Streetsblog New York City

Because of its proximity to Central Park, you might be forgiven for assuming East Harlem has plenty of open space. But a new report from New Yorkers for Parks argues that the neighborhood is isolated from many of its parks by busy roads and other barriers. Streets and sidewalks, the group says, can play a crucial role in encouraging physical activity as part of the neighborhood’s fight against above-average asthma and obesity problems.

The report, funded by the Aetna Foundation and Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito, is the third in the advocacy group’s Open Space Index series; the first two reports covered Jackson Heights and the Lower East Side. Since its release in 2010, the Jackson Heights index has been used by local advocates and leaders to show how the neighborhood stands to benefit from initiatives such as play streets and public plazas.

New Yorkers for Parks Executive Director Holly Leicht told Streetsblog that she is hoping for this report to have a similar effect in East Harlem. “We want to put these in the hands of community leaders and residents,” she said, “and let them figure out what their priorities are with this data.”

One of the report’s top recommendations is the continued expansion of street safety improvements in the neighborhood. “Streets and sidewalks comprise 80 percent of New York City public space,” the report notes. “Unless they are safe, accessible passageways, they can serve as barriers rather than connectors.”

Play streets, which have already been implemented in East Harlem, can play a central role in providing open space for residents, the report finds. For six Thursdays in the summer of 2010, East 104th Street between Second and Third Avenues was converted to a play street, giving children space to play games, meet with friends or work on arts-and-crafts. The report recommends linking play streets with farmers markets to promote healthy nutrition along with physical activity.

The complete street treatments recently installed on First and Second Avenues are a big step forward for street safety, but East Harlem continues to have some of the most dangerous intersections on the East Side, including 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, where 19 cyclists and pedestrians died between 1998 and 2008.

Some intersections that provide critical access to parks along the Harlem River and the East River have already received upgrades after Transportation Alternatives worked with community groups to come up with solutions.The intersection of 142nd Street and Fifth Avenue, for example, received upgrades to slow traffic accessing FDR Drive and shorten crossing distances for pedestrians accessing a footbridge to Harlem River Park.

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We interrupt our post-Sandy coverage to bring you these pictures from Halloween last night at the 78th Street Play Street in Jackson Heights. The Jackson Heights Green Alliance put on the event, “Trick or Treat in the Street,” and Streetfilms’ Clarence Eckerson sent over these photos. This is the kind of thing residents can do in the neighborhood after a successful grassroots campaign to permanently repurpose this block, which used to be a through street for motor vehicle traffic, as a public space.

Jeff Prant sent in this photo from last Sunday’s Summer Space, which just wrapped another season, on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights.

Click here for Jeff’s photos from the first day of the inaugural Summer Space, back in the summer of 2008.

Were we ever so young?

Thanks to reader Jeff Prant for sending in these pics from the Midtown section of Saturday’s Summer Streets installment. I caught the tail end of the event, and turnout seemed as strong as ever.

If the forecast holds, it looks like this Saturday will be less hot and muggy. Which is good, because I think the thirsty crowd at the free Honest Tea booth on 24th Street was on the verge of rioting at one point.

If you’ve got photos of Summer Streets or the neighborhood-scale Weekend Walks events that you’d like to share, upload them to Flickr and add the “Streetsblog” tag.

Remember way back in 2008, when New York’s inaugural Summer Streets dominated the news cycle? By the time August ’09 rolled around, even Fox was on board.

With the first Saturday of its fifth season coming up tomorrow, Summer Streets is a lifestyle story — to the extent that it’s still considered news at all. Consider today’s preview in the Times, which is basically a summary of a DOT press release.

Not that the city isn’t keeping it fresh. Summer Streets 2012 will include football, a climbing wall and the feature everyone seems to be talking about: a 160-foot-long zip line. And if you tire of seeing all those relaxed New Yorkers enjoying seven miles of car-free asphalt, a truck will be on display to offer a view from the driver’s seat. Step up and watch the pedestrians disappear!

Park Avenue will be open to people from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. for three consecutive Saturdays.

“It’s just a street. It’s asphalt. It doesn’t look like anything,” said Jackson Heights resident Donovan Finn of the block of 78th Street between Northern Avenue and 34th Avenue. “But it feels like something.” Finn’s neighbors, it seems, agree.

Two years ago, Jackson Heights residents and City Council Member Daniel Dromm won a hard-fought battle to close the block to traffic for two summer months. Now, 78th Street is being turned over to people 24/7/365, as reported by the Daily News, and it’s on track to receive a bottom-up redesign that will make the new space more than just asphalt.

Turning 78th from a summer play street into a permanent, year-round plaza was a breeze. “It sailed before the community board, with almost no dissenting votes,” said Finn, a member of the Jackson Heights Green Alliance. That’s not because reallocating street space has no detractors in Jackson Heights — it does – but because the hard work of persuasion had already been done, first by hundreds of neighborhood activists and then by the hundreds more who flocked to the new space.

The story of the 78th Street plaza actually goes back to 2008, when local residents concerned with the paucity of park space in the neighborhood managed to turn the block into a play street, but only for half a day on Sundays. When they tried to extend the closure to all of July and August, they encountered pushback from other locals worried about lost parking, nighttime loiterers and rush hour traffic. The transportation committee of Queens Community Board 3 voted down the proposal. It took sustained activism to persuade the full board to change its position.

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Summer Streets will return this August.

NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan today announced dates for the fifth iteration of the city’s premier car-free event. Seven miles of Manhattan streets, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park, will be open to pedestrians from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on August 4, 11 and 18.

“For three Saturdays this August, the streets belong to all New Yorkers, and everyone’s invited,” said Sadik-Khan, speaking at Union Square this morning. Summer Streets 2012 will feature a 160-foot-long zip line, a 25-foot climbing wall, football (the NFL is a sponsor this year, via the league’s “Play 60″ youth fitness campaign) and “other sports-themed activities.” Bike New York will be on hand to provide bike-riding lessons.

Weekend Walks will also take place in 19 neighborhoods throughout the summer.

New Yorkers got an unusual taste of what car-free streets feel like yesterday, thanks to the combination of Occupy Wall Street’s May Day march and the New York Police Department.

To mark the labor movement holiday, thousands of people took to the streets of Lower Manhattan to protest economic inequality. According to the New York Times, the crowd was big enough to fill Broadway between Houston and Worth Streets, a distance of eleven blocks. To prepare for the crowds, the police — who had previously attempted to force protestors to remain on the sidewalk, sometimes violently — closed streets across Downtown to motor vehicles.

The result was a surprisingly pleasant and peaceful prelude to the march. On Twitter, Philip Winn called the temporarily car-free 23rd Street, shown above, an “instantly calmer, slower, more people oriented place.”

I found myself at Broadway and Grand Street just before the march arrived. At that busy Soho corner, the new pedestrian space was being put to good use (sadly, I didn’t have a camera with me). People spread out, enjoying the change from the normally cramped sidewalks. Tourists walked in the middle of the street to better appreciate the architecture (and shops) on both sides of the road. I even saw two joggers, decked out in full athletic gear, taking advantage of what had been turned into, in their eyes, a long, open track.

If you’ve got more photos of this unintentional side effect of May Day, send them to tips [at] streetsblog [dot] org or add the Streetsblog tag on Flickr.

Tom Radulovich, the executive director of the local non-profit Livable City, describes the recent livable streets achievements in San Francisco as ”tactical urbanism” — using low-cost materials like paint and bollards to reclaim street space.

That willingness to experiment was a big reason that the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) gave its 2012 Sustainable Transport Award to San Francisco (an honor shared with Medellín, Colombia). In this Streetfilm we profile the innovations that earned SF recognition from ITDP.

Perhaps the city’s most exciting new development has been the parklet program, which converts parking spaces into public space complete with tables, chairs, art, and greenery. These mini-parks are adopted and paid for by local businesses, but they remain public space. The concept has its roots in the PARK(ing) Day phenomenon started by the SF-based Rebar Group in 2005.

San Francisco has also seen an impressive 71 percent increase in bicycling in the past five years, despite being under a court injunction that prohibited bicycle improvements for most of that time. The city aims to have 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020. Sunday Streets, San Francisco’s version of Ciclovia, has also drawn huge numbers of participants and continues to expand.

The city has also taken the lead on innovative parking management with the SFPark program, which uses new technology to help manage public parking in several pilot neighborhoods. It aims to make it easier to find a parking spot by adjusting prices according to demand, helping to reduce pollution, traffic, and frustrations for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

This is the first in a series of reports about sustainable transportation policies in Mexico City. Last week, Streetsblog participated in a tour of the city led by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Upcoming installments will cover the city’s transit expansions, particularly its new bus rapid transit lines, and its bicycle planning.

Reclaiming Mexico City’s Calle Regina for pedestrians proved more difficult than simply closing the historical street to traffic. If anything, drivers had more trouble passing through the area than those on foot.

“All the space was taken by vendors,” said Walter Hook, the CEO of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. “It was a little bit like a war when they got rid of them.” As the administration of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a former police chief, cleared the area, authorities found caches of drugs and guns, said Hook. Different colored tarps announced which gangs protected each vendor. Only after removing the vendors could officials turn their attention to making Calle Regina car free.

On the Calle Francisco I. Madero, the challenge to pedestrianization was more traditional: the opposition of small businesses along the narrow street. Madero is “the most symbolic connection, maybe, in the country,” said Daniel Escotto, head of Mexico City’s Public Space Authority. On one end of the street is the Zócalo, the central square that has been the spiritual heart of the country from when it hosted the chief temple of Tenochtitlan through Spanish colonization to the political turmoil of today. On the other end is the city’s single busiest intersection, its fine arts museum, and its oldest park.

Despite enormous pedestrian volumes, Madero’s business owners, largely local shopkeepers, resisted all efforts to take away motor vehicle access, said Escotto. “Let me just have one day, with cones,” Escotto recalled asking the local chamber of commerce.

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