Bronx residents seek to remove freeway

Hunts Point neighborhood

Jon Boyd, Jul 16, 10.

“For more than a decade, a plan pushed by some South Bronx residents and transportation advocates has sat on the fringes of the State Transportation Department’s to-do list, in part because it would be a radical undoing: tearing down the Sheridan Expressway,” the New York Times reports. The Sheridan Expressway is a 1.2 mile elevated freeway connecting the Bruckner Expressway and the Cross Bronx Expressway.

There would be several advantages to tearing down the freeway, according to the New York Times:

Removing the Sheridan would open up 13 acres of open space along the river, land that advocates want to connect with some 15 other acres of service roads and riverfront property to create 1,200 affordable housing units, commercial and industrial space, and amenities like playgrounds, swimming pools and soccer fields.

“This proposal is really rooted in the environmental justice battles that low-income communities have been fighting for decades,” said Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a member of the campaign to remove the Sheridan. “If you look at globally competitive cities, they’re all looking at the spaces they gave over to highways decades ago, and they’re rethinking those decisions.”

The New York Times also notes the city’s own experience with demapping a freeway, “The last major removal of a New York City highway was of elevated portions of the West Side Highway, most of which were removed in stages from 1976 to 1989. (In 1973, a truck fell through the highway at Gansevoort Street.)” The youtube video below is an animation of the Pratt Center’s plan.

“‘We’re rolling back the freeway system,’ said John Norquist, president and chief executive of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a group based in Chicago that promotes walkable cities. He pointed to Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; and Milwaukee, where he was mayor, as cities that have removed highways running through urban areas,” writes The New York Times.

Norquist led a fight to remove the Park East Freeway in his hometown, Milwaukee. According to preservenet.com, Park East Freeway was demantled in 2002-2003, yet the old exit ramps distributed traffic onto only three streets. Replacing the freeway with a Boulevard distributed traffic from the same point to two dozen streets. Norquist lectured in Houston in October 2009 (video archive available), where he touched on the removal of freeways.

In 1974, Portland dismantled Harbor Drive, a freeway which ran along the Willamette River through downtown, and replaced it with a park (pictured in the story photo):

Today, McCall Waterfront Park is an attraction that draws people to downtown Portland year round – and particularly during the summer, when it hosts the Rose Festival Fun Center, the Bite, the Portland Blues Festival, and largest Beer Brewers’ Festival in the United States.

It has been expanded several times. During the 1980s, the city built a Waterfront Park Extension from the Hawthorne Bridge to Montgomery Street. During the 1990s, the city built the award-winning South Waterfront Park, completing a two-mile long greenway along the river.

The park has also been an anchor for new development. During the 1980s, Portland sponsored competetion to redevelop the area next to the park as what was called the RiverFront Project. The first phase, completed in 1985, included 298 housing units, an 84-room hotel, two restaurants, and a marina. The second phase, completed in 1995 added 182 townhouse units, an athletic club, and 2000 square feet of retail and restaurant space.

The World Series earthquake in 1991 severely damaged the Embarcadero Freeway and the Central Freeway in San Francisco. The freeways are gone and now the Embacadero area is flourishing:

Replacing the double-decked freeway with a boulevard raised property values in the adjoining neighborhoods by 300 percent and stimulated development dramatically:
•Many individual developments were proposed and built. For example, the Ferry Building, which was once the city’s main ferry terminal but had been vacant for years, was redeveloped as a center for gourmet and natural food, the Gap built a new headquarters building, and Pier One was redeveloped as general office space.
•The Embarcadero Center, a multi-block retail and office center adjacent to the Embarcadero just north of Market St., bragged on its web site that “The Embarcadero Roadway Project has led to an entire renewal of the Downtown Waterfront District that is ensuring a bright future for Embarcadero Center.”
•Rincon Hill, adjacent to the Embarcadero just south of Market St., was developed as an entire new neighborhood. The city had been planning to redevelop this neighborhood with dense housing and shopping since the 1980s, but one developer commented that no one would build there in the 1980s: “Because it was then hemmed in on three sides by freeways, developers felt that Rincon Hill might not be the most inviting location for housing. ... The removal of the visual and physical barriers of a web-like freeway and the 12-acre Terminal Separator … dramatically showed the potential of Rincon Hill.”
•South Beach, south of Rincon Hill, was also developed as an entire new neighborhood, with housing, retail, and a new baseball field so close to the Bay that when a home run is hit over the right-field fence, the ball goes into the water. This neighborhood was not directly adjacent to the Embarcadero freeway – it was further south – but the opening of the waterfront to the north and the improvement of the Embarcadero as a boulevard extending in this direction helped it to thrive.

(Photo credit: Joel Mann The photo looks southwest over the Willamette River toward Downtown Portland, with McCall Waterfront Park in the foreground.)