New York Auto Slums

The recent elevation of the approach road to the Williamsburg Bridge, seen in the distance, was unnecessary. A well designed boulevard would move just as many cars through the Williamsburg Plaza as the elevated highway, but it would do it in a people-friendly way. The considerably higher elevated highway shown is at the northeast corner of the square.

FOR THE YOUNG AND HIP IN NEW YORK, Williamsburg, aka Billyburg, is probably the hottest neighborhood in the city. When the East Village and the Lower East Side got too expensive, the young and the hip did the same thing that the Jewish residents of the Lower East Side had done a hundred years earlier: they got on the Williamsburg Bridge and crossed the river to Brooklyn. Developers have noticed the recent migration: there are more than 130 new apartment buildings planned for Williamsburg.

Physically, the biggest impediments to development are the auto slums and auto sewers built by New York's traffic engineers. In the 1950s, Robert Moses rammed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through the heart of Williamsburg, cutting it in two as effectively as the Berlin Wall divided East and West Berlin (the Berlin Wall looked better, though). That was part of his plan to run an interstate highway across Manhattan from the Williamsburg Bridge to the Hudson Tunnel, through Washington Square. Moses's interstate highway was stopped, but more than 30 years later, traffic engineers disastrously ran an elevated, limited access ramp through Williamsburg's gateway, a distinguished square known as Williamsburg Plaza. Or more accurately, a formerly distinguished square. The gargantuan, anti-human concrete invaders make the Plaza where no one lingers for long if they can help it.

The enormously expensive construction was done so that drivers can speed into Manhattan, where 80% of the residents don't own cars and 99% of the traffic jams are caused by the B&T crowd who think trains and subways are for wimps. The time is coming when Manhattan will have a congestion zone, and we'll be able to reclaim places like Williamsburg Plaza for humans instead of their cars.

An illustration from New York 1900 of a proposal from 1907 for a boulevard between Grand Army Plaza and the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.