Inside an early 18th-century stone farmhouse in Hamlin Park, a 10-year-old model depicts the reconstruction of a portion of the once-grand Humboldt Parkway above a covered section of Kensington Expressway.
A $921.8 million plan to re-create a portion of Humboldt Parkway destroyed by the Kensington Expressway, rather than restoring the parkway, lacks support and enthusiasm.
It’s that concept, conceived by East Side resident Clarke Eaton Jr. in the late 1970s, that shaped the nearly $1 billion plan announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul in January 2022 to attempt to return part of the expressway corridor to its former look and feel.
Eaton’s idea hung in the ether until Restore Our Community Coalition, also known as ROCC, adopted it around 2008. It was part of a larger vision to restore majority Black neighborhoods that spiraled downward after construction of the highway in the 1950s and ‘60s destroyed the verdant parkway, devastated commercial districts and triggered respiratory ailments.
“Nobody believed in the concept, other than a few people who sat around the table for 15 years and said this is doable,” said Richard C. Cummings, one of several ROCC members who met last week with a Buffalo News reporter inside the former farmhouse at 60 Hedley Place, where the…
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