If it turns into nonstop luxury highrises with private lobbies, as is already happening in parts of West Street, not so good. EXCURSUS OUTBOARD, OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY AND ITS AFTERMATH If a city has a memory, then the legacy of discarded infrastructural works forms an important part of that memory. -HAN MEYER, City and Port ะพ UNBUILT PROJECT HAS HAD A GREATER IMPACT ON N NEW YORK CITY'S RECENT HISTORY THAN WESTWAY, THE PLAN TO SUBMERGE THE OLD SIXLANE HIGHWAY der hundreds of acres of parkland and development along the West Side erfront The last three decades of the twentieth century were domi ated by inflamed arguments for and against it, and, as a new century pens the consequences of its defeat continue to shape all future development on the waterfront. Westway is the road not taken, and it haunts every choice made in its stead. Which is not to say that the man in the street even remembers it. The paradox of New York is that it is at once famously destructive and forgetful of its past, and forever walking in its oversized footprints. Those who wonder how a great city, capable of doing so much more along its riverfront, came to such an uninspiring compromise-a landscaped transit corridor that calls itself a park, a highway with a nonwalkable divider that styles itself a boulevard-will do well to review the history of Westway, before it slides from our memory bank. THE UNHAPPY CHOICE to ring the edge of Manhattan with highways, thereby cutting off the public from the water, is usually laid at the feet of Robert Moses, New York's allpowerful planning czar. Moses has become the hissed villain in the municipality's Passion Play, just as Frederick Law Olmsted, who, with his partner Calvert Vaux, gave the city its greatest treasures, Central Park and Prospect Park, is our hero. In fact, it was Olmsted who initially proposed a wide thoroughfare, or "parkway," along Manhattan's western edge, past his Riverside Park. Olmsted had a vision of adorning New York with a system of neighborhood parkways connect lng up new parks, to serve the carriage trade (this was preautomobile). As he and Vaux imagined it, the parkway was to be a pleasurably snaking, verdant route 260 feet wide, enough space to allow a wide path for vehicles own the middle, alternating rows of trees and walkways, then sideroads or vehicles to alight in front of buildings. They managed to build a few ng examples, such as Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway, which in tUtn msPIred a nationwide parkway movement. Olmsted's son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., also a prominent city plan ner, continued the work of his father in advocating a necklace of parkways around the perimeter of New York. But it was Julius Miller, as Manhattan borough president, who proposed the arterial roadway for the West Side in 1925 and oversaw the construction of its first section in 1930, and so it was Miller for whom the structure was named.