The Highway That Became a Park

High above the water on your left runs a park that exists only because a neighborhood successfully fought off one of the most powerful men in New York City history. In nineteen forty one, Robert Moses proposed routing the new Brooklyn Queens Expressway directly through Brooklyn Heights itself, a plan that would have required tearing through residential streets and partially demolishing a recently built courthouse. A Brooklyn Eagle headline from September of nineteen forty two summed up the neighborhood's reaction in four words: plan for express highway is shocking.

The Brooklyn Heights Association, led by a Wall Street lawyer named Roy Richardson and a pharmaceutical executive named Ferdinand Nitardy, organized against the plan and pushed engineers to move the highway away from homes entirely, out toward the waterfront bluff instead. By March of nineteen forty three, city planners had settled on a new route along Furman Street, following the edge of the escarpment rather than cutting through the neighborhood.

The solution engineers landed on, under chief engineer Ernest Clark, was a triple cantilever, a structure that stacked the highway's lanes on top of each other, tucked into the bluff, with enough space left on top for something else entirely. Nitardy had originally proposed a private garden for residents. City officials, working through the borough president's office, turned that idea into a public park instead.

The southern half of the promenade opened on October seventh, nineteen fifty, and the northern half followed on December seventh, nineteen fifty one. The same engineering that was supposed to bury this bluff under a highway ended up giving everyone, not just the homeowners who fought it, one of the best skyline views in the city.