Friday, March 22, 2013
One way to stop development that will ruin natural areas is to stop the building of roads. The Times has an obituary today of Maurice Barbash, a real estate developer who successfully fought a plan by Robert Moses to build a highway along Fire Island in the early 1960s. Other successful examples I know of: The Richmond Parkway, on Staten Island, and the highway across lower Manhattan that galvanized Jane Jacobs, both of which were Moses’ ideas; the Rye-Oyster Bay Bridge (also Moses), and Route 117 from Mount Pleasant to northern Westchester, which, if I remember correctly, the Rockefellers were in favor of (the halting of that project explains why Route 172 is a four-lane, divided highway near Pocantico Hills, from Route 9 to Route 9A but no further).