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Guest Essay

Nov. 9, 2025, 6:00 a.m. ET

Cars on the Bronx River Parkway in 1922, before the road’s official opening three years later. Credit...Westchester County Archives

Thomas J. Campanella

Dr. Campanella is a historian of urban design and city planning at Cornell University.

The Bronx River Parkway officially opened a century ago this month. It was the first modern highway in the world: a limited-access scenic motorway designed for recreational driving. It unleashed the automobile, and helped put America on the road.

Where it ultimately led — a nation of cars, economic dislocation, pollution, an insatiable thirst for oil — would have astonished its planners. They simply meant to set the motor car in a stage-set landscape reminiscent of America’s rural past.

At first, the parkway had nothing to do with cars. In the late 19th century, the Bronx River, once idyllic, had become a trash-filled sewer, its polluted water sickening the animals as it flowed through the Bronx Zoo. In 1905, a local philanthropist proposed cleaning its banks and turning them into a linear park.

But the motorcar was ascendant. Thus a “Parkway Drive” was threaded along the riverbank up though Westchester County north of the city. Soon, it was the project’s defining feature. Motoring eclipsed the environment; the park became a road. The parkway was the first public road designed for sustained driving at speed, with serpentine curves, grade-separated crossings and access limited to interchanges. Its aim — later replicated in the Saw Mill and Hutchinson River parkways — was to impart the illusion of driving through an extensive rural landscape. Berms and plantings screened out anything that might disrupt drivers’ reverie. The roads linked up parks, forest preserves, golf courses and beaches, creating a vast Central Park for the motor age.

Westchester’s parkways were a public works triumph. Engineers from Germany, China and Australia studied their design, as did officials from a dozen states and the National Park Service. But the keenest student was Robert Moses, for whom the parkways were key to fulfilling what he described as a “cherished ambition of mine to weave together the loose strands and frayed edges of New York’s metropolitan arterial tapestry.” Westchester’s parkway planners went on to create some of America’s most beautiful roads: the Henry Hudson Parkway, Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, the Palisades Interstate Parkway, the Garden State Parkway.

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The Pondfield Road Bridge, which crosses the Bronx River Parkway, under construction in 1922.Credit...Library of Congress

Motoring went into overdrive during the Cold War. Cars swelled in size, power and speed. The lissome prewar parkways were supersized into the postwar expressways, the basis for the Eisenhower Interstate highway system — a concrete web that shrank continental time and space, fueled suburban sprawl and made us a nation of motorists. By then, any idea of a scenic rural road for recreational driving was replaced by the brutal logic of moving maximum traffic.

The highway builders came to town as a juggernaut that brooked no opposition. In city after city, whole neighborhoods were bulldozed and thousands of families displaced. Leaked plans or simply rumors of a major new road could set off a cycle of abandonment and blight as people fled from the wrecking ball. The brunt was borne by racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, the poor. Big roads rarely displaced the rich and politically connected.

Bigotry and racial injustice, it turns out, was baked into the American highway from the start. Just as Central Park caused the destruction of Seneca Village, a thriving community of African Americans and immigrant Irish, building the Bronx River Parkway meant scouring the riverbanks of the shacks and hovels that housed society’s least wanted. In the Bronx, that meant Southern Italian immigrants and Blacks who had come North in the early years of the Great Migration.

This was not simply a matter of expedience. For some of the project’s backers, it was a moral imperative. Madison Grant, the most devoted patron of the Bronx River Parkway, was a lawyer and conservationist who led efforts to save the redwoods and the bison. He considered these nature’s aristocrats, akin to blue bloods like himself. Just as sublime natural wonders like the Olympic Mountains, the Adirondacks and the Everglades — places Grant helped preserve — were threatened by exploitation, so too was New York City besieged by “worthless race types,” as he called immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. Their influx would turn the city into a sewer of the nations, yielding “many amazing racial hybrids,” he wrote, “beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.”

Grant was an ideologue — and while his views were repulsive, they represented much elite opinion at the time. His 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” cheered bigots around the world, stirring the eugenics movement and providing the pseudoscience behind the patently racist Immigration Act of 1924.

The highway builders of Cold War America were not packing copies of Grant’s bleak tome when they drove concrete through people’s homes, but in many ways they might as well have been. Their expressways fulfilled its ideological promise. In Nashville and in Birmingham, Ala., Interstates were routed around white neighborhoods and directly through Black ones. In Oklahoma, Tulsa’s former “Black Wall Street” was obliterated by Interstate 244 and U.S. 75. The “colored town” of Overtown in Miami, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, was effectively demolished by Interstate 95 and the Dolphin Expressway. And in Baltimore, planned highway construction alone was enough to set off an exodus from the historically Black Rosemont area, as the historian Emily Lieb has chronicled.

In New York, many roads — mostly built by Moses — sidestepped elite neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights while gutting immigrant communities from the South Bronx to Red Hook and Astoria, including my mother’s childhood home neighborhood alongside the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Today, though, a new vision of urban motoring is ascendant in many American cities. Expressways are being converted into mixed-use boulevards that calm traffic. Sidewalks, bikeways, parklets, gardens and seating now coexist in the very places once leveled for the motorcar. In California, Oakland’s tree-lined Mandela Parkway replaced a viaduct that had displaced numerous Black families in the 1950s. An expressway in Chattanooga was turned into a boulevard and park that revived downtown by reconnecting it to the Tennessee River.

And in the Crotona section of the Bronx, community organizers waged a 20-year fight to reclaim the Sheridan Expressway, a Moses-era road named for a city engineer killed in an auto accident. Now, Arthur V. Sheridan Boulevard can be safely crossed to get to parks, playgrounds and athletic fields a stone’s throw from the Bronx River and the road that started it all.

Thomas J. Campanella is a professor at Cornell University and the author of “Designing the American Century.”

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