The 1.8-mile, 200-foot-wide Humboldt Parkway, connecting Delaware Park with what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Park, was Frederick Law Olmsted’s longest – and some say most beautiful – of seven 19th-century parkways he designed in Buffalo.
But, after World War II, political leaders and city planners began to envision the parkway as an expressway to transport people faster between the city, its suburbs and the airport, and reduce congestion on city streets.
The priority given to automotive travel, with little community input or environmental review, took precedence over the beauty, health and recreational benefits the parkway provided.
Construction of the Kensington Expressway, also known as Route 33, began in 1958 and concluded in 1971. It required the removal of 639 residences and 71 other buildings in neighborhoods that became majority Black, as white people, after the war, moved in large numbers outside the city limits.
The Kensington succeeded in moving cars faster, but it displaced families, severed east-west neighborhoods and collapsed East Side commercial districts after traffic migrated away.
Pollution worsened in adjoining neighborhoods, bringing more respiratory illnesses and cardiovascular diseases to families who lived near the expressway.
The once-grand parkway has been relegated to the past for more than a half century, but the hold it still has on the public – including in the collective memory of East Side residents old enough to remember playing among the eight parallel rows of elms and maples, and seeing horses on bridle paths – led Gov. Kathy Hochul in January 2022 to call for its return.
The form that it takes has yet to be finalized.
A state Department of Transportation (DOT) proposal to construct a tunnel on part of the 33, and top it with vestiges of the parkway, reflects an idea advanced for years by Restore Our Community Coalition, a group based on the East Side. Mounting voices against the…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply