When Renewal is All Wrong
by Luke Stoddard Nathan
A look at the decades-old decision to build Albany’s Interstate 787, at a time when rivers were open sewers and cars were thought to be the end-all of transportation’s future.
“The new mid-town arterial,” the Times Union editorial board gushed in 1968, “is only one link in the lacy network which will bisect and encircle the city in graceful but practical ribbons.” Endorsed by Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Corning, the proposed $112.5 million highway featured “twin 1,600-foot-long ventilated tunnels, each of which would carry two lanes of traffic under the eastern edge of Washington Park”—and called for the destruction of 351 buildings and the displacement of 741 families, according to other reports. The T.U. editorial’s title, “The City of the Future,” offers a clue as to how people—who, presumably, had seen highways—could find them beautiful. (“At first glance it looks like modern 10
art,” a Knickerbocker News caption says of the Patroon Island Bridge interchange.) Boosters forecast Albany as an Epcotian tomorrowland. “It is unfortunate that the dreams of future Albany cannot be realized with a mere snap of the fingers,” the newspaper lamented, though it curbed its impatience by imagining future generations’ gratitude. When “all of today’s planned construction and perhaps more is in place,” it predicted, “the citizens who are still around will look back [on] the 1965-1975 decade as one marked by things being torn down, and carted away, and built up again in vast new forms and shapes.” This was prescient—except today, such recollections are tinged with pained incredulity, in light of the disproportionate impact urban renewal has had on marginalized communities nationwide. Fortunately, the midtown arterial
never despoiled Washington Park. Neighborhood resistance killed the proposal—as, a decade earlier, a similar effort in a similarly named square scotched Robert Moses’ dream of a highway through Greenwich Village. Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), led that charge, and her work popularized the sort of human-scale, pedestrian-friendly ethos behind the now-common belief among Albanians that the “lacy network” corseting the capital is a fatal encumbrance. The “long-delayed Riverfront Arterial,” as the Times Union was calling I-787 by 1966 (not completed for another half-decade), is the tightest stricture. Albany’s current comprehensive plan basically says so. The six-lane superhighway, which serves 80,000 automobiles a day, “represents a visual and physical barrier COOP SCOOP