Urban Legend

Just about the time that Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was hitting streaming services worldwide, the Bronx River Art Center on Tremont Avenue was closing an exhibition about another of history’s greatest monsters: the Cross Bronx Expressway. Despised by generations of drivers, neighbors, urbanists, and every college sophomore with a used copy of The Power Broker, the highway—which slices through the borough with the efficacy of a “meat axe,” as Robert Caro described in his 1974 classic—has become a symbol of bad planning, the preferred scapegoat for the northern borough’s decline after midcentury. But is it possible that this monster, with its assortment of mismatched infrastructural parts, just wants to be loved?

Cross Bronx/Living Legend refrained from answering in the affirmative, though the implication was clear enough. Photographs from documentarian Abigail Montes revealed, in addition to the vehicular squalor, the surprisingly human vitality of the high-traffic corridor. Elsewhere, an elaborate sound installation relayed the voices of local residents and activists speaking out about neglect and pollution in support of the community on the roadway’s margins. In their most impressive curatorial flourish, the center and its co-organizers at the Architectural League of New York assembled an array of archival materials, including newspaper clippings and protest pamphlets (“Mr. Moses: We Can’t Live on a Highway,” read a flier) that date back to the 1950s, showing that resistance to the Cross Bronx is at least as old as the expressway itself. “The story of the Cross-Bronx has always been one written by and about these Great Men,” said Elizabeth Hamby, a Bronxite herself as well a director of Civic Engagement at the Department of City Planning, which helped sponsor the exhibition. “This show kind of turns that on its head, putting the people who live here at the center of the narrative.”

Yet at the afternoon event marking the end of the show’s two-month run, the spotlight landed on a different kind of artifact. “We just got this randomly in the mail,” said Hamby. The large box she brandished turned out to be Cross Bronx Expressway, a new board game from California-based publisher GMT Games set in the years of the highway’s development. Cast as any of several civic forces (“Public,” “Private,” “Community”), players vie to advance their respective interests, marshaling limited resources in an attempt to stave off social and economic ruin.

Or at least that’s what it seemed to be about. “How does this work?” asked a younger attendee, leafing through one of the three book-length “Player Orientation Guides” intended for use throughout the game. There were also ninety-six Event Cards, twenty-four Position Cards, and no fewer than 127 wooden pieces—none portending any obvious application, but making, in the aggregate, a seriously cool-looking mess spread out over the game-board map. Like its titular roadway, Cross Bronx Expressway appeared to be a bit of an ungainly beast. But there can be a certain beauty in the grotesque.