Washington Heights

At October's Walk21 Conference, I got the chance to tour the High Bridge, a viaduct connecting Manhattan and the Bronx which has been closed to the public for nearly 40 years.

This was the scene in Washington Heights Friday evening, after this guy, along with two others, parked their gigantic rental truck directly in front of a trio of elderly people waiting for the M4 at W. 187th Street and Fort Washington Avenue. Rather than sit passively with the spewing behemoth a few feet from their faces, one of them, a woman shown after the jump, took out her cellphone and began taking pictures.

There are two opportunities tonight to get behind livable streets efforts in Manhattan.

Months after Community Board 12 killed plans for a Washington Heights Greenmarket over concerns about parking, a scaled-down market is set to open at a location further south. But not before the board could reiterate its unwavering deference to Upper Manhattan motorists.

When I set out to summarize responses to the Transportation Alternatives Candidate Survey from City Council contenders in Washington Heights and Inwood, I expected it to take some time. It's a crowded field, after all, with challengers looking to knock off incumbent Robert Jackson in District 7 and a full slate of District 10 hopefuls vying to fill the spot vacated by the disgraced Miguel Martinez.

Last September, Manhattan Community Board 12 tabled a resolution in support of a new Greenmarket for W. 185th Street in Washington Heights. The effort to locate the market was community-driven -- a neighborhood resident gathered 1,000 signatures in support of it -- the board's parks committee was enthusiastically in favor, and the city's Greenmarket office was in the process of securing a tow truck to remove errant vehicles. But the idea stalled when a handful of area residents predicted the market would draw noisy early-morning crowds, and complained that it would tie up the street's 19 parking spots for a few hours a week.

Spurred by comments following yesterday's post on Greenway access in Washington Heights, a reader put together this map [download the full size version] of how to get from the Greenway to the George Washington Bridge. It's no straight shot by any means. If the arrows are a little hard to follow, here are the directions:

Last Friday afternoon my wife and I walked the Hudson River Greenway from Morningside Heights north toward home in Inwood. It was nice and warm out, and after a while we wanted water, so just south of the George Washington Bridge we decided to head over to Broadway, where we could stop for a beverage before catching a train the rest of the way. We exited the Greenway at 165th Street in Washington Heights, a route neither of us had taken before. After crossing the pedestrian bridge over the train tracks and taking a trail under the Henry Hudson Parkway and through the woods, this is what we found.

We wondered a few months back why Upper Manhattan Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat, a supporter of congestion pricing, would side with the usual suspects in opposing Ravitch-backed East and Harlem River bridge tolls. At the time, Espaillat told Streetsblog readers that new tolls would place an unfair burden on his district, and blamed MTA financial woes on "contemptible bookkeeping and abject failure to control spending."