Streetsblog New York City

A group of business owners who decried the 37th Road pedestrian plaza in Jackson Heights after it opened have come around and launched a group to act as stewards of the new public space. This turn of events comes after persistent work by Council Member Danny Dromm’s office and local merchants, who are now working together to ensure the plaza is a long-term success. The plaza’s undeniable popularity as a gathering place also hasn’t hurt.

A few months ago, Internet Café owner Agha Saleh and Bombay Chat café owner Shazia Kausar were two of the business owners unhappy with the new plaza. Saleh was quoted in the New York Times saying that it had contributed to crime in the neighborhood, while Kausar told the Times Ledger that soon after the plaza opened in October 2011, her business had dropped and she was having trouble paying employees.

Citing a “gap of communication” between business owners, DOT, and plaza supporters when the project was implemented, Saleh credited months of work by Dromm’s office and DOT to address the business owners’ concerns. “We’re really proud that we brought people on board,” Saleh said.

Now, Saleh and Kausar are working with adjacent business owners to create a new group called Sukhi NY, which will manage what is being called Diversity Plaza. “Sukhi” is an acronym for Social Uplift Knowledge and Hope Initiatives; it also translates from Urdu, Hindi and other languages as “prosperity and happiness.” Council Member Dromm, whose office had until now been coordinating plaza upkeep, joined Saleh and Kausar at an event on the plaza last Friday to announce the formation of Sukhi NY, which is still in its formative stages. Official approval by DOT as a plaza partner is expected to come in September. In the meantime, the organization is kicking off its stewardship of the plaza by hosting a festival that ends today, marking the end of Muslim holy month Ramadan.

“This plaza can benefit the stakeholders who depend on this place for their livelihood,” Saleh said.

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“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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What is it with the New York Times and the Jackson Heights pedestrian plaza?

Yesterday, the paper published a piece by Sarah Maslin Nir on a mugger in the plaza who was tackled to the ground by witnesses. It’s a good story — two of the good Samaritans were missionaries up from North Carolina, another was a firefighter who barely escaped being shot. Rather than leave it that, Maslin Nir casts the plaza itself as one of the actors, a seedy setting tailor made for gritty urban drama.

But if the plaza was really “bare and blighted,” as Maslin Nir writes, what about the missionaries who “had spent the day on the plaza … chatting with passers-by”? What about the firefighter, who was reportedly there with a colleague? Could it be that without the plaza, no one would have been around to thwart the dastardly thief?

This isn’t the first questionable story about the Jackson Heights plaza filed by Maslin Nir. And while she blames the plaza for everything from purse snatching to police brutality to public nudity (really, it’s all in there), she seems to enjoy the space quite a bit herself.

A package of enhancements and adjustments to the new pedestrian plaza on 37th Road in Jackson Heights — the object of a high-profile backlash from a group of local merchants this winter — is winning over some of the skeptics.

DOT has placed new planters and seating to spruce up the plaza and give it more color, while also adding parking and loading spaces and reversing the direction of traffic on a nearby block to improve access to the plaza, allaying some of the merchants’ fears.

The larger package of transportation changes related to the plaza had shown impressive benefits — shaving seven minutes off of local bus trips — and the new public space was already widely used. But recent tweaks have helped build a stronger consensus around the plaza, which proved to be the most controversial element of the plan.

City Council Member Daniel Dromm is a plaza supporter and has used his discretionary funds to pay for its upkeep. ”DOT has stepped up to the plate,” he said of the dozen or so planters that arrived in the plaza last Thursday. “The place is looking much more attractive.”

More street furniture is set to be delivered this Friday, when tables and chairs will be delivered at the request of two local restaurant owners. Those business owners, who had previously aligned with the merchants leading the fight against the plaza, have disassociated from the opposition. “They have grown to see the benefits to their restaurants,” said Dromm.

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Courtesy of Clarence Eckerson, Jr., here are some more scenes from the Jackson Heights pedestrian plaza that don’t fit the New York Times’ preferred narrative. Clarence says he passed through the plaza three times yesterday and it was bustling each time. On a Thursday.

Related posts:

• The Jackson Heights Plaza Photo the Times Doesn’t Want You to See
• Unlocking the Potential of the New Jackson Heights Plaza

Gotta hand it to the Times for some devious photo editing in today’s Metro section. Check out the barren seating and shuttered storefronts in the shot that accompanies Sarah Maslin Nir’s two-sides-to-every-story piece on the new Jackson Heights plaza. That plaza must really be a failure, right?

Except, if you wait until the stores actually open for business, the street looks different. There are all these people hanging out. Here’s another shot from a recent weekend:

In an ironic twist, Maslin Nir holds up the Times Square pedestrian plazas as the ideal which the Jackson Heights plaza can’t match:

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Reader Marcus Woollen submits this picture of the Jackson Heights pedestrian plaza on 37th Road taken yesterday afternoon.

This is the same plaza that some local merchants have described as “a graveyard” and “a ghost town.” What they don’t realize, apparently, is that they’re sitting on a gold mine of foot traffic. Someone just has to step up and manage this space to keep it humming every day of the year.

Earlier this month you might have noticed a few press accounts about merchants in Jackson Heights who think a new public plaza on one short block of 37th Road is crimping their bottom line. The plaza is actually part of a much broader plan to improve street safety, speed bus trips, and reduce traffic congestion in Jackson Heights, which neighborhood groups and NYC DOT have been working on for years without receiving much media attention. Now that there’s a tinge of conflict, the press is all over it — an innovative and community-driven transportation project has turned into a story about shopkeepers upset over the removal of 20 parking spaces.

The plaza reclaimed the block of 37th Road between 73rd Street and 74th Street. Before the plaza, traffic on that block degraded the neighborhood street network. Drivers turning left onto 37th Road used to cause traffic to back up on 73rd Street and beyond, causing epic fits of horn-honking. Buses routed onto the block more than a decade ago to make way for the construction of the 74th Street transit hub had to make a series of zigzagging turns, slowing down more than 10,000 bus riders every weekday. When the proposal to re-route the buses and take traffic off the block came before the local community board, the vote in favor was unanimous.

“The objective was to get that traffic to move more smoothly and reduce that honking,” said Council Member Daniel Dromm, who has championed the changes and shepherded the project through to completion. Now Q47 and Q49 buses make one turn instead of three, and Dromm says bus drivers have told him they save seven minutes on each trip compared to the old route.

Merchants knew about the changes well in advance and most of the neighborhood’s business groups were supportive, said Dromm. After the plaza installation last fall, complaints began to surface about the loss of parking. But the parking loss — 20 spaces, according to one plaza opponent — is insignificant compared to the foot traffic that could be drawn to a well-run public space. Not only is Jackson Heights compact, walkable, and full of pedestrian traffic, but it has the least amount of park space per capita of any neighborhood in the city. The plaza is also right next to the 74th Street subway station, which sees more than 40,000 boardings on a typical weekday.

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Clarence sends over this photo of the newly car-free block of 37th Road between 73rd Street and 74th Street in Jackson Heights. Since this picture was taken, the asphalt on this block has been coated with an epoxy-and-gravel surface, and it looks like a two-way bike path will be striped on one side of the street.

The new plaza is part of a package to improve pedestrian safety, bike safety, transit effectiveness, and traffic flow in the commercial core of Jackson Heights, which DOT has been working on with neighborhood residents since the beginning of the year. You can track the changes and give DOT your comments through the online portal for the project.

Jackson Heights’ 78th Street Play Street, a summertime street closure won in last year’s best feel-good story of grassroots activism, has been expanded from two months of car-free space to three this year. If all goes well in September, when the school year has started, some sort of year-round street closure should be in the works for the kids of Jackson Heights.

“We’re on track to reforming the way that whole piece of street works,” said Donovan Finn, a member of the Jackson Heights Green Alliance. Both the Department of Transportation and City Council Member Daniel Dromm are “pretty solidly on board” with making some sort of big change in the next year or so should all go well this summer, Finn reported.

By extending the play street through September — last year, the block of 78th adjacent to Travers Park was closed 24/7 in July and August — neighborhood residents and city officials will be able to see how it works when school is in session. The private Garden School uses the street both to access its five-space parking garage and for loading and unloading school buses. “That’s actually the only use that faces the street,” said Finn.

DOT and Dromm specifically requested that the play street be extended into September in order to test out how the school would make a year-round closure work, whether full- or part-time.

We’ll see what happens in September, but so far the play street is again wildly popular in the open space-starved neighborhood. “Within 20 minutes of having it closed, there were kids out there running around,” said Finn. Once amenities like picnic tables, umbrellas, and astroturf are brought out, he said, residents will be able to use the new public space in even more ways.