A sewer project was quietly converted into a park corridor

Evidence

With the population of Queens burgeoning in 1951, the Board of Estimate approved a huge new storm sewer for the borough. When Moses had finished taking a hand in its planning, it was running along a route linking Alley Pond, Cunningham and Kissena parks, enough land along it had been condemned so there could be at least a strip of park land all the way from Flushing Meadows to the city line, arrangements had been made to fill the gash made for the sewer with Sanitation Department fill according to plans drawn up by the Park Department—and after decades of dreaming about a Queens park corridor, the land for it was at last in his hands. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 4420

Categorization

• XREF: Instantiates the power-broker mechanism from ch32 that a single official can bend allocations to his own agenda, and the disguised-funding trick from ch15 (line items in other departments’ budgets).
• SEED: A low utility project (storm sewer) turned into a greenway: an essay angle on how infrastructure budgets can be co-opted for landscape ends between the lines of intended purposes.