APE SHALL NOT KILL APE: Lost Apartments of the North Shore: Richmond Terrace at Bank Street (east side)

Monday, July 11, 2022

Lost Apartments of the North Shore: Richmond Terrace at Bank Street (east side)

Letting loose the lunatics wasn't the greatest of ideas
Giving them plans and money to squander
Should have been the worst of our fears

Paul Weller, "The Planner's Dreams Goes Wrong"

In my cataloguing of the devastation caused by the construction of the various NYC housing projects on the North Shore, I was constantly puzzled by the elimination of several blocks of buildings along Richmond Terrace. Only with recently being told where I can find archives copies of the SI Advance (1945-2018), have I discovered what happened.

In addition to building the Richmond Terrace Houses, the city planners decided they were going to continue the promenade and multi-lane Richmond Terrace divided by a median from Westervelt Avenue all the way down to Lafayette Avenue. To accommodate the plan, several blocks of existing buildings were purchased and demolished.

Whelp, like so many well-intentioned plans, this one never came to fruition. Oh, sure, they bought and bulldozed the buildings, but they never built the expanded Terrace or extended the promenade. To be fair, I don't love the original idea, but right now, the narrow stretch of the Terrace in front of the projects is one of the worst bottlenecks on the North Shore. So, businesses and lives were uprooted for an expensive plan that was never implemented. Good going, people.

For these lost apartment posts I wouldn't normally include pictures of so many individual buildings, but the sheer number of them seemed to warrant it. I want to make clear the extent of the destruction wrought for no ultimate yield.