Just what the neighborhood always wanted: a super highway

The Future Possibly Improved North Rouse Avenue

By Marjorie Smith, 6-15-06

Whizzing south along Route 3 last month from my daughter’s new home in New Hampshire toward Boston, I gazed at the thick woodlands on either side of the six-lane divided freeway. “I wonder what was here before they built this road?” I mused, trying to remember back more than four decades to when I, then a young bride, had lived in Boston. In those days we frequently traveled northwest to Bedford, where my husband’s parents lived, and beyond to Chelmsford where his childhood friend, Eddie, lived. That day last month, Kim and I had just passed the Chelmsford exit and I knew the Bedford exit was just ahead. I also knew that Massachusetts – at least eastern Massachusetts – is all towns. That is, the towns fit together, cheek by jowl, each with its own permanent shape, just like the counties in Montana. So how did it happen that there was this vast swatch of forest to buffer homes from view of passing commuters – and vice versa.

“I’m sure they had to move a lot of houses out of the way,” Kim said. “You could actually see a houses from this highway before the trees got their leaves.” And sure enough, as we returned from Boston to Nashua after dark we could see lights twinkling through the trees from the neighborhoods on either side of the throughway. I wondered how many people had been displaced for our convenience on that smooth commute.

Perhaps I fell into a time warp, wondering about something that had happened years ago in Massachusetts, because the day after I returned to Montana I caught a glimpse of future displacement in Bozeman, just a block from my house. I attended a meeting across the street at the Hawthorne School gym to learn about one more of those perfect storms of impending disaster and progress that galloping growth is bringing to the New West. The Montana Department of Transportation was holding a meeting to outline alternatives for improvement of North Rouse Avenue and to seek public comment.

When I was a child growing up in Bozeman, North Rouse was a sort of main drag for the industrial district, if a pretty little town like Bozeman could be said to have such a section. Departing Main Street beside the Bozeman Hotel, venerable even then, North Rouse progressed past service businesses (electricians, tire and brake shops), several blocks of tiny houses crammed between the road and Bozeman Creek (known more romantically two or three miles upstream as Sourdough Creek), the city’s maintenance shops as well as the state highway department’s area office and maintenance yards. Beyond the city limits, Rouse turned into Bridger Canyon Drive and headed up through picturesque farmland toward Bridger Bowl Ski Area.

In its second block, (then and now) North Rouse passes the Hawthorne Elementary School which in my childhood days was known as the poorest, roughest, toughest school in town. Girls from Hawthorne arrived at junior high school with pierced ears and bleached hair, while the boys had DA haircuts and a certain defiant swagger that was almost irresistible to us faculty brats from the south side of town. Now, of course, Hawthorne School students get the best test scores in Bozeman (which puts them near the top nationally), parents line up at the smallest hours of the night to enroll their kids in Hawthorne under Bozeman’s open enrollment plan, and the school and its retiring principal, Marilyn Delger, were just chosen as one of the Kennedy Center’s five schools of distinction in the arts.

The fact that the Montana Department of Transportation sees the need to upgrade this small town byway (in their most optimistic dreams into a five-lane arterial highway plus parking lanes, sidewalks, bike trails and grass boulevard strips) is not unrelated to the upgrading of Hawthorne School over the past generation. Of course it’s all got to do with growth. Whereas residents in Bridger Canyon used to send their kids to two little one-room schools in the canyon, now those kids come to town. Before the open enrollment system, they were bused to Hawthorne. And it wasn’t just farmers living in Bridger Canyon anymore – some of the first wealthy lifestyle immigrants settled there and the canyon quickly became the most valuable land in the county. These folks created the first rural zoning district in Montana and are the same ones who helped fend off, at least for the time being, the specter of coalbed methane development atop Bozeman Pass. Understandably, they didn’t want their kids going to the worst school in town – and suddenly the kids from those tiny houses on North Rouse and the trailer park just past where Bridger Drive begins were rubbing shoulders with kids who not only had their own bedrooms, but whose bedrooms were furnished with televisions, phones and computers. Once Hawthorne became an arts magnet school under a grant Principal Delger got 14 years ago, the wealthy parents became art patrons and each year the school raises thousands of dollars with an auction of the kids’ work. I lurk in my garden across the street, weeding my flower beds and listening in amazement to the voice of the auctioneer as some bids mount into four figures.

I missed the Hawthorne Art Auction this year because I was in New England, wondering what happened to the houses that must have lined the road that used to be known as New England Route 3. And that’s exactly what the occupants of the little houses along North Rouse are wondering. “Your first alternative shows the sidewalk two feet into my living room,” said one man. “And it’s not like I can move my house back ten feet. I’m up against the creek in the back.”

He got a sympathetic hearing from Darryl James, the Department of Transportation representative -- well, actually, Environmental Manager for the Helena firm HKM Engineering with which the state has contracted to design the improvements to North Rouse. There will be some displacement, James acknowledged. But there will also be some compromises in the state’s goal of turning Rouse into a five-lane road plus sidewalks, etc.

“We can’t move the Bozeman Hotel,” he pointed out, noting its historic status, as well as its four-story brick bulk. The Hawthorne School is another protected historic structure, and so, ironically, are the highway department shops. So the highway planners are resigned to settling for three traffic lanes from Main Street to Tamarack Street, where the transportation department is located (they'll go for the full five lanes north of that). But they still want sidewalks on both sides and they want bike lanes. And a parking lane on each side since most the residences have no alley or driveway parking, . And a boulevard strip to pile snow on when the plows come through in winter.

So it appears the sidewalk will still be going through the living room of the guy in the front row.

And then there’s Bozeman Creek. One option would be to cover it up – route it through a tunnel as is done where the creek passes under Main Street. This, of course, would not sit well with the fans of Creekside Park, a delightful little pocket park on the corner of Rouse and Lamme which is maintained by one of the local Lions Clubs. And it reverberates with irony in view of the proposal a month or two ago from some Downtown Bozeman businessmen that historic downtown Bozeman would be greatly enhanced if the creek were uncovered near Main Street.

Many of the tiny homes on their drastically undersized lots would not appear to be a great loss to many passersby, but to their owners they are their finger grip on the American dream. Even if the government paid them enough to buy another small home in Bozeman, they'd never find one with a creek in the back yard. Bozeman’s ongoing gentrification has struck even the four block stretch of Rouse where most these houses are located. A couple years ago a beautification award-winning duplex was constructed at Rouse and Lamme on the lot formerly occupied by a rather scurrilous stucco relic known around the neighborhood as “the crack house” which burned down, killing one of the occupants. And a block or so further north, right by the creek, someone is building an impressive house on a small lot formerly occupied by a tiny shack. The new home is cleverly designed to take advantage of every square inch of the lot as well as the creek coursing past behind it. I wonder how the owners feel about the possibility that the state will need to take half their small yard for a highway project. I also wonder if the state really planned on dealing with people with the obvious financial means of the builders of the new house when they put the Rouse enhancement project on their priority list.

People at the meeting disagreed about whether the proposals represented enhancement or destruction of the neighborhood. Instead of turning Rouse into a five lane road in order to cope with increased traffic (state officials say Rouse carries about 13,000 cars a day now and they expect that to go up to 20,000 in ten years), one woman suggested really big speed bumps to slow everyone down. The highway experts stared at her aghast. “On a major north-south arterial?”

Other people questioned the need for separate bike lanes, but were glared down by representatives from Bozeman’s bicycle and pedestrian advisory board. Several people suggested routing the bulk of the traffic from Bridger Canyon and the big new subdivisions under construction just outside the canyon’s mouth to other streets. But that would either mean bringing traffic down dusty, graveled Story Mill Road and through the Idaho Pole hazardous waste cleanup site, or taking it all the way west to North Seventh, thus encouraging those folks to take their business to the part of Bozeman I call Austin-land because it reminds me of the Big Box complexes in Texas where my daughter used to live.

One woman said she could not see any traffic problems that needed solving. “Other than right at the time Hawthorne School lets out and all the parents and school buses are there I have no problems getting across or onto Rouse unless a train has just passed.”

I second her observation. At the same time North Rouse ducks under the Interstate, in the midst of the industrial part of its route and where the highway planners envision a five-lane artery, it crosses the Burlington Northern railroad tracks. When a train is passing, long lines of traffic back up. It’s after that has happened that we have a heck of a time getting through the stream of cars. I asked Daryll James if creating an underpass at the railroad crossing had been investigated.

“Well, of course we know that it is an issue,” he said. “But it would cost at least $20 million to build one, so it’s not in the cards.”

How ironic – the highway department has prioritized vast changes in North Rouse because their traffic studies tell them there is a problem looming in our future, and yet their plans include no provisions to deal with the one problem many residents and commuters perceive.

But I guess that’s life in the fast growing corners of the northern New West.

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