Bronx River Crossing encourages respect for, and accessibility to, the water, maintaining relationships among communities living and working along the river, through architectural and urban experimentation, while increasing awareness and disseminating knowledge of its ecosystems and legacy. We directly engage local experts, invested youth, and university students in long-term workshops as protagon
ists driving the process, so neighborhood high-schoolers become proud communicators of their discoveries, and agents for a better future in their own neighborhoods. Bronx River Crossing also aims to reveal and strengthen broader water-based networks further afield throughout New York City. Through concerted long-term action between heterogenous participants, Bronx River Crossing encourages communities to become instigators in the discovery of nodes of opportunity for urban ecological and social reclamation. Bronx River Crossing began in 2009, with a grant from the Van Alen Institute as a study of the Bronx River Watershed. From January to June of 2009, we formed teams of invested local youth and university students to study the Bronx beyond entrenched preconceptions of territory, by designing and constructing a large-scale layered model of the ecology and human settlement of the Lower Bronx River Watershed, and then floating it downriver in an overnight campout and all-day public event in close collaboration with the Bronx River Alliance and the New York City Urban Park Rangers. The resulting Watershed Raft juxtaposed pre-industrial riparian zones with decrepit infrastructural networks, laying the groundwork for a multifaceted hands-on exploration of sites requiring social and spatial reclamation. One of the sites that we were to discover is Cass Gilbert’s Westchester Avenue Tain Station. With funding from the Blinder Award of the James Marston Fitch Foundation, and in collaboration with the Bronx River Alliance we are currently working on a strategic framework— through mapping, drawing, and experimentation with tectonic reassembly— for transferring this abandoned 1908 station, currently spanning Amtrak’s right-of way, to the adjacent waterfront, to become a traveling cultural and ecological node of a revitalized Bronx River waterway and greenway.
