Brooklyn Parents Push for Paris-Style School Street
A deadly street sandwiched between a Greenpoint elementary school and a park must be converted to a cul-de-sac coupled to improve safety, demand local parents, who have drafted the nifty proposal themselves.
Hundreds of kids have to contend with heavy cut-through traffic on their way to Public School 110, and parents are so fed up that they have taken a cue from school streets in cities like Paris and London to create a redesign scheme that will calm out-of-control drivers.
“The first day at drop off I was like, ‘This is crazy!'” said Chris Roberti, who leads the PS 110 PTA’s safe streets committee. “It just seemed like a really precarious situation, and I wanted to see if there were things we could do.”
The school is across the street from McGolrick Park, and many families walk through there and across the intersection of Monitor Street and Driggs Avenue, where a driver fatally struck a 73-year-old cyclist Teddy Orzechowski two years ago.
Orzechowski’s death prompted protests from advocates and local politicians to make the street safe.
Driggs also used to be a car-free open street early on in the pandemic, but that came to an abrupt end in 2021 due to unhinged opponents, who assaulted a volunteer and vandalized the barricades — and loaded the gates into an Amazon-branded van under the cover of night and tossed them into the Newtown Creek.
The proposal
Both Monitor and Driggs carry heavy cut-through traffic, including trucks from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The parents’ plan calls for Monitor to be turned into a cul-de-sac by installing a pedestrian plaza on the southern half of the block near Driggs Avenue, providing passage for people between McGolrick Park and the school.
DOT should also create mid-block pedestrian crossings around the park, which already has entrances to the green spaces there, and ban parking at all corners around it to increase visibility for all street users, a design known as daylighting.
“The park is suggesting that people leave and enter through those mid-block entrances but there’s no infrastructure to support,” Roberti said.
Driggs is a shortcut for people getting off the BQE, and the city should close the slip lane at Meeker Avenue, which would reduce the number of highway drivers diverting through the neighborhood, according to Roberti.
“Often they’re getting off the BQE racing down Driggs to get back on the BQE,” Roberti said.
Roberti and parents presented the plans to DOT in July, and officials told them they’d get back in the spring, but they have yet to do so.
From death to joy
The push came after drivers have killed numerous children, including 7-year-old Kamari Hughes in Fort Greene in 2023, and 10-year-old Yitty Wertzberger in Williamsburg last year.
“There was these like sequences of death … two of children on the way to and from school,” Roberti said. “There is just this sense of impending doom, it’s an obvious danger and if nothing is being done, another terrible thing will happen.”
A 2022 Streetsblog investigation found that streets outside schools had higher rates of crashes and injuries than the city average.
Out of the 500 families at the Greenpoint school, 87 percent walk or bike to get there, often through the park, according to Roberti.
The Brooklynites also lead a regular bike bus to the school, which has galvanized several families into pushing for a safer streetscape.
“The dream would be that we don’t have to do that, that we have bike paths and bike routes that are safe enough to let a 4-year-old ride to school with their family,” Roberti said.
Precedents
New York City has closed off streets temporarily and permanently to ensure safety for schools and kids. A block of St. Marks Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant has a double-cul-de-sac that created a playground in the middle back when Robert F. Kennedy was a senator.
The city closed off half a block on 78th Street outside a school in Jackson Heights during the Bloomberg administration, which could serve as a model for Greenpoint.
More recently, the 34th Avenue open street in the same Queens neighborhood also includes a plaza block outside a local school.
DOT’s Open Streets program includes full closure outside some schools during pick-up and drop-off hours, but the pandemic-era initiative has been shrinking under Mayor Adams.
The City that Never Sleeps is trailing other world cities like Paris, where officials have installed hard infrastructure to close off streets near schools, and Roberti urged the city to follow the example of the fabled City of Light.
“Other countries are doing stuff like this are recognizing that the spaces outside of schools are special areas,” he said. “Do we want them to be pleasant and above all safe, that’s the number one priority, what’s the safest situation for families and kids, and it seems to be not mixing them with cars.
“The tradeoff right now is [we] prioritize cut-through traffic, big trucks and parking, [but] we are risking the lives of our kids.”
DOT declined to comment.
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