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Exit 17 has arrived. Once again, an exit number has been held
in abeyance, as the next stop is #19. I suspect that there used
to be an 18, in pre-Nassau Expwy days. Chances are that would've
been for either Cohancy St. or Lefferts Blvd. This part of the
Belt was the central stage for one of the most horrific and divisive
incidents in the city's history. It was late 1986, when three
black men stopped at a pizzeria on Cross Bay, a few blocks from
here, after their car apparently broke down on the bridge leading
to or from Cross Channel. They got into an altercation with a
white South African immigrant who lived in the area. He went
and got a mob of his buddies together. They came after the blacks
and before the smoke cleared, one of the blacks, named Michael
Griffith, was chased onto the Belt, where he was run over and
killed. The aftermath was a nonstop, neverending disaster, as
self styled "advisors" led by Rev. Al Sharpton coaxed
the two survivors, one of whom was Griffith's stepfather, into
not cooperating with the DA. The Howard Beach community was up
in arms over the way it was being depicted and even the driver
of the car that hit Griffith, an innocent motorist coming from
eastern Queens miles away, was hounded by the "advisors",
who kept insisting he be tried as a member of the "conspiracy".
The man lived in Brooklyn, had just left the home of his girlfriend,
who happened to be black, and could not have possibly by any
stretch of the imagination have gotten from Cross Bay onto the
Belt with such timing as to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the other
whites ran Griffith onto the highway. To this day, the exact
nature of what transpired, leading Griffith to feel he had to
run into 55mph traffic to escape a clobbering, is not truly known.
How any mob the size of which chased him can get more than a
few feet in this city without police being notified in time to
corrall them is also beyond my comprehension, whether it be black
and Latino kids "wilding" in the subways or Central
Park looking for whites and Anglos to vent their frustrations
on, or 40 whites jumping and lynching blacks unfortunate enough
to wander into their neighborhoods in Brooklyn at the wrong moment.
Mobs are not exactly something that can be well hidden. It was
a disaster all around and caused racial troubles that NYC has
still failed to recover from, and may never recover from. Shot
10/99. |
There's
a two mile stretch of Belt and Jamaica Bay between Pennsylvania
Ave and Cross Bay Blvd. The landfill to the right gets kind of
scrubby here and the land to the left looks more like a savanna.
The green directional alerting us to Cross Bay's approach used
to specify the south. After reconstruction some years ago involving
the approach to the Nassau Expwy, the separate ramp cloverleafing
onto Cross Bay North was discontinued and the ramp leading formerly
only to the southbound lanes was pressed into double duty. There
are no shortage of such double exit interchanges on city parkways
in which the redundant second cloverleafing ramp could be done
away with. The eastbound Belt ramp leading to Ocean Pkwy North
at Exit 7n comes instantly to mind, followed by the eastbound
Grand Central's Francis Lewis North exit.
