Turning the Cross Bronx from a blight to a boon

Two months ago, Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul launched a $2 million study to assess the feasibility of capping a section of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Funded by a federal grant supported by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Rep. Ritchie Torres, the “community-driven” study is a vital first step toward healing a literal and figurative divide in the Bronx.

This effort is part of a national trend, with cities across the country considering covering over trenched highways that cut through urban neighborhoods with projects like the Stitch in Atlanta or the North Loop in Kansas City.

Capping the Cross Bronx here in New York could help address one of the injustices of 1950s-era planning: the eviction of an estimated 40,000-60,000 politically powerless people — the poor and marginalized — were displaced by Robert Moses. Although today the highway is an essential piece of infrastructure, carrying approximately 200,000 vehicles a day, it is also a racially tainted tear in the urban fabric, the legacy of an era that prioritized car-centered convenience over communities. As Mayor Adams has tweeted, “Racism is built into our infrastructure, and we need to confront and combat it. Capping the Cross Bronx Expressway is just the start!”

Highway caps are usually seen as an opportunity for additional green space. But this singular focus on linear parks suffers from the same single-purpose approach that saw the trenched highways as a cure-all for urban problems in the 1950s. To properly heal the rift in our cities and their racist legacy, today’s politicians and planners must take a multi-faceted approach, understanding that communities are complex ecosystems. A more balanced and nuanced solution could integrate new housing and jobs with new park space. Building strong urban communities requires interweaving social, economic, and physical systems.

In advance of the upcoming city/state process — which should involve conversations both with and within affected communities — an alternate approach is to cap sections of the Cross Bronx using modular housing integrated with smaller, neighborhood-scaled park spaces. While park space is desperately needed in much of the Bronx (and across the city generally), parts of the Cross Bronx are already within a few blocks of larger existing parks like Claremont Park, Cortona Park, and Walter Gladwin Park, or smaller neighborhood parks like Echo Park or Fairmont Playground.

New parks require ongoing financial support to maintain, manage, and program while offering little to no revenue. The best way to connect communities is with people — a living link across the divide — by including housing. This connective housing could be built economically and efficiently using modular prefabricated units.

Prefabricated modular housing has proved viable in other cities, but New York has the opportunity to advance the state of the art with this innovative highway-spanning application that would take advantage of the units’ ability to integrate structural systems to span long distances. Because the units can be lifted into place by crane and are self-spanning, construction times, and the required traffic lane closures, would be drastically reduced.

Manufacturing the units locally would create new jobs, could be used to grow the modular manufacturing workforce, help advance the technology, and build local expertise in modular construction, all of which could eventually help reduce housing costs across the region.

While still only a conceptual approach, we urge those responsible for studying capping the Cross Bronx to consider this more comprehensive strategy, with far-reaching social and economic benefits. By demonstrating the viability of a multi-dimensional, multi-purpose approach to capping highways, the Cross Bronx could be a model for other highway and railway trenches across the city and showcase New York as a leader in innovative and integrated urban solutions for cities nationwide

Robbins is a partner and director of urban design at FXCollaborative.