A rendering from the time shows the planned expressway towering over the French Quarter.
Sandra Stokes:
If you’re really lucky, at least once in your life you cross paths with someone truly extraordinary. I was very blessed to spend time with Bill Borah during his last years. He was an exceptionally intelligent, talented and personable man — not only inspiring, but hysterically funny. He was a force in New Orleans for preservation and planning starting in his 20s, a driven man who could not stop fighting to preserve the unique character of the city he loved even as cancer claimed him.
On the way home from one of too many trips to Houston for his treatments at MD Anderson, and knowing things were not going well, I asked Bill what he wanted to accomplish in the time he had left. Without missing a beat, he said the only thing he felt he did not complete was republishing the book he wrote with his dear friend, the late Dick Baumbach, about the fight they joined to save the French Quarter from misbegotten plans to run an interstate highway along the riverfront. It is one of the great satisfactions of my life that the good people with University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press have made that happen in this, the 50th anniversary of a victory pivotal to the fate of the city.