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CityAndStateNY.com
urban cores, as middle-class, mostly white residents moved to the emerging suburbs. This sucked much of the tax base out of city governments, which then had less money to serve their remaining residents that were already suffering from the decline of the once-dominant manufacturing sector. In 1967, the Kensington Expressway opened, replacing Buffalo’s 19th century Humboldt Parkway while providing a new connection to Rochester. State and local officials argued that building the Kensington Expressway through downtown Buffalo would more effectively relieve congestion than an alternate route along the city’s edge, selling the public on a link to the economic heart of the city. “Robert Moses, who has done such an outstanding work in New York City … rejected bypassing expressways around the edge of the city and recommended expressways through the heart of the city, as planned for Buffalo,” Buffalo City Planning Commission Chairman Welles Moot wrote at the time. Along with the construction of another expressway, the Buffalo Skyway, the Kensington Expressway achieved the opposite of its intended effects. In subsequent decades, as wealthier residents fled to the suburbs, what was once a diverse, middle-class neighborhood on what is now called the East Side of Buffalo became a poor, racially segregated enclave of African Americans. Downtown Buffalo meanwhile continued to decline. The construction of the I-81 viaduct in the 1950s destroyed a tight-knit black community in downtown Syracuse. Now that the 1.4-mile elevated highway is crumbling, there’s an opportunity to undo much of the damage. “There is a widespread understanding now,” Sifuentes said, “that these highways really decimated urban cores and they did a lot to hasten the process of making these communities poor, making these communities polluted and causing undue harm to the people that were removed and the people who were left.” The state Department of Transportation adopted a “community grid” plan as its preferred option in April. The plan, championed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and other groups, will replace the viaduct with a new urban boulevard along the current route. The community grid plan would cost about $2 billion – about half of what a tunnel would have cost to replace the viaduct. What will happen to the 100,000 cars that currently use the viaduct each day? Some local traffic would go through the boulevard, some would use other local streets and through traffic would bypass downtown Syracuse via Interstate 481 on the eastern side of the city. A draft environmental impact study released by the state Transportation Department in the spring
September 23, 2019
Ramps lead toward the Cross Bronx Expressway. Experts say that building a highway will often counterintuitively increase the number of cars on the road rather than alleviate traffic, a phenomenon officials are trying to reverse in the Bronx.
concluded that travel times would change very little if the community grid project became reality. The filling in of the below-grade eastern section of the Inner Loop in downtown Rochester shows what can happen to a downtown area after a city dismantles a highway. For 50 years, the circular freeway divided the city core from its surroundings, leaving anyone who lived on the inside of the loop with few ways out if they did not have a car. Hundreds of buildings were condemned and flattened and many residents moved to other areas of the city or to the newly emerging suburbs. By the end of the 20th century, the city’s population dropped by about a third from its peak of more than 300,000 residents when work on the loop began in the 1950s. “It was actually built to promote economic activity and prosperity,” Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said. “But it really did the opposite.” It took about 15 years and about $22 million to fill the eastern segment of the loop
with mud dredged from Lake Ontario and build the new four-lane boulevard on top, with traffic signals, pedestrians crossings and lower speed limits. The removal of the highway opened up six acres of undeveloped land, sparking a resurgence in an area that was unattractive to development before the completion of the project in 2017. New housing developments have gone up to accommodate the influx of 20- and 30-something residents to the area who now frequent new coffee shops and craft breweries. “The development that has taken place and investment is really something to see,” said Robert Duffy, a former lieutenant governor and former Rochester mayor who now serves as president and CEO of the Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce. “The areas that have been filled in right now, it is almost seamless, you would never know that the Inner Loop East even existed.” The city put out a new request for bids this summer to fill in an additional section of the loop on the northern side of downtown.