Park Slope Residents Demand Immediate Safety Improvements on Ninth Street From de Blasio

More than 100 people showed up outside the Park Slope Y this morning to tell Mayor de Blasio to redesign 9th Street, the neighborhood main street where Dorothy Bruns ran over and killed 19-month-old Joshua Lew and four-year-old Abigail Blumenstein yesterday.

Demonstrators called on the city to immediately redesign 9th Street between Third Avenue and Prospect Park with protected bike lanes and concrete pedestrian islands.

“This particular tragedy — we don’t know what could have prevented it,” Park Slope resident and rally organizer Doug Gordon told the crowd. “But the more I thought about what happened yesterday, the more I thought: That’s just an excuse for not doing anything. That’s saying, ‘This time it was different, and we should wait until the next time.'”

The intersection of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue has an especially awful record of crashes, injuries, and deaths. In 2016, a hit-and-run driver killed 41-year-old Bahtiyor Khamdanov. Later that year, a car crashed into a discount store near the intersection, injuring four people. That year a driver also critically injured a cyclist at the intersection of Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue.

De Blasio’s daily SUV excursions to the Y take him right to the crash site, and as a former Park Slope resident, he’s familiar with the location, he told reporters yesterday. “This is an intersection, again, we know very, very well,” he said. “We have crossed it many times with Dante and Chiara when they were kids, so this is personal.”

As de Blasio approached the gym this morning, he stopped to talk with Gordon, who urged him to commit to redesigning the street with protected bike lanes, concrete pedestrian islands, and other safety improvements. Gordon said de Blasio declined to make any explicit commitment.

A 2007 redesign of Ninth Street added unprotected bike lanes, but the street remains wide and vulnerable to speeding. “We’ve been asking for this street to be fixed for years, and it hasn’t been fixed,” Gordon said.

Local residents are scared to cross the intersection of Ninth and Fifth Avenue. “I’m hyper-vigilant at the corner and I avoid it if I can,” said Kathy Park Price, who lives on 7th Street. “At that area, it’s sort of highway-mode.”

Another demonstrator, who gave her name as Jenny, said she walks on Ninth Street every day with her kids. “I came because I have two small children, and I was just heartbroken over the news yesterday,” she said. “I heard that there were some ways to make Ninth Street safer, including protected bike lanes and some pedestrian islands. I think that’s really important in a community where there are so many walkers.”