Rusting Expressway, Toxic Tunnel & Trees with Roots That Grow Sideways!

By Betty Jean Grant

We Are Women Warriors

Betty Jean Grant

Governor Kathy Hochul, somebody lied on the residents of Humboldt Parkway who will be negatively affected if the NYS-DOT put the tunnel near their homes and under their front yards.

The voters we interviewed opposed putting in a tunnel under the Expressway by an eight to two margin. I am reaching out to you in this manner because your office has refused to meet with or talk to those of us who heard the cries and pleas of the residents on Humboldt Parkway. Many of the longtime tenants and homeowners have illnesses and diseases that possibly can be traced to the toxic air they have breathing since the Expressway was constructed in the 1960s.

I have family members in a house they bought in the mid 1960s suffering from illnesses they have contacted while living next to the Expressway. These illnesses include multiple cases of Asthma, COPD, frequent colds and other respiratory ailments, heart disease, kidney disease and Lupus among others on the health survey that has been compiled by the affected residents themselves.

It seems a dereliction of duty and an absence of accountability to force a health destroying tunnel on a minority group of people that have been harmed so much by the construction of the 33 Expressway. That atrocity, smack dab in the middle of a proud and Black community that had just bought their first homes on a beautiful Parkway adorned with tall, majestic trees that would be cut down to accommodate white flight, is not only a environmental injustice: it was a social injustice, as well.

The residents want trees and soil on the Parkway, but not trees and soil on top of a tunnel with roof or ceiling that will eventually have to be dug up for repairs in 30 or 40 years and every 30 to 40 years thereafter.

Please remove the people-killing, community-dividing Route 33 Kensington Expressway from Humboldt Parkway, and Restore the Parkway by planting trees in soil that is not on top of a tunnel. Governor Hochul, your Buffalo minority constituents want you to do right by them and our impoverished, but proud eastside community.

Just as we are saying now, “What were those leaders thinking when they voted to take the trees and a prize winning Parkway away from, not just the Black people who had no political elected voice, but the entire eastside of Buffalo.” To put that tunnel under an Expressway that can and should be removed, is another slap in the face to a community that deserves so much better. We deserve our health and we deserve a Humboldt Parkway with the Expressway removed and the area filled in and restored with real trees; not trees, with roots that grow sideways, planted in soil that has a depth of only 3 ft.