Highways on the Hudson

After a day in front of our screens, we often escape from Greenwich Village, to the Hudson River.  15 minutes walking down West Houston Street brings us to the river: waves, wind, river traffic, and a view stretching to the horizon (or at least New Jersey).  Sometimes the place also becomes my evening office:

Evening office hours on the Hudson

Few traces remain of the Hudson River's role as one of the world's busiest ports.  Most piers have disappeared, and several are only wooden posts.  But a few are still intact.  They are now converted into playgrounds or walking trails (and one evening, a dance hall).  One of the biggest, Pier 40, is a parking lot and sports complex (including my favorite institution of "higher" education: the Trapeze School of New York).  This new riverfront habitat is the creation of the Hudson River Park Trust.

Where to go when you run away to the circus

Just inland are huge warehouses, some converted into offices, lofts, and galleries.  And there are a few other remnants of the port, like this abandoned hotel (no doubt soon to be converted into a $600/night boutique inn).

Vestige of the old Hudson Waterfront

But to get to the riverfront we must first cross the eight lanes of West Street.  It's been interesting to learn that this was the site of an intense battle over the future of the river and Manhattan's west side.  In the 1930s an elevated highway was built all the way down the waterfront, linking upper and lower Manhattan.  Over time it started to fall apart, and in 1973 a section collapsed under a dump truck carrying 27 tons of asphalt.  By the end of the 1980s it had been demolished.

Old West Side Highway (Wikipedia Commons)

New West Side Highway (West Street)

An ambitious proposal to replace the highway soon emerged.  The "Westway" would be a new highway, tunneled under new land created from landfill.  Some of the land would become parks, some would be developed.  The project had powerful backers: mayors, governors, even presidents (the project depended on federal funding).

But in 1985 the project was cancelled.  Community activists were outraged by the notion of spending so much on cars (mile for mile, it would have been history's most expensive highway), at a time when the city's subway system was falling apart.  Many found distasteful the prospect of turning the Hudson over to developers.  Sydney Schanberg's columns in The New York Times described the project (here and here) as a sordid deal cooked up by powerful interests to enrich themselves.  As Matthew Gandy explained in his terrific book, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, the project seemed a throwback to an earlier time, when the city was being rebuilt for cars rather than people: Robert Moses was at the height of his powers, ramming the Cross Bronx Expressway and many other highways through neighborhoods.  (The irony, as Gandy also notes, is that the Westway's tunnel and landscaping were designed to meet the objections raised by these earlier projects.)

(By the way, I also found William Buzbee's recent Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City a really helpful guide to the history of the issue.  As he explains, this project wasn't just about New York: it's a good window into how regulatory politics really works.)

Looking back, it seems self-evident that cancelling the Westway was a good thing: instead of a highway for the few the city invested in transit for the many.  Sanity won.  Recent recollections (here and here) confirm this view.  Other recent discussions make a powerful case that urban highways are relics of the past.

But I've also been reading other, contrary accounts.  In his wonderful book, Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, Philip Lopate suggests the episode demonstrated a failure to carry through on the big projects necessary for city-building.  As he points out, the project would have created, at no expense to the city, a new riverfront area.  And another observer notes the irony that in a post-Hurricane Sandy New York, something like the Westway project may yet reappear, this time as a bulwark against future storm surges.

Perhaps this episode was more complicated than it seems. At least, it raises the question of just how to build the city of the future, while respecting the communities of the present.