Pre-Moses, the short trip to Kensico Dam consumed an entire day of traffic misery.

Evidence

Fourteen miles north of the city, beyond Mount Vernon, Bronxville, Scarsdale and White Plains, was an unrestricted attraction, Kensico Dam, surrounded by 2,500 acres of trees and meadows, but, since the Bronx River Parkway was still under construction, the only way to get to Kensico—after crossing the Harlem River on the narrow Broadway drawbridge that caused traffic jams even when it wasn’t raised (as it was on the average of fourteen times each day) or on the even narrower East River bridges to the south and creeping through the narrow and often unpaved streets of the Bronx—was to take another narrow road that led through the traffic-clogged downtowns of the four Westchester communities. Families who left New York in the morning were lucky to arrive at Kensico by late afternoon. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 634

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the trees-as-infrastructure essay’s theme of access infrastructure, and more specifically foreshadows why Moses’ parkway system mattered as purely connective infrastructure.