Streetsblog New York City

Gathering at the new public space beneath the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza this morning, city officials and community leaders celebrated the reclamation of asphalt for people at the crossroads of Brooklyn. One of the borough’s iconic places is finally a destination that people can get to comfortably, thanks to a slate of pedestrian and bike improvements NYC DOT completed this summer.

“For too long, Grand Army Plaza has been an 11-acre vicious circle of traffic,” said DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The improvements include enormous new pedestrian islands at the north side of GAP, swaths of asphalt re-purposed as public space and resurfaced with sand-colored gravel, and new crosswalks and bike connections. Sadik-Khan said it added up to more than a football field of new public space, which will “unlock the gateway to Prospect Park.”

Community leaders and civic groups began mobilizing for a safer, livelier, and more accessible Grand Army Plaza in 2006, with the formation of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, or GAPCo. A series of site visits and public workshops followed, defining the problems with GAP and outlining principles to fix it. GAPCo had a receptive audience at DOT, which began to phase in safety improvements in 2008 and revealed a more comprehensive plan in 2010, the fruits of which were on display today.

Grand Army Plaza is “Olmsted and Vaux’s brilliant solution for integrating Flatbush Avenue with Prospect Park,” said GAPCo’s Rob Witherwax. “Over the last 150 years, the balance tipped from park to street. We tried to tip it back.”

Council Member Tish James was an early supporter of GAPCo’s efforts and praised DOT’s implementation this morning. “I grew up in Park Slope, and Prospect Heights was my backyard,” she said. “It was always difficult to navigate these streets. You took your life in your hands. Today it was easy. Today it was calming.”

No one knows about all the organizing, ideas, and coordination that went into this project better than Witherwax, who ticked off the groups that came together to improve GAP: The Prospect Park Alliance, the cultural institutions who collaborate under the banner of the Heart of Brooklyn, three local community boards, the Park Slope Civic Council, and others. “DOT could just as easily have said, ‘Thank you, we’ll get back to you later,’ but they didn’t,” Witherwax said. “They made our vision happen.”

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Earlier this week we showed some before-and-after shots of the pedestrian improvements on the north end of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. Here we’ve got a batch of pictures from the south end, by the entrance to Prospect Park. These pictures are already a little out of date — DOT has put down an epoxy-and-gravel surface on the pedestrian area where the greenmarket sets up every Saturday — so keep in mind that this isn’t the finished product. I think you’ll still get a good feel for how much of a difference this DOT project will make for pedestrians and cyclists.

Thanks are due again to the folks at the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, who’ve been pushing for changes like this for five years.

For cyclists, GAP is quickly becoming a much more functional hub, with bikeways leading into and out from the area in all directions. The addition of a greenway connection on Eastern Parkway, projected to be finished next year, will complete the spokes in the system. A two-way, circular protected bike route on Plaza Street (currently a one-way bike lane) would fill out the hub, though plans for that segment have been on hold.

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Construction work is nearing completion at one of the summer’s biggest livable streets projects: DOT’s improvements for pedestrians and cyclists at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza. Spurred by the advocacy groundwork laid by the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, the city has added huge new pedestrian islands on the north side of the plaza and created safer biking and walking connections on the south side, near the entrance to Prospect Park. All together, the changes make it much easier to walk to GAP’s central public space and navigate the whole area on foot or by bike. Here’s a peek at the pedestrian improvements on the north side.

Above is the intersection of Flatbush and Vanderbilt, looking north from one of the new pedestrian islands. Below is a similar angle, pre-makeover, grabbed from Google Street View.

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Construction is moving ahead on one of the summer’s blockbuster livable streets projects, the addition of new pedestrian and bicycle amenities at Grand Army Plaza. As often happens in Brooklyn, in the course of digging up the pavement the crew unearthed some remains from the previous incarnation of the street. Susan Kille posted this shot of old trolley tracks on Union Street, which were briefly exposed over the weekend.

Trolleys running on Union, Grand Army Plaza, and Prospect Park West were part of the surface rail network blanketing Brooklyn and much of Queens before streetcars exited the scene in the 1950s.

Doug at Brooklyn Spoke has a great series of shots from the era when trolleys plied PPW, there was nary a parked car in sight, and the sidewalks were more generous than they are today. It’s a fitting response to opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign who seem to think that preserving the street’s historic charm entails keeping the parking lanes exactly as they were in May, 2010.

Construction has started on NYC DOT’s project to greatly expand the pedestrian zones at the north end of Grand Army Plaza. The result of a years-long community-based planning process led by the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, these pedestrian improvements will reclaim a lot of asphalt and give people a much more direct walking route to the central public space at the heart of GAP. Construction of the pedestrian islands is slated to run through July, with new bike and pedestrian features on the south side of GAP scheduled for August [PDF]. Another feature in the original DOT plan for GAP — a two-way protected bike path on Plaza Street — has been postponed indefinitely.

The piece under construction right now is the “eastern wing” of the four-part pedestrian expansion:

Construction on a slate of pedestrian and bike improvements for Grand Army Plaza is scheduled to move forward this summer, NYC DOT announced this Saturday. The redesign includes a major expansion of the pedestrian islands at the north side of GAP and the addition of a two-way, protected bicycle connection linking Union Street to Eastern Parkway on the southern side. It does not include the two-way, protected bike lane on Plaza Street shown in DOT’s 2010 presentation on this same project, which Community Boards 6 and 8 both approved last year.

DOT made its revised presentation Saturday at the Grand Army Plaza Coalition‘s annual meeting. It was an anniversary of sorts for GAPCO, a partnership between the area’s major cultural institutions and neighborhood residents, which formed in 2006 to make Grand Army Plaza a welcoming public space instead of a traffic vortex. Since then GAPCO has put together several public workshops and site visits, producing a conceptual blueprint for city agencies to work from [PDF].

The big difference between last year’s DOT plan and this year’s is that the two-way, protected bike lane on Plaza Street has been set aside until an unspecified date in the future. Plaza Street encircles most of GAP, and a two-way path would create a safe hub for cyclists to take the most convenient routes to and through the space. But after last year’s CB votes, some Plaza Street residents contacted the city saying the parking-protected bikeway would cause traffic back-ups, even though Plaza Street receives little traffic and is already just one lane wide.

So call it the NBBL effect: Despite the multi-year community-based planning process that informed last year’s presentation, and despite the community board votes in favor of it, DOT seems unwilling, for now, to stir the pot so close to the litigious and well-connected NIMBYs of Prospect Park West, who happen to have  U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer on their side.

The improvements scheduled for this summer are still significant, and they represent a major milestone in the campaign to make GAP more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. Starting in June and wrapping up in August, the city plans to build out these improvements, which Streetsblog reported on last April:

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With Brooklyn Community Board 6 unanimously approving DOT’s modifications to the Prospect Park West bike lane, the public process surrounding this project has passed another milestone. Including committee votes, last night marked the fourth CB vote in the last two years in favor of the PPW redesign or the city’s proposed changes to it. The process that led to those votes goes back even further, and it’s worth a reminder of just how long the idea of calming traffic and improving bike access on PPW has been bubbling up from local residents.

This clip from the Streetfilms vault recaps a public workshop held by the Grand Army Plaza Coalition in March, 2007. GAPCO had been organizing for a year already at the time of this event. Participants in a May, 2006 site visit concluded that “vehicles travel southbound from Grand Army Plaza into Prospect Park West at a high rate of speed.” Speeding and poor conditions for cycling on Prospect Park West had emerged as key concerns at the Park Slope Civic Council’s traffic and transportation forum that same year.

Participants at the 2007 workshop also identified the lack of multi-modal access to GAP as a problem. The final workshop report [PDF] offered this recommendation:

Improve access to the plaza and connect it into a broader circulation system for pedestrians, bicyclists, automobiles and transit users. Balance the user needs. Make sure bicycle lanes aren’t dumped into fast-moving traffic.

These efforts were initiated by community groups while Iris Weinshall was transportation commissioner. The city was not trying to “sell” the idea of calming traffic on Prospect Park West or improving bike access to the Brooklyn Public Library and the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. Residents were trying to motivate the city to act on their concerns.

A few months after GAPCo published their workshop report, CB6 passed a resolution including a request that DOT study the implementation of a two-way protected bike path on Prospect Park West.

This is the process that Iris Weinshall, Norman Steisel, and Gibson Dunn attorney Jim Walden are seeking to discredit and circumvent by suing the city.

The walking, biking, and public space enhancements for Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza that DOT presented last night are now available online [PDF]. The top graphic shows the expanded pedestrian space and simplified intersection at the north end of the plaza, which will make walking to the center of GAP much more direct, pleasant, and safe. Here's what that space looks like now:

Local activists have been organizing and advocating for years to make Grand Army Plaza a public space that lives up to its setting in the heart of Brooklyn. One of the coordinators of that campaign, Robert Witherwax of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, sent us this reaction:

Of our six tenets -- improved commercial opportunities, close the gap [between the park and the central plaza], buy back asphalt, rethink traffic flow, aesthetic improvements, and improved ped and bike access to and through -- this hits the last four squarely on the head.

We have called for a wholesale rethinking of the interplay between peds, bikes, and cars and the space devoted to each: DOT brought that...

And the fact that DOT can do this in their operational toolbox is extremely interesting. This is Brooklyn's version of Times Square.

With Prospect Park West slimming down to two lanes, there won't be so much asphalt to cross walking from Union Street or Plaza Street to Grand Army Plaza:

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At last night's presentation to a joint meeting of three Brooklyn community boards, DOT assistant commissioner Ryan Russo unveiled what he called "a pretty dramatic and bold, exciting plan" for Grand Army Plaza. The proposal lived up to the billing. Lots of asphalt will be reclaimed for walking and biking. Getting to the central plaza will be a much-improved experience, as will biking to the greenmarket, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the park, thanks to an entirely two-way system of bike lanes. Russo said DOT hopes to begin implementation in August.

It's a complex project that really needs graphics to help you visualize it, but I don't have the plans just yet. Here's my bullet point description and a Google satellite view until DOT posts the full presentation online, which should happen later today.

• Image: Google Maps
  On the north end of the plaza, northbound traffic on Flatbush and southbound traffic on Vanderbilt will cross at a greatly simplified X-shaped intersection. The pedestrian spaces that define the boundaries of the "X" will be much more generous and well-defined than the mish-mash of poorly-connected islands and striping that people navigate now. Walking to the central public space will be safer and simpler, especially if you're approaching from Park Slope.
• The Plaza Street bike lane will be converted from a buffered, one-way counterclockwise path to a two-way, parking protected path, giving cyclists a safe and legal way to take the shortest routes around the plaza.
• The area between the arch and the central plaza will be set off with DOT's epoxy-and-gravel surface treatment, seen on Broadway and other pedestrian reclamation projects. Physical barriers will be added to keep cars from illegally cutting across.
  
• On the south side of the plaza, pedestrian islands will be expanded and five crosswalks will be added, making it easier to walk between Union Street, Plaza Street, and the greenmarket area. The greenmarket area will also be set off with epoxy-and-gravel and have physical barriers from traffic.
• There are several two-way bike connections planned for the south side, the general effect of which will be this: Anyone coming or going from Prospect Park West, the Prospect Park loop, or either end of Plaza Street will be able to bike safely and legally to any of those streets. Eventually a two-way path on Eastern Parkway, part of a separate capital project, will feed into this system. The plan also appears to include a small "bike roundabout" where PPW meets a two-way connection leading into the park loop (h/t @mikepstein for pointing that out).
  

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Just a reminder, DOT's presentation to a joint meeting of Brooklyn CB 6, CB 8, and CB 9 starts at 6:30 at the Brooklyn Public Library main branch. Word is that the advocates who've been working for years to make Grand Army Plaza a better public space are excited about this one, and if you live in the area you won't want to miss it.