When Edmundo Martinez was growing up in the South Bronx in the 1980s, his default playground was a patch of land adjacent to the Bronx River, the 23-mile waterway that had passed the previous 140 years morphing into an emblem of urbanization’s darker turns. By the 1840s, the rise of industrialization had made it a dumping ground for grain and paper mills. More than a century later, it had become a repository for old tires, abandoned cars, refrigerators, the detritus of the narcotics trade and the city’s broader decline.
“You hear over and over that it was an open sewer,” Nilka Martell, chairwoman of the Bronx River Alliance, said. “But it really was an open sewer.” Now the river and park are quietly lovely, the result of extensive environmental remediation.
The land surrounding the river had once belonged to William Waldorf Astor, but by the time Mr. Martinez and his friends were throwing a football around, it was public property, loftily named Sheridan Fields, full of brown grass and concrete. “We had a three-quarter-mile walk to get to a bad park along an expressway,” he told me. Letting children play there made parents nervous, but where else were they to go?
The expressway in question was the infamous Cross Bronx, a stretch of Interstate 95 designed by Robert Moses, built over a 15-year span beginning in 1948 and remaining perhaps the most egregious hallmark of destructive city planning in the country. Now, like so much of New York’s infrastructure, it was in need of major repair to correct structural deficiencies on five bridges that accommodate roughly 150,000 cars and trucks everyday.
History has left many people in the Bronx with little faith in government’s efforts to improve either the lives of individual people or the spaces they occupy. The construction of the Cross Bronx leveled to dust thousands of apartments and many integrated communities, and the legacy and heartbreak have been immune to reversal.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post Robert Moses Tore the South Bronx in Half. Is It About to Happen Again? appeared first on New York Times.
