Will The City Keep Defunct Henry Hudson Parkway Off-Ramp Car-Free? Residents Hope So

A year after the city abruptly closed an uptown highway ramp for repairs, residents are urging officials to preserve the space as extra public space for pedestrians and cyclists.

Exit 12N, which previously linked motorists on the Henry Hudson Parkway to West 125th Street in Harlem, quickly became a popular haven for biking and walking and unlocked easier access to Riverside Park. But Department of Transportation officials won’t say whether they plan to keep it that way as they start work – even though motorists seem to be fine without it.

“Everybody loves it,” said Allegra LeGrande, an Inwood green space and bike advocate. “The cars don’t really need that.”

DOT recently began repairing the half-mile offshoot, and posted flyers around the work site that said the exit ramp “will remain closed until further notice.” Construction workers installed a fence at the West 125th Street entrance, and dumped large wooden beams on the roadway.

Ira Gershenhorn, a local park volunteer, has closely documented the street’s progress. “It’s a minor inconvenience for cars, but not terribly so,” he said.

Everyone outside of a car, meanwhile, can now more easily enjoy Riverside Park without scaling steep roads like Riverside Drive.

The off-ramp runs adjacent the rear of Riverside Park’s tennis courts and a pollinator garden. The road closure has already carved several well-worn desire paths that wind around the back of the courts. The low-lying path also now provides an easier access point to the northern end of Riverside Park, which otherwise only has entries via steep roads and steps that aren’t wheelchair accessible.

Those clear benefits motivated Gershenhorn, LeGrande and other residents to lobby DOT to repurpose the off-ramp even before it closed.

Last July, DOT’s Division of Bridges found a “condition” that “required urgent repair” to the under-deck that carries the 1930s Robert Moses-era parkway over Amtrak railroad tracks — thereby forcing the agency to intervene.

The unexpected closure already stitched the space back into the fabric of public space informally, said another resident.

“By having it car free people are going to do what they think is best for them,” said Felipe Castillo Trujillo, a safe streets advocate and member of local Community Board 9, who clarified that he doesn’t speak on behalf of the civic panel. “That means walking a dog on it, riding their bike on it, accessing parts of the park that were inaccessible to them.”

He noted that the restored parkland would complement local residents’ ongoing push to restore ferry service to the nearby waterfront pier at West 125th Street: “If people are going to make a push to bring a ferry, I would want that push to be successful.

“I think we all want this community to be successful, and a car-free exit could be part of that,” Castillo Trujillo.

“I would assume that if traffic patterns have rearranged somehow, those data are available,” he added. “For me the safest thing would be to have it car-free.”

Keeping the ramp car-free would not require a lot of bureaucratic manuevering. Unlike many other highways, the Parks Department already owns Exit 12N. That means the city would not need to pay for the underlying land from the state, the federal government or a private landowner.

Furthermore, the city has a storied history of transforming obsolete car infrastructure into public space for people. In 1973, after the infamous collapse of the West Side Highway downtown, officials turned the waterfront into a boulevard and a bike and pedestrian path, which became the nation’s busiest cycle path, the Hudson River Greenway.

Three years ago, the city turned a former highway bypass along the Midtown section of FDR Drive into a stunning, albeit short-lived waterfront esplanade on the East River Greenway. And just last month, DOT reopened the Carroll Street Bridge in Gowanus to pedestrians, cyclists and emergency vehicles.