Eyes on the Street

Eyes on the Street: Public Space Upgrades for Allen and Pike in Progress

Crews are currently at work turning the new pedestrian plazas and protected bike lanes on Pike Street and Allen Street into more attractive, long-term fixtures of the Lower East Side. The new construction will add landscaping and higher-quality materials, helping the local community achieve the vision developed for Allen and Pike Streets in a multi-year grassroots process.

By Noah Kazis

2:53 PM EDT on July 25, 2011

After the first phase of this project was completed in 2009, traffic injuries dropped by 40 percent at the intersections with pedestrian plazas, according to NYC DOT. At the corner of Allen and Delancey, injuries dropped 57 percent.

Work on upgrading the improvements with better materials began on the southernmost end of the corridor, on Pike between South and Madison Streets, in February. Right now, crews have dug up the median on the block of Allen between Hester and Grand Streets, with plans to work north to Delancey. Check below the fold for a rendering of what the new sections of Allen will look like once completed.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.

Eyes on the Street | Lower East Side | Plazas | Protected Bike Lanes

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