flâneur

How the New York of Robert Moses shaped my father’s health | Aeon Essays

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The Cross-Bronx Expressway, April 1971. Photo by Dan McCoy/Environmental Protection Agency/National Archives by Katie Mulkowsky + BIO The Cross-Bronx Expressway, April 1971. Photo by Dan McCoy/Environmental Protection Agency/National Archives is an urban planner. She works in London on a range of public-realm and transport projects that seek to improve air quality, reduce highway congestion and foster more equitable, people-centred places. Edited bySam Dresser My father rollerskated on the Cross-Bronx Expressway before it opened to car traffic. Born in 1953, he would have been seven or eight when New York City’s massive thoroughfare reached the peak of its construction, facilitated by the destruction of many tight-knit Bronx neighbourhoods. He didn’t live in East Tremont or Spuyten Duyvil, which were literally cut through by the highway, but he did live in between Fordham Heights and Kingsbridge Heights, about two miles north of the new road. He wasn’t a politician or an urban planner

My father rollerskated on the Cross-Bronx Expressway before it opened to car traffic. Born in 1953, he would have been seven or eight when New York City’s massive thoroughfare reached the peak of its construction, facilitated by the destruction of many tight-knit Bronx neighbourhoods. He didn’t live in East Tremont or Spuyten Duyvil, which were literally cut through by the highway, but he did live in between Fordham Heights and Kingsbridge Heights, about two miles north of the new road. He wasn’t a politician or an urban planner – he was a child, concerned with the size of his clip-on roller…

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