Demapping a Highway; Restoring a Neighborhood
by Sam Dolnick, NEW YORK TIMES, July 12, 2010
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.
Although the plan has no real precedent in New York, advocates recite the benefits. They say it would ease traffic, improve neighborhood life and right a decades-old wrong committed by the master planner Robert Moses of building an unnecessary highway.
As other proposals for the Sheridan have been tossed aside, the idea to tear it down has improbably progressed to the center of the state’s rethinking of the highway, which runs only a mile and a quarter long between the Cross Bronx and Bruckner Expressways.
In the process, the Sheridan, a reliable thoroughfare for truckers and an eyesore for Hunts Point residents, has become something else: a battleground in a national fight to take urban spaces back from the automobile.
“We’re rolling back the freeway system,” said John Norquist, president and chief executive of the Congress for a 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.
Mr. Norquist said the Sheridan was “a big important example because it’s in New York and it’s very visible; it would inspire other people that are trying to do the same thing.”
State transportation officials have been studying the Sheridan for years. They have narrowed the field of proposals to three, including a plan to “demap” the roadway, which would probably lead to its removal.
On Tuesday, officials will release long-awaited results of a study of the traffic implications for keeping and removing the Sheridan. While no final decision is expected, the report could presage the road’s fate.
“We realize that we can’t just look at the highway facility itself; we need to look at the impact of a highway through the community it runs through,” said Phillip Eng, the city’s regional director of the State Transportation Department. “It needs to focus on not just moving traffic.”
The Sheridan carries roughly 50,000 vehicles a day, according to state officials. It provides a route for truckers to reach the major food distribution center in Hunts Point but also acts as a physical barrier between local residents and the Bronx River.
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. [Read rest of story]