They Come to Bury the BQE, Not to Praise It

The Brooklyn Paper reports that there’s talk brewing about seizing an opportunity to bury the section of the BQE that runs underneath the Promenade, rather than simply repair it (right, the Atlantic Ave. overpass where the roadway rises near the site of the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park and the One Brooklyn condo development):

Some Brooklyn Heights residents now want to replace the part of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs beneath the famed Promenade with a tunnel. “The beauty of a tunnel is it can [go] anywhere,” said Democratic District Leader Jo Anne Simon at a Tuesday meeting with the state transportation officials. The current plan for repairing the busy highway calls for rebuilding the steel and concrete decks, but Simon sees “an opportunity” to fix a “cockamamie” design once and for all, noting that one such tunnel was built beneath the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. A Department of Transportation said the state would “look at a tunnel option if there was a strong consensus that [it] must be looked at.”

Photo: Sarah Goodyear