This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
Jackson Heights, Queens, has been called “the most culturally diverse neighborhood in New York, if not on the planet.” It is also a neighborhood with the some of the least green space in New York.
On Roosevelt Avenue, the elevated subway line rattles above a steady stream of car traffic. Storefronts and pushcarts on the narrow, bustling sidewalks offer all kinds of food — Thai, Chinese, Mexican, Himalayan, Indian, Colombian, Guatemalan, Ecuadorean, Peruvian and more — but it’s tough to find any calm.
Yet just three blocks north, running parallel to Roosevelt, is 34th Avenue, where a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020.
That’s 1.3 miles of space. And on a recent Friday, it was being used in a variety of ways.
At 93rd Street and 34th Avenue, in front of P.S. 149, an elementary school, children played chess and Ping-Pong. A few more splashed in a kiddie pool.
On 90th Street, older people were sitting at small tables, socializing. On the other side of the median, a woman pushed a man in a wheelchair.
Block after block, people were enjoying the street: Children ran through the spray of a fire hydrant sprinkler, two girls had set up a lemonade stand, a woman tended to a garden in the median of the avenue. In front of another school, on 74th Street, four teenagers drifted by on bicycles as a man at a folding table read a newspaper in the shade.
To cycle down this avenue — it is closed to cars all the way to 69th Street — is to experience a rare, uninterrupted stretch of peace in New York. And although it is nearly impossible to please everyone — drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, seniors, children — the open street is a bold experiment for New York City that seems largely to be working. It is perhaps a model to be replicated elsewhere.
The 34th Avenue Open Street Coalition formed in May 2020, in a neighborhood that was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Everything was locked down,” said Jim Burke, the group’s co-founder. “Our whole neighborhood, including me, we all had Covid before it was fashionable.”
Bridget Bartolini, a Queens native who lives along the route, said that in those early days, the open street was a symbol of optimism.
“It felt like there was so much potential,” she said. “Some people, myself included, were very hopeful that some good was going to come out of this terrible, terrible pandemic that we were living through. Like maybe our streets could be more people-centered — and the community can come together more.”
Bartolini was so inspired by 34th Avenue that she created an oral history project based on the open street and the ways her neighbors were using it.
Burke and his cohort worked with the city to close off the streets to through-traffic (drivers can, and do, still park cars on 34th Avenue) and set up a schedule of programming. There are gardening club meetings, clothing swaps, cumbia dance lessons, crochet lessons, Zumba, bike rides and more.
There are seven public schools either on the street or less than a block away. “We have 7,000 kids who use the corridor to go back and forth to school during the school year,” Burke said. “Our main goal is to make sure those kids get back and forth to school safely.”
Of course, the 34th Avenue Open Street has had its critics.
More than 700 people signed a 2021 petition titled HALT 34th Ave Open Street — RECLAIM OUR NEIGHBORHOOD. Another 1,200 signed a 2021 petition asking to find some middle ground. “Our group is not against Open Streets, what we want is a compromise,” the petition reads. It called for 34th Avenue to be closed to traffic for fewer hours of the day — and for fewer blocks. It complained about noise.
“We are not in quarantine anymore and this started because of the pandemic, so it’s time to remove these ridiculous barriers permanently,” one signee wrote.
“End this program everywhere,” wrote another. “Streets are not playgrounds.”
There are also those who like the concept, but not the execution.
“I just think it was poorly designed,” said Kevin Dawkins, 76, who lives near 34th Avenue with his wife. He moved to Jackson Heights two years ago, and thought the open street was a great idea.
“When I was a kid, which was way back in the last century, there were a lot of street games — New York was noted for its street games,” he said. He thought his grandson would be able to “play right out in front of the apartment.”
“But then we quickly realized that was never going to happen,” he said.
Dawkins said that bicycles, motorcycles and mopeds make the open street less welcoming for pedestrians. “It’s a dangerous mix,” he said. He’d like to see one side of the avenue strictly for wheeled vehicles and the other side, across the median, just for strolling and play.
Councilman Shekar Krishnan, whose district includes Jackson Heights, said many of his constituents have complained about mopeds on the avenue.
“We had a big town hall about it,” he said. “The Department of Transportation needs to get far more serious about addressing the moped issue on our open street and, frankly, across our city, on our sidewalks, in our parks.” (Last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a street safety bill aimed at what she called “the plague of unregistered mopeds,” requiring them to be registered.)
Still, Councilman Krishnan is a fan of the project overall. And although opponents of the open street heckled him at a ribbon-cutting ceremony two years ago, he brushes off the notion that the 34th Avenue is in any way controversial.
“It is a beloved open street in our community,” he said. “Twenty-six blocks of joy that really brought our neighborhood together.”
Some in the neighborhood have a clear vision for the future, and there is an effort underway to turn 34th Avenue from a street into a permanent park, called Paseo Park — from the Spanish word for a leisurely stroll.
“We want to maximize the green space,” said Dawn Siff, the executive director for the Alliance for Paseo Park, an organization advocating the space. “Where appropriate, where we’re able to, we would put in a more human-friendly surface,” like permeable pavers or rain gardens.
That would, of course, involve removing some asphalt, and the cars that use it. And that’s the point.
“I’d like to see this become a space that is 24-7 pedestrian centered,” said Luz Mercado, board chair for the Alliance for Paseo Park.
Mercado grew up in Jackson Heights and is raising two sons there. Her mother, a 91-year-old wheelchair user, is on the avenue daily, for fresh air.
Mercado noted that Jackson Heights once had golf and tennis courts, but the green was paved over or overdeveloped years ago.
She’d like to remedy that. “For many, many years we’ve been ranked last in park space,” she said. “This community — this Latino community — deserves green space,” she said.
The biggest obstacle will be finding the money to make it happen. “Fund-raising is a challenge in a community like ours,” Siff said. “We need some really important philanthropists to come in and see what’s happening and see that this could be an exciting model of creating park space in New York City.”
Barcelona’s superblocks
In Queens, the 34th Avenue Open Street is like a long, skinny park. In Barcelona, Spain, city officials devoted themselves to a similar idea in a different shape.
In more than half a dozen neighborhoods around the city, Barcelona has shut down multiblock areas to most vehicles to form “superblocks.”
The idea is to improve air quality and create more space — including green space — for people.
Many of Barcelona’s superblocks feature artwork, and residents have repurposed the new space around their needs. In the beachside neighborhood of El Poblenou, for example, residents added a playground in a former intersection. In the Hostafrancs neighborhood, the city built plant beds and seating areas covered with solar panels.
Researchers have flocked to Barcelona to examine this urban planning experiment. One study found that largely because of a reduction in noise, pollution and heat, about 650 premature deaths could be prevented per year if Barcelona added hundreds more superblocks. Another found that when scaled up, superblocks could help “the fight against the climate crisis.” A 2022 study found that dozens of major cities around the world have streets that are primed for conversion. (The study did not include New York, but urban planners say the city’s grid is similar to that of Barcelona.)
“That’s why the superblocks in Barcelona are so exciting, because the street dimensions are remarkably similar to what’s designed in North America,” said Jordi Honey-Rosés, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who has studied superblocks.
Barcelona plans to connect existing superblocks with other green spaces in a web of walkable paths, aiming to open the streets up to pedestrians and further thin the flow of cars.
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Quote of the week
On adding parking meters to cities:
Parking is the single biggest land use of any city. There’s more space for parking than there is for housing or offices, or factories or anything like that.
What is unique about New York City is that 97 percent of all the parking spaces are free — and this is some of the most valuable land on earth. But you can use it for free if you bring a car.
Some people object to a bus lane or a bike lane. They say, “You’re taking away our precious car parking spaces.” Well, how precious are they? Nobody knows until you put it up for auction. And that is what metering does.
— Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning and author of “The High Cost of Free Parking”
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