ICYMI: New York Times Covers Bronxites' Fight to Halt DOT's Harmful Cross Bronx Expansion

BRONX, NY (08/25/2025) (readMedia)-- As the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) advances misguided plans to expand the Cross Bronx Expressway - which first razed Black and Brown communities under Robert Moses - Bronx residents are organizing to halt the proposed expansion, in favor of sustainable alternatives that protect community health. Reported by Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times, the community risks losing precious green space and parts of the recently-expanded Starlight Park to dirty emissions and increased congestion, set to directly impact the Bronx River and surrounding neighborhoods.

As written by Bellafante, "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.

"Would the rehabilitation of the expressway destroy the neighborhoods and the park a second time? This is what Mr. Martinez and his neighbors at the Bronx River Alliance, along with other community groups, have been spending the summer trying to prevent."

Bronxites are urging DOT and Governor Hochul to reject both proposed options for the expressway and pursue alternatives that reduce traffic, restore community access to green space, and reconnect riverside neighborhoods along the expressway.

Full Text:

Robert Moses Tore the South Bronx in Half. Is It About to Happen Again?

By Ginia Bellafante

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 every day.

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.

Would the rehabilitation of the expressway destroy the neighborhoods and the park a second time? This is what Mr. Martinez and his neighbors at the Bronx River Alliance, along with other community groups, have been spending the summer trying to prevent. The repairs for the expressway are the responsibility of the state's Department of Transportation, which has already committed $900 million to the project and is looking at ways to reimagine the Cross Bronx beyond the bridge repairs.

One proposal - the idea that has met the fiercest resistance - would require the creation of an entirely new overpass to divert traffic while bridges get fixed. That overpass would function as a roadway for four years, the estimated time it would take to complete the bridge work. It would then be converted to a bike or pedestrian passageway, according to the state's plan.

However promising that might sound, the problem is that it would hang over a fair share of Mr. Martinez's park - what is now Starlight Park, the 13-acre green space abutting the river. Two years ago, it was connected to the Bronx River Greenway. The construction of a diversionary road would require that trees be cut down in a neighborhood with a longstanding pollution problem and high rates of asthma. But more than anything, it would stand to many people in the area as a demoralizing regression.

"The 50-year story of reclaiming the river was all people-powered," Ms. Martell, of the Bronx River Alliance, told me. In her view, the last thing the area needs is any more concrete. Against the backdrop of all that hard, alienating surface, Starlight is a serene space, where it is possible to go canoeing, however improbably, in the midst of a congested and chaotic part of the city where traffic seems to flow in a dangerous and constant pattern of figure-eights.

Last month, a group of local politicians including Comptroller Brad Lander wrote a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul and her transportation commissioner, Marie Therese Dominguez, urging them to approach the project "in a way that protects the progress we've made" and reflects "a genuine commitment to equity."

When I spoke with Commissioner Dominguez this week about the angst and mistrust that are pervasive in the community, she said she understood that misguided infrastructure projects have had long-lasting and emotional consequences. Many people in this part of the South Bronx are advocating a different idea, which would involve no overpass at all but would extend the time frame of the bridge repairs to six years with lane closures going one at a time. This would be more onerous to drivers, but it would leave Starlight Park unobstructed.

The commissioner stressed that her department had taken no option off the table and that the state was, in fact, taking down an elevated stretch of I-81 in Syracuse that had split the city's downtown and divided two public housing communities, a reclamation project that urban planners have celebrated.

Followers of heated transit debates will see likenesses here to some of the controversies that arose around plans to repair a stretch of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which essentially would have replaced the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with another highway. But in that case the wealthy people who live near it quickly raised the money to sue the city and stop it. The South Bronx is not similarly resourced.

"No one is debating whether these bridges need rehabilitating," Ms. Martell, who has lived in the Bronx her whole life, told me. "We understand that commerce has to move, that people have to move from point A to point B. I drive. I get it. But let's look at other options. Let's look at blue highways. Let's look at how things used to move around before I-95."

About Bronx River Alliance: The Bronx River Alliance serves as a coordinated voice for the river and works in harmonious partnership to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor so that it can be a healthy ecological, recreational, educational and economic resource for the communities through which the river flows.

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