Pedestrian Bridge in Van Cortlandt Park Has an Obstacle: $7.5 Million

Before the dawn of automobiles, Van Cortlandt Park was an unbroken expanse of dense woodlands, steep ridges and meadows, interrupted only by the gentle murmur of Tibbetts Brook.

Then came the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Mosholu Parkway and the Major Deegan Expressway, major highways that cross through — and effectively cut up — the 1,146-acre park, the second largest in the Bronx.

Now, the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, an advocacy group, and other residents of the northwest Bronx are petitioning city officials to build a pedestrian bridge over the Major Deegan to reconnect a particularly isolated section of the park. The new bridge would also sew together the broken halves of the popular Old Croton Aqueduct Trail.

“Right now, to get across the Deegan on the Old Croton Aqueduct, you have to go all the way up and loop around and briefly leave the park,” said Christina Taylor, executive director of the friends group. “It’s a half-hour detour. With a pedestrian bridge, it would take a few minutes.”

There are five pedestrian bridges that cross over and under highways in the park, but they are mainly in the northern half. The effort to build a sixth over the Deegan Expressway, in the park’s southeast corner, dates back to at least the 1990s.

In 1999, the City Council voted to allow the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to build a water-filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park, beneath the Mosholu Golf Course. (Construction on the project, which will filter drinking water from the Croton watershed, is nearing completion.)

The Council directed the department to study options for a pedestrian bridge over the Deegan Expressway inside the park. The agency’s obligation, it said, was to “conduct a feasibility study and, if the study determines the bridge is technically, legally and financially feasible,” to pay for a new bridge.

The agency released its feasibility study on the pedestrian bridge in 2009. It examined five possible locations for such a bridge and identified one — just south of the 233rd Street exit — as the most desirable. The price: $7.5 million.

Now, however, the department is telling parks advocates and residents that it cannot afford to build the bridge, which, it says, lies outside its mission of providing drinking water and sewage treatment. The agency has been under pressure in recent years to hold down rate increases.

In 2004, five years before the feasibility study was issued, the agency agreed to dedicate $200 million, in a so-called Croton mitigation fund, to park improvements in the Bronx in exchange for the use of parkland. But the agreement was made before the bridge feasibility study had been completed, and it did not specify the building of a pedestrian bridge with the money, as Carter H. Strickland Jr., the head of the environmental agency under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, explained in a letter to a local community board in 2011.

Park advocates and local elected officials reject the agency’s logic, saying that it was the Department of Environmental Protection’s own foot-dragging on the study that prevented the bridge from being considered for financing with the mitigation funds.

“This bridge is something that we were promised years ago,” said Jeffrey Dinowitz, a Democratic state assemblyman who represents the Bronx. “It’s another promise broken by the D.E.P. They have been an enemy of our community for many years.”