Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to announce on Monday a plan to eliminate a treacherous stretch of road surrounding Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, part of a long-sought redesign of one of the borough’s most iconic, and hazardous, landmarks.
The plan would effectively reconnect the plaza’s most prominent feature, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, with Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s emerald jewel, restoring the 80-foot-tall arch as a grand entrance to the park, as its designers intended.
Cars would be banned from the parts of the plaza that border the parkon the southern end of the plaza, from Union Street to Eastern Parkway, which would do away with a forbidding four-lane crossing, according to the city Department of Transportation.
“Grand Army Plaza is the gateway to Brooklyn’s backyard, Prospect Park — and it should welcome New Yorkers with a street design that puts safety first,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. “Anyone who’s tried to cross here knows how dangerous and chaotic the streets can be. This redesign is long overdue and will provide a sense of ease and enjoyment to one of Brooklyn’s most important public spaces.”
The redesign, which would also include upgraded bike lanes and walking paths, is expected to add about three-quarters of an acre of public space to the plaza, a 42 percent expansion, and significantly reduce the number of crossings — to 24, down from 39 — where pedestrians and cyclists have to dodge cars.
The 14-acre plaza is one of the most visited — and most chaotic — places in Brooklyn, at the congested crossroads of several affluent neighborhoods, including Park Slope and Prospect Heights.
A project timeline and budget have not yet been finalized, and the department declined to say whether the project would be completed during Mr. Mamdani’s term.
The mayor is facing a yawning $5.4 billion budget deficit over the next 15 months and will have to choose which projects to prioritize. The city will hold a number of public workshops to solicit feedback on the plaza project later this month.
Residents and civic groups have complained about traffic whizzing around the oval-shaped plaza for decades. In 1955, one publication described the traffic circle as “the only concrete and asphalt roulette wheel in the world.”
Between 2021 and 2025, there were 219 traffic injuries along the plaza’s central roadways and outer ring, according to the Transportation Department.
In spite of the constant traffic, the plaza remains a popular destination for those who want to admire the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers of the plaza and Prospect Park (as well as Central Park in Manhattan).
Thousands of people a day visit the plaza to gaze at the memorial arch dedicated to Civil War veterans and lounge on benches near the Bailey Fountain. The annual West Indian American Day Parade culminates in celebrations at the plaza, which is also home to one of the city’s largest year-round greenmarkets.
“It’s totally weird that this beautiful public space is on the far side of multiple lanes of zooming traffic,” said Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a safe-streets advocacy group that supports the redesign. “It’s just so obvious that this should be a pedestrian space.”
The city began planning changes to the plaza in 2022 under Mayor Eric Adams, but the effort stalled. After public feedback, which favored more dramatic changes to the area’s roadways, the Mamdani administration selected a plan that would remove cars from the lower tip of the plaza and divert some traffic to other streets.
“Every time N.Y.C. D.O.T. has provided more space to pedestrians at the park, it’s been an instant success, and it becomes impossible to think of how the space could have functioned before,” Mike Flynn, the transportation commissioner, said in a statement about the plan.
The plaza plan and other recent changes to nearby roads reflect Mr. Mamdani’s broader campaign emphasis on street safety.
In 2013, Sammy Cohen Eckstein, a 12-year-old boy who was playing with a ball a few blocks from the plaza, was killed by the speeding driver of a van. His death led to the passage of Sammy’s Law, which enables the reduction of speed limits to 20 miles per hour or less on many city streets. Mr. Mamdani recently invoked the law in a plan to reduce speed limits near hundreds of schools.
The Transportation Department also expects the plaza redesign to help speed up some of the slowest buses in the borough, including the B41, which serves over 27,000 daily riders, because the reconfiguration should reduce congestion in and around the loop. Later this month, the city will begin adding center-running bus lanes and pedestrian islands along Flatbush Avenue, which connects to Grand Army Plaza.
Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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