Generations of governors and mayors have wrestled with what to do about the Triple Cantilever portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This stretch of highway adjoins the Brooklyn Heights historic district, where community resistance forced Robert Moses to interrupt the destruction he inflicted to the north and the south, by building a triple decker structure near the waterfront with the iconic Brooklyn Heights Promenade on its top.
The problem is that the 70-year-old structure was not built to support the huge trucks that use it today and, importantly, was de-iced with salt every winter, notwithstanding the fact that salt plus water causes concrete and rebar to disintegrate — as was dramatically demonstrated by the tragic apartment collapse in Florida a few years ago. None of this distinguishes the Triple Cantilever from much of the rest of New York’s aging highway infrastructure — including the hundreds of other concrete and rebar bridges in the Department of Transportaion’s inventory.
What makes the Triple Cantilever unique is the cantilever design itself — which makes the typical lane-by-lane highway repairs impossible — and the fact that it is wedged in the narrow space between the landmarked residential district above and the popular Brooklyn Bridge Park below.
To their credit, in 2018 then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg tried to solve the problem — announcing a plan to tear down and rebuild the existing structure, while building a temporary highway next to it to handle the traffic in the 8 to 10 years of anticipated construction. While the plan would have made perfect sense for a stretch of the NJ Turnpike, or a new bridge across the Hudson River, it would not work in the narrow corridor between the Promenade and the Park. The proposal was denounced by neighborhood groups, as well as a chorus of local elected officials — including then-Borough President Eric Adams. De Blasio stepped back and appointed an Expert Panel to consider the issue.
When I became DOT Commissioner in 2021, I asked our team of expert engineers to come up with a plan we could execute in real time, consistent with the findings and recommendations of the Expert Panel and recognizing the geographic constraints.
Their solution was stunningly simple — to reduce the weight on the structure, we would change the lane markings from three dangerously narrow lanes, with no shoulders, to two regulation-width lanes, with shoulders and exit lanes. We also secured legislation to permit the use of our first-of-its-kind Weigh in Motion system to ticket overweight trucks using the highway illegally.
We had already halted the use of salt on the Triple Cantilever, but the decades of accumulated salt in the concrete continued its corrosive work anytime it rained. The solution was to waterproof the structure by replacing leaky seams, gutters and drains, and then applying a waterproof coating. The expert engineers reported that this combination of measures would provide at least 20 years of safe use, allowing time to address the corridor-wide environmental equity issues and to plan for the highway’s future.
De Blasio announced this new plan, the weight-reduction measures were implemented, the waterproofing was in the budget, and we even held the first organizational meetings with community groups to arrive at a corridor-wide vision for the entire BQE. The public reaction was positive and traffic studies showed that the lane changes had resulted in substantial safety improvements with only a minor impact on travel times. (The current traffic issues on the Triple Cantilever and surrounding streets could be addressed by closing the Atlantic Avenue entrance and its counterpart near Old Fulton, as suggested by the Expert Panel.)
But the new year brought a new mayor, who put his then-chief-of-staff in charge, and in short order the funding was removed from the budget, the waterproofing effort was rejected as just “kicking the can down the road” and lacking in “swagger,” and we were back to square one.
Since then the DOT has spent millions of dollars on consultants coming up with over-the-top proposals for the Triple Cantilever — with budgets of $3-$5 billion, building over and destroying access to portions of Brooklyn Bridge Park for a decade, resulting in what one local elected official described as “the Hanging Gardens of Babylon” where the Promenade now stands, and providing the equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” for the rest of the corridor. The only concrete result of these efforts has been to unite all the relevant community groups, from one end of the corridor to the other, in opposition to the options the DOT proposed.
Four years later, there is still NO plan and there certainly is no funding for any of the multi-billion-dollar proposals. Instead, the DOT recently announced its intention to launch an Environmental Impact Statement process – studying fourteen different “alternatives,” with the temporary highway back on the table (although there is still no place to put it) and with an estimated construction time of 10 years. The DOT has not even shared the results of a long overdue engineering study to determine whether tearing down and rebuilding the highway would cause buildings on the street above to slide down the hill after the next heavy rain. To call this legacy embarrassing is an understatement.
But there is still time to get it right. This past December all the local elected officials in the area wrote to the DOT to ask that they return to some version of the rehabilitation plan from four years ago, and more recently those same elected officials joined a corridor-wide coalition of community groups in asking DOT not to commence a wasteful EIS process just as they are about to leave office.
If at least 20 years of safe use is not sufficient, engineers have come forward with a proposal to add structural supports from the street below — like the flying buttresses of old — not only extending the life of the roadway but permitting lane-by-lane repairs in the future — eliminating the underlying flaw in the cantilever design. This is not just a theoretical possibility. In the run-up to the recent vote on the Vision Plan for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, City Hall agreed that if I voted “yes” and the Plan was approved they would return to the remediation plan, if it could still be done and did not require an EIS. It can and it wouldn’t. If they were prepared to agree to this solution as part of a deal to buy my vote, they ought to be willing to do so now simply because it is the right thing to do. Government should not be a game of “Let’s Make A Deal.”
At this point, the ultimate decision as to the BQE’s future will be made by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his team. But it is not too late for the Adams administration to do the right thing, by commencing the remediation and repair efforts they easily could have completed by now, thus providing the new mayor a safe transition to a reimagined BQE, meeting the 21st century needs of New Yorkers and remedying the damage done by Robert Moses and his followers.
Hank Gutman is a retired partner of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where he headed the Intellectual Property practice. For the past 30 years he has been involved in a variety of local civic activities. He chairs the board of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, has served on every version of the Brooklyn Bridge Park board since the original LDC in 1998, was on then-Mayor de Blasio’s Expert Panel on the BQE and served as NYC DOT Commissioner in 2021.
