Project Site Confirmed!














After a long debilitating process of weighing pros and cons, I have finally settled on a project site for my thesis. The project site is a residential neighborhood along the Gowanus Expressway in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It is one of the many neighborhoods that were a casualty of Robert Moses' destructive transit masterplans and continues to feel its effects to this day. The Gowanus Expressway, which is a part of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway which connects the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, Prospect Expressway, the Belt Parkway, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, split the neighborhood into two when it was constructed in 1964. 

The site is ideal for a project that proposes to reroute or repurpose the Gowanus Expressway in a manner that will "stitch" the neighborhood back together. The area along the splitting highway is notorious for air and noise pollution, traffic congestion, and illegal dumping of trash and neglected vehicles is prominent in the area beneath the elevated section. The Gowanus Expressway's infrastructure is crumbling and decaying due to weather conditions, general wear and tear, as well as the constant beating of 110,000 trucks and vehicles daily. The neighborhood fabric has been bifurcated, leaving a neighborhood in need of revitalization and new ideas.



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