group’s constant and consistent presence in a neighborhood can keep the neighborhood more stable. A permanent community lends a culture of steadiness to a neighborhood, and thus makes it harder to permanently blight and scar, even with a highway like the BQE. Also, it is important to note that the correlation between the blighting of the South Bronx and the building of the CBE does not equal causation. While the CBE certainly had an effect, a variety of factors contributed to what happened in the South Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s— decades of disinvestment and suburbanization, ‘urban renewal,’ racism, and policies that favored Manhattan and the suburbs. Many of the most blighted neighborhoods of the Bronx were, in fact, nowhere near the CBE (Ballon and Jackson, 2007, 219). Likewise, there were neighborhoods in Brooklyn that suffered much more through
the 1960s and 1970s than did Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and they, too, were not on the path of the BQE.
Conclusion The saga of the CBE and the South Bronx is a much more captivating story than that of the BQE and North Brooklyn, and thus, it is much more heavily covered. It reads like a Greek tragedy. It has a beginning—a nice, safe, lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood. It has a villain, Robert Moses, portrayed with all the cartoonish malevolence of an evil Disney queen. It has plucky, underdog heroes in the neighborhood association that attempted to have the highway rerouted. It has the tragic end. The failure of the heroes, and the destruction of the neighborhood (did the neighborhood association suffer from hubris? Was Robert Moses Zeus?). The BQE has no such tale
attached to it—nobody in the neighborhoods of Williamsburg or Greenpoint organized a coalition to keep the highway away. There was no political battle. There was actually hardly any coverage of the highway at all. Perhaps this story is not as classically plotted as that of the CBE—The characters are in the shadows: blurry, hulking masses of people, living in tenements soon to be razed, not doing anything about it. But there is a certain poignancy in this, and a certain poignancy in the fact that North Brooklyn has not only recovered, but thrived. The story of North Brooklyn and the BQE is not a tragedy, but, strangely, a comedy. Today, you can rent a one-bedroom apartment in an old tenement building, barely a stone’s throw from the BQE, for upwards of $2000 a month. The author would like to thank Lisa Filipek for her assistance in compiling the research for this paper.
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