With all the current fuss over the early days of the Obama administration and the debate over the stimulus bill, I feel your blog has not given due attention to the negative effects of the 1950s building of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Opine, please.
This is an excellent topic that I don't think gets covered enough in grammar school history courses. Most 5th graders that I discuss this with have a fundamental misunderstanding of the arguments at hand. On the con side, of course, the highway's creation ripped apart areas of the lower Bronx and made previously bustling neighborhoods despondent and morgue-like. I know this because my grandparents were militant NYC activists during their heyday, and I have 1400 pages of their journals that I keep next to my toilet. But, the way I prefer to think of it is this. Let's say Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant want to make an omelette. Now, the decision of how to make the omelette takes awhile, because they both agree they want it to contain 3 eggs -- yet Garnett likes cage-free and organic and Bryant has stated his preference for omega-3. So they flip a coin for it, and Kobe (Robert Moses and NYC commuters) ends up trumping Garnett (poor black people). And that's not even the end, because when an egg is broken, a future chicken life is destroyed. And again. And again.
But you have to view this negative as being on a scale with the positive -- Garnett and Kobe's enjoyment of a delicious 3-egg omelette snack. In my view, seeing the Cross Bronx Expressway through this lens will help elucidate many of the common misconceptions I consistently hear about it.
I'd also recommend Paul Krugman's definitive study on this topic, which he conveniently published this morning. (H/T: Google.)
