Caine Blog

That’s the question I have every time I walk down Metropolitan Avenue, in Williamsburg. Why? Because the land under the BQE is like an untapped oil field, or if that’s a little too much for you, like a wind turbine that’s yet to be raised: pure potential.

Dead zones around expressways aren’t unprecedented in New York: the infamous “master builder” Robert Moses, who singlehandedly sited many of New York’s highways, was notorious for uprooting lower and lower-middle class neighborhoods by ramming highways through them. One of these neighborhoods, Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx, was transformed from a quaint hamlet to a mess of high rises by the Henry Hudson Parkway, constructed in the 1930s. Now Spuyten Duyvil only lives on in name – specifically, the name of a popular watering hole just next to the BQE on Metropolitan Avenue.

It’s the presence of places like Spuyten Duyvil (the bar), however, that make me reconsider the conventional wisdom about highways and dead zones (what Jane Jacobs called ‘border vacuums’). So many pretty young people hanging out in a once-desolate area! Surely with real estate prices through the roof – and the arrival of an ‘industrial-chic’ sensibility – a big vacant lot under a highway would be both feasible and profitable to develop. I’m thinking of interesting mixed uses: boutiques, townhouses, restaurants, light industry, and so on. Before any of that comes, though, I’d settle for farmer’s markets, craft fairs, skateboarding demonstrations – anything to make use of once neglected but now coveted empty space.