Broadway Boulevard Confirms: People Will Sit in Well-Placed Seats

Bianca Assim-Kon, 30, was initially skeptical about the plazas. "I saw them doing this, and my co-worker and I (said) all the tourists are going to sit there and we're going to laugh at them because they're going to get hit" by cars, says Assim-Kon, who works as a production assistant in a building across the street from one of the plazas. "And now here I am, sitting."

Reading a "chick-lit" novel on her lunch break, she says she can eke calm out of the surrounding cacophony. "I'm a New Yorker," Assim-Kon says. "You learn to focus."

"I end then in praise of small spaces. The multiplier effect istremendous. It is not just the number of people using them, but thelarger number who pass by and enjoy them vicariously, or even thelarger number who feel better about the city center for knowledge ofthem. For a city, such places are priceless, whatever the cost. Theyare built of a set of basics and they are right in front of our noses.If we will look."