Demand for Restoration of Humboldt Parkway Neighborhoods Is Demand for Reparation
By Sherry Sherrill, Founder & Pres. Covington Associates Consulting
One side of the debate about the NY Route 33 Kensington Expressway Project, is actually a call for reparation. The other side, is a determination to complete a rushed cover-up. We Black Americans have a right to demand that correct and proper solutions become applied to the myriad problems that public policies have caused our community, and the NY Route 33 Kensington Expressway is a very big problem…to us. You know that, if you have heard any of the countless stories of City of Buffalo Residents who, due to owning homes and living in the Humboldt Parkway Neighborhood and the Kensington Expressway Corridor, have been battling a host of ailments like Cancers, Leukemia, Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Asthma, Bronchitis, Upper Respiratory and Heart Diseases, Sarcoidosis, Lupus, and Low Birth-weight and Premature and Still Births, etc. In all these cases, the common denominator is, was, and always will be the Kensington Expressway. Really, but now that America's households have become increasingly aware that living within a 1000 feet of a freeway like the Kensington Expressway, anywhere, can and does and has made many people sick, everywhere, it is crucially important that we not tolerate any half-baked ‘solution’ to be applied to the Kensington Expressway dilemma, here.
Here, a tunnel proposal is being fraudulently promoted as though it is some kind of blessing to our community. It isn’t a blessing, at all. Instead, the tunnel and the fake 3/4 mile-long park used to ‘sell’ it to us, are false ‘band-aids’. This generation’s Kensington Expressway Project, as proposed by New York State Department of Transportation [NYSDOT], is a multi-year spanning construction megaproject. Along with the expressway continuing to make people sick, the project will greatly disrupt life in Humboldt Parkway Neighborhoods, and throughout the Kensington Expressway Corridor, all over again. That means another onslaught of trauma is in store, for affected households. What is more, studies have established that living within 5,280 feet, or up to one mile, of a highspeed freeway, like Route 33, is harmful in and of and all by itself. Yet, NYSDOT is parading the fraudulent promise that the tunnel’s concrete deck, and the deck’s fake park, and a mere 500 feet of clearance from the ‘improved’ expressway, will be enough to protect residents.
Make no mistake about this: From its start to its completion, the Kensington Expressway Project is going to increase the existing harmful air quality Issue in East Side Buffalo Community, not decrease or improve such. That is fact. All of the above explains why so very many Humboldt Parkway Neighborhood Residents living up to a mile from the Kensington Expressway right now, have the same variety and experiences of environmentally-caused illnesses that residents living on Humboldt Parkway itself, and on other nearby Kensington Expressway Corridor streets, are now making the wider public in Erie County aware of. New lawsuits have been filed on their behalf, including by the New York Civil Liberties Union [NYCLU].
The broad range of sicknesses caused by the NY Route 33 Kensington Expressway are a grave condition that also exists in and throughout the Fruit Belt Neighborhood, and within every single City of Buffalo Neighborhood that borders Route 33, including the Hamlin Park Neighborhood. Up to now, the deaths and suffering have largely taken place in relative silence, because no public elected official has ever lifted a finger, or used his or her voice, or office, to i.e. officially demand that anything constructive be done to address these. It is also a wonder if any physician has ever made the connection.
Freeways like the Kensington Expressway exist all across America, and may be a link to the African American Health Disparities phenomenon. A Public Health or Community Health Study is needed, to determine if that might actually be the case. Earlier in the Spring of this (2024) year, I asked University at Buffalo if such might be convened. I am still awaiting a definitive reply. I also inquired if a law clinic might be arranged at UB’s Law School, benefitting Humboldt Parkway Neighborhood Residents. That request was denied. Fortunately, East Side Parkways Coalition has been very busy at trying to raise funds so legal representation has been gained, nonetheless. ESPC is a racially diverse group of citizen-activists demanding the full restoration of both Humboldt Parkway and MLK Park.
At the very least, our own region’s municipal, county, and state governments should want to do something about this public and community health crisis, and as soon as they became aware of it. Maybe they would, if the Kensington Expressway were plowed mainly through a predominantly white (City of Buffalo) Neighborhood. A large number of white residents suffering in that manner might have gained better listeners, attuned to the suffering. As the matter now stands, the $Billion sent to Buffalo to revitalize and retrofit the Kensington Expressway, rather than to remove it altogether, is a very dire insult to our predominantly Black East Side Buffalo Community. The expressway should be removed, and the money put to better and far more sensible use, revitalizing and resurrecting East Side Buffalo. The tunnel proposal is worse than a bad band-aid ‘solution’ even, if not especially when, bundled together with the fake 3/4 milelong park boondoggle. The rush to build the tunnel and fake park portion of the $Billion project, are an attempt to deny justice to the already detrimentally harmed residents of Humboldt Parkway Neighborhoods. It is beyond ironic that the projects will function to ensure the delivery of even more concentrated bad air out of both ends of the tunnel, and which will continue to course throughout the Kensington Expressway Corridor, including within and throughout the fake park. This is serious, folks.
We East Side Buffalo Community Residents deserve to have Humboldt Parkway’s majestic tree-lined canopy restored, and we deserve it now, not one or two hundred years from now. If the tunnel project moves forward, we may never get that cultural, regional, and environmental asset back. Ever. Once upon a time in the city, Humboldt Parkway’s grassy median area was larger than Bidwell Parkway’s, Lincoln Parkway’s, and Chapin Parkway’s. Present day Humboldt Parkway and Kensington Expressway Corridor Neighbors deserve to have that heritage returned to them. If our governor cared anything for monumental environmental justice, and supported it occurring here in East Side Buffalo, that would have been the DOT's proposal, from the get-go.
The importance of environmental, racial, and social justice, along with the various Adverse Health Impacts wrought by the Kensington Expressway here, should finally be acknowledged by the government of these United States of America, and starting with the State of New York, and the County of Erie, and the City of Buffalo. That governmental accountability factor clearly made all the difference in Rochester, and in Albany, and in Syracuse, where freeways have been are indeed being removed, rather than revitalized and retrofitted with new tunnels. Politicians, who support the doling out of a billion public dollars to well-heeled contractor companies, are depending on all that not happening, and are fervently hoping that continued injustice will be tolerated, in the name of expediency.
However, the time has come for our East Side Buffalo Community to stop being victimized, including by those who supposedly represent us.
When NYSDOT refused to remove the expressway, and in the same breath that the agency refused to acknowledge the suffering of our Humboldt Parkway and Kensington Expressway Corridor Neighbors, it was not hard to understand why the agency also refused to furnish our community with an Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] variety of environmental study.
An EIS would tell we who “know”, what we already know, but would have the ripple effect of necessitating the government “do something” about its reported findings. To quote an elder Humboldt Parkway Neighborhood Resident who knows all too well that this generation’s Kensington Expressway Project is no real solution to what ails our Humboldt Parkway and Kensington Corridor Neighbors, and Neighborhoods: “Before the Kensington Expressway was built, we never heard anyone talk about respiratory illnesses, After construction, air quality was a huge concern for our families, and now today, I’m one of many who has Asthma and Lung Cancer. This project should make us safer and healthier, not the opposite.
If the state doesn’t study the environmental impacts and take action to reduce the harm, my life, and many others will be put further at risk.”
That quote is of paramount importance, and expresses what very many Humboldt Parkway Neighborhood Residents feel about the Kensington Expressway, and about this generation's $Billion megaproject. It appears in a June 2024 edition of The Buffalo News, in a story about the new slate of lawsuits aimed at delaying and halting NYSDOT’s Project. It puts me in mind of the 1921 Massacre that crushed the (then) successful Greenwood Commercial District of Tulsa (OK).
The neighborhood was once widely celebrated as “Black Wall Street”, but a racially- motivated Domestic Terrorism Attack was launched against the thriving community, one morning. Black bodies crammed into unmarked mass graves are still being discovered there, today, due to the human rights disaster that was inflicted against those Black and African American residents. The Black Community in America is still trying to gain justice in that horror, too.
See: https:// www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/#?exible-content