At a September 21 symposium in the Bronx, transportation officials, Hunts Point business figures, community activists and elected officials heard the stories of key figures in the removal of highways in Milwaukee and San Francisco (see MTR #474).

The event was organized by advocates of removing the Sheridan Expressway, which runs between the Cross-Bronx and Bruckner Expressways. NY State DOT has proposed spending hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize the Bruckner-Sheridan interchange and upgrade truck access to Hunts Point industries. Transportation reformers and community organizations say truck access can be improved at the same time that the little-used Sheridan gives way to better city land uses, such as housing, commercial development and park-land.

That case was made strongly by Ajamu Kitwana of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice and the Pratt Institute’s Joan Byron in an excellent visual presentation of the area’s environmental burdens and how a multi-element Sheridan demapping program would ease some of them. The plan would build a new interchange from the Bruckner to the Leggett Avenue gateway into Hunts Point, while removing the Sheridan and easing traffic flow along the Bruckner and Cross-Bronx.

Bronx elected officials took in the Milwaukee and San Francisco cases with interest. Borough President Adolfo Carrion, who helped the Sheridan decommissioning plan along as a member of the city council, remained open to the idea and said that he hoped that removing the Sheridan could work. However, he also mentioned the "compromise" of closing the highway on weekends so that recreational users could use it. That is a small interim step that might be welcome if put into practice immediately, but is a very far cry from the revitalization that could take place along the lower Bronx River if the land the Sheridan occupies is retaken for other uses — it would fail to seize the opportunity to reorganize the south Bronx’ infrastructure that the ageing of the Bruckner-Sheridan interchange represents.

State Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. said he eagerly awaited results of the current State DOT study of the issue, which has included the possibility of removing the Sheridan. Diaz too said he remained open to all possibilities. He heavily emphasized the South Bronx’ asthma problem and took heart from San Francisco’s ability to forge consensus for the Embarcadero Freeway tear-down. He challenged all parties to forge a win-win plan for the area.

Unfortunately, that challenge was discarded almost immediately by Myra Gordon of the NYC Terminal Produce Cooperative Market, who issued a harshly intransigent statement against Sheridan de-mapping. She ignored the community plan’s emphasis on the Leggett interchange or the fact that most trucks reaching the market now use Bruckner Boulevard rather than the Sheridan. For an event that emphasized collaborative solution-building, her remarks were especially striking, and constituted for many veterans of transportation project debates and battles among the most polarizing public statements they had ever witnessed. She was chastised especially by San Francisco consensus-builder Boris Dramov. Fortunately, Gordon is a staff representative of the market association only, and many of the actual business owners there are likely to take their own positions on the issue and be more receptive to the facts regarding transportation and to the desirability of decent community relations.

A NY State DOT official said results from the Bruckner-Sheridan interchange EIS may begin to be released this winter. 

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