The Cross Bronx Expressway is a lasting physical and environmental scar of the mid-twentieth-century interstate highway system, dividing neighborhoods, displacing communities, and exposing residents to decades of pollution, noise, and infrastructural neglect. Over the past decade, community advocates, including Loving the Bronx, have advanced the vision to “Cap the Cross Bronx” as a way to repair the urban fabric, reconnect the street grid, and transform the corridor into a shared public asset. Recent city, state, and federally supported studies have identified multiple feasible sites for intervention, marking a significant step toward addressing the harms created by the expressway.

This framework imagines the capped Cross Bronx Expressway as a new model for inhabitable public infrastructure: one that supports environmental repair, neighborhood reconnection, public space, housing, and civic life. The framework must:

1. Establish a strategy for reconnecting communities across the expressway through new caps, greenways, and public realm improvements;

2. Propose adaptable public realm buildings that provide shade, enclosure, storage, gathering space, and resources for learning, organizing, and making;

3. Support future equitable development by creating infrastructure that is accessible, community-responsive, and scalable across New York City.