Community Board 8’s parks committee unanimously passed two motions last week to maintain and upgrade distinct portions of Central Park which have suffered in recent years.

The Central Park Conservancy brought forth a proposal to conserve and beautify Grand Army Plaza, a popular tourist attraction at 5th Ave and 59th Street. Grand Army Plaza houses the Sherman monument which, according to Conservancy members, is currently in rough shape.

The proposal, in place to move forward this spring, will include several components. The Sherman monument will be conserved and re-gilded. Missing trees in the area will be replanted — a double tree line formation is to replace a single row — and Bradford Pear trees will be replaced by London planetrees, which are more sustainable and have looser canopies for easier pruning and improved view.

The new tree formation is intended to create a better sculptural backdrop to the monument. The rooting zone will also be ameliorated.

Pavement in the plaza will also be fixed to allow for improved appearance and greater accessibility, including leveling out of uneven gradation.

Conservancy representatives and Community Board 8 members agreed that better attentiveness is needed to keeping the plaza looking cleaner in the future. One Conservancy member noted horse-drawn carriages in the area allow for a self-perpetuating ecosystem where pigeon and rat populations flourish because of dropped horse feed. This has been an ongoing issue, he explained. The unique area’s overall maintenance is also affected by drainage and the subway which runs underneath it.

The Conservancy said it plans to replicate what was historically done with the plaza but using improved technology.

The committee also passed a motion to reconstruct the East 79th Street playground, geared toward young children, just south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Conservancy plans to build on the playground’s current layout, which allows it to be integrated into the local landscape. They pointed out the play equipment currently in use is mismatched to the age range — two to five years old — which uses the park. In recent years, new regulations have denoted what play equipment is appropriate for what age range, measures which were not in place when the play area was built.

New plans for the playground going forward will maximize user accessibility and provide sustainable structures and landscape. Additionally, all equipment will be accessible to users with mobility problems. All play implements will meet American Disability Association (ADA) standards.

The fence currently surrounding the play area, which creates a harsh contrast between the playground and surrounding vegetation, will be moved back and modulated for better integration into the landscape, while complete security will be maintained within the playground.

Bikers ride through Central Park.

A new shift is about to once again change the battling dynamic between vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians traveling through Central Park. In the coming weeks, the Central Park Conservancy and the Department of Transportation will be jointly presenting a plan to community boards 7 (Upper West Side) and 8 (Upper East Side) outlining their plans to permanently change the 72nd Street transverse, also known at Terrace Drive. The plan will reduce the number of cars on the road while allowing for an increased number of bicycles.

While the idea of more bikes on the park’s roadways might raise the ire of some local residents, the plan was actually conceived as a way to encourage cyclists off the pedestrian and shared paths and back onto the road.

“The purpose of this plan—developed in conjunction with DOT and Parks Department—is to encourage bicyclists to use the drives instead of interior pedestrian paths,” said Dena Libner, spokesperson for the Central Park Conservancy. “More bike access on the drives, we believe, should help in accomplishing this.”

Currently, the drive accommodates two lanes of vehicle traffic and one bike lane, with a fence between the bike lane and the pedestrian path on the south side. Each vehicle lane is 11 feet wide, with a three-foot buffer between the cars and the eight-foot-wide bike path.

The new plan will create wider buffer zones, with the intent to allow more bicycles and keep pedestrians safer, and allow bikers to travel both east and west on 72nd Street. Two lanes of traffic will become one single 11-foot-wide lane, with a four-foot shoulder on the north side and a four-foot buffer on the other, separating the cars from the double bike lanes. Each bike lane, divided by a dotted line, will be slightly narrower than the previous one, at seven feet wide each.

The DOT has already conducted a traffic study to determine the Loss of Service (LOS) rate that will result in narrowing the road for drivers.

Right now, an average of about 500 cars travel on Terrace Drive during the morning peak hours of 8–9:30 a.m., with an average delay of 9.8 seconds. Using this as a benchmark, the DOT estimates that the LOS level will be a “B” on an A-F scale, with A being the current condition and F being the worst possible, meaning the changes will produce “reasonably unimpeded traffic with average travel speeds about 20 percent less” than current, with an average delay of 13 seconds for the same number of cars.

In other words, if the projections hold, cross-park car trips may only be held up by an additional 3.2 seconds, on average, as a result of this change.

The Parks Department and the Conservancy have implemented several changes recently to address the increasing numbers of cyclists crossing the park on a daily basis as well as the safety concerns of pedestrians who don’t want to share paths with bicycles zooming past. Earlier this year, the park debuted a newly shared path for bicyclists and pedestrians to cross the park at 96th Street, in answer to bicyclists demanding safer cross-park routes. It faced some severe opposition from both East and West Side community board members, but so far has not caused major controversy in action.

While the CPC will be presenting the plan to the community boards and listening to feedback, the new configuration is already slated to switch over in the coming months and is designed to stay.

“This change will be permanent,” Libner confirmed. “We expect more cyclists to use the drive for cross-park commutes and travel, and pedestrians to be able to navigate interior paths with greater ease.”

The Central Park Conservancy, the Department of Transportation and the Parks Department have been working jointly on an initiative to open several east-west pedestrian paths to cyclists, similar to the changes made recently that allow cyclists to bike at walking speeds on nearby Riverside Park paths.

The initial routes likely to be converted to shared paths, possibly by this spring or summer, are the paths on either side of the 96th Street Transverse, which run near the North Meadow Recreation Center, and the path at 102nd Street. Later, the Conservancy will work with DOT to consider adding shared routes along the 72nd Street Transverse.

Currently, to cross from the West Side to the East Side, cyclists can either use the 96th Street transverse—a notoriously risky route—or take the bottom part of the loop, which is a long detour for those who want to get to the northern areas of the Upper East Side. Cyclists are not allowed on pedestrian paths.

Peter Frishauf is on the Recreation Committee for the Central Park Conservancy, and he’s been involved in this effort since January 2010, when the question of how cyclists can safely and easily get across the park arose from a meeting with Upper West Side Streets Renaissance.

“For all practical purposes right now, there is no safe and sanctioned way to get across the park at all,” Frishauf says. “The only legal way is a treacherously dangerous way where cyclists have been killed,” referring to a woman on a bike who was struck by a vehicle on the 66th Street Transverse in 2006 and later died from her injuries.

Frishauf and several others met with the Conservancy president, Doug Blonsky, who is also the Central Park Administrator, and they decided to figure out ways to create shared paths for pedestrians and cyclists.

“There’s a lot of people that commute to work by bike, and they go through the park,” Blonsky says.

Steve Vaccaro works with Transportation Alternatives and bikes with his son to school every morning across the park, from their Upper East Side home to his son’s school on the Upper West Side. When his son was younger, he biked on pathways, but was often chastised by pedestrians telling him to dismount. Children up to 12 years old are allowed to bike on New York City sidewalks, which are the jurisdiction of the DOT, but the rules are fuzzier in Central Park, where the Conservancy governs the pathways.

Recently, Vaccaro and his son started using the Transverse to get from east to west, but that’s not without its problems.

“As the cars and the bikes are headed into the tunnels, suddenly the road gets a lot narrower,” Vaccaro says. “It also gets really dark. It’s sort of a confluence of bad conditions.”

“This would be an enormous safety improvement as well as improve the quality of life for thousands of people,” Frishauf says. “No one should be forced into a dangerous situation just trying to get to work or use the park.”

Is it artists or trees that are the real public safety hazard in parks?

The Parks Department and Central Park Conservancy have unlimited resources to harass and falsely arrest artists, yet they can’t be bothered to maintain the trees properly, not even in a place like the zoo, with thousands of small children. The entire PEP (Parks Enforcement Patrol) force is being mobilized and trained to make hundreds of false arrests of artists beginning July 19 in the city’s four richest parks. Meanwhile, most other city parks never see a single PEP officer.

Whether it’s toxic plastic turf, playground equipment that burns children or trees that are allowed to rot and kill multiple park visitors, it is obvious what the real agenda of the mayor and parks commissioner is, and public safety is most definitely not it.

Robert Lederman
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.