Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections: The Real Estate Record

Real estate record and builders' guide: [v. 92, no. 2389]: December 27, 1913

Text version:

REAL . ESTATE AND NEW YORK, DECEMBER 27, 1913 |lllilllillilH^^^^^^ I PLAN FOR RIVERSIDE DRIVE EXTENSION Report of Arnold W. Brunner and Frederick Law Olmsted Consid¬ ered By Citizens — Treatment For Audubon Park Determined On. TH.\T Riverside Drive w-ill, in time, be extended at least to the northern¬ most point of Manhattan is not ques¬ tioned. It seems equally certain that the city will eventually find it necessary to acquire not only the land needed for the drive proper—in addition to the rights it now possesses in the former Lafayette Boulevard—but the lands lying between the line of the drive and the shore front of the river. Until a proper map has been adopted it will not be possible to fix the lines of cross streets intersecting the drive, or to permit the owners of private property immediately contiguous to the drive either to sell or to develop it. When Mr. Mc.\neny became Borough President, on January 1, 1910, he found not only that a plan for the extension The report of the architects contained an alternative plan for a part of the route, and after hearing representatives of the Washington Heights Taxpayers' Association, Messrs, Brunner and Olm¬ sted and others, President McAneny an¬ nounced that the committee would recommend to the Board of Estimate the adoption of "Plan B." No Outlay at Present. The adoption of the plan will not commit the city to the expenditure of any moneys until its financial condition may warrant such an outlay. The mat¬ ter of immediate importance is to con¬ firm the map and remove uncertainty about the future of private property throughout the district to be afTected by the drive development. The plan is divided for purposes of also unlike the rest of Riverside Drive it was laid out on such a crooked line as to be excessively inconvenient and somewhat dangerous. It has long been recognized, says the report, that some radical improvement must be secured, and many plans have been prepared both for the city and for interested private individuals and associations. All of these plans have contemplated the shifting of the roadway far enough to the westward to cross over ISSth street by a bridge and to smooth out some or all of the abrupt turns in the alignment of the main driveway without changing the location of the present easterly building line of Riverside Drive. The plans have been of two classes: First, the more radical propositions, which have contemplated an extension of the drive existed, but that an appro¬ priation of $5,000,000 of corporate stoik had been allowed to meet the expense of the work. This was to cover construc¬ tion alone, and would have involved a further enormous outlay for the acquisi¬ tion of land. The plan as it then stood did not seem to him to be either ade¬ quate or economical. Upon his motion, therefore, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment cancelled the plan and repealed the appropriation, allowing a comparatively small sum to reimburse contractors who had been engaged for the starting of the work, Messrs. Arnold W. Brunner and Frederic Law Olmsted were thereupon engaged to investigate the whole prob¬ lem, and to submit a new map based upon a simpler and less expensive plan. Their report was the subject of a hear¬ ing at City Hall on Monday before President Mc.\neny, Comptroller Pren¬ dergast and Chief Engineer Nelson P. Lewis. explanation by Messrs. Brunner and Olmsted, in their re¬ port, into three principal sections; the southern sec¬ tion extending from lS5th street to 165th street, and including the crossing of the 158th street valley; the middle section from 16Sth street to a point about 3,000 feet south of Dyckman street; the northern section from the last-mentioned point northward across the Dyckman valley and along Inwood Hill to the Borough of the Bron.x. Southern Section. Throughout the southern section there is now a practicable roadway, largely used by automobiles and occupying a location nowhere less than 100 feet wide. From 155th street, at the northern end of the viaduct, over the railroad along Trinity cemetery to 158th street, this location was laid out as Riverside Drive, from 158th street north it was laid out as Boulevard Lafayette; in both cases, unlike Riverside Drive farther south, it was laid out as an or¬ dinary street through private property with building frontage on the westerly side cutting it off from the river, and CROSS SECTIOX OF PROPOSED RIVERSIDE DRIVE, SOUTH OF IGIST STREET. of the viaduct now existing south of 155th st«eet in a direct line across the valley of 158th street entirely indepen¬ dent of the present location; second, those which have proposed widening of the high fill on which the present road¬ way is built so as to moderate to some extent the abruptness of the two bends between Trinity cemetery and 156th street, and constructing a new causeway or embankment from a point near the third bend, between lS6th street and 157th street, across the valley to Boule¬ vard Lafayette, leaving an archway for 158th street to pass through. Typical of this less radical class of plans was one offered by the Washington Heights Taxpayers' Association, dated 1906, and one prepared by George C. Wheeler, dated March 16, 1910. .A.Iso of this class is the alternative plan submitted with the report and marked "Plan B." The plan offered by the taxpayers' association places the new drive so far to the eastward as barely to afford head¬ room over the existing surface of ISSth street, thus preventing any improvement in the excessive gradient of that street (ten per cent.); and even Mr. Wheeler's plan would interfere with improving that grade as much as would be desirable.