47th Street (Manhattan Neighborhood Network)

Over the past year, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, urban life has been transformed. This seems especially true in New York where the pressure of the lockdown was released in a burst with last summer’s uprising against racialized police violence in May and June. With people anxious to spend more time outside, the city launched a series of programs including Open Restaurants and Open Streets. Intending to buoy the struggling foodservice industry and alleviate crowding in New York’s congested public spaces, with the stroke of the Mayor’s pen, restaurants could construct semi-enclosed structures—little cabanas—atop once-precious street parking, and city officials deployed temporary wooden barriers—essentially saw horses—at intersections to create new pedestrianized corridors. Overnight, New Yorkers could dine out in sheltered sidewalk cafes and stroll car-free lanes.

This ad-hoc pragmatism in the face of dual economic and public health crises revealed just how quickly the knot of spatial constraints in a crowded and still very car-centric city could easily be untied if city officials only care to try. Procuring a permit for a sidewalk café was onerous until it wasn’t. Streets were the exclusive domain of cars until they weren’t. This unexpected pilot program was the perfect prelude to the recent March 1 press release of NYC 25x25. The full report by Transportation Alternatives (TA), a New York-based advocacy group, argues that “streets are the single largest public space in New York City.” The organization, which grew out of a movement of urban cyclists in the 1970s, calls for twenty-five percent to be taken back from cars and dedicated to pedestrian use by the year 2025. This would entail the redesign of an area thirteen-times the size of Central Park. 

While New York has the distinction among US cities of being a place where you really can get by without a car, its streets are still geared towards the automobile and remarkably inhospitable to pedestrians—cars speed down wide avenues, indignant at the sight of a pedestrian crossing into view; narrow sidewalks are regularly piled high with trash bags. Yet, as the TA report notes, there are nearly four people for every car registered in the city. So why are the streets so neglectful of the needs of the majority? This question is especially vexing as New York seems to have so much street space to go around (nearly forty percent of the city’s area). It also has so very little green space. According to a Baruch College study, it has one of the lowest per capita in the US and according to NY’s own Parks Department, this accounts for roughly fourteen percent of the city’s area. As the most congested city in America, it is rich in roadways for cars and poor in greenspace for people.

Procuring a permit for a sidewalk café was onerous until it wasn’t. Streets were the exclusive domain of cars until they weren’t

Indeed, branching out from Manhattan’s gridiron, the five boroughs are crisscrossed by a vast tangle of avenues and lanes, most of which are filled with parked cars and lined with narrow sidewalks. Converting twenty-five percent of this space into plazas and parks would constitute an unparalleled design opportunity for landscape architects and an unprecedented increase in open space for New Yorkers. Unlike privately owned public spaces (POPs), like Zuccotti Park, streets turned into plazas would have the benefit of actually being public. If POPs are sometimes designed in a way to hide the fact that they are technically public through changes in elevation, materials, or the inclusion of barriers, the street is the street and the public nature of the right of way would be difficult to design away. Thus, the role of the architect, much like their role in public parks, would be to make streets more or less inviting to people who will necessarily pass through on their way to their destination, enacting the desires of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) to encourage people to stop and sit or compelling them to move on—how the spaces would be policed is another matter entirely.

Manhattan’s dense grid of streets was not conceived solely for transportation or the generous public life they might engender; but rather, for maximization of rents on lots conveniently shaped for new construction. Thus, from its inception and with the original 1811 Commissioner’s Plan, which established the now famous Manhattan gridiron, streets served the dual function of providing a structure for the city’s movement, while also providing an efficient rectangular format for real estate speculation and the construction industry undergirding the city’s development. Within this speculator’s chessboard, streets have also allowed segregation, delineating who could go where, enabling segregation by race, class, and national origin.

Nevertheless, from time to time there have been real changes to New York’s built environment due to public health emergencies, changes in culture, politics, and even shifts in the disposition of architects. At the turn of the last century, light shafts and fire escapes were added to dark and dangerous tenements with improved tenement laws and fire codes, the 1916 Zoning Resolution (the first in the nation) regulated height and bulk to avoid completely dark streets, and the creation of tower in the park housing responded to the social hygiene movement getting working people out of dank tenements, into light-filled designs inspired by modernist plans like Le Corbusier’s 1930 Ville Radieuse. Nevertheless, many of these housing developments further entrenched racial segregation with white-only and Black-only projects throughout the early 1900s. Highways connecting these projects often severed connections between neighborhoods, polluting areas that are largely working-class and occupied by people of color today.

Without the mechanisms to intervene and reconfigure actual building stock in the ways that 20th-century urban renewal allowed, improving the space between buildings—much of its crumbling roadways nearing the end of their lifespans, which must be constantly repaired on the public dime—is the most logical place to uplift public health on an urban scale. Especially since the links between congestion and poor public health are so unavoidable, might it also be a great equalizer for the city’s environmental and racial inequities?

I spoke to Danny Harris, the Executive Director of TA to understand how the advocates lobbying for a total reconfiguration of New York’s public realm think such a radical change might be enacted. He wants people to “reimagine a city to see streets as an asset” and emphasized the degree of public support for rethinking the use of New York streets. Citing a Siena poll, he emphasized that “voters are telling leaders what they want, but the leaders are not responding.” New Yorkers want a change in the way they engage with their city.

Like anyone who has lived through the pandemic, Harris was clear about the way his organization’s report responds to the current political moment. “If anyone is eager to go back to ‘normal,’ that means a return to a city that was congested and where you couldn’t go across town without honking through traffic.” During the pandemic, “New Yorkers could see their city differently because the streets were given back to the people.” In this sense, his “equation” was given an unexpected test drive during the pandemic: “streets minus cars equals quality of life.”

Yet, winning streets for people will be a matter of perception This idea came up again when I spoke to Tyler Silvestro, PLA, Partner at Marvel in New York. His multi-disciplinary design firm has done work with local BIDs that are already planning for a future with fewer cars. Referencing his work with Union Square Partnership, Silvestro explained that they understand “the nexus of interests and infrastructures” that they have to contend with, like store owners, public transit, parking, and park space. “They understand that there are voices that are not going to go away,” says Silvestro.

When I asked if he thought it was realistic to turn streets into parks, Silvestro was quick to emphasize the role of wording. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘park’” he said. While he is “all for” the idea of adding 13 Central Parks, “this is really a question of marketing.” He encouraged me to think about future streets as plazas, hardscaped areas that could be separated from traffic with bollards. If the framing is crucial for the success of this sort of large-scale urban design shift, Silvestro was clear that the city has already begun to respond by pedestrianizing certain areas of the city where plazas make more sense than roadways—just based on the current use. 

Nevertheless, TA’s report seeks to address deep inequities in the city’s built environment. Looking back to the pre-pandemic “normal” Harris reminded me that it was “broken and left communities of color behind.” Indeed, areas of open space, air quality, proximity to public transit, and even the number of bike-share docks are inversely correlated to income and percentages of people of color in New York City neighborhoods.

Therein lies the particular challenge of NYC 25x25. TA makes a strong argument that pedestrian plazas, bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, and a wholesale reconfiguration of city streets that put people first is not only good for public health, but also good for business. While their list of endorsements includes local community groups from historically Black neighborhoods, like the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which has worked to improve equity and access to New York’s bike-share program, Citi Bike, when I asked Silvestro to help me imagine where some of the first truly pedestrianized zones would occur, they were not in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx.

We spent several minutes fantasizing about the future of Broadway, Manhattan’s iconic, meandering avenue, which we imagined pedestrianized from Columbus Circle to Washington Square Park—it would be like Barcelona’s La Rambla, but in New York. This nearly three-mile stretch contains what was once known as Lady’s Mile, block after block of ornate department stores and the first roadway to have electric lighting installed in the late 19th century. Silvestro emphasized that the parks, like Madison Square and Union Square, would anchor the project. Is the greening of streets, putting pedestrians first, the equivalent of adding electric street lights in the Gilded Age?

Pedestrianizing Broadway doesn’t seem far-fetched, but the question is, will open, car-free spaces be equitably distributed throughout the rest of the city? What of outer-borough areas that are choking on pollution and lack world-renown shopping? Will they actually benefit?

Silvestro recalled how his Brooklyn block was converted into a nightly dance party last summer, suggesting that urban design might follow recent changes to quotidian use. Indeed, it is easy to picture the way central business districts might be converted into pedestrian plazas—the existing parks and large concentrations of retail space make it seem obvious—but changes to the built environment in areas that are undergoing gentrification are much more complex. Nevertheless, the pandemic has forced the city to test opening up streets throughout the city, something it may have been more reluctant to do under “normal” circumstances.

TA has assembled a broad base of advocates and grassroots organizations. In the short term, their call for 25 by 25 will likely start in central business districts, so long as the BIDs and other business leaders, struggling through the pandemic, see that something good for public health can also be good for their bottom line. It will be up to advocates, architects, and everyday New Yorkers to push for more, otherwise, we risk reinforcing the same racial inequities in the built environment, this time held up by a narrative of justice.