Expanding Access to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, located at the mouth of upper New York Bay, connects Brooklyn and Staten Island and serves as a major link in the interstate highway system, providing the shortest route between the middle Atlantic states and Long Island. The earliest plan for a crossing at the narrows came in the form of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s 1888 proposal to build a tunnel extending the Staten Island North Shore line into Brooklyn. Financial constraints and delays in the approval process prevented this project.

It wasn’t until 1946, when the New York City Tunnel Authority was absorbed into the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority—then chaired by a legendary and controversial master builder Robert Moses—that the narrows crossing proposal was reappraised. Moses’ plan, which called for a bridge instead of an underwater crossing, was quickly approved by state legislature, and the bridge opened in 1964 as the world’s longest suspension span. The original plans called for a bike-pedestrian path on either side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (similar to what exists on the George Washington Bridge), but this component was scrapped by Moses, an ardent advocate for auto-centric cities, in favor of maximizing space for motorized transit.

The bridge remains accessible only to cars and buses—a situation that several New Yorkers spoke out about this By the City/For the City. One resident wants to see a more efficient use of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, allowing for walking, biking, and transit. Cat in Bushwick asked for one of the 6 lanes on the double-decker Verrazano Bridge to be converted into a pedestrian walkway/ bike lane. Lee in Castleton Corners thinks that the MTA should run a new subway line from Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island.

In 1994, civic and environmental groups launched efforts to construct walkways for pedestrians and bicycles on the bridge. The proposal received support from the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, a Brooklyn-based environmental advocacy group, and Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle advocacy group. In 1997, the Transportation Division of the NYC Department of City Planning drafted a feasibility plan for pedestrian/cyclist access. Adding walking, cycling, and even mass transit uses to this bridge could greatly increase accessibility and connectivity for residents of Staten Island, Brooklyn, and all of New York, while ensuring a less carbon-intensive future for the city.

Think you’re up to the challenge of improving access to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge? Click here to register for the By the City / For the City design competition today! Entries are due by midnight (EST) on Sunday, July 31st, 2011. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

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Creating Connections, Exploring Culture: Staten Island Ferry and the Community of St. George

Located at the northeastern tip of Staten Island, St. George is a community set upon hills and is home to a mix of art galleries, local businesses, historic architecture, and cultural attractions like the St. George Theater, the Staten Island Institute of the Arts and the Sciences, and the National Lighthouse Museum. On a typical weekday, 65,000 passengers utilize the Staten Island Ferry; unfortunately, many miss out on the rich history and culture of the area of St. George because they never dare to embark on a journey into the “other side”. We recently spoke to Melanie Cohn, Executive Director of the Council On the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI), who explained that the area around the Ferry terminal is particularly unwelcoming to pedestrians as it lacks signage as well as pedestrian connections that bar access from the Ferry to the rest of the community. This is an issue that numerous submissions to By the City / For the City called attention to:

Melanie in St. George wants to see “a better pedestrian path from the Ferry on the Staten Island side to the main commercial corridors of Bay Street and Stuyvesant Street.” A resident from West Brighton wishes “the area right off the Staten Island Ferry was more tourist/pedestrian/resident friendly: Less cars, more plants/art/pedestrian walkways, and more useful/interesting shops.”  Joseph from the North Shore hopes that the “NYCDOT won’t demolish a ramp at the St. George Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry that could allow pedestrian-only access.” Together, these ideas make apparent the need for a dialogue around building better connections between the Ferry and the St. George community with its many cultural attractions.

Recently, urban planning students from Hunter College did a site analysis of St. George highlighting the neighborhood’s strengths. The resulting plan, Art Hill, proposes the development of a sustainable cultural district “where an influx of new artists will live and work in now-vacant or underutilized spaces in St. George, joining the diverse arts community already in residence.” Planners believe that St. George can be transformed into a go-to location, creating a destination for some of the 47 million tourists who visit New York City each year.

Not only does St. George have to be a welcoming place for visitors, but physical connections must be improved in order to ensure more efficient use of the space. A start: the NYCDOT recently began a $175 million rehabilitation of the ramps leading into the St. George Ferry Terminal. This investment is being made to improve mobility within the area, strengthening pedestrian access as well as securing bikeways for cyclists. Not only will this improve daily commutes for residents who use the Ferry terminal, it will also make it easier for visitors to explore the rich history and culture that is St. George. But the question remains: how can better physical connectivity be used to encourage social connectivity as well?

Want to take on the challenge of re-thinking the Ferry’s connection to St. George? Click here to register for the By the City / For the City design competition today! Entries are due by midnight (EST) on Sunday, July 31st, 2011. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

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The Borough Breakdown

While yesterday’s post looked at categorical trends across the city, today we’ll dig a bit deeper to examine unique conditions in each of the five boroughs. Is green space on the top of the list for concrete jungle-residing Manhattanites? Are the good people of Brooklyn as achingly unorthodox as the blogosphere seems to portray them as? Read on to learn about how each borough stacks up…

Manhattan attracted a plurality of the ideas submitted—221, or 45.7% of the total—but differed from overall categorical norms in some surprising ways. Green Space and Recreation were both considerably less popular in the most densely-populated borough than they were across the city, by five and seven percentage points, respectively. The most common categories in Manhattan were: Transportation; Streetscapes; Culture/Public Art; Green Space; and Other.

The 115 ideas submitted in Brooklyn(23.7% of the total) follow the categorical breakdown for overall results most closely; only Safety/Health differs by more than three percentage points from the overall city-wide averages. In fact, Brooklyn is the only borough in which this category broke the top five. The most common categories here: Transportation, Streetscapes, Safety/Health, Green Space, and Other.

Queens residents shared 87 ideas for their borough (18% of the total). With 24 of those ideas relating to Recreation (31.5% of all ideas in that category), this was one of the only issues where an outer borough captured the largest percentage of ideas across the city. The top five categories across Queens were: Transportation; Green Space; Streetscapes; Recreation; and Culture/Public Art.

45 ideas were submitted in the Bronx (9.3% of the total). These were most commonly categorized as: Culture/Public Art; Transportation; Recreation; Retail/Commerce; and Green Space. The Bronx’s preference for ideas dealing with leisure and enjoyment of the city was uniquely strong. Bronxites were also most likely to categorize their ideas as impacting things at the Block-level (40%).

Staten Island received just 15 ideas (3.1% of the total). Staten Islanders were most likely to identify their ideas as relating to the Neighborhood scale (a full 93%). The top five categories here were: Transportation, Recreation, Retail/Commerce, Streetscapes, and Waterfront—making this the only borough where Waterfront was a top five issue.

Click here to register for the By the City / For the City design competition today! Entries are due by midnight (EST) on Sunday, July 31st, 2011. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!