The South Bronx’s Sheridan Struggle
By Kiron Roy
The Sheridan Expressway reopened as a boulevard in December 2019, twenty years after the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance (SBRWA) began organizing to remove it entirely. Governor Andrew Cuomo showed up to the boulevard’s inaugural press conference to declare victory over Robert Moses’ legacy. “These politicians, all they do is talk. And they don’t do anything!” the governor vamped, quoting his grandfather.
Cuomo generously handed out credit for the new boulevard to the various politicians and business leaders in attendance. Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. was the only speaker to acknowledge the work of community organizers. “This wouldn’t have happened if it were not for the community, if it were not for the community advocates and activists, those of you who have worked hand-in-hand with us, those of you who have at times given us cocotazos.”
It was largely thanks to skillful organizing that the interstate designation was removed from the Sheridan, allowing several new access points to the Bronx River and improved traffic safety in the neighborhood. Community organizers were not just fighting against an expressway. They were fighting for more housing and community space. They were claiming the right to shape their neighborhood and to be seen as experts on their home. Despite what community organizers had won, the new boulevard seemed eerily similar in key ways to the expressway it replaced, with a planned extension that was almost identical to what SBRWA had fought against for nearly eighteen years. And so, half a decade after the victory press conference, the work continues.
The Sheridan Expressway
Prior to its conversion, the Sheridan Expressway (I-895) ran just over a mile between the Cross Bronx Expressway (I-95) at its northern end, and the Bruckner Expressway (I-278) at its southern end. Originally proposed as part of a larger network of highways which included the Cross Bronx, the Sheridan was meant to run north from the Bruckner, through the Bronx Zoo, and connect with the New England Thruway (I-95) at the Westchester County line. Its full extent was never realized, as strong community resistance to the Robert Moses freeway prevented its completion, limiting it to the short stretch that had been finished by 1963.
“The more agreed-upon and, therefore, greatly contested route of the never-finished [Sheridan] expressway … would have destroyed the rest of West Farms along with Van Nest, Morris Park, half of Pelham Parkway and eventually Baychester. In other words, Moses would have completed his destruction of the Bronx that he began with the Cross-Bronx Expressway,” a 1999 New York Times letter to the editor from amateur historian Thomas Vasti Jr. read. “Moses was able to get this first leg built because East Tremont and Hunts Point were in ‘transition,’ a euphemism for becoming slums and not in any position to put up a fight like the more viable Bronx neighborhoods.”
The more well-connected neighborhoods in Robert Moses’ crosshairs successfully resisted destruction, but East Tremont and Hunts Point still put up a fight. “We had people involved with [organizing for the Sheridan’s removal in the 2000s] who knew the area before the Sheridan was built,” remembered David Shuffler, current Executive Director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ). “I know folks whose grandparents and parents fought against the expansion of the expressway when it was being built.”
Between its completion in 1963 and its conversion to a boulevard in 2019, the Sheridan caused more problems than its diminutive nature might suggest. First, it ran at-grade from the Cross Bronx to Westchester Ave, limiting the community’s access to a remediated Bronx River and park space that would be added to over the course of the early 2000s as part of the Bronx River Greenway.
Second, at Westchester Ave, polluting diesel trucks bound for the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center (FDC) tended to exit the Sheridan and barrel down residential streets which were not designated as truck routes. Third, the steep grades and sharp curves of the Sheridan and its interchange with the Bruckner failed to meet national design and safety standards, causing traffic to back up along the busy Bruckner.
The second and third problems, in particular, prompted New York State Department of Transportation’s proposal on the Bruckner-Sheridan Interchange, which would become SBRWA’s battleground.
Healing the Bronx River
The struggle to remove the Sheridan Expressway began with the cleanup of the Bronx River. It remained a polluted and underutilized resource until the 1990s, when a community-driven effort to remediate the river kicked into gear. The Bronx River Greenway initiative as it came to be known, was a collaboration between community groups led by the Bronx River Alliance (BRA), NYC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), and others. The Greenway initiative helped to remediate and expand two parks near the Sheridan Expressway: Concrete Plant Park in 2009 and Starlight Park in 2012.
Shuffler remembers his early involvement with YMPJ as a participant in the river cleanup: “The efforts around cleaning up the river led to folks saying, ‘well now that we have a cleaner river, we would like to canoe and we would like to have access to the river.’”
Canoeing is one of the river’s unique draws. Every year, BRA hosts the Amazing Bronx River Flotilla, and boating is a regular feature of volunteer days at Starlight Park.
“For very many years, we had no access to the Bronx River, so these parks serve as our backyard. They’re open passthroughs where nature is just waiting to be discovered, so this is very important for our urban children,” Nilka Martell, a community organizer, said in a 2013 Parks Department video filmed in Starlight Park.
Bronxites are also proud of the unique character of the Bronx River, the only remaining fresh body of water in NYC (the Tibbetts Brook daylighting project, also in the Bronx, might challenge that title one day). “There are tons of waterfront communities [in NYC], but there isn’t any fresh body of water running through an urban community like there is in The Bronx,” Shuffler said. “So it’s really a unique and special place, and I hold it near and dear to my heart.”
South Bronx Boogies With Bureaucracy
The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance coalesced in 1999 to organize around NYSDOT’s planned work on extending the Sheridan Expressway south into Hunts Point. The coalition consisted of four Bronx-based community organizations: Nos Quedamos, Mothers on the Move, The Point CDC, and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, with two technical advisors: the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Tri-state Transportation Campaign. The coalition was well-connected to the community, and well-positioned to understand residents’ concerns about truck traffic and lack of river access due to the Sheridan.
The federally mandated Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), that NYSDOT was preparing when SBRWA formed, represented a rare opportunity for the people of the South Bronx. Through the EIS public engagement process, SBRWA and other community members were able to consistently advocate for the needs of the community. NYSDOT’s initial goals for the project were to relieve congestion, improve traffic safety, and move trucks off of residential streets. A 1998 NYC Council resolution from Adolfo Carrion, Jr. prompted by community groups called on NYSDOT to consider the option of decommissioning (demapping) the Sheridan and turning it into a park. ”You’d be eliminating a massive and blighted structure that separates Hunts Point from the rest of the world,” Joan Byron of the Pratt Center said in 2001 to the Times.
Shuffler was a young member of YMPJ when SBRWA was formed. He remembers early sessions SBRWA held to discuss community concerns. “A lot of the vision around decommissioning [the Sheridan] was percolating from community residents… they closed their eyes and dared to envision ‘if you could do anything, what would you do?’” Residents began to think that maybe the Sheridan Expressway itself was the problem. “If you really want to create access… what if the roadway was a park, or what if the roadway was a farm?”
SBRWA released a public version of its plan to decommission the Sheridan in 2006. The Community Plan for the Sheridan (Community Plan) proposed building 1,200 units of affordable housing and 500,000 square feet of community space in the footprint of the Sheridan Expressway. It would also redirect Hunts Point-bound truck traffic via newly constructed flyovers linking the Bruckner with Leggett Ave, moving polluting traffic away from residential streets and the recovering Bronx River. It was a powerful statement of desire from the community reflecting its desired connection to the Bronx River.
“In addition to traffic safety, this was about creating access to the river, and creating badly needed spaces that the community could control, like deeply affordable housing,” said Elena Conte, who worked with SBRWA as a technical advisor. Incorporating affordable housing and community space in the plan was important to ensure that the community would benefit from the river they had helped clean up.
“This legacy of economic and environmental injustice is what the Bronx has inherited, and our vision is to re-create a healthy environment, robust economy, efficient transportation network, and diverse community; all based around the Bronx River which is an ecological, economic, and social asset that should be enjoyed by all,” SBRWA’s website stated.
SBRWA knew the uphill battle they were facing in advocating for the Community Plan.
“We pushed the vision thinking that this was the most ideal situation, and sort of understood the realities of having to negotiate for it,” Shuffler said. “The Department of Transportation is in the business of building roadways and ramps. Decommissioning is not necessarily what their business model is built on.”
Reality struck soon enough. Between 2006 and 2010, NYSDOT rejected the option of demapping (removing entirely) the Sheridan Expressway twice. The agency’s traffic modeling showed that demapping the expressway would result in a sharp increase in truck traffic on local streets.
Conte feels that NYSDOT didn’t value the 28 acres of developable land that would have been freed up by removing the Sheridan. “State DOT only wanted to talk about moving vehicles. For them it was only about transportation.”
SBRWA turned to the city for another opinion. In 2010, three city agencies received a federal Tiger II grant to study elements of the Community Plan. The beginning of the city’s study, called the Sheridan Expressway-Hunts Point Land Use and Transportation Study (SEHP), was an exciting moment for organizers. Tawkiyah Jordan, the project manager assigned to the study by the Department of City Planning (DCP), had been involved in the Community Plan with YMPJ prior to taking a job with the city. There was also support for the Community Plan within NYC Department of Transportation, whose commissioner at the time was Janette Sadik-Khan.
The city process didn’t quite live up to those expectations. At a community working group meeting in May of 2012, the city announced that traffic modeling indicated an increase in truck traffic on local roads if the Sheridan Expressway were removed. This fatal flaw, as far as the city was concerned, meant that the city would no longer consider demapping the Sheridan. Community members felt blindsided at the time, and organized a walkout in protest at the June working group meeting.
Organizers eventually accepted the recommendations the city released in 2013 as they too eventually abandoned the original plan to nix the Sheridan entirely. The city recommended a replacement for the Sheridan Expressway which would have reduced the roadway’s width by nearly 100 feet, added park space, and freed up more developable waterfront space. The SEHP report also endorsed other elements of the community’s plan, such as a new flyover from the Bruckner near Leggett Ave in Hunts Point, the potential removal of multiple off-ramps from the Sheridan, and improvements for pedestrian safety in along Bruckner Boulevard (beneath the Bruckner Expressway).
SBRWA organized around the city’s recommendations, which gained the support of several state legislators. In 2016, the NY State budget allocated $97 million to “decommission the Sheridan Expressway and create an urban boulevard.” However, NYSDOT did not release a plan for the teardown, and made no public commitment to follow the recommendations of NYCDOT, DCP, SBRWA, the New York City Council, or the state legislators who supported the SEHP plan.
In March of 2017, Governor Cuomo announced $1.8 billion in funding for the Hunts Point Access project. This time, renderings of the proposed Sheridan Boulevard were released as well. They showed a boulevard which appeared to be drawn over the entire footprint of the existing at-grade portion of the expressway and its flanking roads between the Cross Bronx Expressway and Westchester Ave. There was no evidence of the narrowed roadway organizers and the city had called for.
Worse, the state announced that they’d build a flyover to Edgewater Road, connecting the (soon-to-be) Sheridan Boulevard directly to the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. This was essentially the same proposal that SBRWA had coalesced to oppose all those years ago. Streetsblog, which had been covering the Community Plan for several years, noted that between NYSDOT’s Sheridan Boulevard renderings and the flyover at Edgewater, “the new Sheridan’s primary purpose would be the same as the old: to shuttle large, polluting trucks to and from the Hunts Point Market and connect them to the Cross-Bronx Expressway.”
SBRWA was ready to continue the fight. “We will work tirelessly to hold the Governor’s office and NYSDOT accountable to community priorities” its press release stated. Conte, speaking to The New York Times, said “if Governor Cuomo wants credit for undoing the legacy of Robert Moses in the South Bronx, he will do that not just by making physical changes but also by listening to a community that Moses pointedly ignored.” The Times’ editorial board agreed with her.
NYSDOT didn’t seem keen on giving Governor Cuomo, or anyone else, a chance to listen. Streetsblog reported in late June of 2017 that NYSDOT had held a single public scoping meeting on a week’s notice, during which no public discussion was allowed. NYSDOT did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.
The Billion Dollar Peninsula
The Hunts Point Food Distribution Center (FDC) generates over $3 billion in yearly revenue, distributing 4.5 billion pounds of food around the tristate area. Around 12 percent of the city’s food is distributed via the FDC, including 25 percent of the produce, 35 percent of the meat, and 45 percent of the fish that the city consumes. For every pound of food from the FDC delivered to the city, another pound is delivered to other places in the NYC region. To deliver all that food, you need a lot of trucks. On an average day, an estimated 15,000 trucks enter the FDC. These include the larger class eight semi-trucks bringing food to the hungry metropolis from all over the nation and smaller box trucks or vans carrying food to distribute to restaurants, bodegas, and supermarkets.
“There’s billions of dollars of commerce that’s coming in and out of [the Hunts Point] peninsula … The businesses want to be able to move their products as fast as possible, and anything that would have added any time onto their deliveries was a no-go,” said Shuffler.
How those trucks actually travel to and from the FDC depends on who you ask. A truck traffic study commissioned by NYSDOT in 2004 surveyed drivers about the routes they took into and out of the markets. It found that around 55 percent of drivers surveyed took the Sheridan Expressway into the FDC, and about 51 percent used it on their way out. The city’s survey on the other hand, conducted in 2011 as part of its federally-funded SEHP study, found that only 19 percent of trucks used the Sheridan Expressway into or out of the FDC.
Business owners and employees from the FDC emphasized the importance of the Sheridan Expressway in public comments to NYSDOT. “We want the Sheridan to remain! It is our feeling that infrastructure that serves a viable purpose should not be decommissioned,” a 2003 petition with around 800 signatures delivered by Matthew D’Arrigo of the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market Cooperative Association stated. “One hundred percent of the produce trucks that cross the George Washington Bridge use the Sheridan Expressway.”
While NYSDOT’s traffic modeling led the agency to reject everything but an extension of the Sheridan into Hunts Point, the city’s modeling told a different story. The city found that reducing the width of the Sheridan and converting it to a boulevard would only increase travel times by two minutes during peak hours, while actually reducing travel times during off-peak hours. The city study points out that “the majority of the traffic [that] accesses Hunts Point is in the off-peak period (outside of commuter rush hours). As a result, impacts to businesses at the FDC may be less than that suggested by transportation modeling.” It’s unclear whether NYSDOT incorporated the city’s findings into its eventual analysis.
A Hard-fought Victory for Organizers
Over 17 years of monthly meetings, the terms of three mayors, four governors, six NYSDOT commissioners, and multiple rounds of congressional redistricting, SBRWA waged a long and skillful campaign to shape the Bronx so that it met the community’s needs. What they won wasn’t exactly what they dreamed of. Organizers could not move truck traffic away from the Bronx River. The footprint of the new Sheridan Boulevard doesn’t make room for affordable housing, or community spaces. At the final hour, the disappointing design of the Sheridan Boulevard, along with the decision to send trucks rumbling close to the Bronx River via massive flyover ramps, were made with little public input.
But the Sheridan is no longer as much of a barrier between the community and the Bronx River. Three new pedestrian crossings on the boulevard provide access to Starlight Park. Shuffler feels safer crossing the street in Hunts Point with his three young children. “We have young people now who are in their mid-twenties who came in at the later years of the campaign who have the same ownership of the campaign,” said Shuffler.“So I have young people who are like ‘when I was a teenager, we worked on the Sheridan campaign and we won!’”
Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice won a $500,000 federal grant to monitor air quality in the South Bronx. It’s also working on realizing the Soundview Economic Hub in space under the Bruckner made available to the public by NYSDOT as part of the Hunts Point Access Project. This fall, YMPJ held an art exhibition at the space.
The South Bronx’s fight continues. The Bronx River Alliance recently began organizing against NYSDOT’s plan to permanently expand the Cross Bronx Expressway as part of its efforts to repair the aging roadway. Activists claim that the work on the Cross Bronx threatens the Bronx River and Starlight Park, two of the resources the South Bronx fought for access to with the Community Plan for the Sheridan. Construction crews were recently caught on video dumping materials into the Bronx River. The community has relied on documents obtained through a freedom of information request by Streetsblog’s Dave Colon, rather than official NYSDOT communications, for information about the planned expansion.
Conte offers a warning: “This doesn’t take away at all from the incredible work that community members have done—but I don’t think State DOT was ever serious about doing [the Community Plan]. It was easier for them to just include the alternative, shut everybody up—or so they thought—and then proceed in the way they wanted to proceed. The fear is that’s what’s happening now, and why community members are appealing to Governor Hochul to ensure that’s not the case.”
The South Bronx is facing a familiar bureaucratic behemoth adversary in NYSDOT, this time with the backing of national political figures like Bronx Reps. Ritchie Torres and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Conte says organizers learned a lot from the Sheridan campaign that can be applied to this new fight. “What the community is doing right now on the Cross-Bronx, the Sheridan campaign was a training ground for that.” If the Sheridan campaign is any indication, community organizers in the South Bronx will achieve the impossible.
Kiron Roy is a programmer with an interest in just and sustainable cities. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Urban Planning program at Hunter College.
