Study weighs options for Vannie footbridge

By Aliza Appelbaum

The struggle to build a pedestrian footbridge across the Major Deegan in Van Cortlandt has not exactly been a walk in the park.

Progress, though, is being made. A new study by engineering firm Philip Habib and Associates presents five potential sites for the footbridge and includes costs and concerns, though without giving a timeline for construction. Mr. Habib, who presented the report’s findings at a May 20 meeting of the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee, said the study was merely to determine whether a pedestrian footbridge in the park is feasible.

“This is one of the great travesties of this park, that it’s all sliced up by highways,” said Tony Cassino, chair of Community Board 8’s Traffic and Transportation Committee at the CFMC meeting.

The objectives of the study, according to Mr. Habib, are to show areas where park segments could be reconnected, and figuring out how to do it so that pedestrians, cyclists and the disabled are all served.

Though there are five options in the study, Mr. Habib presented only the three most feasible, ultimately recommending the third option because the topography aligns and the path would follow the Old Croton Aqueduct, Mr. Habib said.

The entire project, per Mr. Habib, would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 to $6 million, and would take about six months to complete.

That cost is “a drop in the bucket” compared to the $2.8 billion marked for the Croton water treatment facility, Mr. Cassino said.

At the CFMC meeting, he hinted that the bridge would be a way for the DEP to give something back to the community that has dealt with Crotonrelated construction since 2004.

“This has been a missed opportunity,” Mr. Cassino said.

Though plans for a bridge were included when the Croton facility was drawn up, funding for the project never materialized because there was never a concrete proposal, said Ann Marie Garti, president of the Jerome Park Conservancy.

“How can you allocate funds for something you don’t know if it could be done or not?” Ms. Garti pointed out at the meeting. The lack of a proposal, she said, was an “administrative oversight” that should now be corrected.

Still, the report is only the first step. From here, the committee will make a recommendation, and it will go to Community Board 8, which contains much of the parkland.

Getting money for the bridge may be a tough sell, said Mark Lanaghan, who represents the DEP at the CFMC meetings.

“This project isn’t a given. We don’t have any funding,” Mr. Lanaghan said. And because of the recession, the city and state budgets are tighter than ever, he said, meaning that “there’s no money in the capital budget for this [project].”