Manhattan

According to Upper East Side residents, only criminals and marauders would use the proposed subway entrance at 69th Street and Lexington Ave.

There ain’t no NIMBY like an Upper East Side NIMBY, and an Upper East Side NIMBY don’t stop.

Let’s take a trip to 68th St. on the 6 train. There, we will find one very crowded subway station and one very loud and particularly arrogant group of NIMBYs ready to face down the MTA. It’s not a very pleasant stop during most of the hours of the day. Last year. It was the 30th busiest station last year as over 10 million people entered the station, and with hospitals, Hunter College, Central Park and a densely populated residential neighborhood surrounding the station, it is a very popular destination for exits too (although those numbers are not available). For years, people who use that station have cried out for better exits and a handicapped-accessible station, and the MTA is ready to oblige.

Last week, at a Community Board 8 meeting, the MTA along with a joint venture between Urbahn and Dewberry presented plans to make the 68th St. station ADA-accessible. These plans include, of course, the installation of elevators at 68th St. and a slew of other changes that will make the station a more pleasant one to enter and exit. The authority plans to widen the staircases leading up to the street at 68th St. and will add entrances to the back of the platform at 69th St. as well. At a station famous for its exit time — some riders say it can take around five minutes during peak hours to leave — these changes would make it better for everyone.

Plans for 68th Street include wider stairways, elevators and some back entrances on 69th Street.

But wait! As this is the Upper East Side, home of the people who want better subway access as long as it’s not going to disrupt their precious isolated existence, a group of folks on 69th St. say a subway station entrance will ruin their block. They don’t, as some residents at the meeting said, want increased foot traffic on a street on the Upper East Side in the middle of Manhattan. “It would ruin the fabric of the neighborhood,” Nancy Friedman, who lives on East 69th St. (with a roaring fireplace), told a reporter after the meeting. “It’s the most beautiful block in the city.”

DNA Info’s Amy Zimmer had a bit more from the meeting:

Particularly on the west side of the street, the entrance wasn’t needed, [Friedman] said, because “people to the west don’t take the subway. Not to be elitist, but they don’t.”

The MTA’s plans spurred one man from the ritzy block to accuse the transit agency of using the ADA requirements as a “charade.” Board members bristled at the accusation, with the committee’s co-chair calling the comment “offensive to disabled people.”

In support of the MTA’s plans, CB 8 member A. Scott Falk…told the residents at the meeting, “New York City is not a gated community. The whole idea of putting an entrance on 69th Street is going to open you up to marauding down the street seems a bit reactionary.”

But CB 8 member Teri Slater took umbrage at those remarks. “This is not an elitist argument,” said Slater, who believes that there is simply more crime concentrated around subway entrances. She didn’t think there was a “mandate” for the new entrances on East 69th Street and thought the MTA should redesign the plaza on East 68th Street in front of Hunter College to increase the size of the entrance instead. “There’s a fundamental disconnect between the MTA and the neighborhoods of the Upper East Side,” she said.

So here we have Upper East Side residents from East 69th Street between Lexington Ave. and Park Ave. bemoaning one subway entrance at the rear of the train because “people to the west don’t take the subway.” They think ADA accessibility is a “charade” and insist that “this is not an elitist argument.” And these people apparently

Now Teri Slater, for one, isn’t new to this fight. She’s been in the news for decades fighting ostensibly for Upper East Side preservation. Elizabeth Ashby, a preservationist who founded the group with Teri Slater, gave the first toast. “We’re here to protect the Upper East Side from bad ideas,” she said to The Times in 2004. “We want you to be part of our army.” Bad ideas, apparently, include anything which may draw attention to her block whether it be good or bad.

Now, the Upper East Siders claim that because their buildings are landmarked, so too must their street corner. It’s hard for me to find any compelling grounds though for giving heed to their argument (which one observer termed 28 Days Later rage rather than good old NIMBYism). They don’t want a subway entrance on their corner because they think only criminals are subway riders, and they don’t want to introduce unsavory elements to the Upper East Side. That is an insult to everyone else. It’s a slap in the face to subway riders and the handicapped. It is, truth be told, an elitist argument, and it’s why urban planning policy is stuck in a rut in New York City.

The new stationhouse at 96th St. sits amidst a busy Broadway. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

The new entrance at 96th St. and Broadway is one near and dear to my heart. My parents live a few blocks south of the 93rd St. side of that station, and even though I no longer live on the Upper West Side, that station will always be home to me. Over the last three years, the station had been undergoing a comprehensive renovation that saw the main entrances at 96th St. moved to a new stationhouse on the Broadway median. Unfortunately, though, now that the new entrances have been open for a few months the neighbors aren’t too happy with it.

The problem, as DNA Info’s Leslie Albrecht reported this week, is one impacting pedestrians and drivers alike, and it was one entirely foreseeable. When the MTA rebuilt the 72nd St. stationhouse, they closed off Broadway’s uptown lanes to all traffic, but at 96th St., straphangers leaving and entering the station must compete with cars zooming down Broadway and trying to access the Henry Hudson Parkway. It has become a dangerous mess.

Albrecht has more:

Pedestrians cross Broadway to reach the bustling subway stop, which serves the 1 local line as well as the 2 and 3 express lines, and like most New Yorkers they stride into the crosswalk when there seems to be a break in traffic. But those bold walkers can’t see the turn signals guiding cars, and they don’t realize they’re sometimes stepping into the path of cars turning left onto southbound Broadway from westbound West 96th Street. “The way it currently is, it’s not flowing very well at all,” said Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, who represents the 69th District.

O’Donnell says he is so worried about unsafe conditions at the busy crossroads that he wrote a letter earlier this month to the DOT, voicing concern about “construction, timing of turn signals and general pedestrian confusion” at the intersection. O’Donnell wants DOT to run a safety inspection at the intersection…

O’Donnell says problems at the intersection are compounded by cars racing to reach the West Side Highway via West 96th Street now that the West 95th Street highway on-ramp is closed. Parents at nearby P.S. 75, at West 96th Street and West End Avenue, say they worry, too, about the onslaught of cars.

Police at the NYPD’s 24th Precinct have also asked DOT to make safety improvements at the intersection and have even gone as far as submitting a list of suggestions, including using signs to warn people leaving the subway station from a median in the middle of Broadway to watch for turning vehicles, and prohibiting left turns onto Broadway from 96th Street.

As Albrecht notes, the MTA had to cut sidewalk space to accommodate traffic on Broadway while building a stationhouse wider than median. Thus, cars are battling people for space on the avenue while, at the same time, every passenger exiting at the north end of the station comes up in the middle of the street. The sidewalk entrances that kept pedestrians safer have been shuttered as part of the renovation. It’s a perfect storm for potential accidents.

Short of closing off parts of Broadway or attempting to siphon Henry Hudson-bound traffic around to 97th St., there is no easy solution to this problem. With the 95th St. entrance to the parkway shuttered, cars need to access 96th St. to reach the Henry Hudson. Cutting a lane of traffic to save sidewalk space and make the crossings shorter would have been ideal, but that ship has sailed. Instead, traffic calming and a delayed green should solve this pesky problem.

An Ave. A entrance to the L's 1st Ave. stop would be a boon for Alphabet City.

As subway expansion plans and a city-subsidized ferry service have made headlines lately, the L train has come under consideration from some of my readers. I recently did some sleuthing on the potential for expansion within Manhattan and can now answer the question of why. Why doesn’t the L stop at Ave. C? Why is there no Ave. A entrance?

The 14th St. route into Williamsburg and beyond has seen tremendous growth over the last 15 years, but its limitations, especially in Manhattan, are obvious. It stops every two avenues until First Ave. and then not again until Bedford Ave., leaving the eastern part of the island without easy subway access. From a planning perspective, an entrance at Ave. A would alleviate pressure at First Ave. and bring the subway one very long avenue block closer to Alphabet City. At stop at Ave. C would be even better.

I had a chance to query Transit on these concerns this week and wanted to share the results. At Ave. C, as many expected, the engineering demands and issues with the city’s water table make a stop there too difficult to maintain. In an email, a Transit spokesman said he consulted with the operations planning team, and they explained the issues. “After the L train leaves 1st Ave., it begins to descend and the slope is too great to place a station (and reliably stop trains),” he said. “Excavating the station and smoothing out the tunnel would be extraordinarily challenging because the ground at that particular location is all filled in swamp. We would likely have to close the L completely for years during construction.”

The entrance at Ave. A however has suffered from another fate entirely. Transit tells me this is both a feasible and beneficial idea. In fact, it has been “conceptually sketched out” but it has “never made the capital program.” I don’t have any further explanation as to why it has been omitted from expansion plans, but I can guess that it’s not been a long-term priority. Up until quite recently, population growth in that area and L train ridership would not have warranted an entrance at Ave. A.

As they say, knowing is half the battle, and now we know. Of course, armed with this knowledge, community groups in the East Village, Alphabet City and Stuyvesant Town should began agitating for a concrete commitment to build out the entrance at Ave. A. It’s a project worth pitching for the five-year capital plan that starts in 2015, and it’s one that could be realized by the end of the decade.

15 Penn Plaza, right, could lead to numerous improvements in and around Penn Station. (All renderings courtesy of The Architect’s Newspaper)

By a vote of 47-1, the City Council approved Vornado’s plans to build a 1216-foot tall building at 15 Penn Plaza. In recent weeks, the plan had come under fire by the owners of the Empire State Building who claimed that another tall building just two avenue blocks away from the iconic tower would disrupt the skyline. The City Council, however, encouraged by Vornado’s pledge to spend $100 million on transit improvements, gave the new tower the go-ahead anyway.

“New York as a city has to grow,” David Greenbaum, the head of Vornado’s New York office, had told reporters this week. “This project has been fully, fully considered by the City Planning Commission, it has been considered in the context of SEQRA and the EIS. In our opinion, and theirs, there will be no adverse impacts.”

At one point during the debate, Anthony Malkin, owner of the Art Deco New York City icon, had proposed limiting buildings within 2000 feet of the Empire State Building. The city, said Greenbaum, would be foolish to kill development within such a significant swath of midtown. City Council members, including Leroy Comrie, chair of the Land Use Committee, were highly skeptical of this argument. “I think what you’re asking us to do is beyond any one project,” Comrie said. “You’re asking us to make a policy decision. You’re asking us to look at many things beyond this one project.”

To dispute this claim, Vornado released a set of renderings that show how the Manhattan skyline will appear with both the Hudson Yards development and 15 Penn Plaza. The Empire State Building’s owners may have been overstating their case a bit. Take a look and click to enlarge:

While the development rights battle has played itself out, the underground development will soon take center stage. Of the $100 million pledged to Penn Station, the bulk of that would go toward reopening the Gimbels Passageway, shown in renderings below. Other plans include plans include wider staircases, a direct entrance to the express platforms at 32nd and 7th and a variety of new entrances and connections between the subway and PATH at 6th Ave.