Aaron Donovan

The Gansevoort Market Historic District attracts new visitors and businesses every day. This makes the neighborhood vibrant and exciting. But it also adds pressures to the streets and sidewalks. You can help make the neighborhood safer for pedestrians, more efficient for vehicular traffic, and more attractive to the public at large. Please join the Greater Gansevoort Urban Improvement Project for a community workshop. The project is asking for public input, as part of a larger planning study that seeks to find balanced solutions to our transportation challenges and aims to maximize the public value of the area's unusual historic streets and sidewalks. The workshop will be led by the Regional Plan Association, with a presentation by the Sam Schwartz Company. All ideas are welcome.

Governors Island Alliance and the AIA New York Chapter, APA New York Metro Chapter and the New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, in association with the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) and Governors Island National Monument are pleased to invite you to a forum on the development of the parks and public spaces on Governors Island. The forum will feature discussions on design opportunities and challenges, the interaction of public and private spaces, and creative programming, at a time when GIPEC is launching its design competition for the Island’s parks and public spaces.

Fatal Crashes (19 Dead This Week; 5 Dead This Year)

Project for Public Spaces will lead teams of residents on a field trip to key intersections in Hells Kitchen, where the participants will propose solutions to redesign the blocks.

Ninth Avenue Renaissance invites you to attend a town hall meeting on traffic congestion in Hell's Kitchen. Expected speakers include Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Tim Tompkins of the Times Square Alliance and Fred Kent of Project for Public Space, but most of the agenda remains focused on community input.

Come voice your support for pedestrian safety improvements on the Upper East Side! This is an issue Streetsblog's own Glenn McAnanama has pushed to the forefront (as seen here on Streetsblog and in The New York Times).

On the evening of Saturday, January 10, 2004, Peter Hornbeck, 26, stepped off the curb at Park Avenue and 96th Street and was struck by a Chevy Suburban traveling 74 miles per hour. The SUV, being driven by a 26-year-old man from Queens who had had his license revoked years earlier, dragged Hornbeck for a block as Hornbeck's friends cried out in horror. The driver, Gurpreet Oberoi, sped off, ditched his SUV and continued by bus to Atlantic City, where he spent the night gambling. Oberoi's friends stayed in the city, went to the police and called Oberoi on his cell phone to urge him to turn himself in. Oberoi was arrested (NYT Select, 2nd item) days later and sentenced (NYT Select) to up to nine years in prison for second degree manslaughter.

5BBC members Ken Coughlin and Brian Hoberman will warm up the evening with a travelogue and photo album from their trip to Sweden and Denmark this past summer. They will provide practical information on self-contained bicycle touring, shipping bikes by air, and rail transportation in a foreign land. 5BBC hopes to serve authentic Scandinavian refreshments.

Brooklyn is distinctly different and yet such an important part of New York City. The name itself brings to mind tree-lined streets, finely carved rowhouses and beautiful churches and diverse communities, rich in cultural life and ethnic heritage. On the upswing, vibrant and rebuilding itself, Brooklyn faces a new challenge-an uncommon development, designed by world famous architect Frank Gehry, that threatens to redirect Brooklyn's future and reshape its identity. Brooklyn Matters reveals the fuller truth about the Atlantic Yards proposal and highlights how a few powerful men are circumventing community participation and planning principles to try to push their own interests forward.