Aaron Naparstek

» Friday, December 09, 2005

The History of New York City Public Space

Interested in this photo? Visit Streetsblog.org for more.

New York City's Park Avenue was once... a park!
This photo is looking north on Park Avenue at about 50th Street some time before 1922. That's St. Bartholomew's Church on the right side there.

Park Avenue post-1922 after "improvements" to accommodate motor vehicle traffic.

You might say that these two photos tell the story of 20th century New York City public space about as eloquently as it can be told. Looking south at about 48th Street.

The two photos above were part of a presentation I did on Wednesday, November 16 for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's monthly brown bag lunch seminar. In my talk I argued that New York City's current surface transportation system is broken, dysfunctional and in increasingly urgent need of repair. Then I offered five ideas that could go along way towards fixing it:

Better Bike infrastructure
Traffic-calming
Pedestrian & public space improvements
Bus rapid transit
Congestion charging

A number of people have asked me for copies of my presentation. Unfortunately, the thing is a whopping 22 megabytes; too big to e-mail. So, I've put it up on my server and made it available for download. The presentation might not make complete sense without my speaking notes (actually, it might not have made complete sense with the notes) but it includes some great historical images and more recent urban design photos snapped during my U.S.-German Marshall Fellowship to Europe. Credit for digging up the great old photo of Park Avenue as a park goes to Jeff Prant.

If you asked for a copy of the presentation, here at long last is Aaron's European Transportation Vacation Slide Show. Enjoy!

11:04 PM | Link |

Comments

Thanks Aaron. Thanks Jeff. What a transformation. All that traffic makes the city a much less attractive place to live.

Posted by

AD @ 12/10/2005 3:12 PM | Link

Good Job. And relatively simple. With all the international progress on these issues, it makes NY feel pretty backwards.

Posted by

anon-69 @ 12/16/2005 3:47 PM | Link

Come on now. All your examples of bicycle friendly cities have a dramatically lower population than NYC, with the largest being 3.3 million.
In a city of 8 million, those changes are just not feasible.
Lets see what examples you have of flowing traffic and bicycles and pedestrians in a similar sized cit

Posted by

Anonymous @ 1/04/2007 6:35 PM | Link

Hi! I´m Puerto Rican and I am ashamed about a lot of thing that did not work very well in the Island like the traffic. We are 3.8 millions of habitants and there are 1.2? millions of cars in an Island of 10 thousand square km! The government made a pseudo subway that costs millions and nobody uses because it only serves a municipality called Bayamón that have the WORST TRAFFIC IN THE WHOLE ISLAND. Hopefully you did not saw it. I visited various countries included Bogotá, the Transmilenio it´s a great idea and works efficiently, like or even more than Barcelona. Thanks for visiting the Island a group of people are trying to keep away cars from the Casco Viejo. Which is the part that have adoquines those big heavy blue "bricks" on the street. But even the Major when her wife felt down from a horse car and he ordered to pave the streets with tar. Those "bricks" are part of Old San Juan as the fortresses, those bricks served as ballast for the Spanish Galleons who came to pick up the Situado, (the gold). So we have a lot to learn about caring and conserving our historic places. And I understand you, some days I struggle very hard with the ignorance among our people. It's really hard.

Posted by

The Box Observer @ 4/29/2007 10:45 AM | Link

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