Hunter’s Field Playground in New Orleans looks almost untouched. It’s been open more than nine years, but the brightly painted red-and-yellow slides and monkey bars are still shiny, and the padded rubber tiles feel springy underfoot.

For people who live nearby, it’s no mystery why the equipment is in relatively pristine shape: Children don’t come here to play.

“Because kids are smart,” explained Amy Stelly, an artist and urban designer who lives about a block away. “It’s the adults who aren’t. It’s the adults who built the playground under the interstate.”

Hunter’s Field is wedged directly beneath the elevated roadbeds of the Claiborne Expressway section of Interstate 10 in the city’s 7th Ward.

There are no sounds of laughter or kids playing. The constant cuh-clunk, cuh-clunk of the traffic passing overhead makes it difficult to hold a conversation with someone standing next to you. An average of 115,000 vehicles a day use the overpass, according to a 2012 study.

“I have never seen a child play here,” Stelly said.

Stelly keeps an eye on this area as part of her advocacy work with the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, a group of residents and business owners dedicated to revitalizing the mostly Black community on either side of the expressway.

For as long as she can remember, Stelly has been fighting to dismantle that section of the highway. She’s lived in the neighborhood her entire life and said the noise is unbearable. “You can sustain hearing damage,” she said.

Now, she’s helping collect new noise and air pollution data to show it needs to be taken down.

The Claiborne Expressway was built in the 1960s, when the construction of interstates and highways was a symbol of progress in the United States.

But that supposed progress often came at a great cost for marginalized communities — especially predominantly Black neighborhoods.

When it was built, the Claiborne Corridor, as it’s still sometimes known, tore through the heart of Tremé, one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods.

For more than a century before the construction of the expressway, bustling Claiborne Avenue constituted the backbone of economic and cultural life for Black New Orleans. Back then, the oak-lined avenue was home to more than 120 businesses. Today, only a few dozen remain.

What happened to Claiborne Avenue isn’t unique. Federal planners often routed highways directly through low-income minority neighborhoods, dividing communities and polluting the air.

In Montgomery, Alabama, an interstate cut through the city’s only middle-class Black neighborhood and was “designed to displace and punish the organizers of the civil rights movement,” said Rebecca Retzlaff, a community planning professor at Auburn University. In Nashville, Tennessee, planners intentionally looped a highway around a white community, and sent it plowing through a prominent Black neighborhood, knocking down hundreds of homes and businesses.

The federal government has started working on ways to confront the damage highway construction continues to do to low-income and minority communities. An initiative established in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act called the Reconnecting Communities Pilot seeks to do just that: reconnect neighborhoods and communities that were divided by infrastructure.

But there’s wide disagreement on the best way to do that, and some strategies are likely to do little to limit the health effects of living near these highways.

Stelly and her organization are turning to a new strategy: helping with a new study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency on the expressway’s health impacts. They hope the data will support them in their efforts to remove the highway from their neighborhood.

In addition to noise impacts, the EPA-funded study is looking at the health impacts of pollution under the Claiborne Expressway — especially harmful pollutants like particulate matter 2.5, or PM 2.5.

These microscopic particles, measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, are released from the tailpipes of passing vehicles, said Adrienne Katner, an associate professor at the Louisiana State University School of Public Health, who is the principal investigator on the EPA study. They’re so small that, when inhaled, they lodge deep in the lungs. From there, they can migrate to the circulatory system, and then spread and potentially affect every system in the body.

“So the heart, the brain,” Katner said. “If a woman is pregnant, it can cross the placental barrier. So it has a lot of impacts.”

Katner and her team of researchers are beginning the study by taking preliminary readings with monitors along the expressway. Completing the research and publishing the data will likely take two to three years.

One of Katner’s monitoring sites is Hunter’s Field Playground. Researcher Jacquelynn Mornay said the noise levels registered there could cause permanent hearing damage after an hour or so of exposure.

Residents and workers occupying the homes and businesses lining the area under the expressway are exposed daily to these levels of noise and pollution. When complete, the EPA study will join a decadeslong body of research about how traffic pollution affects the human body.

“We’re not inventing the science here,” Katner said. “All I’m doing is showing them what we already know and then documenting it, giving them the data to then inform and influence policy. That’s all I can do.”

Eventually, the study’s findings could help other communities divided by infrastructure across the country, Katner said.

Stelly said she’s always known the air she and her neighbors breathe isn’t safe, but she’s hopeful that having concrete data to support her efforts will do more to persuade policymakers to address the problem. That could mean taking down dangerous on- and off-ramps — or scrapping what she considers to be a wasteful plan by the state of Louisiana to put a market and event space under the overpass.

Stelly sees only one true solution to the problems posed by the Claiborne Expressway, only one way to really right the wrongs done to her community.

“Removal is the only cure,” Stelly said. “I’m insisting on it because I’m a resident of the neighborhood, and I live with this every day.” And, she said, “the science tells us there’s no other way.”