Definition
East Tremont was a working-class, largely Jewish neighborhood in the West Bronx, organized around a vital commercial street and an interconnected grid of apartment buildings. In the 1950s, Robert Moses's Cross-Bronx Expressway tore a mile-wide trench through its center, forcing the displacement of thousands of families and triggering the collapse of the neighborhood's social fabric within a generation.
In The Power Broker East Tremont is the moral center of Caro's argument: the proof that decisions made in distant rooms, justified by traffic projections, destroy worlds that took decades to build.
Why it matters
How it works
When an expressway is driven through a dense, walkable neighborhood, the damage exceeds the buildings demolished. Block-edge stores lose their pedestrian base; transit routes are severed; the noise and air-pollution corridor depresses property values along a half-mile band; and the people displaced — disproportionately tenants without savings — scatter rather than reconstitute the community elsewhere.
The dynamic is general. A neighborhood is a network, not a stock of buildings. Cut enough edges of the network and the remaining nodes lose the connections that made them valuable. The replacement cost is therefore much larger than the demolition cost — but it is borne by the displaced, not by the agency that chose the route.