By: Foreign Correspondent, Lucas R. Watson
Buffalo’s parkway system was designed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. These spaces include Delaware Park, Cazenovia Park, South Park, Front Park and Humboldt Park (now Martin Luther King Jr. Park). These were connected via parkways intended to act as an ‘emerald necklace’ for the City of Buffalo.
One of the many parts of the ‘emerald necklace’ was the former Humboldt Parkway, which connected Delaware Park and Humboldt Park.
Now, it’s known as the Kensington Expressway, NYS Route 33. This connects Downtown Buffalo to Rochester, but its busiest stretch is between Buffalo and the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. The expressway runs directly down what was the Humboldt Parkway, constructed in 1958.
It divided entire neighborhoods. Canisius University sits right along Humboldt Parkway and is a part of the very communities that were forced to separate by the construction of this freeway.
The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) has proposed a project that will cover the Kensington Expressway to emulate the Humboldt Parkway. It will turn considerable sections of it into a tunnel.
State officials claim that this projected project will help bring the community back together after years of forcefully being separated by the expressway. However, many advocates and members of the community are against this decision, suggesting that it could breed an environmental catastrophe.
As WBFO reported in June, Wayne Blassingame and sixty other members of the Parkway Coalition have entered an ongoing lawsuit to bring back the Humboldt Parkway. The article states, “The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court on Thursday, would also require the state to remove the portions of the Scajaquada Expressway that run through Delaware Park.”
Marcia Ladiana, who worked for the Department of Transportation and has lived in the Humboldt Park area for thirty five years is quoted as saying, “I’ve seen people get sick, die, and all because of this expressway,” she continued, “I see no reason to have a six-lane expressway through a residential neighborhood.” Ladiana noted how the decision to do this may “perpetuate this for another 100 years,” and other organizations seemingly agree.
According to the Kensington Expressway Project FAQ page, the tunnel will be a bit longer than three-quarters of a mile (4,150 feet) and will run from Dodge Street to Sidney Street. Filling the Expressway is not an option due to the amount of daily traffic that runs through the Kensington Expressway.
The project is expected to start this year and be completed by 2028. This would cost approximately one billion dollars, which comes from state and federal funding. While there are plans for the ventilation of exhaust fumes along the expressway, all of the projected air concentrations for particulate matter are well below federal-based health standards, also according to the FAQ page.
In February of 2024, the Western New York Youth Climate Council filed a lawsuit against Kensington Expressway, as the council claims that the project has failed “to be consistent with the NY State Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act’s emissions reduction goals,” according to WKBW. Furthermore, they report that, since the announcement of the project in 2022, there have been “four total lawsuits against the project.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has also sued NYSDOT, writing on their website that the NYSDOT’s “decision to proceed with redeveloping Buffalo’s Kensington Expressway without conducting an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS),” is a “refusal” to “study the environmental impacts of the Kensington Expressway Project.”
Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, Director of NYCLU’s Racial Justice Center was quoted by the organization as stating that this decision directly impacts a “predominantly Black community that has carried the burden of decades of environmental racism.” The organization writes, “Today, the Humboldt Park neighborhood has some of the worst air quality and the highest rates of concentrated asthma in New York.”
WGRZ reported on Sept. 20 that the transportation department had “asked Judge Emilio Colaiacovo to dismiss the case,” following their formal response to the claims from these groups. Adam Walters, one of the lawyers who is representing the plaintiffs stated that “Respondents (NYSDOT) would have this Court believe that the Project is the best thing ‘since sliced bread’ with significant community support that went through a comprehensive and thorough environmental review, which achieved all that would or could be achieved by an EIS with a 35,000-page record to prove it,” adding “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Walters goes on to say that NYSDOT had failed to “analyze the impact of traffic on roadways adjacent to the project.” Furthermore, NYSDOT cited the new Buffalo Bills’ stadium as a part of their reasoning as to why “no additional environmental reviews [were] needed,” according to WGRZ. Walters points out that the large difference between those two situations is the proximity the Kensington project has to “dense urban neighborhoods.”
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