Talk Bronx New York

A Community Plan for the ‘Highway to Nowhere’

North of Westchester Avenue, where the Sheridan now runs on grade, the Community Plan would create 1,200 new homes with retail and community space below. Open space would enable residents of Longwood and West Farms to easily reach the Bronx River and the new and redeveloped parkland of the Bronx River Greenway.

Sheridan ramp traffic menaces pedestrians and subway riders and interrupts the Westchester Avenue commercial strip

Removing the Sheridan would allow development of a retail and community hub at the intersection of Whitlock and Westchester Avenues, linking the Number 6 train stop with the station designed by Cass Gilbert for the New York and New Haven Railroad.

For 10 years, South Bronx residents have been fighting to get the state to tear down an old expressway so that a greener and more sustainable mixed-use neighborhood can take its place. The community’s vision fits nicely with the goals of the city’s long-term sustainability plan, PlaNYC2030. But will the city embrace this precocious community-based effort?

The Highway to Nowhere

South Bronx residents have fought for a decade to cast off the shadow of Robert Moses’ Sheridan expressway — a 1.25-mile, little-used stretch of highway locally known as “the highway to nowhere.” In its place they aim to build more than 1,000 sustainable and affordable apartments, greenways, parks, resident services and progressive businesses that will offer living-wage, long-term jobs to Bronx residents in the city’s burgeoning “green industry” to Bronx residents.

One of Moses’ few projects that never reached full fruition, the Sheridan Expressway carries an average of 37,000 cars a day (to compare, on any given day, approximately five times as many cars traverse the nearby Cross Bronx Expressway). Construction on the Sheridan began in 1958, and Moses named the road for his good friend, the Bronx commissioner of public works, Arthur V. Sheridan, who died in a car accident in 1952.

Determined to provide yet another option for drivers traveling between New York City and New England, Moses originally envisioned the Sheridan to continue four miles north from the Cross Bronx Expressway through the New York Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo, to the New England Thruway. In one of the first of several defeats that eventually ended Moses’ reign, advocates for the gardens and the zoo blocked his plan. This was good news for the city, but the South Bronx was left with the redundant stub of an expressway that connects the Cross Bronx to the Bruckner — a purpose already served by parallel stretches of the Major Deegan Expressway and the Bronx River Parkways.

Stunted or not, South Bronx residents say that the road does its share of damage. Not only does it cut them off from access to the Bronx River, but the Sheridan also separates Bronx Community Districts 2, 3 and 9 from one another. Home mostly to African American and Latino families with significantly lower than average household incomes, these districts also suffer from some of the highest asthma rates in the entire state.

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New life for Bronx rail station?

Can the Cass Gilbert-designed Westchester Avenue Railroad Station ? abandoned since 1937 ? be transformed into a grand entrance to the Bronx River and its new greenway?

That?s the hope of local group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice ? one that?s complicated and costly.

?It could be a beautiful gateway from Westchester Avenue to the new park,? said Tawkiyah Jordan, senior director for community programs at Youth Ministries.

The boarded-up station that belongs to Amtrak overlooks the new Concrete Plant Park, which is expected to open in summer 2008. After months of pestering Amtrak, Youth Ministries was able to bring in architects to look at the space.

?It?s a building that would break your heart to lose,? said Joan Byron, of the Pratt Center for Community Development. ?But it?s about as challenging a site as they come.?

It?s ?fragile,? with an exposed steel lattice work embedded with terra cotta, Byron said. ?The steel is expanding and exfoliating, like little potato chips flaking off, and that?s damaging the terra cotta.?

It would cost millions to renovate the roughly 2,700 square foot building above rail tracks. ?It?s like the size of a ranch house,? Byron said, ?and that?s one of the challenges because it can?t generate revenue that would pay for its development debt.?

Residents have pitched turning it into a Bronx River ecology center or a place for renting fishing gear and canoes. Some envision a holistic heath care and reproductive rights clinic there or a food pantry or restaurant.

Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, the public-private partnership overseeing the Bronx River Greenway, said any project would be ?a daunting? undertaking.

?We need a closer look at the costs, the benefits and if it?s even feasible for the building to be made available,? she said.

Adam Liebowitz, of community group the Point, said some locals want a hip-hop museum.

?The South Bronx was the birthplace of hip-hop and to have this place all graffitied up in the heart of the neighborhood could be great,? Liebowitz said. If not, ?I think Youth Ministries would make sure it?s something the whole community has a stake in.?

SOURCE: NYMetro.us

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