Atlantic City was a neighborhood before it was a highway.
The book started there — the crossing at Hampton and Brambleton, built on top of a community demolished to build it. The working-class neighborhood, racially integrated in a city that worked hard to prevent that, demolished in 1957 to build Norfolk General Hospital and the roads serving it. The community that was not relocated. The community that was erased.
Historian Forrest White has documented what this was: a technique. Once city leaders floated the possibility of redevelopment, landlords stopped investing. Properties deteriorated. The deterioration was cited as evidence that clearance was justified. The slum was manufactured, then used to justify destroying the community that had, until the manufacture began, sustained itself. The look of natural decay hid the engineering of it — beguiling, cast as policy.
In 1957, the city council approved demolition. Hundreds of homes were torn down to build Norfolk General Hospital — now a medical campus — and expand the surrounding road infrastructure. No new housing was built for those displaced. The community was not relocated. It was erased.
Atlantic City was not an isolated case. Between 1951 and the formal end of urban renewal in 1973, every racially integrated neighborhood in Norfolk was targeted for clearance. Roughly 20,000 people — almost a tenth of the city's population — were displaced. James Baldwin called it what it was: Negro removal.
Why these neighborhoods specifically? White's analysis is precise: the targeting aimed to wipe out the city's transition neighborhoods where indistinct color lines had failed to produce two distinct school communities, one Black and one white. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 had made explicit school segregation unconstitutional. The city's response was to destroy the integrated neighborhoods that would have produced integrated schools — to maintain de facto segregation by eliminating the residential conditions that made integration possible. When that wasn't sufficient, Norfolk simply locked six of its public schools in 1958, leaving more than ten thousand students with nowhere to go.
The institutions built on the displaced community are now the anchor institutions whose presence makes the surrounding land expensive. The displacement didn't just destroy a community. It created the conditions that made it impossible for a community like it to exist there again. The people who might have lived in Atlantic City now cannot afford to live in Ghent.
A woman who grew up in the neighborhood that replaced Atlantic City's residents said it plainly in Chapter 2: they're saying it's for us, but really they're just sprinkling us in there to make us feel welcome. She knew the structure before this chapter existed. She was describing the completion of a process she was living inside — the enclosure made visible to the people it enclosed, decades before any analyst named it.
Hampton Boulevard is still there. The crossing is still dangerous. The neighborhood it was built on is still gone.