Griping herd on the street

WHAT’S under the tree for Christmas? Steel fences, concrete barricades and imposing iron bollards.

To make it easier for people to see the Rockefeller Center tree, the city turned the zone between Fifth and Sixth avenues into a cattle pen. At the year’s most festive time, the area resembles a yard sale of crowd-control products.

Closing both West 49th and 50th streets between the avenues to vehicular traffic wasn’t a bad idea in theory. But the NYPD also blockaded just about everything in a multiple-block radius of the big tree — even a tree.

The hapless arboreal on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th is surrounded by an iron fence, shrinking the overcrowded sidewalk even further. (This one’s on the landlord as well, according to a “property of Tishman Speyer” sign.)

At two different times on Friday, almost everybody walking on 49th and 50th streets stuck to the busy sidewalks even though the whole street was open to them. It was obvious why: The NYPD installed concrete blocks and parked vehicles at right angles to the sidewalks at the ends of each block.

What genius decided to also put concrete barriers in the middle of the Sixth Avenue eastern sidewalk between 44th and 45th streets?

Officers stood in bunches where they weren’t needed. But there wasn’t a cop in sight at the hazardous corner of Sixth and 48th, where a van driver, fed up with the traffic crawl that resulted from the street closures, nearly ran us over.

So much fun — and the tree isn’t even lit until Dec. 4.