Advocacy
Bronx River Alliance
The Bronx River Alliance has restored the Bronx River through three linked programs since 2001, reclaiming a waterway that industry, highway construction, and decades of municipal neglect had turned into a dumping ground. The Alliance now leads one of the most sustained environmental-justice recovery efforts in New York City.
- Location
- Bronx, NY
- Founded
- 2001
- Website
- https://bronxriver.org/
The Bronx River Alliance incorporated in 2001 as the successor to the Bronx River Working Group, which the New York City Parks Department’s Partnerships for Parks program convened in 1997. The Alliance brought together more than sixty community organizations, public agencies, and businesses around the shared work of reclaiming the river.
The Alliance runs three linked programs. The Ecology Team restores the riverbank and the salt-marsh estuary at the river’s mouth. The Greenway Team has built most of a planned twenty-three-mile continuous greenway from the Kensico Dam in Westchester County south to Soundview Park. The Education Team runs youth science and stewardship programs from the Bronx River House at Starlight Park in West Farms.
The Alliance emerged from the cumulative damage the Cross Bronx Expressway, decades of industrial dumping, and a century of municipal disregard inflicted on the river and the communities along it. The Alliance has reintroduced the alewife fish run, restored tidal wetlands at Soundview, and brought the river’s water quality back to levels that support aquatic life. The Reimagine the Cross Bronx Expressway study now draws on the Alliance’s community-planning work as the city considers capping the expressway trench.
Cited in
- Cross Bronx Expresswaynew-york