A Park is Born

A Park is Born. . , Constructed in the 1920s, the elevated West Side Highway allowed cars to zip above the crowded piers and neighborhoods below. Unfortunately, it was also prohibitively expensive to maintain., After years of poor maintenance, in 1973, an overloaded truck, ironically carrying asphalt for highway repairs, fell through a section of roadway abutting the Gansevoort Peninsula. Before the collapse, government officials had proposed a new project, "Westway," which would have buried a new highway beneath 220 acres of new landfill deposited into the Hudson River, while creating housing and park area above., The 1973 collapse accelerated plans for Westway. After receiving funding and most approvals, a series of citizen lawsuits prompted Congress to rescind some funds for the project in 1985. That same year, New York City and State officially cancelled the project, reallocating funding to mass transit and a new roadway conceived as an urban boulevard with a dedicated bikeway., Litigation, community advocacy and science helped demonstrate that Westway posed significant concerns for critical fish populations, specifically striped bass. Juvenile striped bass used (and still use) the west side's shallow waters and piers as habitat., State legislation passed in 1998 created Hudson River Park and its Estuarine Sanctuary to protect the Hudson River habitat and promote reuse of the very piers that would have been replaced with landfill as part of Westway. Few people could have imagined that the collapse of a decrepit roadway in front of a city trash facility would ultimately lead to the creation of Hudson River Park.