Commentary

What Burying the 33 Might Look Like

by / Sep. 22, 2015 4pm EST

The removal of a portion of the Robert Moses Parkway in Niagara Falls has put the writing on the wall for a host of other area highways that were built in America’s postwar zeal for vehicular traffic along waterways and through public parks.

The community is reimagining how the Scajaquada Expressway could work, and the topic of what could be done along the former Humboldt Parkway continues to strike a nerve. Our editor-at-large Bruce Jackson recently called to bury the highway to restore “the most magnificent parkway Frederick Law Olmsted designed in his grand plan for Buffalo, the one parkway that tied the city together.” 

Jackson’s piece itself was less a call for the removal of the road, but a plea to build public land over the top of it, an idea that our editor-in-chief Geoff Kelly wrote a comprehensive story on in 2010. 

To get an idea of what that might look like, Buffalo architect Seth Amman created a 2-minute animated film on Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, Texas—a park built over a large expressway to reconnect vital parts of its downtown. 

Downtown Dallas is not Buffalo’s East Side, but there’s no question that a similar plan would overhaul the current neighborhood dynamic, from Canisius College to the Buffalo Museum of Science and its adjoining Martin Luther King Jr. Park, in a major way.


What do you imagine for the future of the 33 and Humbolt Parkway? Leave your comments below.

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