Brooklyn Heights Promenade

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade (also called the Esplanade), a 1,826-foot (557 m)-long platform and pedestrian walkway cantilevered over Interstate 278 in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, in New York City, United States. With views of Lower Manhattan's skyline and the New York Harbor, it came about as the unplanned byproduct of competing proposals for the highway’s route that were resolved in the midst of World War II. Actual construction came after the war. As a structure constructed over a roadway, the Promenade is owned by the NYCDOT and is not considered a park; however, NYC Parks maintains the entire Promenade.

The Promenade runs between the Brooklyn Bridge and the ramp north of Atlantic Avenue. The walkway itself is curtailed at both ends. Due to the area's topography, the Promenade is four stories; from top to bottom, they are the walkway, eastbound I-278, westbound I-278, and service road.

The need for a highway to connect the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens predated the war. In 1939, a topographical engineer with New York’s then new City Planning Department mapped a route for such a highway that hewed quite closely to the East River waterfront of the two boroughs.

Independently, the "master builder" Robert Moses subsequently envisioned a somewhat more inland route. A proposal by Moses in 1941 to run the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway through the neighborhood was successfully opposed. This was in part due to the Brooklyn Eagle issue of September 19, 1942 having alarmed some residents of Brooklyn Heights with the front page headline "Plan for Express Highway Is Shocking". The Eagle reported that the route proposed by Moses would bisect the neighborhood, even requiring at least the partial demolition of a recently built marble courthouse. The news galvanized the leadership of the Brooklyn Heights Association, representing one of the city’s more affluent and politically connected communities. Two men in particular, Roy M.D. Richardson, the association’s president and a Wall Street corporate lawyer, and Ferdinand W. ("Fred") Nitardy, vice president for plant construction of Squibb Pharmaceuticals, which then had a major complex at the north end of Brooklyn Heights, lobbied hard for a route that would move the highway westward, to run along the water-fronting escarpment at the neighborhood’s edge. Meanwhile, engineers with Andrews & Clark, the firm commissioned to build the highway, similarly concluded that the route along the escarpment was best, since an inland route would entail excessive condemnation costs.

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