Concourse

Like most city-builders, they were shortsighted who built up Manhattan Island. The high, rocky, sunset edge of the island has been allowed to fall into the hands of cheap-johnny apartment builders and tenants. It was a natural development, however, because, like the swampy eastern edge of the island, the upper bank of the Hudson was less accessible than the island's spine. Also, because the Hudson's bank is the island's natural dock and shipping side. Wharves, warehouses and railroad tracks thrived there and stretched up the island before society or even social convenience made competitive demands. The commercial coagulation on Manhattan's western bank is no stranger than Cleveland's hideous, eastern waterfront, Cincinnati's and Pittsburgh's smoke-draggled riverbanks or Chicago's fuliginous south shore.

As cities grow, however, cities awaken. Chicago has taken its shore lines in hand, built new land with sandsuckers and made a new outer-driveway to the south as well as a made-land drive skirting Lincoln Park on the lakeside and a riverside boulevard (Wacker Drive) around scow-ridden reaches of the Chicago River. And last week New York City's Board of Estimate finally approved plans for a driveway, which will ameliorate land values as well as living standards, up the western shore of Manhattan Island from Canal Street to 59th Street. A linking boulevard from 59th Street to 72nd Street, where Riverside Drive begins, had already been approved. Construction of the whole was authorized to begin with the New Year and promised in completion for July 1, 1930.

The plan is to elevate a motor concourse above the railroad right-of-way now labelled Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues and commonly, because of accidents, called "Death Avenue." Ramps to the superstructure will occur at 22nd, 44th and 57th Streets. The whole will cost some $13,500,000 (graft excluded). One boom in Manhattan riverside real estate has already occurred recently, on the Harlem River bank around 80th Street, under the leadership of Vincent Astor. The new concourse was expected to carry the boom from east side to west side, all around the town.