The city's brand new $160-million state-of-the-art recreation center is now welcoming Harlem residents – except those who want to get there by bike.
In the latest example of a Parks Department that ignores or actively thwarts the needs of cyclists, the Davis Center opened last week with no bike racks on the northern end facing Harlem and with bike racks up a very large hill that were installed in a way to endanger cyclists.
The dangerously and inconveniently placed bike racks have been closed since the center's grand opening on Saturday and will apparently remain covered in a blue tarp until the agency devises a fix.
Livable streets activists were stunned, despite years of battling a Parks Department that can't seem to understand the needs of cyclists even though the word "recreation" is in the agency's full name.
"The [Harlem-side] bike parking is placed in a counter-intuitive way," said Carl Mahaney, the director of Streetopia Upper West Side and an advocate for a more bike-friendly Central Park. "If you’re arriving from Harlem, the natural inclination is to head toward the entrance, so there should be bike parking there."
Mahaney has been circulating a map.
Streetsblog's questions to the Parks Department were referred to the Central Park Conservancy – the nonprofit organization that manages most of Central Park.
After the issue was raised by Streetsblog, a representative for the conservancy said — on background, not for attribution — that more bike parking would be forthcoming, with a new rack "in proximity to Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard" and another "on the Drive entrance at Malcolm X Boulevard."
But no timeline was given, nor were any details provided about the closed uphill racks beyond that the conservancy will "study" the location.
So when Streetsblog biked to the center on Tuesday, our reporter was forced to roll her bike inside the building in order to ask the manager about the lack of bike parking.
An entrance employee said she'd really like to know where people can lock their bikes so she can give the right information. Over the weekend, she was letting people park to a fence, but that's not what it's meant for, she said.
The Davis Center bike brouhaha is the latest snafu by the Parks Department, which controls vital cycling infrastructure like the city’s greenways, miles of bike lanes within Central and Prospect parks, and waterfront boardwalks yet has been frequently accused of being anti-bike.
Recently, the department announced it would ban bikes from a large chunk of the Rockaway Boardwalk, that it would be closing a part of the Hudson River Greenway for yet another one-off sinkhole repair job, and that it would welcome vehicle traffic back into a Staten Island park where cyclists have been enjoying car-free bliss since the pandemic. And now, Harlem Cyclists will have to wait to truly access the new Davis Center by bike.
The fact that no bike racks were ready for the grand opening of a $160-million recreation center is typical of an agency that treat cyclists as an afterthought, said advocates.
"This situation feels like a manifestation of an attitude that bikes (and the people who ride them) are a nuisance to be minimized and managed rather than a legitimate, socially beneficial mode of transportation worth supporting and encouraging," said Mahaney.
