It seems like this question is a pretty simple one: do the ends justify the means? The ends in this case being the convenience of millions of commuting New Yorkers, and the means being the destruction of the hundreds of families’ homes the highway would have to go through. But maybe it’s more complicated than that. As Robert Caro points out, East Tremont wasn’t just a neighborhood; it was an urbanizing zone for immigrants of all colors and creeds. When it was destroyed, the Bronx didn’t just lose out on its benefits, the entire city did.
Additionally, the poverty left in the Cross-Bronx’s wake rippled throughout the entire metropolitan area. To this day the borough of the Bronx remains significantly low-income, perhaps in part because of the destruction of the middle-class stronghold of East Tremont. The abandoned buildings and vacant lots left once the residents had been relocated became locusts for crime and vandalism. The taxes the residents were paying were lost, further contributing to the decline of the borough at large. In my opinion, the building of the Cross Bronx should have been handled more carefully. It should only have been built had these consequences been taken into consideration, which it seems likely they weren’t. Robert Moses ought to have accounted for the highway’s immediate effects on the citizens and city it was supposed to convenience. Infrastructure is important, but not important enough to merit uprooting families and destroying neighborhoods as important as East Tremont
Robert Mayo
