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Thursday’s Headlines: A Streets New Year Edition

The city will pedestrianize parts of Borough Park for Rosh Hashanah for the first time. Plus more news.
Thursday’s Headlines: A Streets New Year Edition
The Jewish New Year means car-free streets in some neighborhoods. Jeremy Price via Flickr

We’re sweetening ourselves up over here at Streetsblog in advance of Rosh Hashanah this weekend — and what better way to sweeten the new year than with a car-free street.

On Friday, the first night of the holiday, the city plans to close down several streets in Borough Park to vehicle traffic to handle what BoroPark24, which reported the news, described as an annual parade of “particularly heavy pedestrian traffic.”

The one-night-only open street will mark the first time, at least in recent memory, that the city temporarily pedestrianized streets in the area for the Jewish High Holy Days, after officials implemented a similar closure in Williamsburg last year, BoroPark24 said.

Given that Brooklyn Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods are already car-lite every week for the Sabbath, when religious Jews abstain from driving, it might be time to make “shul streets” more of a thing. It may also help NYPD better protect those spaces from vehicle attacks.

Just an idea.

In other news:

  • Gov. Hochul and the MTA released new IBX renderings. (amNY)
  • A car passenger died in Midtown on the east side after her driver struck scaffolding, jump the curb and hit and mailbox and bus stop pole. (ABC7)
  • The 77-year-old who died in a crash on Schermerhorn Street who reports initially identified as a cyclist was in fact on a stand-up scooter, cops said. (Brooklyn Eagle)
  • The Transit Museum is hosting an underground ’70s dance party. (TimeOut)
  • Still high off its insurance policy wins, Uber is out with another round of ads in support of Gov. Hochul’s re-election campaign. (Gothamist)
  • A trash pile in Sunset Park erupted in flames because of a discarded lithium-ion battery. (Gothamist)
  • Believe it or not, someone in the Trump administration told people to drive less. (Business Insider)
  • And finally, here’s video of a Department of Sanitation driver going the wrong way on a street where a driver killed a child earlier this year:
Photo of David Meyer
David was Streetsblog's do-it-all New York City beat reporter from 2015 to 2019. He returned as an editor in 2023 after a three-year stint at the New York Post and is now Managing Editor.

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