Kensinger on Staten Island

Nathan Kensinger continues to explore corners of the city that I’m curious about but too nervous to visit myself. (The phrase “packs of wild dogs” comes up frequently on his blog.)

Richmond Parkway Interchange, Kensinger’s latest photo essay, sheds light on an episode from late in the career of Master Builder Robert Moses.

One reminder of the Master Builder’s incomplete mission to redesign the city’s infrastructure still hovers above Staten Island. Moses built more than 400 miles of parkways during his long reign, but the Richmond Parkway Interchange—one mile of twisting concrete paths - is a symbol of his final days in power. It has been abandoned for 45 years.

The Richmond Parkway “was originally intended to be 9.5 miles long” according to the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, and would have connected southern Staten Island to the Staten Island Expressway via the Richmond Parkway Interchange, providing quick access to the nearby Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which was completed in 1964 as “the last great public works project in New York City overseen by Robert Moses,” according to Wikipedia. The plan for the parkway was to cut through what is now the Staten Island Greenbelt, tearing down pristine forests, threatening Pouch Camp and devastating the Blood Root Valley.

Kensinger’s photos remind me of Tim Butcher’s descriptions in Blood River of roads and rail lines being engulfed by forest in the eastern Congo, until some disappear completely.