Imagine Broadway as a pedestrian mall. Vehicles are banned, except for deliveries. Cafes and stores overlook a wide plaza, bisected by a row of trees. There are benches, chairs and tables where people can meet or take a break from shopping. Little kiosks sell coffee or a quick snack. Bicycle parking is plentiful.
A few years ago, anyone suggesting this would have been laughed out of the room. It is almost a rule of nature that New York City streets exist to move as many cars and trucks possible, as quickly as possible, and to provide the maximum number of parking spots.
But the balance is starting to shift. Two key goals of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030are to reduce traffic congestion and increase open space. City agencies, including the Department of Transportation under its new bicycle-riding commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, are working intensively to lay the plan's groundwork before the end of the mayor's term.
Against this backdrop, many West Side residents and elected officials believe the time has come to reclaim the streets as public space. In November, several hundred people filled the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan to hear Jan Gehl, the Danish urban planner renowned for humanizing the streets of Copenhagen, London and dozens of other cities. Gehl's talk launched the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance, a campaign to radically reconfigure the streets led by Transportation Alternatives, the Project for Public Spaces and the Open Planning Project.
Gehl is working as a consultant for the transportation department. With a team of volunteers, he conducted studies of how the streets are used in various parts of the city and made recommendations for supporting “walkability” in public life.
He was not free to reveal his suggestions for specific locations, but his vision for the city as a whole inspired the Upper West Side crowd. He said there is plenty of room on New York's broad streets for bus and bicycle lanes, along with wider sidewalks lined with trees as on the boulevards of Paris. Where space allows, there can be flowers, nice benches, good paving stones and public art.
" The nicer a city is, the more you will sit down, not to miss anything," he told a group of reporters on a walk earlier in the day. "New York was made to get from point A to point B. That has changed in many cities. It can change in New York."
The city's minimum open space goal is 1.5 acres per thousand residents. Yet many neighborhoods, particularly low-income minority areas, fail to reach this bar. If current population trends continue, 59 neighborhoods will be deficient in parkland by 2030, according to the projections in PlaNYC.
PlaNYC sets a goal of ensuring that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park. To do that, it proposes re-imagining the entire public realm, not just underused parks and schoolyards but also the public space between buildings, including streets, sidewalks, medians and unused asphalt at oddly shaped intersections.
The plan proposes creating or upgrading a public plaza in every community district and filling in barren blocks with street trees. If this happens, along with reducing traffic congestion, extending greenways and encouraging bicycling, the city could be a much greener place 25 years from now.
Although it would seem that taking away space for automobiles on some streets would clog other nearby roads, research showsthat doesn't happen. Instead, the traffic shrinks. When driving becomes too inconvenient or expensive, people decide to take public transit, carpool, bicycle or walk. In New York City, 90 percent of car commuters have another transit choice.
Creating plazas, adding greenery and making it easier to get around on foot and bicycle offers many environmental, health and social benefits. These changes can also boost property values and business revenue. Studies have found that when safe and appealing public spaces make it easier for people to walk to stores, they spend more time shopping - and more money.
People-friendly streets also help create a sense of community. Studies show that people living on heavily trafficked streets go outside less often and don't allow their children to play in the streets. Gehl believes that urban public gathering places are even more important now than they were in the past. "Today you can easily have a life where you do everything by Internet and driving," he said. "We have found that when we offer bigger public spaces, people come streaming out of their houses to see what's happening."
Gehl's ideas have particular resonance on the Upper West Side. It is a highly residential area, with a lot of families and senior citizens. Only 10 percent of the residents commute by car, but the high volume of traffic overwhelms the community's streets with noise and pollution and makes it dangerous to navigate on foot or bicycle. Two of the city's great parks - Central and Riverside -- bookend the blocks of apartment buildings and brownstones, but in between there are few public spaces, except for benches on narrow islands of greenery amid Broadway's tumultuous stream of cars and trunks.
Over the next year, the Streets Renaissance campaign intends to bring together planners, elected officials, residents and businesses to create a blueprint to make the Upper West Side into the most walkable, bike-friendly and vibrant neighborhood in the country. To accomplish this, it hopes to introduce traffic calming and safer intersections, encourage bicycle and bus travel, develop a cohesive network of protected bike paths, address the pricing and best use of parking spaces, and reimagine Broadway as a pedestrian way.
An exhibitdisplayed at the campaign's launch suggests some possible changes. A block of 81st Street zigzags around three alternating mini-parks (replacing parking spots), while wider sidewalks at the intersections make crossing safer and add space for plantings, seating and bicycle racks. On Amsterdam Avenue, a tree-filled median separates bicycle and bus lanes from traffic, and curb extensions provide more room to plant trees.
Many ways of reconfiguring the streets would be inexpensive to put in place, requiring mostly a change in policy. For example, on weekends, half the streets could be closed to make playstreets. "You would within a year have a generation of kids growing up meeting their neighbors," said Mark Gorton, founder of the Open Planning Project, who lives on the Upper West Side.
" Basically, every street should be thought of as public space," he said. "A lot of functions that we think of as belonging in parks - it wasn't always that way. Kids used to play in the streets."
One participant in the effort is the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District, which covers the stretch from 67th to 82nd streets. The business improvement district has been working for more than a year with the Project for Public Spaces to develop a plan for a greener, more inviting streetscape and has prepared a wish list for the Department of Transportation. It includes a physically separated bike lane, expanded sidewalks at the gateway intersections, benches and bike racks. The list also calls for the installation of Muni-meters so that parking can be priced to encourage turnover and make spots available at all times.
Whatever specific recommendations ultimately come from the Streets Renaissance campaign, there is no guarantee that they will be put in place by the Department of Transportation, which has to weigh competing interests, such as delivery trucks and business owners who want people to be able to park in front of their stores.
Over the past few years, though, the agency has begun making some areas more people-friendly. It has altered streets and intersections to make them safer, and in 2006, it created a very successful temporary public plaza on Willoughby Street in downtown Brooklyn.
These efforts have gained a lot of momentum now that PlaNYC is pushing all the city agencies in the same direction. At the Department of Transportation, Commissioner Sadik-Khan has refocused the staff toward the goals laid out in the plan.
In the last half-year, the agency turneda parking lot in DUMBO into a pocket park and created a public space, a bike lane, and safer pedestrian crossings at the intersection of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street.
To oversee the creation of four new plazas a year, as promised by PlaNYC, the agency hired Andy Wiley-Schwartz, formerly at the Project for Public Spaces, as assistant commissioner in its new Office of Planning and Sustainability. In an e-mail message, Wiley-Schwartz said that the agency is considering sites for new plazas, although none have been selected as yet. "We are especially looking to build plazas in 'underparked' neighborhoods to start, to help fulfill the PlaNYC goal of putting every New Yorker within a 10-minute walk to a park," he said.
At the urging of City Councilmember Gale Brewer, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and the community boards representing the area, the Department of Transportation has also begun a comprehensive study of traffic, parking and pedestrian issues in the Upper West Side.
Given the political clout of automobile commuters and their deep sense of entitlement to drive and park wherever they want, it is still a stretch to think that Broadway could one day resemble a European-style promenade. But clearly, more livable streets are coming to the Upper West Side.
" I think we have a tremendous opportunity to push the envelope," said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, "to not just realize some very progressive street changes but also to lock in a whole new paradigm for street management that will continue into the next mayoral administration."
Speaking at the Streets Renaissance event in November, Commissioner Sadik-Khan described a recent trip she and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden had taken to Denmark. "To see how safe everyone felt on the streets in Copenhagen really affected me," she said. "I don't see why we can't have some of that here."
The next event scheduled for the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance campaign is a talk on December 10 by Dr. Donald Shoup, author of the "High Cost of Free Parking," on how changes in parking policy can improve the public realm and generate the revenue to do it.
Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.Â
Bedford-Stuyvesant is back.
Or so it seems. With 34.5 percent of the population living in poverty, an unemployment rate nearly twice that of New York City and some of the highest foreclosure rates in Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy seems an unlikely candidate for gentrification. Yet the neighborhood, referred to by the Times of London in 2005 as "a horrible and inconvenient area of Brooklyn with some lovely buildings and a nasty crack habit" is being touted by some as Brooklyn’s next hot neighborhood.
Despite or perhaps because of this poverty, Bed-Stuy has had a strong community infrastructure. It is home to the nation’s first federally funded community development corporation, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, and has a long history of leadership, community organizing and providing services from within. Now years of public and private disinvestment are slowly giving way to market-driven development, and Bed-Stuy, following a path familiar to many of New York's lower income neighborhoods, is changing.
As this happens, residents and community members are drawing on their strong organizations and sense of community to shape the transformation from within. A handful of local initiatives are already in the works in the hopes that Bed-Stuy can maximize positive development without acquiescing to gentrification. Community leaders are hopeful, but all acknowledge the enormity of the challenge.
"Bed-Stuy has been discovered, like Columbus discovered America," City Councilmember Al Vann has warned, "The rush is on."
With so much community capital in place, it is no surprise that Bed-Stuy is one of the communities in New York that has drawn up its own neighborhood land use plan under the city’s 197a process. By allowing neighborhood residents and not city planners to determine the physical future of a place, the plan empowers them to ensure that their concerns, such as increased affordable housing, are addressed.
Initiated by Community Board 3 just one year after the New York Times called Bed-Stuy "Brooklyn’s next investment region," the 197a helped those living in the community imagine strategies for dealing with market-driven change. Rudy Bryant, former director of the Pratt Center for Community Development warned that such a plan was necessary to guide the coming development. "If development goes unfettered, Bed-Stuy is going to be a prime target area," Bryant said,
This month, City Council voted to rezone a 206-block portion of Southern Bedford-Stuyvesant largely in accordance with the community plan. The expansive rezoning fits into the Bloomberg administration’s citywide effort to create new business districts in communities with good access to mass transit. The new zoning rules aims to increase density along Bed-Stuy’s key commercial corridors while preserving the residential character of the neighborhood's brownstone-lined streets.
The rezoning does not incorporate all aspects of the community plan. For example, the residents wanted increased incentives for affordable housing on several north/south corridors in the area, according to Mercedes Narciso, a planner at the Pratt Center. Overall, however, the rezoning speaks to what the Pratt Center found to be the greatest concerns of the community: increased commercial space to provide economic development and jobs, 400 new affordable apartments and preservation of the neighborhood’s residential character.
The rezoning is not the only example of community driven processes. As the neighborhood gears up for more commercial space along Fulton Street, the Fulton-Nostrand United Merchants Association, comprised of more than 60 business owners, is pushing for a Business Improvement District or BID on Fulton Street.
Its supporters say the proposed BID would help diversify the mix of businesses, improve conditions for shoppers and maximize Fulton Street’s commercial potential. "The area has excellent access to the city and a great location, but things such as crime and the visual streetscape have kept it from achieving its potential," said Joel Dabu of merchants group. According to Dabu, the BID would address crime and work with entrepreneurs to create businesses that better serve customer needs, perhaps even attracting shoppers from outside Bedford-Stuyvesant.
With the recent rezoning allowing larger commercial spaces, Dabu hopes Fulton Street will be able to attract some national and regional chains such as the recently opened Applebee’s restaurant. He thinks larger stores would help smaller, local businesses by attracting more people to the area. Rudy Bryant agrees the area needs more commercial development but added a caveat. "The community would be interested in department stores as long as they’re not exploitative big box stores that are going to drive out smaller merchants," he said.
Joe Long, a longtime resident or the neighborhood and owner of Birdel’s Tapes and Records, shares Bryant’s concern. "We need to make sure minority businesses will still be in the community and be able to harvest the longevity of their time here. We can’t let the conglomerates move in on us," he told AM New York.
Dabu, though, sees some change as inevitable. "As Fulton Street gets more successful, of course rents will go up," he said.
There are other community-based initiatives. The city’s Economic Development Corporation, for example, has launched a pilot program in Bed-Stuy to provide an alternative to traditional economic development. It focuses on comprehensive neighborhood economic development, using the existing community infrastructure to meet the needs for jobs, workers and facilities in the neighborhood.
Today, Bed-Stuy is dealing with issues that have confronted many parts of the city before it. The question is not whether change is desirable -- everyone seems convinced that it is -- but whether the community can shape this change. Can the active residents of this neighborhood promote a new model for development?
Many have concerns. Andrew Fils-Aime of the Pratt Area Community Council for one applauds increased commercial and residential diversity but worries that the new development will not meet the needs of low-income residents. For Fils-Aime, not enough has been done to organize, inform or prepare the existing residents for the changes about to take place in their midst.
But others remain optimistic. "The neighborhood is back," Brenda Fryson of Community Board 3 told New York Magazine in 2005, "and it’s not because white people have come here, but because of the tenacity of the people who have lived here all along."
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Residents of two very different neighborhoods can look to the City Council this week with either appreciation or dismay after it approved a landmark designation for the private courts and row houses of Sunnyside Gardens and a rezoning for the brownstones of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
At its stated meeting on Monday, the council unanimously approved both proposals in order to preserve the character, density and novelty of the two neighborhoods. The council also approved an expansion of the Fire Department's Pension Medical Board, which has faced an influx of applications following the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001.
Comprising 55 acres of row houses, apartments and co-ops all adjoined by private gardens, the Sunnyside Gardens housing development was constructed more than 80 years ago as one of the city's first planned communities. The landmark designation faced considerable community opposition and was approved by the council by a vote of 49 to 0. It requires that renovations or exterior home improvement projects be reviewed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission – from changes to the private gardens to work conducted on building facades.
Though some residents opposed the designation, contending the commission's review process would be time consuming and costly, a plethora of others lobbied the city to title Sunnyside Gardens a historic district, specifically the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance - a group of residents.
The area already has some protection. During the 1970s, the neighborhood was named as a Special Planned Community Preservation District, but that only protected the size of buildings and the character of the neighborhood's acclaimed open space. The historic district goes a step further.
City officials said the designation represents a growing trend to landmark neighborhoods outside of Manhattan – which had typically contained most of the city's historic districts.
" You don't have to have a mansion for it to be landmarked," said Councilmember Eric Gioia, who represents the neighborhood. "Middle class neighborhoods can be preserved as well. When you walk around Sunnyside Gardens what you see is a place where the middle class cannot only survive, but actually thrive."
Some Sunnyside Gardens residents fear the historic district will weed out the area's classically moderate-income population. City officials disagree, contending the district designation will protect its middle class occupants.
The development was constructed from 1924 through 1928 in response to a lack of affordable housing in the city following World War I. The area comprises about 16 blocks and 624 residential buildings. It is the largest historic district in Queens.
In response to growing development in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the City Council also approved a rezoning for 206 blocks in the southern portion of the neighborhood. The zoning revisions were approved by a vote of 49 to 0.
As more developers eye the brownstone blocks of Bed-Stuy, both residents and city officials called for a rezoning to preserve the character, density and height of the neighborhood. The new zoning will also preserve existing commercial uses and provide incentives to develop vacant lots.
Councilmember Al Vann, who represents part of the area, said the rezoning is meant to stifle the rush of unscrupulous developers in some areas and promote mid-rise apartment construction in others.
" As you all know Bed-Stuy has been discovered - you know like Columbus discovered America," said Vann. "The rush is on."
The rezoning area is bounded by Lafayette Avenue and Quincy Street to the north, Classon Avenue to the west, Saratoga Avenue and Broadway to the east and Atlantic Avenue to the south. It will also provide incentives to construct affordable housing, which city officials predict could reach 400 units.
Vann said this rezoning is only a first step. The city is now working on a plan to address development occurring in the northern section of the neighborhood.
Since the September 11th attacks, an increasing number of firefighters are applying for disability retirement. Because the Fire Department's Pension Medical Board has a limited capacity to review applications, the City Council approved an expansion of the board by a vote of 49 to 0.
The board is currently comprised of three physicians. Under the bill (Intro 369-A), which was proposed at the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the board, the commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services could each appoint an additional three alternate physicians, who could also review applications when needed.
" We wish there weren't so many disability applications coming forward from September 11th," said Council Speaker Christine Quinn. "But the reality is there has been a large number, and (with) the board in its present, more limited configuration, there are only a few people that can sit and review them."
Under the current system, city officials said, an application can take more than a year to process. Quinn could not estimate by how much the process would be expedited with the board's expansion. In 1999, only 404 applications were before the board. In 2003, that grew to 719 applications, and in the first four months of 2007 there were 240 applications.Â