BROOKLYN: ATLANTIC AVE
Atlantic Ave in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, before-and-after the street’s “widening and modernization” immediately following WWII (shortly after the 1946 photo was taken). In the years before the widening, the neighborhoods of eastern Brooklyn began to overtake Harlem as the largest Black community in New York City, with the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood at its core. Black workers and their families had been attracted to the area from across the city (and the country at large) due to the many easily-accessible jobs on the nearby waterfront and Navy Yards, as well as excellent transit connections to Manhattan (and Harlem in particular after the opening of the IND Fulton Line in 1936, today’s A & C trains).
It is no coincidence, then, that Robert Moses, New York City’s notoriously racist chief planner, sited many of his “urban renewal” and transportation projects in the area. While the widening of Atlantic Avenue, the southern border of Bed-Stuy, did not require the sort of wholesale block clearance that construction of the BQE had entailed, it nonetheless had devastating effects. The resulting concentration of car and truck traffic down the corridor caused the formerly mixed-use area along Atlantic Ave to become home to primarily car-related uses. Auto-body shops, gas stations, and parking lots replaced rowhouses, restaurants, and shops as residents fled the noise and pollution. The papers began to occasionally refer to the street as the “Avenue of Death,” with vehicles striking pedestrians more and more frequently—a trend which continues on Atlantic to this day.
The widening of Atlantic Ave. had been undertaken by RM as part of his many efforts to speed automobile traffic from the (racially-restricted) suburbs into the commercial cores of Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Ultimately his attempts backfired miserably. In his biography of RM, “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro notes that “pre-war congestion on old Atlantic Avenue had been intolerable. Post-war congestion on a new—widened and modernized—Atlantic Avenue was more intolerable.” (Caro, 914).
This was ultimately the case with nearly all of Moses’ roadway projects, which remain interminably jammed to this day. Rather than solving existing traffic, his expressways simply induced more people and commerce to purchase and rely on automobiles, leading to more traffic. For commuters, Moses’ neglect of the railroads and transit led to a noticeably deteriorating system, further enticing people into cars and onto the highway. Moreover, his highways into Long Island had been built with no provisions for transit, ensuring the development of automobile-centric suburbs which would only lead to more cars.
For commercial traffic, trucking became cheaper due to government-funded highways and arterials. As freight rail lost local competition to more flexible (but significantly less efficient) trucks relying on public infrastructure, short-haul urban freight rail access was significantly cut back as sidings and entire lines were abandoned or allowed to deteriorate (such as the Bay Ridge Branch in Brooklyn). In cities across the country, freight rail distribution systems were abandoned due to insurmountable competition from government-funded highways (accounting for the preponderance of abandoned rails in American cities) as trucks flooded the streets. The construction of highways and trucking routes such as Atlantic did not relieve truck traffic—rather it created more by pulling freight from the far more efficient railroads (and, in coastal cities like NYC, local maritime transport). Citylab has a good article on this subject entitled “The Lowly Boxcar Can Make Your City a Better Place to Live.”
More on Bed-Stuy: Today the neighborhood faces a different threat: gentrification. In the mid-20th century, RM’s projects damaged the neighborhood’s built fabric (in particular the corridors along the triangular neighborhood’s northern and southern borders, Myrtle and Atlantic) displacing thousands and reducing the amount of housing available, replacing ornate brownstones with far fewer units of high-rise public housing. However, more so than many of the communities covered on this project, Bed-Stuy survived and thrived. Not even RM could convince the public that the neighborhood—home to a stable working class and one of the largest collections of stunning Victorian brownstone houses in the world—was a “slum.” Precisely because of this beautiful urban fabric (and the neighborhood’s relatively central location and decent transit connections), the neighborhood has seen precipitously rising rents over the past decades, mirroring the trend of gentrification in similar communities across the city. Landlords have been capitalizing on the neighborhood’s increased attractiveness, pricing many in the community out of their homes.
