BROOKLYN: BQE
Construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway required the forcible displacement of tens of thousands of people across the two boroughs. Designed by Robert Moses (RM), the highway cut a nearly 15-mile gash through some of the most densely populated neighborhoods on the planet, ripping the core out of several communities while isolating others and inundating them with traffic.
The animation begins in Greenpoint, where in the 1950s the BQE cut through the working class, immigrant neighborhood, gobbling up the commercial corridor along Meeker Ave. In Williamsburg and South Williamsburg, thousands of immigrants, including Jews from Eastern Europe, Poles, Italians, etc., and recently arrived Puerto Ricans were displaced as the highway cut diagonally through the existing street grid, taking out dozens of blocks and hundreds of buildings.
Continuing to the neighborhoods of Downtown Brooklyn, RM flattened much of the historic core of what had been known as New York’s “twin city” before the days of municipal consolidation in 1898, replacing the formerly bustling area with parking lots and on-ramps for the bridges to Manhattan.
From there, the highway cut through the neighborhoods of what at the time was referred to as South Brooklyn. Working-class and diverse Red Hook—home to the Red Hook Houses, the largest public housing project in Brooklyn—was completely cut off from the rest of the city, as the approach to RM’s Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel formed a massive, traffic-choked and exhaust spewing trench between it and the rest of the city.
In Sunset Park, despite community outcries to move the highway over one block west to industrial 2nd Ave, RM routed the highway down the commercial heart of the neighborhood on 3rd Ave (he claimed it was cheaper as the plan was to repurpose the existing elevated train into a highway, but in reality the structure was completely rebuilt as the highway’s footprint was significantly wider). (Caro, 520.)
Across NYC, Robert Moses’ highways and “urban renewal” projects required the displacement of over 250,000 people during his forty year reign as the city’s “Master Builder” between the 1920s-60s, according to Robert Caro’s biography of RM, “The Power Broker.” The book tells of how Moses specifically targeted immigrant communities and communities of color for destruction, bulldozing countless homes, businesses, schools, churches, landmarks, and more for his projects.
His tenure left a legacy of divided neighborhoods choking with pollution and traffic, with significantly reduced mobility for the city’s residents (and deteriorated public transit). In his effort to make New York City more automobile friendly, Moses laid waste to vast swaths of the city (see previous posts for more on The Bronx, in particular; more on Brooklyn coming soon), all while ignoring the obvious reality that his highways were immediately making traffic worse. Two years after the opening of one of his crowning achievements, the Triborough Bridge, which had been intended to relieve traffic on the older East River crossings, traffic jams on the old bridges were even worse than they had been before. The Triborough itself was—and still is—regularly at a standstill.
Caro notes, “construction of [the Triborough], the most gigantic and modern traffic-sorting and conveying machine in the world, had not only failed to cure the traffic problem it was supposed to solve—but had actually made it worse.” Contemporary planners were aware of the phenomenon causing these jams, at the time called “traffic generation” and today called “induced demand.” There are better explanations of “induced demand” out there (check out City Nerd on Youtube for a good one), but in short adding highway capacity encourages more people to use that highway (as well as further auto-centric development) creating a feedback loop that simply results in more traffic.
While “traffic generation” was known at the time, Robert Moses didn’t care. By the time he was building the BQE in the 1950s, RM had been in power in New York City for 30 years and had already built hundreds of miles of expressways and parkways. By then his reputation as the inflexible “Power Broker” was well known, and he wasn’t about to let data get in the way of his vision. What’s more, traffic didn’t bother him—Caro notes RM’s “chauffeured limousine was an office, to him a peculiarly pleasant office, in fact, since in it he was away from secretaries and the telephone and in its upholstered confines he could buy himself in his work without interruption.” In fact, Moses never had his drivers license.
Caro goes on, “It was in transportation, the area in which RM was most active after the war [World War II], that his isolation from reality was most complete: because he never even participated in the activity for which he was creating his highways—driving—at all. Insulated in the comfortable rear seat of his limousine, unable to experience even once the frustration of a traffic jam, unable, unless he made an effort and put his work aside and leaned forward to look out the window, even to look at a traffic jam, Robert Moses did know know what driving in the modern era was. He did not know that the sheer weight of numbers of new cars had changed the very nature of the activity for which he was creating his facilities...He was making transportation plans based on beliefs that were not true any more. He was making plans that had no basis in reality.
“But because of the enormous power he controlled, power that was absolute in fields he had carved out for its own, such as transportation, he could impose these plans on the metropolitan region, and on its 12,000,000 residents [Now 20,000,000]” (Caro, 836).
More on Brooklyn coming soon. Thanks very much to The Institute for Public Architecture for their support—they will be featuring this animation at their upcoming exhibit on the BQE on Governors Island, opening in early March, 2023!