DBWI: LOMEX never gets built.

[Crunch Buttsteak]

If you’ve ever been to New York then you know about the segment of I-78 that runs from the Holland Tunnel to JFK that’s always jammed with traffic.

And it’s kind of a perpetual gripe in New York about the bad drivers and traffic on I-78.

What a lot of people don’t remember is that it was steeply opposed by the residents of the former neighborhood of Greenwich Villiage and the Lower East Side when it was planned, since required demolishing a good chunk of the neighborhood.

So if the plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway were scuttled and I-78 just stops at the Holland Tunnel, what would New York look like?

 

[Edward_Elric]

Unlike others who’ve speculated on the matter, I’d wouldn’t expect the Subway to fare that much better in this no-LOMEX New York. The influence of Robert Moses’ urban planning remains strong enough with all the other car-centric projects he successfully pushed for. And taking one expressway route away from the equation doesn’t change the other systemic barriers to fixing the subway, like the lack of local ballot initiatives for transit taxes in New York State.

Perhaps the continued presence of those neighborhoods means they never get the martyrdom status in the eyes of urban revivalists. I guess LOMEX made it clear how highways can also tear through established white-majority communities alongside all the urban black neighborhoods. And only then did a majority of America once again start giving more of a damn about what was being lost in the drive to suburbanize and hollow out the urban cores. Well that could still happen in a no-LOMEX urban landscape, but probably after a few decades of delay.

No-LOMEX also probably means the concurrent proposals to demolish Penn Station have an easier time getting approved. The already-underway demolishing of blocks in 1964 SoHo and Greenwich helped motivate NYC preservationists to dedicate more to their surprisingly successful protests against the aboveground Penn Station’s planned replacement by an arena. Remove the urgency that LOMEX caused among that crowd, and we’d get a big ugly drum smack in the middle of Midtown (seriously, the design proposals for that planned Madison Square Garden are so crappy).

And speaking of delayed urban/mass transit revivals - this no-LOMEX world might just have had repercussions for how transit over on the west coast developed. Without the Greenwich martyrdom and earlier skepticism of continuous highway building, Ray Bradbury doesn’t get a critical motivator in his and others’ successful drive to revitalize SoCal mass transit. That could still happen, but probably decades after with a patchwork of on-the-ground light rail on the old vacant PER rights-of-way rather than the still-expanding monorail system which ultimately came about.