Manhattan

A new subway entrance could tear asunder the entire fabric of an Upper East Side block, says its residents.

Over the weekend, The Times’ Metropolitan Section took on the dispute over the MTA’s planned expansion of the 68th St. subway station. As we know, Transit is planning to make this busy station ADA-accessible and an overall easier place to exit the system by building new entrances and some elevators at 69th Street, and the residents along one part of 69th St. doth protest too much.

Cara Buckley penned The Times’ take on the dispute, and it’s a perfectly sterile piece. Those crazy one-percenters, it seems to say. Here’s how Buckley writes it:

There is talk that the proposed newcomer will bring riffraff to the block, or rats or outdoor urinators. That things will be noisier. Squishier. That property values will drop. Such are the fears running along 69th Street near Lexington Avenue, home to the Union Club, neo-Georgian homes and carriage houses. They are fears normally associated with the less-charming realities of urban life, like a homeless shelter or a late-night dive bar. But in this case, they are focused on something quite different: new entrances to a subway station.

Some New Yorkers can only dream of having a subway train ferry them straight to their front door, but residents of East 69th Street say the entrances have no place on what they believe to be one of the prettiest streets around. They have formed a block association and hired lawyers, and they plan to tap an engineering firm to conduct transportation and environmental assessments that will likely show that the entrances can and should go elsewhere, or perhaps are not needed at all. Residents are feeling, in the words of one, “hysterical,” all the while trying to defuse charges of Upper East Side snobbery.

“It’s not as though any of us are sitting there riding around in limos and saying other people should ride the subways, like Marie Antoinette,” said Charles Salfeld, who has lived at the Imperial House on East 69th Street since 1976. “What we object to is this access to and from the subway done at the expense of the residential and pristine quality of 69th Street.”

Actually, that’s exactly what those folks said at previous meetings, and now they’re trying to backtrack. What Buckley only tip-toed around when describing a block a few feet from Lexington Ave. and Hunter College were the clear racial undertones of the residents’ statements. During an October meeting, one resident said “people to the west don’t take the subway. Not to be elitist, but they don’t.” In January, another said the new station would “attract people looking to hang out.”

Now that these East 69th St. residents had time to compose themselves, their language — still ludicrous — has lost its edge. They speak of rolling a bowling ball down the block at night without hitting anything. They call the MTA’s new “absolutely preposterous” and worry about property values which will somehow go down with better subway access. They’ve lawyered up and toned it down.

This story runs deeper than just some neighborhood opposition to a new subway entrance. It’s about a group of people who think they’re better than everyone else and want to keep their quote-unquote pristine block of urban space shoved between Lexington and Park Avenues in Manhattan, the nation’s most densely populated area, to themselves. This isn’t a quaint dispute with some self-centered Upper East Siders. It’s elitism, classism and maybe even some racism at its worst, and that deserves attention.

One architect has a plan to send the L train to the United Nations. (Via nybydzine. Click to enlarge)

Via DNAInfo, here’s a fun one for a Friday afternoon: Architect David Wright, while dreaming up plans for future subway expansions, has proposed sending the L train to the United Nations via Hudson Yards. It’s an ambitious plan that carries with it numerous engineering and operational challenges along with astronomical costs, but it’s an entertain one to ponder nonetheless.

Here’s his explanation:

Suppose that L to 7 Hudson Yards Extension actually happens. The platforms are offset so the L Train could eventually extend east to Penn Station and directly connect to Grand Central Terminal.

From there, there’s a very convenient connection with the 2nd Avenue Subway and First Avenue – UN Plaza. Add in a new Herald Square L Train Station, and 3 of the busiest transit hubs become connected. There isn’t a 34th Street tunneling conflict since Penn RR lines are under 32nd & 33rd Streets.

Maybe this becomes a reversed “C” shaped SAS revised route. It would include a Harlem Crosstown extension connecting west to the 1 Train. This would greatly improve horrible bus traffic on 125th Street and provide connections with all existing subway lines across Harlem…And maybe this Crosstown L just heads north up 2nd Avenue and west across Harlem and we’re done!

A few days ago, Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction, spoke vaguely of extending the 7 train if the popular will and political muscle is in place to do so. Wright’s plan, a dream more than anything else, certainly could capture public imagination. It’s thinking big, and I like thinking big.

Upper East Side NIMBYs are worried that shady folk might 'hang out' at a planned subway entrance at 69th Street and Lexington Ave.

Remember how the MTA wants to make the 68th St. station along Lexington Ave. ADA-accessible and easy to navigate by adding an entrance with elevators at 69th St.? And remember how a bunch of entitled East Side residents (along with their fireplaces) threw a fit about the plan back in October? Well, they’re back.

At last night’s Community Board 8 meeting, those overly elitist and out-of-touch residents of 69th St. once again spoke out against the MTA’s plans. This time, they brought along lawyers who threatened to defend their so-called “bucolic” lives on 69th St. between Lexington and Park Avenues in the very heart of the nation’s densest urban area.

DNA Info’s Amy Zimmer was once again on the scene. She wrote:

Residents on the tony block, many of which came to a Community Board 8 meeting Wednesday night, are worried the entrances would ruin their quiet residential enclave. “Sixty-ninth Street is a really bucolic street,” said Charles Salfeld, a resident of the Imperial House at the southwest corner of East 69th Street and Lexington Avenue. “But [by] putting this subway entrance in front of our building, you turn 69th Street into 68th Street, which is a busy commercial street…The idea of spending $57 million because you want to put in an elevator, and that elevator is going to change the character of our buildings, is madness.”

…Residents are teaming up — and hiring legal muscle — to stop the project. “The co-ops on 69th Street have gotten together and formed a block association and retained counsel,” resident Bill Roskin said, with his lawyer from Davidoff Malito & Hutcher sitting next to him.

Roskin told MTA officials that owners on the “pristine” block were hopeful to have a discussion about changing the entrances…Transit officials said it would be more complicated and expensive to build the entrances on East 67th or 70th streets, and that they have already spent a lot of time looking at alternative scenarios and narrowing them down to the most feasible ones.Roskin told DNAinfo he was particularly concerned that the unmanned station would “attract people looking to hang out.”

Few locals seemed to care about alleviating the crush of straphangers coming on or off the platforms. “So it’s congested,” Salfeld said. “Manhattan is a congested place.”

People might hang out. At a subway station. On Lexington Ave. and 69th St. If that’s not NIMBYism acting as a front for veiled classism or racism, I don’t know what it is.

According to sources who were at the meeting, this group of residents could charitably be described as an unpleasant bunch, and now they’re going to sue. Much like the residents of 86th St. who objected to subway entrances on their less “bucolic” and “pristine” block, they’re going to lose. They should be ashamed of themselves, but they’re not. It’s the ugly, ugly side of New Yorkers rearing its head. It’s NIMBYism, and it should not be tolerated.

Roosevelt Island will soon be transformed into an applied sciences campus run by Cornell.

Much like wide swaths of New York City outside of Manhattan south of 96th Street, Roosevelt Island has long been fetishized as a strange “other” amidst the urban life of New York City. Cut off from both Manhattan and Queens by water, the largely residential island with a few hospitals sits amidst the East River. The 59th St. Bridge passes over it, and only the F train, the Q0102 and a tram — how neat! — service the island. Its residents love it for its access and idyllic qualities amidst the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.

With the announcement earlier this week, though, of a brand new applied sciences campus run by Cornell University on the souther end of the two-mile landmass, life could change on Roosevelt Island. The school will start to open in 2017, and city officials expect it to be fully built out by 2027. The plans call for housing for 2500 students and another 280 faculty members, and the Economic Development Corp. says the campus alone will create 8000 new jobs. For an island with 12,000 residents, those totals represent a large influx of people.

Already, transportation advocates are casting a wary eye on the project. In a lengthy press release on the campus, the word “transportation” appears just once, and it’s unclear at this stage how Cornell will improve accessibility to the southern part of the island. It’s a manageable half-mile walk from the F train, but that walk is a relatively long one compared with how close, say, Columbia, NYU and Fordham are to their nearest train stops.

In a post yesterday, Cap’n Transit wondered how Roosevelt Island would remain relatively car-free. The infrastructure on the island can’t really support a huge influx of cars as it is even as the current hospital areas near where the campus will go up are relatively car-heavy. “Let’s hope,” the Cap’n writes, “that the Cornell and Technion designers have more vision than they showed in that lame fly-through, and that they build something urban and scholarly, with really narrow streets, like in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Let’s hope that they don’t think they’re too good to take the train to work, or at least to park at the Motorgate and take the bus. But if they do, let’s hope that Bloomberg, Steel and the RIOC will make them do the right thing.”

One potential “right thing” could involve exploring a new subway stop for the island. The 53rd St. tunnel passes directly underneath what will be the southern end of the Cornell campus. There’s no station right now, and I have no idea if one is even technically or economically feasible. But it would serve to anchor the campus and would nearly eliminate the need to drive to Cornell-on-Roosevelt. Currently, while the F train itself at Roosevelt Island is very crowded, the station is only the 180th most popular. That figure is a bit deceptive though as the 37.6 percent increase in ridership from 2009 to 2010 was the second highest in the city. Over 2.5 million riders a year use the station, and that number will jump considerably with the campus.

It is, at least, an idea. With the Cornell campus, the city could be sending upwards of 10,000 people a day to Roosevelt Island, and the transportation infrastructure improvements must be a part of the conversation before the project moves too far along. Will transit play the proper role or will it, as Stephen Smith worries, turn into yet another academic Corbusian nightmare in New York City?

The Triboro RX line would improve transit access in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx but skips over powerful Manhattan.

Historically, the New York City Subway system has always focused on delivering people into the heart of Manhattan. It grew out of the need to bring people from the north, south and east to Wall St. and spread it tentacles through midtown, upper Manhattan and the Outer Boroughs always shuttling people to what we now know as the Manhattan Central Business District. The alluring draw of Manhattan still dictates the city’s expansionist transit policies, but should it?

The MTA likes to tout its megaprojects, and since the start of the century, they have embarked on a rather ambitious expansion plan to grow the transit network. The Second Ave. Subway will alleviate congestion on the Lexington Ave. IRT while better providing transit access from the Upper East Side to Midtown and Lower Manhattan. The 7 line extension will open up a new frontier of development along Manhattan’s Far West Side while East Side Access will bring LIRR to Manhattan’s East Side. The Fulton St. Transit Center and the new South Ferry station are all a part of the comprehensive effort to develop Lower Manhattan.

Take a deep breath because that’s a lot of Manhattan. At a time when areas in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens are undergoing rapid transformation as residential neighborhoods, job centers and desirable places for growth, the New York City subway system remains singularly focused on bringing people into Manhattan, its own job since the early 1900s. On the one hand, it should be concerned with Manhattan because most commuters want to get to and from Manhattan every day, and since Manhattan is an island, it has only so many entry points.

On the other, the Manhattan-centric nature of the subway system makes interborough and some intra-borough travel quite complicated or convoluted. It’s nigh impossible to travel from Bay Ridge to JFK Airport on the subway without a considerable investment in time, and many of the job centers focused around health care remain frustratingly out of the way for straphangers. Yet, the only non-Manhattan projects involve some Select Bus Service corridors that take forever to go from planning to reality.

Meanwhile, city officials starting at the top are making noises about another Manhattan-centric subway project. Mayor Bloomberg, as we know, wants to build an extension of the 7 train to Secaucus. Doing so would funnel more workers from Hudson County, New Jersey, into Midtown via the Hudson Yards development. It’s a developer’s dream and one that would improve both mobility and desirability west of the Hudson.

That said, I don’t blame Staten Island politicians who feel slighted over the rumored plans. The city would rather build the subway to New Jersey than ponder Outer Borough expansion plans. After all, those expansion plans wouldn’t have the same impact as a subway that funnels commuters straight into midtown would. Still, as Bloomberg draws responses to his proposal for a new high tech campus somewhere in the city, the push to add jobs outside of Manhattan will inevitably lead to demand for better transit options.

The short wishlist of Outer Borough transit projects is centered around the Triboro RX line. Last mentioned by the MTA in 2008 as part of Lee Sander’s 40-year plan, the Triboro RX line would use preexising rights-of-way and tracks to connect Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx while staying clear of Manhattan. It would pass through job hubs and offer connections to at least 17 other subway lines. It could be amended to cross the Narrows to Staten Island and would extend somewhere into the Bronx.

Beyond that, the city could use better transit access to LaGuardia, a Nostrand and/or Utica Ave. subway extension and service past Flushing/Main St. on the 7 line. None of these projects offer the sexy political allure of Manhattan, but they would do wonders for mobility in and around the region. The dollars and the will though just aren’t there, and we’ll watch as Manhattan remains, for better or worse, the center of attention.

Addendum: As the good Cap’n just reminded me, he offered up his take on Manhattan recently. Check out this piece for a different view on why Manhattan has all the fun.