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| Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) (464945) | |||
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Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) |
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Posted by WillD on Mon Jul 23 16:16:09 2007, in response to Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic), posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Mon Jul 23 14:55:25 2007. And there is a rail line right in the center of the Expressway today, so what's the problem?It cost 1000 times the amount that 50 foot ROW was expected to cost, or almost 200 times the completed subway was supposed to cost! It doesn't give a one seat ride up to the Queens Blvd IND stations, nor even a one seat ride to Manhattan. And where was the money coming from AT THAT TIME to build this line? The City's contribution to highway construction, not counting state and federal funds for the same projects, was at that time 280 million dollars. If they couldn't find some way to scrape around 9 to 11 million dollars together to fix an expressway which was broken before it opened then what does that say about the city's priorities at the time? Clearly not all the city thought this was a bad idea, the CPC with F. Dodd McHugh was behind this project, as were other departments, but at that time the city's will was Moses' and he didn't want transit on his highway. And name all the other cities that were expanding, and upkeeping their systems running like a swiss watch in that era. Chicago. They opened the State Street Subway in 1943, the Dearborn St Subway in 1951. I-290, then called the Congress Expressway and now called the Eisenhower was opened in 1955 with the EXACT arrangement that was proposed for the Van Wyck. Admittedly rather than a new route the CTA route down the median which opened in 1957 was a rerouting of the old Garfield Park branch and thus little mileage was gained it was exactly what NYC should have done on the Van Wyck. Later the CTA returned to this arrangement for the Dan Ryan line and the Kennedy expressway to O'hare and both of those were new lines. They've now realized that median lines are far from perfect, and the Orange line to Midway was built along an AT&SF freight line. It is also worth noting that Cleveland's Red Line came into existence in 1955, as did Toronto's subway. No, the bankrupt IRT and BMT was responsible for that, and the failure for them to be able to raise the 5 cents fare for decades before to allow them to remain viable. The city inherited the BMT and IRT, that was left to deteriorate since the 1930's while they were still privately owned. Yes, the city left them to deteriorate because it didn't have any goddamn money because every time the debt limit was raised those funds went off to build roads. The IRT and BMT may have left things in sorry shape, but there's absolutely no reason the city couldn't have fixed them up with the amount of money they recieved in the 1930s and 40s from the federal government. That is unless NYC had a construction coordinator acting as a liasion between New York City and NY State and the Federal Government who was monomaniacally focused on highway construction. In fact it'd make a whole lot more sense to spend that money fixing up the subways than to spend it building roads. Frequently Moses' desire to continue building highways despite the war effort put him at odds with the groups coordinating steel and concrete production. And because of wartime limitations on oil and rubber few people drove, so he could claim his highways were reducing traffic and thus boosting productivity. In reality everyone was on the subway which was being run ragged and a rebuilding of those likely would entailed a far simpler recycling of steel as opposed to new construction. Yes, that's one opinion on one side of this. An opinion? It may be an opinion but it's backed up by ample evidence that he was an incredible control freak. He fought the Midtown Tunnel which tunnel engineer Ole Singstad had been placed in control of by LaGuardia. Moses first tried get control of the authority from Singstad, then attempted to delay its construction so as to cause the Public Works Administration funding to lapse, and finally refused to construct a highway to connect it with his parkways. Both Singstad, city legislative represenative Reuben Lazarus and corporation council Paul Windels all arrived independently at the opinion that Moses' only problem with the project was that it didn't have his name on it. The same situation played out with the Brooklyn Battery Bridge and later Tunnel debacle, with the same cast of characters and nearly the same fight except that now the government reformers who had secured his position found he turned on them rapidly when confronted with what he saw as desertion. In the end only the president of the country could put an end to Moses' plans and force the construction of a tunnel. He also proved himself astonishingly petty by closing the Batttery Aquarium and relocating it to Coney Island, then attempting to bulldoze the old fort it occupied. It's particularly interesting because as soon as Moses did get control of the Tunnel Authority he reversed his position that the Queens Midtown didn't need an access road and after the Horace Harding expressway was constructed traffic soared, exactly as Singstad had predicted it would. Moses' only problem with the Queens Midtown and Battery tunnels was that he didn't control them. The highway, bridge system being one, but also the many, many parks. There's good and bad in the story, and I will not listen to just one side of the story as being the full picture, and being the absolute truth in the whole saga. No, you'll only listen to the good side. Never mind that those parks were almost exclusively built in middle class white neighborhoods, despite them costing more money than parks in lower class neighborhoods. There were many contributing factors involved also in the fall of NY and the breakdown in the 70's. Of course, but when the City spent almost all their funds from the rich years of the 1950s and 60s on the basic equivilant of fried chicken it's little wonder that they had a heart attack just 10 years later. |
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