When I walk through Tribeca today, it is hard to imagine that a major highway was supposed to cut right through it. The streets are quiet and tree-lined, filled with converted lofts and artisanal bakeries. But if you look at a map of the neighborhood from 1960, you will find a thick red line running north-south straight through its center. It was never built.

Robert Moses wanted to build it anyway.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway, known as the LOMEX, was supposed to connect Brooklyn and Queens to the Holland Tunnel via a six-lane elevated highway that would have sliced through SoHo, Tribeca, and Chinatown. It would have displaced thousands of residents and demolished entire blocks of nineteenth-century buildings. Moses had the power, the funding, and a long record of getting exactly what he wanted.

This time, something stopped him.

Jane Jacobs is usually the hero in this story, and she deserves credit for organizing resistance against highway projects that threatened neighborhoods across New York. But the real reason LOMEX never happened was not activism alone. It was economics, timing, and the fact that building an elevated highway through Manhattan turned out to be even more expensive than anyone had guessed.

The cost overruns were staggering. By 1968, the project budget had tripled from its original estimate. The city could not justify spending hundreds of millions to demolish a neighborhood when the housing crisis was getting worse and the subway system was crumbling. Moses wanted to build highways that moved cars fast through dense urban areas. The people living in those areas wanted something different.

But here is what most stories about this period miss: the highways that never got built shaped New York just as much as the ones that did.

Consider what happened where Moses actually succeeded. The Cross-Bronx Expressway destroyed 6,000 housing units and displaced tens of thousands of residents. It created a physical barrier between communities that still exists today. The highway did not cause all of the Bronx’s decline, but it certainly accelerated it by making certain neighborhoods less desirable for investment and more difficult to access.

The BQE in Brooklyn tells a similar story. Built through working-class neighborhoods in the 1940s and 50s, it created an urban wall separating communities on either side. The concrete pillars cast permanent shadows over streets below.

Now look at Tribeca. No highway means no elevated concrete structure cutting through its center. The neighborhood retained its street grid, its scale, and its walkability. When real estate investors discovered it in the 1980s, they found intact loft buildings and a coherent urban fabric that could be converted to residential use. That conversion would have been impossible if an expressway had already divided the neighborhood in half.

The same logic applies to Chinatown. The LOMEX was supposed to run right through Chinatown’s heart, displacing families and businesses that had lived there for generations. Instead, the neighborhood held on and became one of the most vibrant cultural districts in the city. Walking through Canal Street today, it is hard to imagine it as a highway corridor.

There is a deeper lesson here about how cities work. We tend to think about urban planning as visible results: buildings, bridges, roads. But some of the most important aspects of a city are defined by what was almost built but never materialized. The absence of infrastructure creates possibilities that no architect could have planned.

When I think about this, I am reminded of something my grandmother used to say. She lived in Queens her entire life and watched Moses’ projects reshape the borough in ways she never approved of. She told me once that you can look at any neighborhood and tell its history by counting how many major roads run through it. Highways feel like they were designed for cars. Streets without them feel designed for people.

It is a simple observation that captures something important about urban design. The best cities are not the ones with the most impressive infrastructure. They are the ones where it gets out of the way and lets human life happen at street level.

The highways that never were in New York did more than spare neighborhoods from destruction. They created an implicit boundary between what a city can become and what it already is. Every time someone tries to build something massive through an established area, they are asking whether the existing urban fabric has value that efficiency cannot replace.

The people who fought Moses in the 1960s understood this instinctively. They did not have data visualizations or traffic models or cost-benefit analyses to justify their resistance. What they had was a sense of place and the conviction that neighborhoods are worth more than the cars that drive through them.

That conviction turned out to be economically prescient as well as morally right. The neighborhoods that escaped Moses’ expressway plans became some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Tribeca is one of the wealthiest zip codes in Manhattan. Chinatown generates billions in economic activity every year. Neither would exist in its current form if a highway had cut through it.

The lesson is not that we should never build infrastructure. Every city needs roads, bridges, and transit systems to function. But there is a difference between building what a city needs and imposing a design philosophy on a neighborhood that was never meant to accommodate it. The highways that never were in New York represent one of those rare moments when the city pushed back against efficiency and chose something harder to measure but more valuable in the long run.

You can see the result every time you walk down a quiet street in a neighborhood that has no highway running through it. The buildings are older, the sidewalks are wider, and the air sounds different. It is not magic. It is simply what happens when a city decides that its streets belong to people first and everything else second.