Looking at it now, you’d never know that the Kensington Expressway used to be the beautiful, tree-lined Humboldt Parkway. Before it was turned into a state highway in the 1960s, Humboldt Parkway was a ribbon of urban tranquility connecting Delaware Park to Martin Luther King Jr. Park. Today, the historic parkway is six lanes of below-grade highway, where cars cut through the heart of Buffalo at 55 mph.
The Humboldt was part of the park and parkway system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted – a comprehensive, city-wide design that Olmsted said made Buffalo “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places, and grounds, in the United States, if not the world.” The loss of the parkway was devastating for residents who, by the time of the highway’s construction, were predominantly African American.
“At the time that the expressway was announced, that was a predominantly white neighborhood and community,” said Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo. “Realtors knew and understood that the property would be devalued once that expressway was built and developed. But they sold African Americans these houses situated against the parkway without them knowing that that Parkway was going to disappear.”
Residents have long discussed addressing the Expressway – primarily due to the high rate of respiratory illness in the neighborhoods around the highway, which residents attributed to their proximity to the highway’s pollution.
“Every week or two, month or two, we'd hear about another family, you know, either on Humboldt Parkway or right off on the parkway, same upper respiratory diseases,” said Stephanie Barber-Geter, president of the Hamlin Park Taxpayers Association, and President of the Board of the Restore Our Community Coalition. Geter has attributed her advocacy to a single goal: “stop the road from killing us.”
According to Trevor Summerfield, the New York State Director of Advocacy for the American Lung Association, the community’s concerns are well-founded. Breathing the dirty air around a heavily trafficked corridor will have significant health impacts – both for those with and without preexisting conditions like asthma and COPD.
“Certainly people already living with lung disease, such as asthma, or COPD, or even lung cancer, are going to suffer significantly if they're living in those neighborhoods,” said Summerfield. “But also, you're talking about long term exposure to particle pollution. And people can develop chronic disease like asthma or COPD over time when you're exposed to that level of pollution.”
After years of community advocacy to address the expressway and its effect on the health of the community, the New York State Department of Transportation (DOT) got involved. In the summer of 2022, DOT held scoping sessions and proposed different plans for the project, which included maintaining the highway (“no build”), covering or “decking” the section of the expressway that is below grade to create a tunnel, or removing the expressway entirely and restoring the historic parkway.
At public meetings this June, the DOT announced that they are moving forward with the tunnel plan, and are now in the environmental assessment phase. Certain elements of the project are still up in the air – including how air will be ventilated, and how – and if – the air from the tunnel would be filtered.
Lifelong Buffalo resident Terrence Robinson has lived on Humboldt Parkway, overlooking the Kensington Expressway, for 36 years, and within 200 feet of the current expressway since before its construction. Robinson remembers playing touch football with his cousins in the parkway, and walking down the parkway to early morning mass at St. Francis DeSales Church.
“Numerous factors go into making a quote unquote, healthy environment, calming, restorative, connected, that creates a walkable, safe, community and neighborhoods adjacent to it,” said Robinson, who supports filling in the Kensington Expressway and fully restoring Humboldt Parkway. “When you consider what are the health consequences – what are the health consequences of not having a particular environment on the population that resides there?”
Robinson knows the stakes of the project, and fears that a car-centric proposal could be doubling down on the planning mistakes of the past – mistakes that didn’t take into account the holistic health of the community: “if you continue the present state of things, you prevent an improvement in those things that could happen over the next 20, 30, 40 years, which is the life of this next project. So you prevent a walkable, safe neighborhood.”
Neighborhood walkability, according to pulmonary specialist Dr. Sanjay Sethi of the UB Jacobs School of Medicine, can have a huge positive impact on public health.
“Right now, if you're living right next to the Kensington, even if you go for a walk, you're gonna end up walking in a relatively crowded, polluted, noisy environment,” Sethi said. “We know the health benefits of exercise, or even just regular walking on a daily basis can make a big difference.”
Re-treeing the parkway would also play a significant role in enhancing air quality. “Plants take up carbon dioxide and release some oxygen so the quality of the air will be better,” Sethi said.
The DOT’s proposed tunnel project would extend from Dodge Street by the Science Museum to Sidney Street – 4,150 feet total. New York State alone has pledged $1 billion to the project, putting the cost to the state at $240,963 dollars per foot. Jim Gordon, Treasurer of Citizens for Regional Transit, said that he believes that amount of money could go much further if put towards climate-friendly modes of transportation, such as transit.
“This is a lot of money – that much money is enough to build the entire light rail system all the way from downtown out to Transit Road and out to the new Bills Stadium in Hamburg,” Gordon said. “If they spend a billion dollars on those 12 blocks of the Kensington expressway, that will be among the most expensive stretch of highways ever built on the planet.”
In a written comment, the DOT’s Regional Public Information Officer Susan Surdej told WBFO that, quote: “The Kensington Expressway Project represents a transformational opportunity to reconnect the communities of East Buffalo and begin to correct for the misguided planning decisions of the past. As part of the ongoing planning and environmental review process, the New York State Department of Transportation continues to assess the best available options to safeguard the air quality in the surrounding neighborhoods. NYSDOT fully intends to work with the community to mitigate concerns about air quality or other issues that arise as a result of this project and we will keep the public apprised of further developments. Safety is always NYSDOT’s top priority.”
For Taylor, these goals can only be achieved through robust community input. “If you want projects that service the people, not the market, you have to find a way of getting people to really be in control and drive those projects,” said Taylor.
The project remains in the environmental assessment phase; advocacy groups are awaiting the results of the air quality modeling data that will be released later this month. A public hearing on the project is slated for September.