Point of view

Build the Greenway now!

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This weekend I checked out the interactive Citywide Waterfront Map on the Department of City Planning’s website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/cwp/cw.shtml. The website directs the viewer to “select a borough to view publicly accessible waterfront spaces.” I selected the Bronx. A map appeared with green areas depicting park land. Most of the water-adjacent green areas appeared in the northeastern segment of the Bronx. A few appeared in the south Bronx.

But I was interested in the northwest Bronx – my home of sixteen years. Two green slivers – depicting Riverdale Park – appeared in that region. When I placed my mouse cursor over them, a text box appeared with the words, “visual access only.”

I wondered if this were the case in other water-adjacent city parks, so I did the “mouse hover thing” over all the other Bronx waterfront parks depicted on the map. Nope. Only Riverdale Park in the Bronx holds that distinction. I did the same on the Manhattan map. No “visual access only” waterfront parks there. “What about Brooklyn?” I wondered. I checked it out. Those Brooklynites have access to the water at all their waterfront parks. Perhaps that’s why their property values are through the roof. And Queens? Same thing. Even Staten Island does not have a single “visual access only” waterfront park.

When did the Northwest Bronx become the poor stepchild? In 2011, Mayor Bloomberg launched “Vision 2020” — a 10-year, $3.3 billion plan to take back New York City’s waterfront. The plan included 130 waterfront restoration projects throughout the five boroughs, funded with $700 million from the city’s capital budget. When he announced the project, the then-mayor proclaimed, “New York City has more miles of waterfront than Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Portland combined — but for decades, too many neighborhoods have been blocked off from it.”

Riverdale, Riverfest, Yael Levy, Greenway, Bronx
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