Mayor to close parts of Broadway to traffic

[thx1138]

Good idea or bad? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/nyregion/26broadway.html

[trish]

Why should we give you the answers to the test? How about you answer the question first? Put a little effort into your posts.

[BrendaQG]

I heard about this on the Radio here in Chicago. It was a talk station here so they took a couple of calls on it. Basically everyone thought it was a bad idea.

We did simmilar to a portion of state street in Chicago. State street is the street that Marshall Fields (now god dammed Macy's) was on. It was turned into a sort of outdoor mall for a while and paved with cobble stones. It killed many of the businesses there. That was reverted to a driving street....in about 1990.

Unlike what Mayor Bloom berg says people who drive can and do jump out of their cars and run in to buy things sometimes. I know Manhattanites don't drive but not everyone who passes through lives there. Those are the ones who will just avoid the area if it is closed to traffic.

[Oli]

I heard about this on the Radio here in Chicago. It was a talk station here so they took a couple of calls on it. Basically everyone thought it was a bad idea.

We did simmilar to a portion of state street in Chicago. State street is the street that Marshall Fields (now god dammed Macy's) was on. It was turned into a sort of outdoor mall for a while and paved with cobble stones. It killed many of the businesses there. That was reverted to a driving street....in about 1990.

Unlike what Mayor Bloom berg says people who drive can and do jump out of their cars and run in to buy things sometimes. I know Manhattanites don't drive but not everyone who passes through lives there. Those are the ones who will just avoid the area if it is closed to traffic.

You ever been to Manhattan?

You do realize the streets are a grid system, right?

You realize that Broadway is a diagonal street that cuts across the grid?

You understand that the cross streets won't be closed?

Thanks for your :2cent anyway.

[JelenaCD]

Bloomberg is a great dictator , most dictators are incompetent and selfish , what do you say of a dictator that actually is correct on many issues if he is weak on democracy ? I man who accept $ 1 to run NYC is a blessing ! Like Frank Sinatra says ' i did it my way ". Right man , right time , right place, the planets are aligned , only in NYC thought !

[thx1138]

@ Trish: ordering me around? I didn't know we were married.

[BrendaQG]

I heard about this on the Radio here in Chicago. It was a talk station here so they took a couple of calls on it. Basically everyone thought it was a bad idea.

We did simmilar to a portion of state street in Chicago. State street is the street that Marshall Fields (now god dammed Macy's) was on. It was turned into a sort of outdoor mall for a while and paved with cobble stones. It killed many of the businesses there. That was reverted to a driving street....in about 1990.

Unlike what Mayor Bloom berg says people who drive can and do jump out of their cars and run in to buy things sometimes. I know Manhattanites don't drive but not everyone who passes through lives there. Those are the ones who will just avoid the area if it is closed to traffic.

You ever been to Manhattan?

You do realize the streets are a grid system, right?

You realize that Broadway is a diagonal street that cuts across the grid?

You understand that the cross streets won't be closed?

Thanks for your :2cent anyway.

I have been to new york. People who post here saw me there at a couple of parties. In any case Chicago is a great big huge city both population wise and geographically. It's like NYC with better food, and midestern hospitality. What's more once again we tried this and it did not work.

Here is a story about it from the New York Times.

Chicago Gives a Pedestrian Mall the Boot,By DIRK JOHNSON
Published: February 1, 1996 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04EEDE1739F932A35751C0A9609582 60)

There was a time when no place in town was quite so jaunty as State Street on a Saturday night. "On State Street, that great street," sang Frank Sinatra in the song "Chicago," "I just want to say, they do things they don't do on Broadway."

But State Street, in the heart of downtown's Loop, has been struggling for decades, as theater-goers and shoppers have moved to the suburbs and the stores and cinemas have followed. City planners, trying to replicate the success of suburban shopping malls, in 1979 turned a mile-long stretch of State into its own kind of mall, closing the street to traffic, except for buses. But rather than make the street snazzy again, the mall worsened the slump by giving State a quiet, deserted, even dangerous feel.

Now, the pedestrian mall is getting what retailers say it has long deserved: jackhammers. The city is going to rip up the broad pedestrian walkways and turn State back into a street, with standard sidewalks and two-way traffic.

"The mall took the excitement out of State Street," said Elizabeth Hollander, who was Chicago's planning commissioner in the 1980's and is now director of a center for urban affairs at DePaul University. "Planners are rethinking these kinds of urban malls. They've learned that cities are different than suburbs. And cities ought to do what cities do best, which is crowd a lot of people together."

More than 200 cities have created pedestrian malls in the last 20 years, according to the American Planning Association. But many cities have reversed course and turned malls back into streets, including Eugene, Ore.; Little Rock, Ark.; Norfolk, Va.; Rockford, Ill., and Oak Park, Ill. Officials in Baltimore are considering doing the same.

"Retailers believe opening the street to traffic means more activity," said Laurie Schwartz, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, which speaks for business interests. "And it reminds passers-by that stores are open for business."

In Chicago, mall promoters had envisioned a lively alfresco carnival of shoppers and gawkers, with Paris-style curbside cafes. Indeed, outdoor cafes did open. But the street remained open to bus traffic, and the cafe experience did not quite match the ambience of the Left Bank.

"The buses would line up, one after another, like a herd, with their diesel fumes," said Adrian Smith, a partner in the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is designing the new State Street, a $24.5 million project that will include special lighting, trees and other improvements.

Planners and architects point out that people like to go where other people are going. It did not help that the vast walkway of the mall gave State an empty look, which, together with the absence of cars, "gave it a deadened feel, like a ghost town," said Craig Wolf, a spokesman for the city's Department of Transportation.

For shopping, State Street has long been a sort of blue-collar cousin to the elegant North Michigan Avenue, which has prospered with upscale attractions like Neiman-Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Burberry's and the Four Seasons Hotel. When affluent suburbanites come to Chicago for a weekend of shopping, it is almost always to North Michigan.

State Street still has the dowager Palmer House hotel, with its elegant lobby. And the street's spectacular Chicago Theater, built as a motion picture palace in the 1920's and styled after the Arc de Triomphe, has attracted the interest of the Walt Disney Company, which has been negotiating with the city on a deal to lease the theater for stage productions.

State Street is also the home address of the venerable Marshall Field department store, which was built in 1868 and then rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871.

But several other department stores have disappeared from the street since the pedestrian mall was created, including Sears, Montgomery Ward and Goldblatt's.

Still, it is unclear how much the mall can be blamed for State Street's woes, since the economic troubles had started as early as the 1960's.

The stores on State have traditionally catered to middle-income people. And it is that middle-class base that has long been eroding in Chicago, as in many American cities. In the last 40 years, Chicago's population has dropped to 2.7 million, from 3.6 million, while the suburbs continue to grow, reaching deeper into farmland every year.

State Street retailers have long been pushing for the return of cars. Daniel J. Skoda, the president of Marshall Field, said that "bringing back the traffic won't be magic" in boosting sales, "but it's a key."

People on State Street on a recent morning, who were braving temperatures that hovered near zero and a stinging wind that sliced in from Lake Michigan, voiced strong support for bringing back traffic.

"Since people don't drive on State, they forget it's here," said Carmen Rocha, a 24-year-old sales manager who was waiting for a bus at the corner of State and Madison, once said to be the busiest intersection in America. "Hopefully, this will bring the suburbanites and the tourists back into the Loop."

Ann Kramer, a retired telephone operator, who remembers the glory days of State Street a half-century ago and more, said the mall "sounded like a good idea at the time," and added with a laugh, "So do a lot of things."

Mayor Richard M. Daley, who rode one of the jackhammers in a pavement-breaking ceremony on State last week, noted that the mall was so unpopular no one would take credit for its invention.

"As Mayor," Mr. Daley said with a smile, "I have found it difficult to find out whose idea this was in the first place."

[thx1138]

It might work for April to June & September to November. Who would want to sit out there in the heat of summer and/or the cold of winter?

[Oli]

Blah blah blah *insert cut and paste*

You must be a hell of a scientist- Use 20 year old, not quite similar data to dismiss an idea which you know next to nothing about.

The NYC Plan

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/02/26/nyregion/26broadway_map.jpg

"The plan calls for Broadway to be closed to vehicles from 47th Street to 42nd Street. Traffic would continue to flow through on crossing streets, but the areas between the streets would become pedestrian malls, with chairs, benches and cafe tables with umbrellas.

Seventh Avenue would be widened slightly within Times Square to accommodate the extra traffic diverted from Broadway. "

That's 5 blocks. A North/South block in Manhattan is 264 feet long, or 88 yards. 88x5 = 440 yards, or a quarter mile.

There will be a cross street every 88 yards.
There are 2 subway stations inside the 5 block stretch.

That's not 1 mile, as the State St. Mall was.
Broadway is not 'dying', as State St. was when Chicago's plan was enacted.(from your article)
Manhattan has never experienced 'White Flight', as Chicago did in the 70's & 80's (from your article)
Manhattanites use their feet, cabs or the subway. They tend not to use a car to get around town.

There are more, but I think my case has been made.

thx, I think it will work year round. When New Yorkers flee the heat in July and August , and thru the winter, tourists (46 million in 2006) will fill it. I try to avoid Times Square area because the auto and pedestrian traffic is terrible most of the time.

[BrendaQG]

All I am saying is that a very simmilar idea has been tried and failed miserably here in a big city comparable to NYC in every way.

I just wonder since you ask me if I have ever been to Manhattan, have you ever been to Chicago for more than a layover. Have you shopped on state street.

State street has L stations all along it's length, The streets around it like Michigan Ave were widened etc. etc. All the same stuff. You know what happend. The theaters there closed, 7/9 huge department stores closed down, The place was a ghost town.

But you know what I give up. Us backward by water Chicagoans don't know notihin bout nothin. We's just waiting to host the Olympics that NYC was too big and sophisticated to win. /sarcasm

[Oli]

All I am saying is that a very simmilar idea has been tried and failed miserably here in a big city comparable to NYC in every way.

I just wonder since you ask me if I have ever been to Manhattan, have you ever been to Chicago for more than a layover. Have you shopped on state street.

State street has L stations all along it's length, The streets around it like Michigan Ave were widened etc. etc. All the same stuff. You know what happend. The theaters there closed, 7/9 huge department stores closed down, The place was a ghost town.

But you know what I give up. Us backward by water Chicagoans don't know notihin bout nothin. We's just waiting to host the Olympics that NYC was too big and sophisticated to win. /sarcasm

Good luck with the debt the Olympics will run up.

Been to Chicago many times. Nice place. Don't agree about the food there.

State lacked the residential population density to work. It relied on drawing people, when the Miracle Mile was better.

Broadway/Time Square are places people go already. Not to shop, just as an attraction. A pedestrian mall will only make them stay longer and spend more.