The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 65

JUNE 27, 1937 A Matter of Approach Thanks to Robert Moses, New York Is Rapidly Developing Into a Modern Rome, Hub of a Vast Wheel of Parkways Leading North, South and West by Edith Liggett Rijhert there to connect with the greaC system already in existence and growing all the time. Barren Island, off the shore of Brooklyn, was connected to Flatbush, Avenue as the Floyd Bennett Airfield. What is now wasteland, Moses visualizes as a great Marine Park, The 1,593 acres acquired by gift, purchase, condemnation and transfer will, he says, have not merely playgrounds, ball fields, tennis courts and golf courses for the public but will have a series of boat basins for large and small craft. pxCEPT for the depression and the tremendous amount of WPA labor which Moses has been able to use in his many projects, it would have been impossible to accomplish as much in so short a time. Where the funds have been found for all these roads, parkways and bridges is almost as much a miracle as the rapidity with which work has been accomplished.

The Marine Parkway Authority is financed through a bond issue which will be amortized by the collection of a fifteen-cent auto toll on the Marine Parkway Bridge and a twenty-five-cent parking fee at Jacob Riis Park. The tolls at the Jones Beach Causeways have helped pay for that park. Sometimes it is more difficult to find money. The West Side program, from which the Henry Hudson Parkway has sprung, came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the depression before Robert Moses came into the picture as Park Commissioner. But Moses discovered more sources of revenue than public or private agencies.

Work started with money raised from an old city credit with the New York Central; with Federal, State and city grade crossing money; with city, street and park opening funds raised by assessment; with railroad funds, and with money, obtained by the sale of bonds. Robert Moses had not merely the task of building, it was up to him to keep track of all these agencies, to satisfy them all. to appropriate $750,000 toward its construction. However, Governor Lehman vetoed the bill, which had passed in the last days of the session. From Flatbush Avenue it is planned to have the Brooklyn trunk highway encircle Jamaica Bay to connect with Southern State Parkway just beyond its junction with Linden Boulevard.

The Brooklyn trunk highway, partly constructed, partly existing only as the sort of dream Robert Moses has been materializing, will take Brooklyn and Long Island drivers to Manhattan, Westchester and Connecticut by means of the West Sido tunnel. A 38th Street Tunnel will go beneath the East River from Greenpoint, pass below 38th Street and take the driver to New Jersey by a new tunnel underneath Manhattan and beneath the Hudson River. The great Triborough Bridge has enabled residents of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island tp drive to the Bronx or beyond without being obliged to pass through Manhattan or to use the slippery, overcrowded Queensboro Bridge. And already Moses is planning a bridge from Whitestone Landing to old Ferry Point in the Bronx. It is easy to outline the plans for beautifying the city's waterfront with parkways and playgrounds, to describe plans for new bridges and underpasses.

Competent engineers and far-sighted regional planners have decided what improvements were needed, how they should be built. The impossible task which Robert Moses has been accomplishing is one of co-ordination. New York's metropolitan area sprawls over three States, involves some fifteen counties. There are municipal, State, county, port, Army and Navy authorities; WPA, ERA and PWA heads to placate and harmonize. With long range plans firmly in mind, Park Commissioner Moses improves a parkway here, straightens a by-pass there.

He utilized Riverside Drive while he continued to work for a Henry Hudson Parkway which would run from the Battery to the Saw Mill River Parkway, rectly over railroad tracks. Visitors to the city, unless they chance to visit the Battery, learn that New York is a seaport only if they go to the top of Radio City, the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Tower. But regional planning gave the city the West Side express highways to take cars uptown after they had come through the Holland Tunnel. Mere New Yorkers used it to avoid traffic lights and surface traffic congestion. Even viewed in tiny snatches between piers, the Hudson is a beautiful river.

Maybe it was felt highways which paralleled both East and Hudson rivers would be as lovely as useful. The entire plan, which entails East and "West Side express highways, practically encircling Manhattan, connecting with Bronx and Hutchinson River parkways, envisions a system which eventually will extend from New York's Battery to Saugerties on the north and to Stamford, on the east. Nor is this all. If all goes well there is to be a tunnel, whose plans have already been approved by the New York Tunnel Authority, which will run from West Street in Manhattan to Hamilton Avenue, Brooklyn. This will lead directly from downtown Brooklyn to the West Side, Westchester and Connecticut parkway systems.

by no means ends the plans. Brooklyn, too, is to have its waterfront encircled by an express highway. This will lead from the tunnel to Bay Ridge's lovely Shore Road, which will be extended to Bensonhurst. At present automobile traffic will have to follow Cropsey Avenue, Guider Avenue and Emmons Avenue across Coney Island. The new roadway along Sheepshead Bay will then connect with a Marine Parkway spur, which will join with Flatbush Avenue and will also include a bridge across Gerritsen Inlet to permit the development of Marine Park for extensive boating activities.

Plans for this road had been drawn and the State had been asked FIVE years ago the most sanguine regional planners hoped that by 1940 Brooklyn would be connected with the Rock-aways by a bridge across Rockaway Inlet. On July 3 the new Marine Parkway Bridge, which connects the foot of Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, with Jacob Riis Park, will be opened to the public. Another step in the parkway system, whereby motorists can enjer and leave New York without bottleneck highways, without traffic lights, without grade crossings, will be completed. It was the Bronx River Parkway In Westchester and the Southern State Parkway in Long Island which first disclosed to New Yorkers that roadways aren't necessarily wide strips of concrete bordered with hot dog stands. The experience of driving along narrow landscaped parks proved delightful.

Once on the parkways motorists enjoyed the ease of driving on roads to which access is afforded only at fixed and specified entrances, always a considerable distance apart and never opposite each other. But, although these parkways gave New Yorkers a taste of what driving should be, it was necessary to. reach them through a wilderness of city traffic. And so, while under the leadership of Robert Moses in his triple capacity as chairman of the State Council of Parks, president bf the Long Island State Park Commission and Park Commissioner of New York City, the parkway system has been expanded through Long Island and Westchester, his Marine Parkway Authority and the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority have extended the roads into the city itself by means of parkways and highways. Almost as a by-product of the plans to enable New Yorkers to drive in and out of the city, the naturally beautiful waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn are being retrieved for the city's people.

in the ordinary pattern of American life, most cities and towns pride themselves on their Lake Shore Drives, River Bluff Boulevards. Almost always "down by the railroad" or "across the tracks" is the euphemism for the local slum. Decidedly individual, New York has glorified her shore line with gas plants, worm-eaten docks, gloomy warehouses. Park Avenue, the most aristocratic street in the city, spurns any view of park, river or bay, except for the narrow glass-covered center panels; is constructed di East River Drive at 123d Street 1.