My plaza’s so sweet – Mike
THE NEW TEAM at City Hall won’t put the brakes on the carless Crossroads of the World, Mayor Bloomberg predicted Monday.
The mayor, cutting the ribbon on the first chunk of a permanent pedestrian plaza at Times Square, unveiled a 30,000-square-foot space on Broadway where the once-busy road has been replaced with granite pavement for pedestrians to stroll. Granite benches will soon be added.
The controversial closing of Broadway from W. 42nd to W. 47th Sts. was one of Bloomberg’s signature moves in a transportation policy that included closing streets around the city for pedestrian plazas, adding hundreds of miles of bike lanes and creating a bike share system.
Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has wavered on whether to keep the plaza in place, saying he has “profoundly mixed feelings” on the issue.
But Bloomberg predicted de Blasio would follow his lead.
“I think he’ll take a look at this and find out that this is exactly the right thing to do,” he said. “You’d have a very tough time rolling this back.”
Bloomberg recalled being shocked when Transportation Commissioner Janette SadikKhan first floated the idea.
“I remember when Sadik-Khan came to me and said, ‘I want to close Broadway,’ and I said, ‘You want to do what?’ ” said Bloomberg, who decided to give the idea a whirl as a test project anyway. “The results of that experiment have been tremendously positive for public safety, for our economy and for traffic flow.”
So far, one block of the stretch, from 42nd to 43rd Sts., has been turned into a permanent plaza, while the rest is closed to traffic and set up with temporary structures for pedestrians. All five blocks of plaza will cost $27 million, part of a $55 mil-
Photo by Reuters lion project that also includes underground work on electric and sewer grids.
The Times Square visit was another stop on Bloomberg’s legacy tour, and his transportation commissioner didn’t hold back on praise for his achievements.
“You’ve changed the streets of New York forever,” Sadik-Khan told him. She said Times Square before the changeover “was crowded, it was dangerous, it was certainly not worthy of a worldclass city.”
Pedestrian injuries in Times Square have dropped 24% since the changes, she said.