Right Side of the Tracks

As urban land grows ever scarcer and more expensive, planners are increasingly turning their eyes skyward to the unused space overhead. And when they survey the city, the airspace that stands out most is that over open railroad tracks and highways.

A start has already been made toward tapping this new urban dimension. In Boston, the Prudential Center is built on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike. In Manhattan, four high-rise apartment buildings have straddled the approaches to the George Washington Bridge since 1963. Chicago's 41-story Prudential Building rose over the Illinois Central tracks just east of Michigan Avenue nearly twelve years ago, and only last month, the last legal obstacles were removed from plans to construct $1 billion worth of apartments and office buildings over 188 acres of Illinois Central track and switching yard near Chicago's lakefront.

Vaulting the Rails. New York City has now been presented with two new and particularly imaginative schemes for using the space over railroad tracks. The first, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and designed by a five-man team of New York architects, proposes building over a 37-block length of the New Haven Railroad tracks on upper Park Avenue, from 97th Street, where the tracks emerge from underground, north to the Harlem River.

First, the tracks would be covered by a continuous concrete vault that would muffle train noise. Atop the vault would run a traffic-free pedestrian mall dotted with shops, restaurants, theaters and schools and connected to new mixed-income housing on either side. Since the new Harlem apartment buildings would be bigger than the tenements they replace, the planners hope to encourage racial integration. Moreover, because the project would be built in stages, people living in the path of construction could immediately move into adjacent completed portions, thus minimizing urban renewal's thorniest political and human problem--relocation.

Unity for Division. The second scheme, announced by Mayor John Lindsay last week, is really a doubleheader: it starts with 5 1/2 miles of existing Long Island Rail Road tracks in Brooklyn, calls for covering them over first with the proposed Cross Brooklyn Expressway, then placing on top of that a "spine city" of schools and colleges, housing, parks and community facilities. The planners envision shuttle trains and moving sidewalks to carry people to and from the length of the spine, see the linear plan as capable of indefinite extension.

"Expressways tend to divide communities when they cut through them," said Mayor Lindsay, speaking of the Brooklyn project. "But here, a linear city would be a unifying factor instead." The same could as easily be said of the plan to cover over the Park Avenue tracks. Both designs suggest that, in the future, the right side of the tracks to live on will be in one direction: up.

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