Plazas Will Serve Low-Income Neighborhoods… But at Whose Cost?

Event: New York City Plaza Program Information Session
Location: Department of Transportation, 07.16.08
Speaker: Andy Wiley-Schwartz — Assistant Commissioner, Office of Planning and Sustainability, NYC Department of Transportation
Organizer: NYC Department of Transportation

Before and after image of the Plaza Program’s potential.

Courtesy NYC Department of Transportation

With the NYC Plaza Program, the Department of Transportation (DOT) is looking to create “vest pocket parks” — small, modestly landscaped plazas on existing marginal sites such as traffic islands and underused turning lanes. At a recent information session, Andy Wiley-Schwartz, assistant commissioner of the Office of Planning and Sustainability, presented how the department could use its authority over the public right-of-way to displace or divert streets and parking to create easily accessible plazas, complete with benches and plantings.

To be designed by the city and managed in cooperation with neighborhood nonprofit groups who will apply to DOT to enter the Plaza Program, the criteria for acceptance will favor community organizations in low-income areas with inadequate public space but with the means to maintain the proposed plazas. But there’s the catch. Local groups are expected not only to provide upkeep and programming, but also to assume liability for the new public spaces, according to the program’s proposal guidelines. The cost of insurance alone could make the plazas prohibitively costly for the very neighborhoods where they’re most needed.

However, with construction still two years away and a relatively modest $14 million on hand expected to fund about four plazas a year to start, the NYC Plaza Program is only one small piece of a much larger urban puzzle — a signal, along with the midtown Broadway Esplanade from 42nd to 34th Street opening mid-August, of a shift in the Bloomberg administration away from automobile traffic towards a more pedestrian-friendly streetscape for New York.

Ian Volner is a writer and critic living in Manhattan.