Seton Park plan stalls, motorists face rationing

1974

Hurry up and wait

Great beginnings and screeching halts.

Important neighborhood institutions began life in new homes this year. Two others didn’t fare so well. Riverdale Senior Center gained approval to create a home-away-from-home for local residents of a certain age in the still-underconstruction Century Building at 2600 Netherland Ave., and the Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy completed the construction of a new school on Palisade Avenue near West 254th Street.

The 50th Precinct moved into its new headquarters on Kingsbridge Terrace along with a host of new services including an Emergency Services Unit and a full-time ambulance.

Meanwhile, construction at Seton Park was grinding to a halt.

The long-awaited park at Independence Avenue between West 232nd and West 235th streets was supposed to have been ready by mid-May. Instead, the contractor shut down the job and sent his workers home because, he said, he needed to be paid for blasting away an unanticipated quantity of rock on the site. Work wasn’t completed until 1976.

Riverdale was also slowed by the 1974 gas crisis. Thanks to a sales boycott by Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, gas supplies were being rationed across the country.

Jim Honeycutt, the owner of a Sunoco station on West 230th Street, described the daily tension at his garage — with round-the-block lines forming long before his 6 a.m. opening.

“They start to wait at 4 a.m.,” he said, “because they know I’m going to pump every morning at 6. I start early because I want to give gas to the people who need to get to work in the morning, people like dairymen, postal workers and doctors.”

“At some local stations guns and knives have been pulled,” a Press article noted, “as tempers rise and frustrations mount.”