Underneath the BrooklynQueens Expressway.
Heights Promenade, which features a waterfront pedestrian walkway cantilevered over two levels of the BQE, a project much lauded and loved—at the Promenade’s dedication, Brooklyn Borough President Cashmore said he had never taken part in the dedication of a more beautiful project (Brooklyn Heights Promenade Opens; Moses Praised, 1950). Brooklyn Heights was a wealthier community and used its political and social clout to keep the highway from ruining its character. Other neighborhoods were not so lucky—there is no evidence that the residents of Williamsburg or Greenpoint even started a campaign to have the highway routed elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the South Bronx, East Tremont citizens organized and proposed an alternate route for the CBE that would result in far fewer of the neighborhood’s buildings being razed. The citizens, of course, were not successful, and the highway was built as planned (Caro, 1975).
Blight, Displacement, and Worse: Effects of the BQE There are not many writings about the BQE, and there are especially not many writings about the BQE’s effects on North Brooklyn. Articles, books, and papers that even mention the building of the BQE through these neighborhoods often do so in violent and alarming terms—the BQE “slashed through the heart of the neighborhood” (Marwell, 2007, 38), it “ripped through [Williamsburg’s] middle” (Ritterband, 1993, 202) it “cut a winding path through Williamsburg” (Perlmutter, 1955), its construction “through the heart of the neighborhood displaced homes and businesses” (Curran, 2003, 1249), it “cut through the heart” of the neighborhood’s Jewish community (Price 1979, 16), and it “cut Williamsburg in half” (Reiss, Williamsburg, 2005, 10). Despite the visceral terms in which people have written about the BQE’s impact, there is very little concrete detail provided about what exactly the highway did. Marwell, in her book Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City, devotes a page-and-a-half to the BQE’s effects on Williamsburg, which is a page and a quarter more than any other book on the subject. Marwell describes the effects of the highway as “less salutary” on Williamsburg as compared to the convenience it afforded the suburban residents of Long Island, and claims that the highway’s “fallout was massive.” She cites
the razing of the tenements along Broadway, and the resultant displacement of the working-class white ethnic residents—Italians, Poles, Orthodox Jews—as leading to the closure of businesses in the neighborhood. Marwell states that the BQE caused a dispersal of population and a destruction of businesses that started a prolonged drain of capital from the neighborhood (Marwell, 2007, 39). To get a better idea of the population dispersal and general decline of Williamsburg, the author looked at Census data for the area and for Brooklyn as a whole. Two years were examined: 1950—during the very early construction the BQE through North Brooklyn, and 1960—eight years after the Williamsburg/Greenpoint section of the BQE opened to traffic. The tracts examined were the ones bordering or straddling the BQE in residential sections of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Three factors were considered—population, median income, and median years of school completed for the population over age 25. The measure of population gain or loss among tracts bordering the BQE as compared to Brooklyn as a whole indicates dispersal. The measures of median income and median years of school completed indicate the prosperity and economic competitiveness of the neighborhood. A few of the tracts underwent boundary changes between 1950 and 1960, but fortunately, they underwent boundary changes amongst themselves. For example, tracts A, B, and C were studied, and due to a redrawing of boundaries, tract B lost some of its area to tract C. This shifting is accounted for in that the data is averaged when comparing the tracts to Brooklyn as a whole.
The assertion regarding population dispersal holds up: tracts bordering the BQE in North Brooklyn lost an average of 8.9% of their population between 1950 and 1960, and a median of 14.1%, compared with the 4% that Brooklyn as a whole lost. On average, the median income rose 32.2% among the tracts bordering the BQE, but 33.5% in Brooklyn as a whole—this is not a great difference, but the average median income among the tracts was $4,646.35 in 1960, but $5,106.00 in Brooklyn. Between 1950 and 1960, the median years of school completed for the population age 25 and older increased 6.7% in all of Brooklyn, but among the BQE tracts in Northern Brooklyn, only an average of 2.8% (see Table 1 for all data). The building of the BQE brought a greater tragedy to the neighborhood as well. In 1956, during the construction of the highway’s section south from the Williamsburg bridge—a neighborhood teeming with children and sorely lacking in playgrounds—six children were killed while playing in a construction-site sand bank, twenty-four feet below street level, that caved in (6 Children Killed As Sand Caves in At Brooklyn Cut, 1956). The demolition that the CBE brought to East Tremont in the South Bronx was no less, and is much more widely known—residents moved away if they could afford it, and others were forced out of their homes in the path of the highway and into public housing projects. The neighborhood became emptier, crime rose, landlords became negligent, and fires burned (Caro, 1975, 882)—“construction of the CBE
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