🚨 BQE Triple Cantilever CLOSED 🚨 Brooklyn Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights, New York City

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade, also called the Esplanade, is a 1,826-foot (557 m)-long platform and pedestrian walkway cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Interstate 278) in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York City, United States. With views of Lower Manhattan's skyline and the New York Harbor, it came about as the byproduct of competing proposals for the highway's route that were resolved in the midst of World War II. Actual construction came after the war. As a structure built over a roadway, the Promenade is owned by the NYCDOT and is not considered a park; however, NYC Parks maintains the entire Promenade.

The Promenade runs from the west end of Remsen Street to the west end of Orange Street and can additionally be accessed from Montague Street and Pierrepont Place and the west ends of Pierrepont Street, Clark Street and Pineapple Street.

Planning
The need for a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to connect the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens predated World War II. A link between the Gowanus Parkway in Brooklyn and the Triborough Bridge in Queens was first proposed in 1936.[4] In 1939, a topographical engineer with New York's then new City Planning Department mapped a route for such a highway that hewed quite closely to the East River waterfront of the two boroughs.

Independently, New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses subsequently envisioned a somewhat more inland route. A proposal by Moses in 1941 to run the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway through the neighborhood was successfully opposed. This was in part due to the Brooklyn Eagle issue of September 19, 1942 having alarmed some residents of Brooklyn Heights with the front-page headline "Plan for Express Highway Is Shocking". The Eagle reported that the route proposed by Moses would bisect the neighborhood, even requiring at least the partial demolition of a recently built marble courthouse.

The news galvanized the leadership of the Brooklyn Heights Association, representing one of the city's more affluent and politically connected communities. Two men in particular, Roy M.D. Richardson, the association's president and a Wall Street corporate lawyer, and Ferdinand W. ("Fred") Nitardy, vice president for plant construction of Squibb Pharmaceuticals, which then had a major complex at the north end of Brooklyn Heights, lobbied hard for a route that would move the highway westward, to run along the water-fronting escarpment at the neighborhood's edge. Meanwhile, engineers with Andrews & Clark, the firm commissioned to build the highway, similarly concluded that the route along the escarpment was best, since an inland route would entail excessive condemnation costs.


The view from the Promenade at night
By March 10, 1943, the date of a hearing before the City Planning Commission, the outer, or Furman Street, route had been settled on. The proposal presented at the hearing was for two roadways of three lanes each in either direction to be built side-by-side on top of the Heights escarpment. A plea by Nitardy at the hearing for the highway to be built on two separate decks with a "cover" on which he could restore his rear garden was heard with seeming sympathy by Moses. Moses agreed to the idea of the cover, but then, a month after the hearing, Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore, whose office was in charge of the project, informed Nitardy by letter that the adopted plan "would preclude the use by you of the deck" above the highway, which would instead become a public esplanade. Moses betrayed no hint that a similar plan, with two highway decks covered, not by private gardens but by a public walkway, had already been drawn up at Andrews & Clark.

Opening and early years
Demolition of the warehouses that lined the eastern, or inland, side of Furman Street began in the fall of 1946, and construction of a triple cantilever section followed for the next few years. The southern half of the Promenade was opened to the public on October 7, 1950, and the northern half on December 7, 1951.The highway itself was not ready for traffic until 1954.

The Promenade and BQE in 2024, seen from Brooklyn Bridge Park
With the Promenade's success, various claims were made for who originated the idea. A proposal by the landowner and early developer Hezekiah Pierrepont in about 1827 for a promenade along the bluff of the Heights figures nowhere in the correspondence over the proposed highway. Other claims for and by Heights residents and others also lack documentation. One member of the Andrews & Clark team, the engineer S. Starr Walbridge, in 1982 claimed unequivocally that he had conceived both the cantilevering and the Promenade.