This essay is part of the “Car Harms” series of Streetsblog, a package of stories that should remind the political decision -makers and the public to the hidden costs, dangers, inefficiencies and simply old sadness that result from the construction of our city around the needs of the drivers. Auto-dependency has undermined the joy and beauty of our large urban spaces, and that has to change. Click here to read the full series.
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I love the picture below, which was taken up by my brothers Brian and Harold in 1948 and held me in the street bed of the Tapscott Street in the Howard Avenue, where we lived in Brownsville. Brian (left) was 10 and Harold was 12 (now both was at 86 and 88!) And I'm about 8 months. In the background is the Howard Avenue, a wide and important road that connects to Kings Highway.
What is missing are cars.
And that explains why the Schwartz boys were on the street at all. My mother was the prototypical prototype Jewish mom who wanted it never Let your babies do everything dangerous. But play on the street Wasn't Dangerous in those days – a few years after the end of the Second World War, shortly before the autocrats in the region became astronomical.
In front of the car population's boom, the “street”, also known as “Gutter”, was our playground. And it was lost in the name of progress and improvement by the car. Let's look back.
The early 20th century
At the turn of the 20th century, the Bronx was still awake; The battery and the Avenue Park was a park, the Fifth Avenue was a boulevard, and every East River Bridge had features and toll.
Really a “park” Avenue
For the first time I came across the photo on the right Lost New York By Nathan Silver, a wonderful picture for buildings, squares and streets that once adorned our metropolis but have disappeared since then.
Back then I was probably the New York City traffic commissioner (it was the 1980s), and I was with the ground that Park Avenue was once a park that stretched from Midtown to Harlem.
Today the “Park” in Park Avenue is long and is replaced by a narrow middle garden that is designed for viewing but has not experienced:
Fifth Avenue was once 'fifth avenue'
During the “Golden Age” in New York City (around 1870-1910), the Fifth Avenue was the Grand Boulevard in City, which was lined with wide sidewalks, shops and villas. But in 1909 the city announced plans to expand the street bed at the expense of the sidewalks, which the New York Times aptly reported: “The new Fifth Avenue“” Would be “New York's largest driveway” – since the sidewalks on every side of the street should be narrowed by almost eight meters to make room for two more motor traffic lanes.
“Probably no local improvement … received by the people who are most directly affected with as much regret as the extension of the Fifth Avenue,” reported the paper paper.
Fortunately, Adams' Adams are trying to correct this mistake and to restore the sidewalks on their latitudes from 1900. As shown below from a rendering from autumn 2024, the sidewalks would be widened, trees planted and pedestrians would resume their role as kings and queens on the street.
East River Bridges were all due
In the late 1980s, when I acted as the chief engineer of the City Dot, I read a guiding article in the New York Times Written by the great urban herb fall. The Williamsburg Bridge was on a bad street and there was no money for repairs. Herbs described a scene of A winter storyMark Helprins 1983 novel, in which the opening passage has a white horse that crosses the snow-born Williamsburg bridge in silence, which sleeps in its stand.
I called Herb to correct him – there were no trips on the Williamsburg Bridge. Instead, he corrected MeAnd pointed out that all four East River Bridges had originally remained when they were opened for the first time. His point was clear: if we had kept the toll, the bridge would not have crumbled due to a lack of maintenance money (it was completely closed in 1988 due to a structural emergency).
Sure enough, in the city's records I found a photo of the long -forgotten toll cabin on the Queensboro Bridge. The crossing of a horse cost three cent; If you were traveling in one of these new “auto-mobile”, it would cost you a pretty cent!
The toll fees were removed by Mayor William Gaynor in 1911, who did not like the idea of calculating people from one district to the next. Of course, he never met Robert Moses, who revived the practice with the Triborough Bridge and calculated a quarter of cars in 1936.
These bridges once had 24 tracks!
All four bridges were originally developed for Transit: Brooklyn Bridge with four tracks, Manhattan Bridge with eight, Williamsburg Bridge with six and Queensboro Bridge with six 24 routes. Today, only six routes remain on Manhattan Bridge and two on the Williamsburg Bridge. When I “worn people” in Dot in 1989 in Dot, I found that the “old”, unmoding bridges with rails per day, wore almost a million people more than the rehabilitated mainly persecuted structures.
Streets are for humans (especially children)
I met David Gurin in 1977 when I was an engineer of the old traffic department. He had turned me to me after a stay after a two -train.
The following year Schoenbrud became deputy commissioner for planning at the newly founded Ministry of Transport and hired me as his deputy commissioner. How I grew up in Brooklyn and remembered the days when the streets were playgrounds.
Diploma
The message is clear: we have lost a lot in our collective efforts, the automotive. We have lost so much that some can't even see it. Even old citizens' groups, who romp around on the street on their websites in the 1940s, set the needs of drivers about today's children's children!
Fortunately, the pendulum begins to finally swing back, and the valuable public space is restored to humans, albeit slowly.
The end result will be a healthier, happier and more humane city.