The Kensington Expressway project would send a section of the sunken freeway deeper underground and cap it with a park that reconnects the neighborhoods on either side.
Photographer: Malik Rainey/BloombergA Highway Cap Divides the City It Was Designed to Reconnect
The $1 billion project in Buffalo, New York, promises to replace a stretch of freeway with a park and restore a historic boulevard. Critics say the fix doesn’t go far enough.
For the last 35 years, the sounds and smells of the Kensington Expressway have been a constant accompaniment to Marcia Ladiana’s life on Buffalo’s East Side. Her home, a century-old wood-framed house with a neatly planted front garden, overlooks the concrete trench that holds the six-lane highway. “When I dust, I find black soot from the cars,” Ladiana said. “You can’t escape it.”
Ladiana, a retired environmental engineer with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, rattled off the diseases and health conditions that seem uncannily common amongst her neighbors in this low-income, majority-Black neighborhood: asthma, lung cancer, heart disease, deafness. “People are getting sick left and right.”