Washington, DC: Where the Instrument Was Blessed

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Southwest Washington, DC, and Berman v. Parker (1954), the Supreme Court decision that made clearing land as "blighted" constitutionally safe across the whole country. The pilot course in this series found that a blight designation and land assembly, not the highway, actually cleared Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis. This is the course where that tool was authorised. Its prerequisites, The Green Book: How to Read a Route and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It, teach a method and apply it to one corridor; this course reads the opinion that licensed the method, quotes its operative language accurately, and is honest about what it did and did not hold, including that the plaintiff was a department store owner rather than a displaced resident. You will walk Southwest DC before clearance and read the surveys the Court relied on, see the modernist superblocks that replaced a working neighborhood, learn the instruments beat by beat, trace the holding forward to Kelo and back to Indiana Avenue while testing that link against a chronology, meet the freeway revolt that is one of the few victories in this series, learn why the people whose homes were cleared could not vote for the Congress that governed them, look up a real DC parcel, and write grounded nonfiction about one block. A 360 tour of the waterfront is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.