On Friday morning, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan cut the ribbon on Willoughby Plaza, the first permanent pedestrian plaza in the city. Afterwards, she told The Observer that even after she and Mayor Bloomberg are out of City Hall, the plazas will persist thanks to public support.
The same morning, 200 miles away in Washington, the mayor Read More
For the past six years, thousands of people a day have descended on a 150-foot long stretch of black top across from Borough Hall. There, nestled among planters and folding chair, Brooklynites and visitors, workers, students and tourists would all relax, meet up, hang out, maybe enjoy a shack stack.
Willoughby Plaza was one of the very first asphalt strips formerly dedicated to cars that was closed to vehicles, taken over and transformed into a space for pedestrians, helping to inaugurate the city’s popular if occasionally controversial NYC Plaza Program. Before Times Square and the Broadway Boulevard, before the new Grand Army Plaza or Fordham Plaza, before Janette Sadik-Khan even became DOT commissioner, there was Willoughby Plaza.
And now it is permanent, a thoughtfully designed, well-integrated piece of the streetscape rather than a bastardized piece of roadbed dressed up as well as DOT and the local business groups could manage. This is the dream for all 50 (and counting) of the city’s new temporary plazas, and 16 finished spaces are already in the works. But standing in the freezing cold with Commissioner Sadik-Khan and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz trading barbs, one wonders how many more plazas might be in store for the city. Read More
Ever get lost in the city before? Of course not! You’re a real New Yorker.
But according to the city’s Department of Transportation, one out of 10 of us gets lost every week based on department surveys. “And those one the ones who would admit it to us,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told The Observer. The department also found that one in three New Yorkers couldn’t say which was was north and one in four out-of-towners could not say which of the five boroughs they were in when asked.
To help with this confusion, the city will begin installing 150 wayfinding signs in four city neighborhoods starting in March. Midtown, Chinatown, Long Island City and Prospect Heights and Western Crown Heights will all be getting the new signs, which include major local landmarks and destination, all streets and estimated walking times, since the focus is on helping pedestrians get around town. Read More
Michael Bierut is one of the most renowned designers in the world. As a principal at Pentagram, he has created logos, identities and campaigns for everyone from United Airlines to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Citibank to New York and The Atlantic, Saks Fifth, Princeton and Yale, even Walt Disney and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for which he designed an updated “doomsday clock.”
Still, one of the greatest typographical minds of our time could never make sense of the city’s parking signs.
“On the occasions I drive and try to park on the street, I tend to get as confused as anyone,” explained Mr. Bierut, who lives in Westchester and normally takes Metro-North into the city. “I have received many tickets and been towed twice. I am so paranoid now that I will park in a garage for even a 15-minute errand.”
Perhaps now he can start parking on the street again. Read More
George Carlin, passed on in 2008—he would prefer died—but the celebrated, foul-mouthed comic will live around the corner from where he grew up in the 1940s, the 500 block of 121stStreet in Morningside Heights. After months of disagreement, Community Board 9 voted last week to rename the 400 block of 121st Street after the controversial comedian.
The vote, 25-4 with 3 abstentions, comes after months of disagreement. Perhaps fitting for a man with an album called Class Clown, Carlin is still riling up his Catholic grade school, Corpus Christi, which is attached to Corpus Christi Church on the block between Broadway and Amsterdam that was almost renamed. Rev. Raymond Rafferty, the pastor at the church, had protested naming the street where the school is located after a well-known atheist and opponent of religion. Read More
The city has a love-hate relationship with its cyclists, but at least a few savvy Village business owners have embraced the city’s two-wheeled denizens for fun and profit.
Last month, Transportation Alternatives, the pro-transit advocacy group, in collaboration with Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, opened the city’s first Bike Friendly Business District on the Lower East Side. The district, a network of some 150 businesses and institutions now dedicated to better bike infrastructure, was proposed as way to increase customer traffic to local businesses. It’s an idea that has, according to the latest study, worked remarkably well. Read More
What are you looking at?
When it comes to crossing the street, the city’s Department of Transportation hopes the answer is oncoming traffic—and not your smartphone or your beautiful European model boyfriend.
As any good three-year-old could tell you, always look both ways before crossing the street. But harried, hurried and distracted New Yorkers (and perhaps not a few New Yorkers) are ignoring the rules they learned in preschool, so the department has launched a new campaign to nudge as all into paying more attention when crossing the street. Read More
Janette Sadik-Khan, the sui generis city transportation commissioner, was standing on 51st Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues as rush hour was just starting last week. Rather, she was standing at the intersection with 6½th Avenue, her latest asphalt confection. The pedestrian passageway was designated and demarcated about two months ago, connecting up a series of plazas running from here to 57th Street. Ms. Sadik-Khan was out for her first official stroll.
“It’s kind of a secret garden, one of the new secret spaces we’ve helped create; we’ve got 500 of them in the city and we’re trying to connect people better to their surroundings, make the city that much nicer,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.
She gazed up at the cute little green street sign one of her construction crews had installed. “6½th Avenue” it read, like a sign on any other corner, though it, along with five others along the seven-block passageway, are the only ones in the city bearing fractions. The commissioner looked down and smiled. “It’s like Harry Potter,” she said. “The 9¾ platform. Or Being John Malkovich, with the 7½ floor.”
“I love it.” Read More
Next year, spring showers will bring a flood of bikes.
Despite years of planning and the highest hopes, New York City’s bike share program will not be launching this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on his radio show this morning. “We are just not going to put out the system until it works,” the mayor said. “We were going to try a partial launch, but we’re just not going to do it if it doesn’t work.” Read More
Remember the graffiti from a few years ago, the stripe down the sidewalk dividing it between New Yorkers and tourists? If ever there was a place for such a demarcation, it would be the Brooklyn Bridge, where wayward out-of-towners and death-courting cyclists do battle on a daily basis.
“We are issuing a call to expand the human capacity of the bridge,” Councilman Brad Lander of Park Slope declared at the Manhattan entrance to the 129-year-old span yesterday. An average of 4,000 pedestrians and 3,100 bicyclists cross the Brooklyn Bridge every day, according to the Department of Transportation. A good many of them have close encounters of the two-wheeled kind.
Along with a few colleagues in the council, Mr. Lander wants the city to consider expanding the narrow boardwalk atop the beige bridge to accommodate more passengers. Read More
