Exhaust and territorialisation at the Washington Bridge Apartments, New York City, 1963–1973 David Gissen Department of Architecture, The California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA Introduction Completed in 1963, the Washington Bridge Apart- ments are part of the Washington Bridge Extension Complex sited above the Trans-Manhattan Express- way in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of upper Manhattan (Fig. 1). The extension complex spans the expressway and includes the Washington Bridge Apartments, the Pier Luigi Nervi-designed Port Authority Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, and a parking structure that services the buildings. The following essay examines the centrepiece of the Washington Bridge Extension Complex, the Washington Bridge Apartment development, one of the first highway ‘air-rights developments’ in the United States — a form of building in which structures span the open space above highways. The Washing- ton Bridge Apartments provided an economic and environmental strategy that enabled municipal, state and developer agents to use financial arrangements and advanced engineering potentially to rectify the pollution problems that highway construction pre- sented to the city, while encouraging the transform- ation of Washington Heights from a working-class to a middle-class neighbourhood. In the earliest studies for the extension complex, the proposed apartment buildings were located in the air-rights space above the highway, and the proposed apart- ments were for middle-class residents, a stark contrast to the historically working-class population of the immediate area. While state-subsidised, the influx of middle-class residents to the neighbourhood and the future promise of the taxes levied against the buildings themselves, made this type of development attractive to the municipal and state governments. The key impediment to the realisation of highway air-rights development in Washington Heights (or any locale, for that matter) remained the intolerable levels of pollution above urban highways. By the early 1960s highways were central in debates regard- ing the environmental impact of automobility on cities. The planners, engineers and architects of this and other air-rights developments promised to rectify the problems of invidious automobile pollution at least within the context of the air-rights develop- ment itself. The complex’s thin, air-circulating slabs, soot-repelling aluminium exterior, and proposed exhaust-removing ventilation system relate to its hostile surroundings in ways that appear to acknowl- edge the realities of its environment, while making habitation possible. In hindsight, such proposals seem at once optimistic and irresponsible. The result- ing intersection of the demographics of air rights — their use to shore up shrinking tax bases and the environmental enclave character of the buildings — produced a new image of urban gentrification: one in which the transformation of a neighbourhood was enacted by simultaneously introducing pollution, dirt and grime via the highway and providing an enclave from that pollution through the apartment building’s engineering. Highways, air-rights and pollution In postwar New York City, highways provided convenient routes in and out of the city centre, 449 The Journal of Architecture Volume 12 Number 4 # 2007 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360701614722