Cities rarely break all at once; more often they fray through policy choices that seem technical, neutral, even benevolent. Our conversation with historian Emily Lieb traces how Baltimore’s “Road to Nowhere” never reached a ribbon cutting yet still carved deep wounds into Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood. The damage began with a pencil stroke: a highway alignment shifted in the late 1950s to run through Rosemont just as school board actions accelerated racial trans