It took years of advocacy to get Starlight Park and to turn the Sheridan Expressway that runs alongside it into a boulevard.

And with the New York State Department of Transportation proposal to build a so-called traffic diversion over the park and the Bronx River, as they repair one of five bridges that carries the Cross Bronx Expressway, a coalition of activists says the park will be destroyed.

“So you’re literally putting this expansion over the greenest, thickest part of a canopy that filters the noise and the air pollution,” Siddhartha Sánchez, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, said at a Monday rally in Brooklyn.

The state says the elevated diversion could be turned into a pedestrian and bike path when construction is finished.

“Think about what a bike lane or a pedes

See Full Page