who represented Lyttonsville during the urban renewal years. She can remember growing up in a community with no paved streets, no running water and sewerage, and a two-room “colored school.” For Tyson, the proposal to close the Lyttonsville Place Bridge and to re-open a route from Brookville Road undoes a hard-fought win to mitigate the damage done when Montgomery County converted a church, stores, and homes along Brookville road into a light industrial and commercial zone during urban renewal.
“We don’t have streets that accommodate industry,” Tyson told transportation officials in the April 3 meeting. “In fact, it was purposely built — in fact, 40 years ago, that idea came and it was purposely closed off so that we would not have to have industry. Industry is one part of the community and residents are the other.”
Lyttonsville Urban Renewal Area, proposed new traffic pattern, 1975. Montgomery County Archives,
Elmoria Stewart — her grandfather Albert Stewart is Stewart Avenue’s namesake — is a third-generation Lyttonsville resident. She told transportation officials, “I have a one-hundred year anniversary along with the [Talbot Avenue] bridge of my family being in the community.”
Proposed Stewart Avenue Connection. Credit: Maryland Transit Administration, Purple Line website.
Stewart, who would be directly impacted by any new traffic patterns created by opening Stewart Avenue to Brookville Road, underscored Tysons comments. “The reason why that was closed because they put in commercial areas in Lyttonsville when we were told they would never be put there,” she said. “So it was closed so that Kansas Avenue would not be inundated with all of those vehicles.”
Kansas Avenue and Albert Stewart Lane, Lyttonsville. April 2018.
Issues Were Predictable
State and local transportation officials could have avoided the current conflict had they done more than perfunctory National Environmental Policy Act studies for the Purple Line and historic preservation planning as part of the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan. They also would have benefited from better communications with Montgomery County transportation officials who have known for decades that the Talbot Avenue Bridge suffered from structural issues and deferred maintenance.
A more informed understanding of the community’s history could have sensitized transportation officials to past environmental racism there going back to the 1890s. They also would have benefited from a more comprehensive understanding of the reasons why existing traffic and street patterns emerged during and after urban renewal. Armed with that information, they might not have proposed having the community’s two bridges closed simultaneously and they could have avoided proposing to reopen old wounds inflicted during Jim Crow by reopening a closed street.
Lyttonsville Place and Brookville Road. Top: c. 1970s; Bottom: April 2018.
This situation illustrates the value of using history and historic preservation for more than saving pretty old buildings, boosting heritage tourism, and burnishing a community’s brand. Historical research and genuine community engagement during the NEPA studies and the sector plan process could have informed decision makers about Lyttonsville’s complicated history and given them some pragmatic alternatives to what has emerged: a proposal to dump traffic in a community where Montgomery County once had its trash dump and incinerator. The environmental racism throughline couldn’t be brighter and easier to see, if only state and county officials had looked.
At the April 3 meeting, I asked the Maryland Transit Administration’s Purple Line project deputy director Mike Madden if he thought that his agency had done a good job with its NEPA and National Historic Preservation Act compliance. Though the thrust of my question was related to the Talbot Avenue Bridge, it also represented my concerns about history repeating itself in Lyttonsville with what was being proposed with the Lyttonsville Place Bridge and Stewart Avenue.
Purple Line Deputy Director Mike Madden (with microphone) discussing the Talbot Avenue Bridge, April 3, 2018.
“We went through the [Section] 106 process regarding the historic Talbot Bridge and we do have an adverse effect because we have to take that bridge down,” Madden replied. “That is well documented in our 106 evaluation, which Maryland Historic Trust and FTA signed off on that.”
So for Madden and all of the other state and local transportation officials, it’s case closed because they got a “sign-off” from the Maryland Historical Trust during Section 106 consultations. That’s an easy answer because most people, including federal and state agency officials and their consultants, don’t really understand what the Section 106 and NEPA processes are. They are not perfunctory exercises in checklist completion and approvals; they are consultation processes.
Bad Planning Leads to Greater Social Costs
There is no consensus on what social costs the Purple Line will impose on communities ripe for gentrification and displacement. Montgomery and Prince George’s counties declined to enact a legal mechanism to protect people along the Purple Line from displacement and they instead executed a handshake agreement, a compact, with no legal enforcement mechanisms. Meanwhile, the people of Lyttonsville who have had foisted upon them the social costs associated with segregated housing, expulsive zoning, and urban renewal continue to shoulder an unfair burden so that Montgomery County and the State of Maryland can proceed with completing the Purple Line.
© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein
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