This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
A plan to create a park in the middle of Park Avenue, which runs north to south along Manhattan’s East Side, might seem strange at first.
The location of the proposed green space, stretching from 46th Street to 57th Street, is a busy commercial corridor. There are multiple lanes of traffic and boxy, shimmering steel and glass office towers, including Lever House and the Seagram Building.
And though there are lush flowers in the median, especially along the residential portion north of 57th Street, Park Avenue is not known for being associated with an actual park.
But underneath the avenue is the Grand Central Train Shed, the hidden infrastructure that acts as an artery for Metro-North Railroad trains. The shed is over 100 years old and in desperate need of repair.
That presents an opportunity for the Department of Transportation to reimagine the streetscape above.
“Given that they have to rebuild the train shed,” said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, “they’re also going to rebuild the malls above — technically the medians are called malls.”
The new malls will be wider, expanding from 20 feet to 48 feet, Levine said. There are several stakeholders, including the City Planning Commission and Grand Central Partnership, working on the plan.
The first step, a $1 million “visioning” process — in which various design proposals are requested — is happening now.
Even without knowing exactly how it will turn out, Levine said, New Yorkers can be sure “there will be a lot of greenery, a lot of benches. Maybe even some lawn features. And potentially performance space, potentially concessions, like cafes.”
Work on the train shed has already begun in the area around 47th Street.
“They’ve removed that mall, and you can see how sad it looks without trees,” said Barbara McLaughlin, the president of the Fund for Park Avenue, a nonprofit organization that installs sculptures and maintains the trees and flowers — “the tulips, the mums, the begonias!” — on the Park Avenue malls from 54th Street to 86th Street.
McLaughlin said she was “thrilled” about the plan, describing the chance to reimagine the space as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Currently, McLaughlin pointed out, Park Avenue is “not a place where people are encouraged to gather.” She said the median, with car traffic rushing by on both sides, is “kind of dangerous.”
That changes each summer. Park Avenue participates in Summer Streets, so on certain weekend days, for hours at a time, it is closed to cars and filled with people jogging, walking and biking.
McLaughlin sees that as a preview of the coming redesign. “You can walk down the middle of the street and look up at all the architecture, look at all of our sculptures and plantings, and enjoy it all,” she said. “That’s a treat.”
Park Avenue actually has a history of major transformations.
Before the boulevard earned its reputation for extremely exclusive luxury real estate — there’s currently a five-bedroom apartment being offered for a whopping $48 million — “it was just a big open pit,” said Greg Young, the co-host of the Bowery Boys podcast, which has an entire episode about Park Avenue’s many iterations.
In the mid-1800s, railroad tracks ran through its center, belching smoke. “It was a trench that went all the way up the island,” Young said. “There were gaping holes, and kids would stand there and watch the trains come by, blowing all this exhaust and coal dust.”
In 1902, the smoke was so bad that one train collided with another because an engineer couldn’t see any signals. Fifteen people were killed.
Eventually a plan was put in place to cover the train tracks, “because they were spewing out soot and noise, and people didn’t like it,” said Gerard Koeppel, the author of “City on a Grid: How New York Became New York.”
After the train tracks were buried, pedestrian spaces with benches were installed in the middle of the street. “They gave it the name Park Avenue,” Koeppel said. “But it was hardly anything like a park.”
In the late 1920s, thanks to “the seduction of the automobile,” as Young put it, the elegant green spaces were narrowed to skinny medians to create more lanes for cars.
But the only constant in New York City is change, and more green space is generally welcomed — though not everyone is convinced that a park in the middle of Park Avenue is a good idea.
Jon Harari is the co-chairman of Patrons of Park Avenue, a committee that takes care of the trees, flowers and sculptures on the malls within the Murray Hill neighborhood, from 34th to 39th Street.
He is “indifferent” to the idea and more than a little skeptical, given how much traffic Park Avenue typically attracts.
“It’s not really a fun feeling to have cars whizzing by you,” he said. “It’s just not a comfortable environment to be hanging out.”
But Levine is optimistic. “This is a very exciting moment for street space in Manhattan,” he said.
He pointed to several examples of successful transformations, like Plaza 33, a new public space outside Penn Station that was previously a traffic-choked cross street, and Broadway between Herald Square and Union Square, which has become more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists, with planters, cafe tables and bike lanes.
“There are twin rationales for these projects: One is to deal with pedestrian overflow,” Levine said. The other? “To create great public space — space that even can become a destination.”
McLaughlin said she imagined the new nine-block park “could be our High Line,” referring to the linear park with greenery and sculptures that was once a freight railroad track cutting through the West Side of Manhattan and now has millions of visitors a year.
Young likes the sound of it too. “I feel like if they create it, people will come,” he said. “It will be a destination.”
Park Avenue’s history with a different kind of grass
So Park Avenue never had a real park. But in 1968, it was the site of a hyperlocal mini organic farm of sorts.
The crop was marijuana.
An October 1968 New York Times article followed a man named Bill and his brother Frank, described as “the Johnny Appleseeds of pot,” who planted marijuana near police stations, churches and on Park Avenue. They declined to reveal their last names.
“We’re only interested in decorating the symbols of hypocrisy,” Bill told a Times reporter. “We’d never do it to a high school or library.”
One can assume that the plants flourished, if only briefly: Two years later, in 1970, a 22-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman were arrested near 25th Street and Park Avenue South after police saw them “destroying public property.”
Asked what they were doing, the woman said: “Harvesting the crop, and we’ll share it with you.”
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Mailbag!
And now for an email from a self-described “car-hating person in Los Angeles,” received via the [email protected] inbox:
As a Realtor I can guarantee you that walkable and bikeable (is that a word?) areas of the country are more valuable when measuring real estate prices. So why do we keep building parking lots that sit empty for 14 hours a day?
Who wants to go to Houston for vacation? They have plenty of parking so it should be awesome! Disneyland (and Disney World) is your perfect urban model. You pay $120 to get rid of your car and walk around in a circle.
I don’t know it all and it’s never perfect. More parking and more lanes of traffic is not the answer. We aren’t ever going to fix traffic.
— Tim Hyde, Beverly Hills, Calif.
The post Does Anyone Want to Hang Out in the Middle of Park Avenue? appeared first on New York Times.
