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Same with beaches. The idea of “beachfront property” being worth anything, let alone worth more than anywhere else, is EXTREMELY recent in history.
Important to note: The river was very polluter and would smell like sewage for several blocks. If you notice, all water front condos were built after the 1980s
The water also reeked pretty much until the 2000s. I grew up on the other side of the river and was sandwiched between it and the gowanus canal. Double stank all day
yeah the water used to smell bad.
sometimes it still does.
I’ve lived near two waterfronts in Baltimore and Baton Rouge. Neither were nice areas!
or literally formed the industrial bedrock of the city, which grew around the (now perceptible) blight eg. Hamilton, ON.
This is not really the driving factor.
Highways are typically built on the edge of dense urban areas, less so through the middle. Many obvious reasons but land cost being among the highest.
In Manhattan, the edge is the water… it’s basically that simple.
30 years ago, Edgewater NJ was a dreary little town on Hudson River, facing upper Manhattan. Abandoned warehouses, rotting piers, forgotten barges, left on muddy River bank. Today, a million dollars is an entry fee.
Have to consider the smell factor. Waterways by cities were unbelievably gross until the 80s at least.
It wasn't that the land was worthless, just the opposite. In fact, these highways were designed to service those docks and warehouses and make it easier to get goods in and out of cities instead of having trucks slowly grinding through the neighborhoods.
All the points made in this thread are great and are an example of the recency bias that ppl often engage in. This is also true when ppl say that Boomers got a house for $17K in 1960 and it's now worth $2 million. In many cases the area was undeveloped in 1960.
If cities must have freeways, there are worse places to locate them. The mistake was committing to the freeways as intralocal and intraregional transportation:
bnjd.substack.com/p/urban-freewa
This actually isn’t true of the FDR Drive. Moses had a huge fight with the River Club because it destroyed their yacht harbor.
Exactly this. Prior to the whole "Gidget Goes Hawaiian" thing of the 1960's, for example, Los Angeles was known as a hiker's paradise, not a beach-going paradise.
It's like sometime in the 1960's we discovered the beach--and suddenly it wasn't a place for light industrial.
Not to mention, NYC did not get through its treatment until 1986, when you flushed it ended up in the East River. The filth and pollution of the NYC Waterfront was so bad that the last oyster bed in NYC died in 1927. By the 1950s and '60s, no one cared about waterfront property.
Except for Storrow drive in Boston. That was originally a park that the city’s built a highway through
And these dockyards can easily become trendy nightclubs, art galleries, etc.
The worst place to put a highway would be in the middle of the densest part of America.
Yep, and a lot of that real estate is reclaimed from the shore line as was. Basically it was the least expensive place to build while displacing the least amount of people.
the idea that nobody back then could have foreseen the concept of urban renewal is laughable man
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Bodies of water, especially those near cities, used to be gross too. Factory run off, medical waste, human waste, or other garbage that was just dumped right into the water so it would stink and be pretty unsafe
FDR Drive was built long before the Manhattan waterfront became decrepit, Tbf
Also, that's the East River, nobody would ever want beachfront property on it and inner Manhattan real estate is worth much more.
fake-urbanist shills like bizarrely set themselves against coastal roadways and roads parallel to rivers/water courses even though every single developed country extensively has them. we live in strange times.
True. When the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco was being built, the area WAS decrepit and full of warehouses.
There was NO Pier 39 tourist trap, and the freeway wasn't going anywhere near there anyway.
that is absolutely not true. read some history about new york city in the early to mid 20th century and learn more about what people were actually advocating for at the time vs what administrators like robert moses built
I get this on a base level but it still always blows my mind. In New York they built tons of housing projects with full river views. They really never could imagine that one day that might be desirable?
Classic UK planning - pave over waterfronts when they're 'worthless', now we pay the price with congestion and lost potential. Brilliant foresight!
