Buffalo’s Kensington Expressway – Dale’s Daily Data

Can you imagine hearing that a new expressway is going to cut right thru the middle of Chestnut Ridge Park? In this day and age it likely would never happen. Enviornmental groups would take the developers to court and keep it wrapped up in so much red tape the project would never get started.

But that’s almost exactly what happened in the 1950’s when plans for the Kensington Expressway were unveiled. The idea was to build an express route from downtown Buffalo to the eastern and northern suburbs, but it destroyed vibrant neighborhoods on the east side of Buffalo.

Most damaging was it tore right thru Humboldt Park and Humboldt Parkway. And that wasn’t just any park. It was designed by famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. Olmstead envisioned an interconnected parkway system for Buffalo.

Humboldt Parkway extended from what is now the intersection of the Scajaquada Expressway at Parkside all the way to what is now Martin Luther King, Junior Park. It connected Delaware Park with what was then Humboldt Park. It was a wide parkway with a beautiful median planted with trees and flowers. But all of that was done away with in the name of progress.

Planners told homeowners that traffic was getting so bad on Main, Kensington, Genesee and other major streets that if they don’t do something now property values will fall. So they built the Kensington Expressway and property values fell anyway. Fell so badly that many of those homes are worthless and abandoned now.

Is that the price of progress?

SOURCE: danreitz.com/gridplan