BALTIMORE — Once, it was somewhere.

“If you drive there, you’re driving through my backyard,” Rochelle Atkins said. “I tell my grandchildren, that’s where I used to live, by the lamp post.”

Her childhood home at 1916 W. Mulberry St. is long gone, demolished, along with nearly 1,000 others, to construct a highway meant to extend west, from downtown Baltimore to I-70. But in the face of opposition, work was halted after about 1.4 miles, leaving behind the truncated “Highway to Nowhere.”

This month, Baltimore received $85.5 million in federal funds to begin repairing the neighborhoods scarred from being slashed in two by a sunken six-lane highway dropped in their midst. Entrance and exit ramps over Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard will be torn down, and a block-long portion will be capped to restore some of the walkability and public gathering spaces lost to the highway.

But for some of those whose families were among the 1,500 residents displaced by the early 1970s construction, there is skepticism.

They have heard previous lofty improvement plans that sought community buy-in but never came to pass. Primary among them: the Red Line light rail that would have brought jobs, development and modern transit to and through the area but was killed by Gov. Larry Hogan in 2015.

“Promises made, promises not kept,” said Glenn Smith, 75. “People are getting tired of going to meetings.”

Smith’s family had been forced to leave their home at 2400 Lauretta Ave. in 1969 to make way for the highway, he said, although ultimately it never extended that far west.

“Where do you put your trust when you’ve been constantly misled and have reaped no benefits from any of these projects?” Smith said.

Today, once thriving neighborhoods are pocked with tired or vacant rowhouses, some just shells with trees growing through them, and weedy, neglected open lots. It was not always like this, Smith said.

“There was disinvestment,” he said, “a creation of poverty.”

As The Baltimore Sun wrote at the time, once the neighborhoods in the planned highway’s path were targeted for demolition, there was little incentive or even permission to maintain or improve them.

“The city would not issue repair permits,” James D. Dilts wrote in October 1968 in his Baltimore Sun column, The Changing City. “The homeowners were left with slum streets and declining property values.”

That had consequences for the Black residents whose houses were in the way of the planned highway.

“The city was offering prices based on the fallen value of their property (which the city caused in the first place),” Dilts noted. “Not only that, houses were more expensive since they had bought theirs and further, being [Black], their choices were limited.”

His pieces detailed meetings and years of turmoil over the expressway, of homeowners fighting for their homes and neighborhoods. “These homes is all we have,” one resident told state lawmakers at a meeting.

“We lived in the projects before; this is the first house we’ve had of our own,” Dilts quoted Ada Wells, who lived on Pulaski Street just north of Franklin Street. “It was one of the best looking neighborhoods in the city. Now it’s a haunted village.”

She and her husband, John, were part of a successful effort to get homeowners replacement value rather than market value for their houses. They ultimately moved to the county.

Atkins thinks if the highway hadn’t forced her family out, they would still be living there.

“It was a good life on Mulberry Street,” Atkins said. “My house was open to everybody, and if I went across the street, it was like home.”

Atkins, who was a student at Western High School at the time, lived with her grandmother, who resisted selling her home until “just about the whole block was empty” in 1968, Atkins said. By then, her grandmother was widowed and in her 70s; what she received for giving up her home “was nowhere near enough to buy another house.”

They moved to a rental in Park Heights, Atkins said, where she was “miserable” in a home that leaned to the left from what seemed to be foundation issues and missed her friends. Decades later, two of them surprised her with a visit to her workplace — she was a supervisor in the city’s Department of Social Services — which led to a reunion in October 2003. They gathered regularly until recently, when the pandemic and their own getting up in years made that more difficult.

Such decades-later reunions were not uncommon among various groups of friends displaced by the highway.

“The neighborhood was a tight neighborhood,” Smith said.

“If you only saw how thriving it was before,” said his sister, Catherine Pearson, 81. “We all played outside, we skated, played dodge ball, jumped rope, jacks. In the summer, we’d sit on the porch, we’d sleep on the glider — we didn’t have air-conditioning.

“We’d leave our doors open,” she said. “We had no fear.”

She was in her 20s, and Smith was 19 and just drafted into the Marines, when the family moved. Pearson said her father, a widower with eight children, was “threatened with eminent domain” if he didn’t sell the house. They moved to Windsor Hills in Northwest Baltimore.

“We got displaced from the friends we grew up with,” Pearson said. “Looking back, it really crushed us.”

She said she’s not sure what the plans are for the Highway to Nowhere, only that it’s “too late for us. They can’t restore what was.”

With projects underway such as the Reconnecting Communities Program — the source of the new federal funding — and the Red Line proposal revived by Gov. Wes Moore, Smith has organized neighborhood groups on either side of the highway to advocate for residents’ interests. Reconnecting Communities in West Baltimore Coalition includes neighborhoods like Harlem Park, Lafayette Square, Poppleton and Rosemont.

What stopped the highway before it continued further west and split even more neighborhoods was citizen activism, what Dilts called “a strange coalition” of West Baltimore homeowners, those fighting to protect Leakin Park and still others trying to protect Federal Hill and Fells Point from yet another highway.

The fight stopped a massive and ever-changing plan to build highways that would cut through those and other areas to connect Interstates 95, 83 and 70. The fight famously launched the career of the former U.S. senator, Barbara Mikulski.

“The road lobby had this aura of invincibility,” said Stuart Wechsler, then a staff member of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which was drawn into the battle against the highways.

“What we did with the expressway is a template of what could be done and should be done,” said Wechsler, who went on to work for the Rouse Company and Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. “It was a real David and Goliath moment.”

Despite their success in saving other parts of the city, he said, “the Highway to Nowhere is a tragedy.”

The current effort to fix the damage of the highway is just the latest. Back in 1997, for example, then-Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke suggested tearing all or part of it down.

Despite those dashed plans and the trauma of her family’s uprooting, Atkins remains hopeful, for her city as a whole and her old neighborhood in particular.

“I love Baltimore, I would never live anywhere else,” she said. “It’s still my home, and it’s a great home.”

Perhaps the influx of funds and attention will uplift those who live along the highway, and they’ll come to love it as much as she did growing up there, she said.

“Make it a good community, give people jobs,” Atkins said. “Give people a desire to want to live in the area and be proud of where they are.”

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