Public Space
Streetsblog Basics
T.A. Offers Reward for Park Slope “Post-Automobile Street” Designs
9th St. and 4th Ave.: "A dangerous crossing that divides surrounding neighborhoods and inhibits street life."
July 7, 2008
Streetfilms: Hiking the Heights
If you spend much time in upper Manhattan, you know it's blessed with hundreds of acres of parkland, much of which serves to showcase the area's naturally rugged terrain. To help bring attention to this sometimes overlooked resource while promoting public health, an organization called CLIMB (City Life is Moving Bodies), in conjunction with Creative Arts Workshops for Kids, hosts an event called Hike the Heights, an "urban safari" through parks from Morningside Heights to Inwood. Streetfilms correspondent Mark Read has the lowdown.
June 24, 2008
Streetfilms: Depaving Day in Portland
Our coverage of the Toward Carfree Cities conference continues with this Streetfilm from Elizabeth Press, who brings us a unique public service project.
June 19, 2008
Watching the Water Fall, by Bike
Next Thursday, artist Olaf Eliasson's much-anticipated "New York City Waterfalls" installation will debut along the East River. The project, as elegantly described in this week's New Yorker, "features four tall, widely separated, openwork steel towers housing
powerful pumps that will pull river water up to a high basin and send
it cascading down again, continuously, from seven in the morning until
ten at night, through mid-October."
June 18, 2008
DOT Gives Its Regards to Broadway
Last night's Tony winners aren't the only newsmakers on Broadway these days. In May DOT quietly rolled out plans to give the city's premier north-south thoroughfare the livable streets treatment from Times Square to Herald Square (between 42nd and 35th Streets). The redesign replaces two car travel lanes with pedestrian plazas and a protected bike lane.
June 16, 2008
Petrosino Square to Expand Into Lafayette Street
Alan Gerson extolls the value of using underutilized traffic lanes for park space, with Friends of Petrosino Square founder Georgette Fleischer, Parks Borough Commissioner Bill Castro and CB 2 Chair Brad Hoylman
June 12, 2008
T.A.: Car-Free Central Park Would Ease Neighborhood Congestion
A study released this week by Transportation Alternatives undercuts the claim that closing Central Park's loop drive to cars would increase traffic on the streets of Harlem. To the contrary, findings indicate that loop entrances on 110th street at Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards "act as traffic magnets," drawing vehicles onto neighborhood streets from more appropriate routes like the FDR, Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.
June 12, 2008
SE Prospect Park Re-Design Includes Some Restrictions on Cars
A new Prospect Park skating rink and recreational facility will come with a smaller parking lot and improved bike access, reports neighborhood blog Hawthorne Street. The plan to re-design the southeast area of Brooklyn's flagship park, unveiled at a public meeting this Monday, will also restrict car access at one entrance, but stops short of doing away with the current rink's parking lot altogether. It remains to be seen whether the re-design will address the hazardous entrance at Parkside and Ocean.
May 22, 2008