High Bridge, spanning the Harlem River and connecting Manhattan to the Bronx, is the oldest bridge in New York City. It is also an aqueduct, or used to be. Built in the 1840s, when public health officials across the country were battling cholera, it carried clean water from upstate to a growing urban population. In just a few decades, planners would build not just aqueducts but the so-called sanitary greens that today we call parks, including Highbridge Park, on the Manhattan side of the bridge. A side benefit of High Bridge was the walkway above the aqueduct that allowed Bronx pedestrians to reach Manhattan. By the 1960s, though, the aqueduct was no longer in use, and city planners, working to fight what was then called urban blight, decided to disconnect the boroughs. The Parks Department closed the old bridge, cutting off an artery.
In June, the Parks Department reopened High Bridge to pedestrians, not just resuming the flow of foot traffic but also connecting it to a more recent innovation in public health, called the Giraffe Path, which was spearheaded by Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Fullilove has spent the past 30 years investigating how broken connections between various parts of cities harm public health and, more recently, exploring ways to reconnect them. The Giraffe Path, a six-mile trail that runs from Central Park to the Cloisters, is designed to do just that, providing links between communities that have, by Fullilove’s analysis, undergone systematic disinvestment, resulting in numerous public health crises: AIDS epidemics, crack addiction, asthma, post-traumatic stress and obesity.
[For more of this story, written by Robert Sullivan, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06...the-town-shrink.html]
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