Letters
Burning Bridges
The “Any Questions?” segment regarding Robert Moses and the Bronx River Parkway was totally incorrect. The Parkway was designed by Hermann Merkel and Gilmore Clarke, not Robert Moses. The low bridges were designed solely to keep trucks off the Parkway; trucks and buses used the more direct routes—Route 1 and Route 22. To even associate racism and Robert Moses with our beautiful Bronx River Parkway and its historic bridges is a shame.
—Frank Giuliano, Katonah
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Robert Moses. Photo by C.M. Stieglitz / Wikimedia Commons |
Writer’s Response: I never mentioned the Bronx River in my article at all, and I didn’t mean to suggest that Robert Moses was responsible for ALL Westchester roads. Robert Moses did, indeed, plan some of the thoroughfares in the county. From the New York City Parks website:
In 1936, New York master builder Robert Moses (1888-1981) decided to build more parkways in the Bronx and Westchester. A year later, the Hutchinson River Parkway was extended north from White Plains to King Street (NY 120A) in Rye Brook, on the New York-Connecticut border. The southern extension of the Hutchinson River Parkway into the Bronx was completed in 1941.
As for the emotionally charged claim that Moses was a racist and wanted to keep minorities in buses from traveling north, I was simply reflecting what has been written in articles like this one from the New York Times on May 6, 2007:
That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists.
—Tom Schreck
