Peter S. Craig papers

Peter Stebbins Craig was a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who led legal challenges against the construction of interstate highways through the city in the 1960s and 1970s. Taking the side of residents whose homes would be razed for new freeways, Craig successfully battled developers, business leaders, and members of Congress to block seven multilane highways that would have destroyed 200,000 housing units within the city.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1928, Peter Stebbins Craig spent his childhood in Oberlin, OH and attended Oberlin College and Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1953 as a member of the law review. He first joined the law firm of Covington and Burling, and later became counsel at Southern Railway in 1960, working there until he retired in 1989 with one break from 1967-69 to serve at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Craig first opposed freeway construction in the city when he became aware of plans to build a major new artery through his Cleveland Park neighborhood, from Georgetown to Bethesda, in the late 1950s. In 1960, as part of the citizen organization Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning, Craig and two other lawyers won a 5-year ban on freeways west of Rock Creek and north of M street, stalling the proposed highway. But success was short-lived. In response to the ban, developers shifted their proposed highway to the west, proposing a North Central Freeway that would have sliced through the city from Capitol Hill to Silver Spring, destroying 4000 homes in a primarily African American neighborhood.

Joining with the community planning organization Committee of 100 on the Federal City, Craig then pushed back against all planned freeways, arguing that they violated a law from the 1880s allowing no road in the city wider than Pennsylvania Avenue. He and his team won in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1968, though they still faced significant opposition in Congress, which controlled the District’s spending and attempted to push the projects through by withholding money for Washington’s planned subway system until the highways were built. This impasse lasted until 1976, when the Department of Transportation intervened on the side of the District, freeing the money for the subway without requiring construction of the highways.

Many of the proposed highway projects, including the proposed Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac, faced significant public protest, including violence and arrests at a 1969 City Council meeting. Craig and fellow volunteer lawyers won a victory in U.S. District Court in 1970, ordering work on the Three Sisters Bridge to stop.

Transportation projects that were canceled in part due to Craig’s work include: the Three Sisters Bridge across the Potomac, connecting to I-66; Interstate 266; the North Central Freeway (from Capitol Hill to Silver Spring); the South Leg Freeway; and Interstate 70-S/Northwest Freeway (along Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda). Craig was named a Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian Magazine in 1972. Reflecting on his struggle against the freeways 30 years later in 2000, Craig told the Washington Post, “While I’ve done a lot of things in my life, this has made the most difference.”

Craig was also an avid genealogist. As a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists and a Fellow of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, he wrote prolifically on the Swedish Colonial Period in the Delaware Valley. He died on November 26, 2009.