Peace Boulevard

This guide to Peace Boulevard in Hiroshima starts with a raw hundred-meter firebreak, cleared through the city in late 1944 to stop incendiary bombs from spreading, and the single atomic blast on August sixth, 1945, that erased the whole logic behind it. It follows how that scar became the city's postwar spine instead: folded into the 1948 Peace Memorial City Construction Law, renamed by citizens' vote in 1951, and not fully paved until 1965, twenty years after the bombing it was meant to answer. Look at the roughly hundred twenty thousand trees donated to line it, and the Isamu Noguchi-designed railings on its two nearby bridges.