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 ac…