Pavement Purgatory Showing Cracks
Modest measures to roll back asphalt in our over-paved region:
- In the Bronx' Hunts Point neighborhood, the Point Community Development
Corporation has succeeded in winning approval for turning the stub end
of Lafayette Avenue west of the Bronx River into a neighborhood park.
Transformation of the half-acre site has already begun, and the city Parks
Dept. has agreed to acquire the land next year. The new park will allow
the community direct access to the river along a waterfront largely hemmed
in by industrial sites. Bronx greenway planners have discussed a bike/pedestrian
bridge to connect the segments of Lafayette Avenue on either side of the
river.
- Carteret, NJ officials will use urban enterprise zone funding to transform
a block of Cooke Avenue into a town center plaza designed to anchor
new businesses. A new town library recently opened on the block, which
also hosts borough hall. Traffic will be rerouted along Pershing Street.
- Elected officials have won a city budget allocation to begin demapping
the Richmondtown Loop, a phantom roadway that has haunted official
NYC maps of Staten Island since it was proposed in 1954. Richmondtown citizens
have fought the project ever since, claiming it would attract traffic to
the neighborhood and would carve into the Greenbelt. Civic activists now
want the Willowbrook Parkway, another ghost road that would slice through
parks to connect the Bayonne Bridge and Hylan Boulevard in Great Kills,
demapped as well. "…more roads attract more traffic," Richmond
Town and Clarke Avenue Civic Association President Carol Donovan told the
S.I. Advance.
