[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll do a follow-up on the segment we did on Wednesday in our series 100 Years of 100 Things. It was 100 years of Robert Moses, urban planner extraordinaire, meaning he accomplished a lot, but often for better and or worse, for so much of the transportation infrastructure, especially.

There was also a parks legacy that I think he's much more beloved for, and a housing legacy, but the transportation infrastructure in and around New York City also upstate, since much of his power was in state-level authorities got him so much hate and resentment and hurt so many people and communities as time went on. The follow-up today is specifically on undoing some of the most destructive parts of Robert Moses' legacy.

There is literally a movement in New York and elsewhere these days to tear down highways, tear down highways, where they are seen as doing more harm than good. Now to set this up, here's a caller we got on Wednesday, Thomas from Red Hook, complaining about a particular Robert Moses roadway in his borough of Brooklyn.

Thomas: Yes, I live in Red Hook, and it's very apparent that Gowanus Expressway splits through Red Hook. It's almost impossible to get across Hamilton Avenue except for a couple of overpasses, but from what I know of this book, and I struggle with whether Robert Moses was a genius or an evil genius because certainly a lot of what he did was destructive and also quite beautiful, especially Jones Beach.

It seems from his work that he was fairly racist, especially in cutting off poorer neighborhoods like Red Hook, which was once the drug capital of the world, as opposed to Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens, which are much more wealthy because of that expressway. Second Avenue under that expressway was completely destroyed from being a neighborhood extension of whatever was to the east, neighborhoods to the east, Park Slope. Now it's just a commercial wasteland.

Brian Lehrer: That's Thomas in Red Hook on the Gowanus. Here's one more from Wednesday. Caller Sam in Milwaukee, who's currently reading The Power Broker. That's the book that Thomas also referred to in that clip, Robert Caro's critical biography of Moses that just turned 50 years old, The Power Broker. The caller, Sam, talks here about reading part of it to his parents, who come from New York.

Sam: I was with my parents on the Upper West Side. They live in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side. My father is from Washington Heights, a German-Jewish immigrant family. My mother is from the Rockaways Beach, 140th. Actually, that house stayed with us all the way up until Hurricane Sandy, when it was destroyed.

We would spend all of our summers and weekends traveling from the Upper West Side down the West Side Highway, which Caro talks a lot about. We would get on the Van Wyck. This is how we would get there, West Side Highway onto the Van Wyck. Right. My parents, despite being the most native New Yorkers imaginable, didn't really know the extent of Robert Moses. I think maybe a lot of New Yorkers might relate to this. Oh, Robert Moses. Yes, I know Robert Moses, but then when you hear everything he built, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming to know just how, like, grand his vision was for the city.

Then finally, I'm reading the introduction to them, and they're sitting there, and we get to all the parkways and parks that he built, and suddenly the Van Wyck shows up. My mother, who's sitting on the couch and is dozing off a little bit, her eyes perk up and she goes, "He built a van Wyck. He should be in jail," [laughter] literally.

Brian Lehrer: Sam in Milwaukee calling Wednesday's show. This is a follow-up to 100 years of Robert Moses' efforts to undo some of his worst things going on today. With us for this, two guests, Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy and planning at NYU's Wagner School, and Rachel Weinberger, the Peter W. Herman chair for transportation at the Regional Plan Association, that think tank that looks at what they consider the best interests of the whole New York City region. Mitchell and Rachel, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back, both of you, to WNYC.

Mitchell Moss: Glad to be here.

Rachel Weinberger: Super happy to be here, Brian, and glad to be here also with Mitchell.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the examples in those clips, and definitely also to the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx and more. Can you give us an overview? Rachel Weinberger, would you start? Is this even a thing, tearing down highways as a movement or something government actually does?

Rachel Weinberger: It is a thing. It is a movement. It is also the case that many of the legacy highways are really well beyond their built lifespan and are crumbling. We're thinking about things in lots of new and different ways. The Sheridan's been decommissioned. They're tearing down a highway right now in Syracuse. Milwaukee has a famous early example of a highway teardown. It is definitely a thing.

Brian Lehrer: Mitchell, would you add to that?

Mitchell Moss: Well, one, I think we must really understand, and I thought you're 100 years of Moses was great, but when they built the Cross Bronx Expressway, it was a way to allow New York, which has only one county on the mainland, to allow trucks to get off local streets and to be put on this high-speed road connecting the George Washington Bridge to the mainland.

For all of your listeners who go to Cape Cod or Vermont, they drive across the Bronx and aCross Bronx Expressway, I think we have to recognize the flaw there was that Bob Wagner, Jr., the mayor, had a staff person who said, you can change the location without destroying east Tremont at no cost. Moses basically was able to bamboozle Wagner. I remember you said your father lived in a house that was torn down. My father had an office building.

Brian Lehrer: An apartment building, yes.

Mitchell Moss: My father had an office at 645 East Fremont Avenue, so I know that area. I used to see it as a kid. I just want to say that--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, my dad was on Kratona-- Go ahead.

Mitchell Moss: There is a theory of everyone, which is that Robert Moses did this by himself. He was appointed by Al Smith. He was reappointed by--

Brian Lehrer: Governor Smith.

Mitchell Moss: Yes, by Governor Smith, a great governor, and that gave him the parks commission, but he was reappointed by other governors. Mayor LaGuardia, Mayor Wagner, Mayor Lindsay. They all gave him vast powers. He was the favorite son of Mrs. Sulzberger, the wife of the publisher of The New York Times. He was able to operate with a great deal of freedom because he had the support of elected officials who enjoyed cutting the ribbon at his projects.

Brian Lehrer: Sure, [crosstalk]--

Rachel Weinberger: If I could add to that, to Mitchell's comment.

Brian Lehrer: Sure, go ahead.

Rachel Weinberger: Also, one of the things that Moses did was he capitalized on a tremendous federal government opportunity. The federal government was matching local governments 90 cents on the dollar. The federal government was putting up 90% of the money for these projects. By exploiting that, Moses brought a huge amount of jobs, construction jobs, and money into the region.

Part of the problem is there were no federal guide rails on how those highways were planned and positioned. I know many people like to call Moses an urban planner. I don't think he would have called himself that. He's also called the master builder. I think essentially he was putting in place roads and policies that many people-- Mitchell's absolutely right. He was not acting in any kind of a vacuum. He was leveraging federal money in what we now, in hindsight, understand to be a somewhat reckless and harmful way. The question of how to undo that legacy is definitely pertinent.

Mitchell Moss: Brian, I just want to say the BQE, which Robert Moses created as a way to have a high-speed road, not go through the historic streets of Brooklyn Heights, which, by the way, have 150-year-old water mains that do crack when trucks go on them, that now should be replaced. It's decaying. There was a commission which Polly Trottenberg convened that I served on, and that [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: When she was New York City transportation commissioner under de Blasio.

Mitchell Moss: Every day we delay, we lose the opportunity to shrink that highway to a two-lane in each direction system. We should then use it as a chance to put a park space over that awful trench in Cobble Hill. In other words, we can make many parks connected to a smaller and more prudent BQE. That should be a priority right now. You don't have to tear the whole thing down because there is a need for some vehicles to get there, but you can reduce the amount of pollution that comes from those diesel effluents from the trucks.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call that might be very relevant even in real-time, because here is Darrell calling from the Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, I-87. Hi, Darrell. You're on WNYC.

Darrell: Hi. Good morning, Brian. Yes, I am on the Deegan right now. I just want to say, I've been a fan of this idea about city structures and everything else. I think we have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that Moses is a devil and an angel. His ideas were the popular ideas about how to develop the city back in the 1950s, from Corbusier and things like that. I know that [inaudible 00:09:58] is ruined because their origins are race-based, class-based.

Another part of it is that a lot of Black and brown people have always known the effects, that you've been regulated to certain areas of the city. It's rewarding and it's a little frustrating because it seems that a lot of- now that neighborhoods are getting gentrified and a lot of people are moving from other places that they were able to live in, in the city, now that they're able to move into these Black and brown neighborhoods, they're like saying, oh, well, this sucks that, you can't go across the street at Hamilton, or that you've got to crawl through the Cross Bronx in order to get from one [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: It's worse than the inconvenience as I'm sure in race and class terms, the asthma rates, for example, in the neighborhoods along the Cross Bronx Expressway, and I imagine the Deegan and many of the others that we talk about as Robert Moses' legacy, besides cutting off communities and separating a good side of the tracks, except the tracks were a highway, and the bad side of the tracks, and guess who bore the brunt? It's also public health.

Darrell: It is. I've lived in all of these neighborhoods. I've lived in Brooklyn. I've lived in the Bronx. I've lived in Queens. When those roadways are less populated, they are really quick, convenient ways to get around. You can get from the Bronx down to lower Manhattan within like, 10, 15 minutes when the traffic is not crazy, but this city has exploded in population, and a lot of these roadways are simply unworkable.

Brian Lehrer: Darrel, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you for calling us from the Deegan. I want to keep this focused on undoing things that Robert Moses had built. I want to read to both of you, Mitchell and Rachel, from an article in City & State from 2019. This movement is at least five years old. It's more than that. It gives some examples. It says, "A boulevard lined with new apartment buildings and craft breweries has replaced a section of the inner loop," that highway, "in downtown Rochester. Plans are underway to dismantle the Interstate 81 viaduct in Syracuse in order to reinvigorate downtown.

The Sheridan Expressway-" I'm definitely going to ask you to talk about this in the Bronx- "The Sheridan Expressway will no longer be a limited access interstate highway, opening up access to the waterfront in the south Bronx." Then it quotes Governor Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo from 2016, saying, what we are doing is correcting past mistakes. That was when he actually removed a two-mile stretch of the Robert Moses Parkway, actually its name, which was in the Buffalo area. He renamed it the Niagara Scenic Parkway after they undid it up there.

"The governor's appetite for tearing down highways has evidently only increased since then," says this article, including his September 17th, 2019, call to remove the Buffalo Skyway. Mitchell, this is actually a thing. Say whatever you want, but definitely talk about the Sheridan Expressway and what exactly has actually happened there.

Mitchell Moss: The Sheridan Expressway blocked access to the cleaner, improved Bronx River. Once the local community realized that that highway was a barrier, there was huge support to get rid of it, especially since all it was, was basically providing a shortcut to the Cross Bronx. Now, we have to say, we can praise Andrew Cuomo for many things, but he did far more building than taking down. Really, the Tappan Zee, [unintelligible 00:13:57]. Let's be serious.

We should acknowledge there now there's been success here. Richie Torres used his power to convince the MTA to invest money in a study to cap parts of the Cross Bronx. When you talked about asthma coming from those trucks, it's the schools that are built next to those highways which cause kids to have slow brain development, to have limited test scores. We should be very careful. We should not build public schools next to roadways that have industrial trucks.

The capping of it and the diversion of the air affluence from that would be a great health improvement because we're not going to get rid of that highway, but we could certainly limit its impact. I think also I happen to disagree with the caller from the Red Hook. We have destroyed southern Brooklyn with the Gowanus Expressway. It tends to be ignored because we take it for granted, but there was an effort at one time to tunnel it, to suppress it. This would be what they did in Boston.

Tip O'Neill, when he left Congress, he got a gift. He got the tear down of what was really a barrier to the waterfront. Well, we should think of the Gowanus as a real barrier, especially when it is holding up access to the waterfront. People in Red Hook should be able to get to the piers if we cap parts of it, if we put a park above parts of that trench. We should also get rid of that barrier so that we can have residential development. One of the great ironies is that we're limiting access even to the Brooklyn Army terminal by having so many roads which are barriers to it.

Brian Lehrer: Our lines are full with people wanting to weigh in on how to undo the downside of the legacy of Robert Moses. 212-433-WNYC. You can still text us. I want to take probably a very relevant person. Here is New York State Assemblymember Karines Reyes, who represents part of the area around the Cross Bronx Expressway. Assemblymember, thank you for calling in. Hello.

Assemblymember Karines Reyes: Hi, Brian. How are you? Thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Assemblymember Karines Reyes: I'm very interested in this conversation. I find it fascinating because, myself as well as the Congressman Richie Torres, and especially some community groups where the idea of capping the Cross Bronx came from, we've been working really hard to really reimagine the Cross Bronx. There is some money coming in from the bipartisan infrastructure law, and it's being used to upgrade some much-needed bridges in the area.

The Department of Transportation has come back with a plan where they're actually trying to build an east-west connector. When they sold that project to the community, they sold it as this is going to create more bike lanes, an ability for pedestrians to be able to cross the Cross Bronx and go east and west, but when you look at the plan, it really is an additional lane that's being added to the Cross Bronx. We have some serious concerns about that.

I just find it interesting that these structures that have been built by Robert Moses, like the Cross Bronx, there is so much development that has happened since then around it that almost make it difficult to think of innovative ways to mitigate that impact and change what the Cross Bronx is. I think that by far the best idea has been to find ways to deck the below-grade portions of the Cross Bronx, particularly because of the health impacts of it.

I'm a registered nurse right here in the Bronx, and our zip codes around the Cross Bronx have some of the highest asthma rates in the country. It's really hard to really make inroads with folks and their health needs when we don't look at the environmental impact of things like the Cross Bronx.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. That same City & State article that I was quoting from 2019 adds the Sheridan, Ruckner, and Cross Bronx expressways have been blamed for high asthma levels in the South Bronx. That's not news. The Interstate 81 viaduct in downtown Syracuse has been called a segregating wall that divides poor minority residents from a vibrant university community. The Kensington Expressway transformed middle-class Buffalo neighborhoods into an isolated pocket of poverty. All those examples of that kind of legacy. Assemblymember, thank you for calling in. Let's take another call from the Bronx. Edmundo, you're on WNYC. Hi, Edmundo.

Edmundo: Hi, Brian. Thank you for this. I live right along the Sheridan Boulevard and the Cross Bronx Expressway. I'm one of the community advocates who was pushing to get the Sheridan decommissioned. Just like when the Sheridan did get decommissioned, the State added additional Edgewater ramp roadways that the community didn't want. Currently, as the elected official was talking about the project to cap the Cross Bronx way, I too have been promoting that project and providing input.

New York State DOT is currently looking to expand that with additional roadways on each side of I-95. They haven't done the necessary outreach to people. Aside from the high asthma rates that zip code that area has the highest noise pollution in the city and is like top five in the State of New York. So there's a lot of work that has been gone to undo Robert Moses's known injustices, especially when it comes to environmental justice.

Meanwhile, State DOT is doubling down on his legacy by expanding the Cross Bronx, the actual footprint, anywhere from 5 to 10ft on each side, and adding additional rocks are going to cause noise pollution, water runoff into the Bronx River, New York City's only freshwater river that's taken 25-plus years to get to the state where it's currently at. It's just really challenging that while we know the negative impacts this has, the state continues to push these projects forward. We already learned by doing some hard research that these projects are going to be replicated throughout other areas of the I-95 corridor. This is the only area that New York State DOT will be looking to expand the Cross Bronx and bring more roadways to an already impacted community and neighborhood.

Brian Lehrer: Edmundo, thank you for all of that. To that point, Rachel, I know you wrote an op-ed in the Daily News about two years ago with the headline, Bigger, broader highways are really a dead end. Do you want to tell people what you wrote in that op-ed and react to Edmundo's call, which seems to be about exactly that?

Rachel Weinberger: Yes, I think Edmundo and the assembly member, Karines Reyes, were very articulate and on point on this issue. I want to say we're not going to walk away from highways completely, but we have got to stop doubling down exactly as Edmundo said. The Van Wyck has been expanded in recent years. I know the project well that he and Assemblymember Reyes are talking about.

The state DOT is proposing to essentially double the infrastructure in a stretch of the Cross Bronx Expressway, just as the city DOT had intended to build a doubling of the capacity on BQE right where Mitchell was saying. That portion both of them are talking about in both projects, it's a supposed temporary roadway that increases the existing capacity and then rebuilds.

What we really need is a managed retreat approach from car dependence. We need to start reclaiming and repurposing ramp spaces, not expand the highways. There's a lot of, oh, we have to build to modern standards. The idea of the BQE lane reduction that Mitchell raised at the very beginning of the program, I hate to brag, especially on the radio, but that came from an RPA report where we said, well, a modern lane actually has more capacity than the lane that you're replacing.

In the BQE case, 25% of the traffic was bypassing the battery tunnel to take a free bridge into Manhattan, which that traffic impact would have been mitigated with congestion pricing. There's lots of tools, really, that we have at our disposal to help bring down the level of traffic, the volume of traffic, which then infects all sorts of public health questions. It's not just asthma. It's heart health. It's a variety of issues.

We're in this schizophrenic moment where the State DOT is bringing down the viaduct in Syracuse, but at the same time increasing infrastructure. I think as a first step, we've got to stop expanding the highway infrastructure. Then as a second step, we have got to start repurposing some of these dead spaces that the highways are creating. We've done a lot, I think, undoing the bow tie in Times Square, all of that has been pedestrianized. Broadway used to be much more of just a traffic hose pipeline. That's been very much reduced. I think, little by little, as we notch it down, we can start thinking about all kinds of different opportunities that are presented.

Brian Lehrer: Mitchel, anything to add there?

Mitchell Moss: Yes. Brian, this is simple. The State Transportation Department cares about trucks. New York has 8.3 million people. We should not let the knuckleheads in Albany drive policy in New York City. If the governor doesn't understand this, she should look at the voting pattern. The people in the Bronx should recognize their kids are more important than the trucks coming from the State of New Jersey. Let them go up to the Tappan Zee across 287. They'll spend a little bit more time in the truck. We might have kids, live a little longer in the Bronx.

This is a political problem. If we make this a technocratic fight, we lose. You have to simply say that the children are suffering because we are expanding truck capacity. These trucks are diesel-fueled vehicles. They are lethal.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another caller. Here is Katie, who says she just got off the BQE. We probably haven't talked about the BQE enough in this segment around undoing some of the worst of the legacy of Robert Moses. Hi, Katie.

Katie: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I try to stay off the BQE. I'm pretty sure that cantilever is just going to fall down, given the lack of urgency that our government seems to take on having it repaired. I advise everyone to avoid the cantilever. I'm interested in how this conversation can inform future planning, current planning for New York City. The effects that we're talking about are 100-year effects. We know that the projects that are happening today will have that decades-long, hundreds-of-year impact.

How can our large-scale planning be more comprehensive and actually set out a long-term vision that tries to undo some of this harm that's been done over the decades, but also responsibly plan for climate change for all of the repair that needs to be done from places like the BQE and as was referred to, the horrible trench in Cobble Hill? Can we lengthen the timeframe for our vision?

Brian Lehrer: Rachel, can you take that?

Rachel Weinberger: Well, the City is looking at better options for the BQE. I think next week or maybe in the next 10 days, a report is coming out on how the north and south sections should be handled. I think the BQE turns out to be, as Mitchell says, an important artery for trucks. Just taking it away does put those trucks back on the street, which he also mentioned are heavy enough to crack the water mains.

We are really in a jam here. If the solutions were easy, they would have been implemented, but we do have definite ways forward that we can start to address the trench, the bridges, just the mess that we've created.

Mitchell Moss: I think we fail to appreciate that most people in New York use mass transit or commuter rail to get to and from work and increasingly to go to and from social life. Actually, we're not going to do what they do. You can easily take out a highway in Syracuse or Rochester because there's not a thing in that downtown anyone wants to go to anyway, but I think in New York there's eight and half million people. You can't put a sofa on the back of a bicycle. People like TVs. You got to get them to your house, but we can make the mass transit system more efficient, more reliable. If we do that, then you're going to have less of the preference for using some of the vehicles that are on these roads we just have discussed.

Brian Lehrer: I think we're going to leave--

Rachel Weinberger: It's two-pronged, though.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Rachel Weinberger: At the same time as you're improving public transit, you have to stop improving the system for cars. It has to make sense that transit or bike or walking when you're not carrying your sofa is the better choice.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there. As you hear, efforts are underway to undo some of the worst transportation projects or some of the worst effects of parts of the transportation projects that Robert Moses was most responsible for overtime. Our guests have been Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy and planning at NYU's Wagner School, and Rachel Weinberger, Peter W. Herman chair for transportation at the Regional Plan Association. This has been a follow-up on Wednesday's 100 Years of 100 Things segment on 100 years of Robert Moses, undoing the worst of Robert Moses. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Mitchell Moss: Thank you.

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