Such a surplus would fund the proposed Battery crossing, but this would come at a price. In a desperate search for funds, LaGuardia discovered the Moses' Triborough Bridge Authority was generating $30 million in surplus revenues. The federal Public Works Administration (PWA) refused to provide additional funds to the city. After spending $105 million on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and other high-priority projects, the city government was running low on funds. However, its construction was delayed by the deepening economic depression. The proposed tunnel, which also had the support of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, was approved by the New York City Board of Estimate in November 1930. Originally envisioned as a three-tube, six-lane tunnel, the crossing was to connect two pieces of Robert Moses' rapidly expanding arterial network: the West Side Highway in Manhattan, and the "Circumferential bypass" (later known as the Gowanus Expressway and the Belt Parkway) in Brooklyn. At that time, city planners noted that the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges were together carrying 150,000 vehicles per day, and projected that this number would double in the years ahead. MOSES WRESTS CONTROL OF THE BATTERY TUNNEL AND PLANS A BRIDGE: Proposals for a crossing between the Battery Park in lower Manhattan and the Red Hook section of Brooklyn had been around since 1929. Passenger car EZ-Pass toll (both directions): Passenger car cash toll (both directions): (Photo by Steve Anderson.)Ĭoncrete used in structural and tunnel lining:Ģ05,000 cubic yards (156.734 cubic meters)Ĩ13,000 cubic yards (621, 583 cubic meters)Ĥ,150,000 cubic feet (117,515 cubic meters) "You can't wash race out of it.This 2017 photo shows the Manhattan portal and ventilation tower of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (I-478). "Oftentimes, communities of color have the wrong complexion for protection," urban planning professor at Texas Southern University, Robert Bullard, told NPR in a July 2020 report. The connection between transportation, infrastructure and racial discrimination can be seen across the country, with infrastructure projects disproportionately harming people of color. Transportation Alternatives, a street safety advocacy group, wrote in a blog post last summer: "Moving between these neighborhoods requires finding the single pedestrian overpass, or crossing a fast eight-lane street on one of very few crosswalks under the highway. In Brooklyn, Moses built the BQE, structurally cutting off Red Hook from the borough and the wealthier neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights. The construction of the Bronx's Cross-Bronx Expressway divided neighborhoods and has become the structural signifier of high asthma rates in the Bronx. To build Lincoln Center, Moses displaced 7,000 families, many who were low-income, in the process. City planning professor Thomas Campanella wrote in a 2017 City Lab article that "parkways" were intended to exclude trucks and buses, which was "essential to the aesthetics of the parkway, and had nothing to do with racial discrimination."īut Moses's legacy extends further than the most frequently cited anecdote. Some say Moses's parkway design was more complicated than that. The structural choice is now seen as a tactic intended to keep people of color from accessing the beach. He has been credited for opening Jones Beach to the public-but is infamously cited in Robert Caro's The Power Broker as making the Southern State Parkway leading to the beach inaccessible via public transportation because overpasses were built too low for buses to pass. For those unfamiliar, Moses was an urban planner in New York credited with building many bridges and highways around the metro area.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |