Broome Street
looking east.
Broome Street
looking east.
Broome Street helps to relieve Canal Street with cross-town traffic.
Since Broome Street is not very wide to begin with, the street experiences
a lot of traffic congestion. Moses believed the LOMEX would aid with
the movement of local traffic. From nycroads.com: "The removal of
through passenger and commercial traffic from the local streets would in
itself provide much needed relief for local and short trip movements.
In addition, surface improvements would be provided as a part of the expressway
program with the result that additional capacity would be available for
local traffic (from the 1955 Joint Study of Arterial Facilities)."
Broome
Street, looking west.
Broome
Street and Centre Street, looking south at Centre Street. The LOMEX
would take on a different appearance from this point on. From nycroads.com:
"Near Centre Street, the outer lanes of the highway would descend and pass
under Elizabeth Street, continuing eastward in an open-walled cut to the
Williamsburg Bridge Plaza. All streets except Mulberry and Mott would
be carried across bridges over the depressed highway."
This
particular section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, located in the neighborhood
of Red Hook, gives us a good indication of what the depressed highway would
look like. The open-walled highway cut for the LOMEX was to transverse
the neighborhoods of Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side.
Approaching
the corner of Broome and Mulberry Streets.
According to the LOMEX highway plans, the neighborhoods of Little Italy and Chinatown would have been divided in to two, since engineers did not allow Mulberry Street and Mott Street to have a through-connection that would have traversed the expressway. Dividing the neighborhoods would not have been a good thing for the communities involved.
Notice how Broome Street is now only a two-lane thoroughfare at this
location.
Here
is what happens when a depressed highway cuts across a neighborhood and
there isn't a bridge to provide access to the other side of the street.
Warren Street in Red Hook Brooklyn is split in to two because a bridge
was not built in order to traverse the trenched section of the Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway. Mulberry and Mott Streets would have suffered the same
fate had the LOMEX been built.
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Street!