Author Event! Emily Lieb's Road to Nowhere

Join us on November 15th at 4pm as we host Emily Lieb, who will be reading from and discussing her latest book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.

About the book:

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 author:

Emily Lieb is an historian of 20th-century American cities whose research focuses on processes of racial segregation and neighborhood change—especially housing policy and school policy—from the Progressive Era to the present day. Her book The City’s Dying and They Don’t Know Why is a biography of one West Baltimore neighborhood called Rosemont from its development in the 1920s to the 1970s. She teaches classes on the histories of American cities, schools, and social policy; the histories of civil-rights and freedom struggles in the United States; and the American labor movement. Road to Nowhere will be published in November 2025.

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