Here’s a Solution for Fixing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway: Get Rid of It

The landscape architect Michael Rapuano, who designed the BQE along with his partner Gilmore Clarke, spent time in Rome, gazing at the urban vista from terraces just like this. Charles Birnbaum, the head of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, makes a persuasive case that the Promenade was Rapuano’s translation of Rome’s Pincio into Brooklynese. The architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi have made the point that the BQE’s stacked design — “compact bunk-bed urbanism,” they call it — should inspire a new generation of infrastructure that incorporates parkland and public space.