The Mount Hood Freeway is a partially completed but never to be finished freeway alignment of U.S. Route 26 and Interstate 80N (now Interstate 84), which would have run through southeast Portland, Oregon. Related projects would have continued the route through the neighboring suburb of Gresham, out to the city of Sandy.
The original plans for the freeway were presented by the Oregon State Highway Department as part of a 1955 report that proposed 14 new highways in the Portland metropolitan area. (Urban planner Robert Moses is often mistakenly credited with the original plan.)
The proposed route was to run parallel to the existing alignment of US 26 on Powell Boulevard, and would have required the destruction of several long-standing Portland neighborhoods and one percent of the Portland housing stock. Plans for the freeway triggered a revolt in Portland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading to its eventual cancellation. In addition, other proposed freeways in Portland were also scratched, including Interstate 505. Funds for the project (and other canceled freeways) were spent on other transportation projects, including the first section of the MAX Light Rail system.
When the freeway was canceled, a segment was already completed southeastwards from East Burnside Road and Southeast Powell Blvd in Gresham, continuing to Sandy, Oregon which remains in use today; an unusual divided sweeping turn is visible where an interchange with an unbuilt segment would have been.45°28′24″N 122°23′47″W / 45.47335°N 122.3964°W / 45.47335; -122.3964 (Mount Hood Freeway never-to-be-finished interchange)
Read more about Mount Hood Freeway: Alignment, Revolt and Aftermath, Remnants
Famous quotes containing the words mount, hood and/or freeway:
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“A certain portion of the human race
Has certainly a taste for being diddled.”
—Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)