And has any agency done a traffic study as to what will be the effect of all these cars converging on the intersection of Webster Avenue and 200th Street (aka, Bedford Park Boulevard) to attend the Botanical Gardens?
This is, after all, a residential neighborhood, and a resilient one at that. It has survived all the pressures of the past 50 years, turned over its ethnic makeup several times, and continually revived to save itself. Its priceless architecture alone spans several generations, from the Victorian 1880's, to new law tenements, to 1920's Art Deco, to 1950's shlock. Can it now withstand all those limos from downtown?
The Gardens and its wealthy patrons have ruled the creation of the parking garage, according to local merchants. Botanical Square has been nothing more than an illegal staging area for the construction company, as has been the Metro North Parking lot, to hell with the residents of Botancal Square. What the Garden wants, the Garden gets. Downtown money talks, and dictates.
Then again, it was the downtown money of the 19th Century, from Vanderbilt's railroad, Belmont's Elevated line, wealthy patrons of the Jerome Park Racetrack, the Archdiocese (its College and Convent), the Gardens and the Zoological Society, Thomas Edison and his studio on Oliver Place and Decatur Avenue, that attracted the gliterati of that era to this bluff over the valley of the long gone Mill River.
The rich, students of the rich, the clergy, the professors, the actors, directors, and producers, the architects, and the financiers, they all made Bedford Park the equivalent of Greenwich, CT in 1900. Perhaps that downtown money will do it again.
But what of those who reside there today?
I was supervisor of that tiny post office from 1977-78 when it was a slow, quiet, lonely outpost. They've been wanting to close it for years but the sisters at a nearby convent always fought to keep it open. 