Summoned last week by community groups, the Brooklyn Heights Association and A Better Way, the crowd in Brooklyn Heights assembled for a town hall at lovely old Plymouth Church to help quash two nasty plans — one painful, the other even more so — that the city’s Department of Transportation had put forth a few months back.

The plans offered alternatives for repairing the despised roadway, a crucial mile-and-a-half of which morphs into a six-lane triple-cantilever affair, clinging to the hillside beneath the Heights — a kind of bunk-bed arrangement conceived during the 1940s by the prolific landscape architects Michael Rapuano and Gilmore Clarke.

The cantilever system was a victory for People Power over the Establishment. It diverted the highway from running straight through the middle of Brooklyn Heights, as Robert Moses, the city’s all-powerful planning czar back then, had wanted but community groups protested. The top bunk became the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, one of the loveliest spots in the whole city.

Saving it is now inextricably linked to the destiny of the B.Q.E. Ideally, New York should leave the Promenade alone and probably just give up on this stretch of the expressway, the way other cities have torn down highways to create parks and flourishing neighborhoods — the way the Bloomberg administration removed traffic from Broadway where it passes through Times Square.