Don’t Be Fooled: ‘Capping’ the Cross-Bronx Is Harder Than Schumer, Torres Want You To Think

Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres and Sen. Chuck Schumer want to “cap the Cross-Bronx” — i.e., build a deck over 40 percent of the 6.5-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway to create a High Line-style park. But beware the pols’ easy promises: The idea is a lot more complicated and expensive than they might have you think.

Reducing the Cross Bronx’s impact on hundreds of thousands of poor residents is long overdue. Nilka Martell, a paralegal, has lived near the interstate highway all her life.  

“When I got married,” she says, more than 20 years ago, her baby son’s window “was right along the Cross-Bronx.” Knowing little about pollution back then, she would come home from work to ask, “Why is this window so grimy? I just washed it.” Her son was hospitalized for asthma. 

Contrary to popular belief, Robert Moses wasn’t explicitly racist when he built the Cross-Bronx. For that matter, Moses didn’t even build the Cross-Bronx. It wasn’t his idea, and he had no special sorcerer’s ability to force politicians to carry out his evil plans.  

He was just delivering what every governor, mayor and borough president had wanted since the 1920s: more roads. Any one elected official could have stopped him, but none did. The conventional wisdom was that massive highways across dense neighborhoods were a fine idea.  

The people Moses displaced for the ’50s project were white and middle class. They were just a decade ahead of their time. 

In the ’60s, Jane Jacobs and others used the horror of the Cross-Bronx as an argument for why we shouldn’t build two similar expressways across Manhattan, also planned long before Moses. 

But somehow, we’ve never got around to fixing the one urban interstate highway we did build: the Cross-Bronx. 

Martell, who founded Loving the Bronx, has pushed to repair her borough for five years.  

Much of the highway is below ground level, and the idea is to cap it off with parks. “I’m just a regular person,” Martell, a paralegal, says. “When we started talking about this, people were not receptive at all. . . . People were like, are you crazy?” 

Now, they don’t think she’s crazy — but beware of Schumer and Torres’ press-conference promises.  

First, they say that Biden’s infrastructure and Build Back Better bills will fund it. But the infrastructure bill includes just $7.5 billion for these type of projects across the whole country. New York won’t get all that, or even most of it, which explain why Torres and Schumer also say capping the Cross-Bronx will cost just $1 billion.

That’s unrealistic. Uncrossing The Bronx is an immensely complex project.  

It’s not quite the Big Dig in Boston ($21.5 billion) or the World Trade Center transportation hub ($4 billion), but it is a mega-project in a dense environment. What does that mean? 

First, New York is unlikely to shut down the highway, used by 200,000 cars and trucks each day, during construction. Politicians loathe such inconveniences.

That means a construction project taking place above, below and alongside major traffic — immediately raising costs.  

Second, any deck longer than 1,000 feet needs ventilation shafts and structural support. That means taking more land alongside, or narrowing the roadway.  

The city can build smaller parks with large gaps for traffic, avoiding ventilation. But that’s not exactly what the pols are selling — nor what’s on the (unofficial, un-engineered) renderings floating around.

Third, urban parks also need massive sums of money, every year, for operation, maintenance and programming. The federal government doesn’t provide such money; the city and state would have to. 

Finally, what if all this succeeds and makes the Bronx more attractive? It would be ironic that undoing the effect of a highway that displaced middle-class white people would result in an influx of middle-class white people, pushing out the people there now. 

These aren’t insurmountable problems.  

But when Schumer and Torres imply that, thanks to the Biden bill, the mid-Bronx is about to be greened over, they’re not quite leveling with long-suffering residents.  

We’ll know they’re serious when Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor-elect Eric Adams chime in — not just with words about how “racism is built into our infrastructure,” as Adams has done, but with serious financial plans, and what other mega-project they are going to reduce (four-borough jails, in Adams’s case?) to pay for this one. 

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post