Gladys We passes along this piece from gizmodo:
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While we’ve looked at the ill-fated project before (the Lower Manhattan Expressway, or LOMEX), a new exhibit is a chance to look back at how dramatically NYC could have changed.
The exhibit, In the Shadow of the Highway: Robert Moses’ Expressway and the Battle for Downtown, opened this week in the lobby of the New York City Municipal Archives, and shows off photos and plans beneath metal struts designed to look like those which would have created a raised six- to ten-lane elevated expressway across Manhattan)..
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… there were other reasons the project was defeated, too—namely, its cost, which totaled $749 million in today’s dollars. Here’s how the SoHo Memory Project explains the survival of SoHo, using the words of the preservationist Brendan Gill:
Much of the most admired architecture of older New York—the SoHo district, for example, and scores of square blocks in Greenwich Village and Little Italy—have survived because, at a critical moment, the city didn’t have enough money to pay for knocking them down.
It’s funny now to think that some of New York’s most valuable real estate today—and its most architecturally important—was saved, in part, because it wasn’t valuable enough to pay to destroy it.
This issue of cost and feasibility was of course a huge factor in Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton, too. So a little modesty from all when claiming that we ‘fought’ the freeways and had the bold vision (there were of course those who did) and a little more admission that western Canada’s small provincial cities (really small indeed in the 1960s/1970s) just couldn’t get it together financially or technically to destroy themselves, would perhaps paint a more honest picture. And as with the Lomex example (and the Gardiner counter-example), we’re lucky indeed that it worked out this way.
Your readers would of course be familiar with Project 200, but tae a look at what didn’t get built in Calgary and Edmonton: http://albertaroads.homestead.com/
On the history of why the Calgary project didn’t go forward (also involving the CPR similar to in Vancouver): http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120222 and https://www.erudit.org/revue/uhr/2005/v34/n1/1016045ar.pdf