Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed to regret what he had wrought with the Interstate Highway Act; ramming the big roads through American neighborhoods had never been his intention. But more than the highways or the slum-clearance projects, it was the need for car storage that ate through American downtowns. By 1972, the Detroit City Planning Commission made a downbeat assessment of how the Motor City’s downtown had wound up dedicating 74 percent of its land to vehicle movement and storage: “The automobile has an insatiable appetite for space. It needs about 300 square feet when stored
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