The New York City Board of Estimate unanimously voted against a plan for a $100 million elevated expressway across the bottom of Manhattan


Tuesday 11th December 1962

The New York City Board of Estimate unanimously voted against a plan for a $100 million elevated expressway across the bottom of Manhattan. The road, known as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had been in the works since 1941. It was supposed to link the Holland Tunnel on the city’s West Side with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges on the east side, slicing right through the neighbourhoods now known as TriBeCa and SoHo.The powerful city planner Robert Moses had urged the city to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway because, he said, it would ease the cross-town traffic that made it very difficult, and no doubt very annoying, to get from New Jersey to Long Island in a car. However, the proposed road stood to cause a great deal of damage to the city neighbourhoods in its path. Some 1,972 By 1962, preservationist groups had joined with residents of the threatened neighbourhoods in protest against the road. Highways like the Lower Manhattan Expressway would make city life worse, not better, they argued; the road would make poor neighbourhoods poorer and would actually lead to more traffic congestion, not less. It took until 1969 for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to declare that Lower Manhattan was safe from the highway for good.


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