>>1936206reminds me of a powerful excerpt from a The Power Broker by Robert A Caro
>Robert Moses had "reclaimed the city's waterfront for its people," an edi- torial said.
>Not exactly.
>Robert Moses had indeed built a huge, beautiful Riverside Park. But the park was not on the riverside. The parkway was on the riverside. For much of the six miles of Riverside Park, the road, not the park, occupied the land nearest to the river. And that meant that the park, and the people who used it, were separated from the river by six lanes of concrete filled with rushing automobiles.
>If Moses had built the road where other planners and young reformers like Bill Exton and Robert Weinberg had wanted it built—atop the New York Central tracks, at the edge of Riverside Park close to the steep slope below Riverside Drive—the city's people would, after strolling down from the Drive and crossing the road on easy overpasses, have found themselves in a park whose tree-shaded lawns, playing fields and esplanades swept hundreds of yards down to the river's edge unbroken by the concrete of a highway or the rush and smells of automobiles. Because the park would have extended to the Hudson's edge, they would have been able to picnic or play, or simply sit on benches and think, at the very edge of a broad and beautiful river. They would have been able, on the very rim of the city, to escape the city—and to escape it completely.
