How One Man Destroyed America's Most Famous Borough: The Bronx, New York

In 1953, residents of East Tremont believed they had found a way to save their neighborhood. Their alternative route for the proposed Cross Bronx Expressway would demolish only six buildings instead of 159, displace nineteen families instead of 1,530, and save the government $10 million. Then Robert Moses issued an ultimatum. If officials changed his route by even an inch, he would withdraw the entire federal highway budget allocated to the borough. The board surrendered, the original plan was approved, and The Bronx, New York, was permanently divided. But what was destroyed went far beyond 159 buildings. Before the expressway, the Bronx had been one of America’s greatest engines of upward mobility. Once a quiet landscape of farms and wealthy country estates, it was transformed by the arrival of the subway in the early twentieth century. Immigrant families moved into new apartment buildings, local businesses flourished, and the population surged from roughly 200,000 in 1898 to more than 1.2 million by 1930. The Bronx, New York, offered working families something Manhattan increasingly could not: space, stability, and a path into the American middle class. Moses carved his highway directly through that world. A trench approximately 40 feet deep was blasted through some of the hardest bedrock on the continent. Families were displaced, commercial streets were severed, property values collapsed, and communities that had taken generations to build began to unravel. Today, approximately 165,000 vehicles travel along the Cross Bronx Expressway every day, including 18,000 diesel trucks. Exhaust surrounds nearby apartment buildings, while residents along the corridor face some of the highest asthma rates in New York State. This is the story of how an unelected official used a single ultimatum to reshape The Bronx, New York, and how one highway became a permanent scar through the heart of America’s most famous borough. #abandoned #history #unitedstates