You bet – in 1964, Robert Moses forced the “Kensington Expressway” right down the middle of Buffalo. Paved over neighborhoods that he didn’t like (mine!) and forced suburban sprawl on the city. He devastated the working class sections of Buffalo, leaving onramps in his wake.
Moses did the same thing in Niagara Falls: check out the “Robert Moses Parkway” – it completely blocks the city of Niagara Falls from the riverfront of the Niagara River.
And don’t get me started on the hideously Stalinesque “Robert Moses Niagara Power Project”.
Similar in cities across the country through the 60s and 70s, as urban planning tended/tends to be the study of maps in offices rather than understanding what people “on the ground” might need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_and_expressway_revolts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_695_(Massachusetts) would have been the one that cut Boston residential areas (of course lower income than the outer suburbs) up in addition to I93 (which was buried by the infamous Big Dig). Thankfully they were able to manage reuse of some of the rights of way that had been planned for subway and commuter rail in the “southwest corridor” though that line has its own impact on the neighborhoods it cuts through.
Was the planning of these highways in response to increased car traffic due to increased car ownership, white flight to the suburbs, death of trolley and other public transportation in the 40s, or just increasing availability of federal highway funds? (Or all of the above of course?)
Not only that, when he was building the Long Island Expressway through
what was then cheap farmland, other officials begged him to buy a wide
enough right of way so commuter rail might someday be run down the
median.
Yeah I think that story is also in James Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere, where he excoriates Robert Moses. That’s also a really good book for understanding what happened to our cities in the 20th century.
Otherwise I’m so happy there’s another Wilcock installment and I wish they came out more often!!
Wow, we are lucky to have avoided a Lake St. highway. Like we needed our neighborhoods further sliced and diced by giant roads. My dream is that someday the 94 trench is somehow covered, at least near the downtowns. (Good picture of the changes 94 brought near downtown Minneapolis here: http://www.streets.mn/2013/09/20/then-now-minneapolis-loring-park/)
While not on the same scale, our latter day Robert Moses-types are continuing the tradition by planning poorly placed LRT lines through our parks and low density neighborhoods to serve the exurbs. It is unfortunate Hennepin County and the Met Council would rather do it cheap than do it right.
I actually saw Jacobs talk about that exact vicious circle.
Build the LRT/train etc. cheap - meaning through low density areas. Then nobody is riding it, so we have to increase fares to cover costs. So even fewer people ride it, and eventually it becomes an example of why we should not build public transit and instead build more roads.
Roberta Brandes Gratz covered the defeat of the LoMEX pretty comprehensively in her book The Battle for Gotham. I video’d a reading back in 2010
As well as Jacobs’ in-your-face tactics, it was fascinating to hear how the opposition used Moses’ own hubris to bring him down - by taking his inflated traffic projections and revealing that they would result in overwhelming pollution of the supposedly offsetting green spaces. This effort established environmental impact policy as a critical factor in urban planning.
