Baltimore’s Historic Charles Street. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
The best-known research on the West End’s loss came from Fried, whose work the museum covers in its article Marc Fried and the Human Cost of Urban Renewal . In the West End, Fried interviewed hundreds of displaced residents in the late 1950s and worked with a team that embedded itself in neighborhood life to document pre-relocation and post-relocation effects. The study suggested that losing homes could also mean losing social ties and identity. Fried described that disruption as a form of bereavement, and later scholarship has cited the research as foundational to discussions about community displacement and root shock.
Drawing on interviews conducted before and after relocation, Fried published Grieving for a Lost Home in 1963, a study that examined residents’ emotional responses to displacement and demolition. Thus, he published his paper Grieving for a Lost Home in 1963. A decade later, Fried published The World of the Urban Working Class: Social Movements and Ideology (1973), drawing on years of research connected to the West End.
Destroying tightly connected communities could cause significant psychological distress, according to Fried. Also as noted in the article above, Fried found that such closely knit communities provided individuals with a sense of rootedness. Later, psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove described similar community disruption through the concept of “root shock. One interviewee, Mrs. Borowski, compared it to uprooting a plant from its surroundings. The research suggested that people could mourn not only the loss of a person but also the loss of a place and way of life. In fact, it had an effect on how community mental health care was handled, not to mention urban renewal projects in the United States. Fried’s research joined a wider body of criticism The museum further adds that the article by Fried was included in Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, a book compiled by the Joint Center for Urban Studies, a collaborative effort between Harvard and MIT. This book also contained contributions from Herbert Gans, Martin Anderson, and activist Chester Hartman.