Thursday’s Headlines: Park Finally Gets Its Park Edition
We were happy to see that the increasingly nationally focused New York Times devoted a great deal of space to paper’s namesake city with two very interesting stories yesterday.
First, the Paper of Record was handed the scoop that the city had finally created two worthy design schemes for Park Avenue — both of which (pictured above) are good in their own way, but one is clearly better.
As the City Hall press release later pointed out, both designs would cover 11 blocks between 46th and 57th streets and would remove one travel lane in each direction. Freeing up that much space will allow for a wider median to accommodate more greenery, plus pedestrian space and seating — or as the great Times newsman Andy Newman put it, “transforming one of the city’s least inviting green spaces into, at the very least, a decent place to eat a sandwich.”
One option (above left) would maximize the pedestrian space. The other (above right) would create great pedestrian space, but also a two-way protected bike lane — which is essential on a roadway that already serves lots of cyclists, albeit dangerously.
We were most pleased that Newman spun the proposed changes as anything but radical. In fact, the forces that ruined Park Avenue by making it more car-friendly decades ago were the radicals.
“While the plan may seem revolutionary, it is the opposite,” Newman wrote, perhaps anticipating howls from the car-owning fauxgressives of the East Side. “The city’s proposed designs are throwbacks to what Park Avenue looked like a century ago, when New York’s boulevards had much more space for pedestrians and much less for automobiles. The original park along the median gave the avenue its name.”
Left out of Newman’s story was the deeper history of the city’s effort to reclaim a few more crumbs for pedestrians and cyclists. We wrote about it in 2020, the Times wrote about it in 2021, and we wrote about it again in 2024. Dear reader, we apologize if you’re sitting there saying, “For fuck’s sake, it takes a long time to do anything in this city.”
Well, we may be nearing the home stretch this time. The city has scheduled a bunch of public outreach sessions (because one more outreach session oughta do it!), which are all listed on the Streetsblog calendar (the next one is May 2 at 10 a.m. at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park at 50th Street). (Gothamist and amNY also covered it.)
Our other good story in the Times was Dana Rubinstein’s deep dive into the long and tortured history of a tiny corner of a Brooklyn park that has been seized by judges for the purpose of parking their cars under the false premise that they need parking because they get death threats. Indeed, as one Times commenter pointed out, the last thing a judge needs is a big sign that reads, “Judges’ Parking Only”:
Bottom line: Rubinstein’s a total pro. But of course…
In other news from a slow day:
- The Times jumped onto WPIX‘s coverage the other day with an important public safety request: Don’t walk to the World Cup!
- Tunnel schism for LIRR. (NY Post)
- Cops arrested the truck driver who ran down and killed Jenny Sanchez earlier this month in Ridgewood. But he’s facing almost no time. (NYDN)
- Vision? Zero: Cops arrested the Department of Transportation truck driver who killed a Queens woman back in March. (NY Post)
- A cyclist was badly hurt in an early morning crash on Church Street. The initial report by WPIX didn’t have the full story, which we gleaned from video that we obtained: The 24-year-old cyclist did go through a red light, but she was struck by the driver of a speeding SUV that rushed through a yellow light at an intersection with a construction shed that eliminated all ability for drivers to see anything but straight ahead of them. Further research showed that the building’s sidewalk shed has previously been implicated in two earlier crashes and caused a partial work-stoppage order by the Department of Buildings. Yet it still remains a danger to drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Here’s a photo of the scene (the car driver was going straight and the cyclist came from the right):
- We have Sophia Lebowitz at the Bloomberg City Lab convention in Madrid (stories TK!), but once-powerful billionaire Mike Bloomberg made some news:
- Here’s the Streetsblog angle on King Charles’s visit (it’s all about the streetscape):
- And we’ll end on this note: Pols and activists rallied at City Hall on Wednesday to get Albany to enact Gov. Hochul’s budget measure to allow the city Department of Transportation to install speed-governing devices inside the cars of the worst super speeders. Transportation Alternatives set up piles of simulated tickets racked up by the 10 worst speeders, including James Giovansanti, the Staten Island cop whose recklessness earned his truck 547 camera-issued tickets since 2022. “One out of every 200 drivers in New York City is a super-speeder,” said Council Member Lincoln Restler. “They get ticket after ticket, but their behavior doesn’t change. So we need to start holding them accountable. We need to implement technology in their vehicle that slows them to hell down.”
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