New Guy R. Brewer Boulevard overpass
Photo Gallery: Belt Pkwy
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The eastbound Belt Parkway is ready to slip
beneath its newest toy, the new and dubiously improved Guy R. Brewer
overpass in Springfield Gardens, east of South Ozone Park and west of
Laurelton. Brewer Boulevard used to be called New York Boulevard, and until a jaunt last summer with Forgotten-NY.com's Kevin Walsh to check out some things in the area, I had not been on that street north of the Belt since its New York Boulevard days. I believe the name change took place in the late 1970's. Guy Brewer was probably a big local political figure from the recent past. |
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Further out on Long Island, new parkway
overpasses are getting at least a modicum of stone facing treatment, even if
its just faux stone design carved concrete, so that they blend into their
surroundings and adhere to the original parkway idyll and atmosphere. In
fact, many new bridges on the Northern State, for example look very close to
their ancestors. Even the new overpasses along the Long Island Expressway
get adorned. Even the Coney Island Avenue overpass, which was always an
ugly, pure functional design bridge, got bricks carved along its new
retaining walls. Yet for some reason, the replacement span for Guy Brewer
Boulevard was not given the slightest adornment. Now, I'm not criticizing the replacement of deteriorating overpasses, which is obviously necessary. Many bridges spanning parkways and expressways in this city have been, or are being, replaced, and in keeping with the fiscal restraints under which we live today, the new bridges usually do not look anywhere near as good as the originals, but at least most of them make some effort to. Why not Brewer? Those who've read the rest of my site have gleaned by now that I'm no lock-step liberal, and that quite to the contrary I'm less than sympathetic to many activist cries of racism. However, I call them as I see them, and just as I viewed the Airstain pain to the plane now snaking over the heads of Van Wyck commuters as a royal screw job on the mostly non-Caucasian residents of South Jamaica, so too I suspect that to the Department of Transportation, the almost universally African American residents of Springfield Gardens do not merit the slightest stone facing on new bridges built in their midst. But, if they're not going to complain, why should I? Maybe I'm the only one who even bothered to notice. Photos shot by Rosaura Murillo, May 2003. |