A Conversation With New Orleans Designer, Planner, Teacher and Activist Amy Stelly

"When I was a kid, I vowed to take it down with my bare hands," says Amy Stelly about the hulking concrete I-10 overpass that towers over Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans’s storied Treme neighborhood. Speaking with her today, it’s clear she’s never lost that determination. Stelly worked as an architectural designer on residential projects for Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk’s firm in Miami and later spent several years as an urban designer for the City of West Palm Beach. Since moving back to her family’s 100-year-old home in 2012, just a block and a half from the "bridge," as locals call the overpass, she has become a prominent and uncompromising voice calling for its demolition.

The story of how the Claiborne Avenue overpass came to be built played out in cities all over the United States. As cities and states had been doing for decades, the federal government in the early 1960s intentionally built highways through Black neighborhoods, bringing with them noise, pollution, and disinvestment. In New Orleans, I-10 was particularly brutal. It cut through Claiborne Avenue, a broad boulevard shaded by a canopy of mature oak trees and lined with thriving businesses, ripping the commercial backbone out of a centuries-old Black community.

All across the country, as these aging monuments to racist planning fall into disrepair, local and federal officials are considering whether now is the time to tear them down. Cities like Buffalo and Oakland are studying plans to reroute urban highways. When it was unveiled, the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill specifically called out I-10 as an example of an outmoded construction that has divided neighborhoods in a way that future projects should remedy. We spoke with Stelly about why it’s time for the bridge to go—and how the city can ensure that, as a gash in the neighborhood heals over, the recovery benefits the people who have long called Treme home.

Dwell: Has the callout in the infrastructure bill given momentum to efforts to tear down the overpass?

Stelly: Our political leaders in New Orleans aren’t saying anything other than that it’s not on their radar—which I have to tell you isn’t true. The city needs to pay attention to the disrepair of the highway and take advantage of federal funding, whatever it ends up being, to further this along. What will it take to tear it down? Actually, new leadership is what I think, frankly. 

Suppose it does come down. You’ve written about needing "guardrails" to ensure that rising property values don’t lead to the displacement of longtime residents. What are those guardrails? 

Well, the first thing that needs to happen is that the residents who have lived and suffered with these urban highways need to be fully engaged and brought to the table. We’re fortunate in New Orleans in that there’s a lot of life on the streets, so there’s a lot of opportunity to talk to people. And that has to be done, because we can’t totally rely on the Internet. Not everybody has it. Not everybody is going to look for city notices. So old-fashioned outreach—going door to door, talking to people, going to churches, talking to clubs—that is really how we are going to have to get interest stirred up to participate in the civic process.