Built in the federal highway-building heyday of the early 1960s, Buffalo’s Scajaquada Expressway offered commuters an unusually scenic high-speed trip into the city: The highway’s planners routed the four-lane thoroughfare right through the middle of Delaware Park, the crown jewel of an ambitious city-wide network of parks and parkways designed by celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and his partner Calvert Vaux in the 19th century. [...]
Upstate New York residents will find their region well represented. In addition to the Scajaquada, Rochester’s below-grade Inner Loop (“designed to wrap like a noose around downtown,” according to the report) and Syracuse’s sunken stretch of 1-81 (which “cuts like a knife through the heart” of downtown) make the list. Both highways bulldozed historic neighborhoods of color and kick-started downtown population purges. Demolishing and replacing them with wide, tree-lined avenues—as community groups and planners have proposed—could spur economic revitalization around them, according to the report. NYSDOT is currently considering such an approach for Syracuse, and thanks to a TIGER grant, the Inner Loop is already on its way getting filled in. Further east, Trenton, New Jersey’s waterfront-blocking, under-used Route 29 also makes CNU’s cut, and its demise, too, is being plotted. [...]
But some highways on this list are here to stay—and even expand. State highway engineers still love straight, wide roads, and this inertia cannot be underestimated. At the very least, some state DOTs are becoming more sensitive to impacted communities. Lately, “cap parks” have emerged as compromise solutions that restitch neighborhoods bifurcated by highways by literally covering up their air and noise impacts. Denver’s much-protracted fight over I-70 came to a decisive moment last week, when the Federal Highway Administration approved Colorado’s plans to lower the highway below grade, widen lanes from six to ten, and put a grassy “cap” over a small section of it. It will adjoin a local schoolyard. The I-70 saga offers one illustration of the challenges in such highway facelifts: Many residents love the prospect of a grassy cap park, while others fear that hiding the highway beneath it could draw in a tide of gentrification and displacement.
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