I-278 Problems, But A Car Ain't One: The Gowanus Expressway

The Gowanus Expressway at 43rd St. in Sunset Park. Image via Google.

The Gowanus Expressway is one of Robert Moses' most controversial projects. From the day it opened on November 1, 1941 until now, the highway has always been problematic, with issues ranging from its contribution to urban blight to how to best fix it now that it has fallen into disrepair.

The Gowanus Expressway is a 6.1-mile section of Interstate 278, which starts in Linden, New Jersey and travels through all five boroughs before it ends in The Bronx. The Gowanus section starts after the Verrazanno Narrows Bridge, and runs through the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, and Red Hook until it meets the interchange of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and heads north as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It is six lanes wide, and carries 200,000 vehicles a day.

The road is most notorious for, other than its traffic congestion and deteriorated condition, the ruin it brought upon the neighborhood of Sunset Park after its construction. According to The Power Broker, Sunset Park was a poor neighborhood, but a clean, tight-knit one, with its commercial hub under the elevated train tracks along Third Avenue. When new tracks were constructed along Fourth Avenue, Moses was determined to build a new highway over the disused ones on Third. Residents pleaded with Moses to build the road along the run-down, industrial Second Avenue one block to the west, but Moses maintained that using the El pillars would be cheaper than building new ones, and that it wasn't worth building to accommodate Sunset Park because it was, in his words, a "slum."

Once construction began, one hundred stores and 1,300 families were displaced. Third Avenue under the Expressway was expanded from four to ten lanes, and became a major thoroughfare for truck traffic. The elevated highway was ninety-four feet wide and, unlike the El tracks, allowed no light through, effectively blocking the sky on the street below. Underneath, it was always dark and loud and damp, and dangerous to cross, so people and businesses began fleeing the neighborhood. It decayed into a place for drugs and prostitution and poverty and abandoned cars; the slum it had not been before Robert Moses built the Gowanus Expressway.

Currently, the neighborhood is experiencing some regeneration, but problems with the Expressway remain. It is now nearly seventy years old, and in poor condition. In 2006, the Department of Transportation okayed a $12.8 billion, 3.5 mile, 7 lane tunnel along the waterfront that would replace the Expressway, but the project remains stalled and would take an estimated 15 years to finish.