Public Space

The crowded streets of Corona, Queens will receive a welcome infusion of public space this July, thanks to the New York City Department of Transportation's plaza program. With wide-ranging community support, DOT will close a block of  service road between National Street and 104th Street to traffic and fill it with plants, tables, chairs and bike racks [PDF].

City Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr. opposes a proposal to create a new pedestrian plaza in public space-starved Astoria. The plaza is one of the options on the table for a dangerous intersection that NYC DOT has targeted for safety imporovements.

What is it with the New York Times and the Jackson Heights pedestrian plaza?

"It's a private property with public access," a security guard explained after stopping me from taking photos of a mid-block passageway through the Metropolitan Tower on 56th Street. The space in question, which connects 56th to 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, is one of more than 150 privately owned public spaces in central Midtown, many of which are products of a 1980s zoning program to improve pedestrian circulation. In exchange for development bonuses that today are worth millions of dollars in rentable square footage, developers were supposed to build and maintain publicly accessible mid-block passageways to help ease pedestrian congestion on the heavily used north-south avenues. The problem is many of these semi-public spaces now appear so private, most walkers wouldn’t even know to use them.

Fort Greene's newest public plaza opened today and Brownstoner was on the scene to capture the moment. The plaza, which reclaimed space for pedestrians on a short, lightly-trafficked block of South Elliott Place between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue, connects the sidewalk to an existing public triangle.

Downtown Brooklyn's Willoughby Street plaza, located just off Adams Street, was the forerunner of New York City's current efforts to reclaim roadways as pedestrian spaces. Built in 2006, before Janette Sadik-Khan took over the city Department of Transportation, the city used now-familiar ingredients -- concrete planters and folding chairs -- to close the block to auto traffic and open up space for people to walk and sit.

Courtesy of Clarence Eckerson, Jr., here are some more scenes from the Jackson Heights pedestrian plaza that don't fit the New York Times' preferred narrative. Clarence says he passed through the plaza three times yesterday and it was bustling each time. On a Thursday.

Gotta hand it to the Times for some devious photo editing in today's Metro section. Check out the barren seating and shuttered storefronts in the shot that accompanies Sarah Maslin Nir's two-sides-to-every-story piece on the new Jackson Heights plaza. That plaza must really be a failure, right?

Reader Marcus Woollen submits this picture of the Jackson Heights pedestrian plaza on 37th Road taken yesterday afternoon.