Paul Steely White
Summer Streets: A New Spin on an Old Tradition
New York City has plenty of summer traditions: block parties, street games, double-dutch, rambling talks on the stoop, feisty dominoes on the sidewalk, open hydrants and many, many others -- far more than I could know or name. In all this diversity though, there is a common thread that every New Yorker knows: our streets.
This summer, the NYC Department of Transportation is getting serious about these summer-time street traditions by hosting an event called Summer Streets. A temporary street closure spanning 90 consecutive blocks, Summer Streets will give New Yorkers a 6.9 mile car-free, recreational route between Central Park (at 72nd Street) and the Brooklyn Bridge. For three Saturdays in August, Park Avenue and other connecting streets between these two landmarks will be open to millions of New Yorkers and thousands of summer traditions. Along this car-free route, the DOT and Summer Streets sponsors will host art, dance and fitness classes, musical performances and bike-related activities. As an added bonus, many side streets adjacent to the route will be car-free and host to a variety of citizen-organized activities from double-dutch tournaments to scooter races and anything else imaginable.
Street closures are nothing new to New York City, but Summer Streets will be the first of its kind. Similar to Bogotá’s Ciclovía and Paris’s Plage, Summer Streets will not be your typical street fair, but rather an opportunity play, meet, relax and shape public life on a larger scale. It will be the culmination of a summer of unprecedented pedestrian and recreation-oriented street closures (Williamsburg Walks, Block Party NYC, Car-Free Crotona) spearheaded by community coalitions across the city and Transportation Alternatives and made possible by Mayor Bloomberg, the NYC Department of Transportation, the NYC Police Department, the Mayor’s Community Affairs Unit, local community boards and many other agency partners.
While raising the profile of public space is a primary goal of Summer Streets, the timing for this event, no doubt, has much to do with the City’s interest in reducing motor vehicle traffic, improving public health through urban design and meeting some of the goals established in PlaNYC -- and summer-time fun too, which in my opinion often makes for fine public policy.
By Karla Quintero, Deputy Director of Planning and Graham Beck, Communications Coordinator. Photo credit to Emmanuel Fuentabella
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Posted at 7:07 AM, Aug 08, 2008 in
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