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Street Wars: Trash, Crime and Chaos on Eighth Avenue
Street WarsA weekly series on the battle for space on New York's streets and sidewalks.
What's the Matter With Eighth Avenue?
Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan is many things. It is the first street to greet many travelers as they arrive at Pennsylvania Station or the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It is the temporary address for thousands of hotel dwellers. It is the backdrop to any night spent at a Broadway show or Madison Square Garden, or just out on the town. Eighth Avenue can also be unsettling. At the best of times, it is the Champs-Élysées of hot dog carts: a grand thoroughfare of vendors, tourists and commuters whose bustle brings the city to life. Motorists share it with bicycles, pedicabs and the occasional horse-drawn carriage. Pedestrians crowd the sidewalk and overflow into an ad hoc expansion of it, created in 2016 when the city began to cordon off a lane of traffic and paint it gray. But at the worst of times, Eighth Avenue is a Dickensian parade of humanity. It is strewn with garbage and pockmarked by potholes and pools of unidentifiable fluid. People suffering from addiction and mental illness roam the street. Bicyclists race down the expanded sidewalks, endangering pedestrians. Tourists plod slowly through the sea of walkers, sometimes abruptly dropping anchor in the middle of the sidewalk.
Eighth Avenue's problems have preoccupied city officials in recent weeks, in part owing to the advocacy of the Broadway theater community, whose investors and heavyweights fear that the anarchic vibe will start to keep theatergoers away. "There is a lawless element to it," Jeff T. Daniels, the chief strategy officer of the Shubert Organization, the largest theater owner on Broadway, said on a walk through the neighborhood last week. An empty drug vial lay on the sidewalk near his feet, half a block from the theater where "Hamilton" is performed. "People use the standard where they're like, 'Well, it's not as bad as it was in the '70s,'" he added. "But that is the wrong stick to measure with." Asked how they would describe Eighth Avenue, two more theater executives, James L. Nederlander, the president of the Nederlander Producing Company of America, and Jason Laks, the interim president of the Broadway League, both landed on the same word: "chaotic." "Our audience walks to the theater, they drive, and the question for us is how to make it safe for them," Mr. Laks said. He said the league was also concerned about the "thousands of people who live in this neighborhood" and are employed by Broadway theaters. "This is what they have to go through every day just getting to work," Mr. Laks said. Last month, Erik Bottcher, who represents Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea and Greenwich Village on the City Council, sent an anguished letter to Mayor Eric Adams decrying what he called "the humanitarian crisis unfolding on the streets and subways of New York City." The letter focused on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea and Midtown, as well as an area near Washington Square Park, where, Mr. Bottcher wrote, a "significant numbers of individuals are engaging in a range of illegal and antisocial activities that are causing distress and fear." A look at the police blotter reveals a steady drumbeat of robberies, assaults, stabbings, attempted suicides, and various forms of disorderly conduct up and down the avenue. Indeed, Mr. Bottcher wrote that the police department has received "a large volume of calls regarding open narcotics sale and narcotics use, property destruction, physical and verbal intimidation, shoplifting and other illegal activity." That is because, amid all the hustle and bustle, Eighth Avenue is also home to deeper problems. Like many public spaces in New York, the street is a gathering point for a broad population of people struggling to get by.
Some are recent migrants who wait on the sidewalk for short-term work, sell snacks or beg for change, holding up signs describing their arduous journey north. Often, their children sit beside them, playing games and taking in the view of the city they worked so hard to reach. Others stumble down the street or rant and rave into thin air, locked in addiction or active psychosis, frightening passers-by and occasionally being taken away by police officers or paramedics. The worst-off lay unconscious on the asphalt, ignored by the people who pass by. These days, Eighth Avenue belongs to them just as much as it does to the tourists, the commuters and the theater owners. Maybe more so. The street has been stuck in a sort of limbo as other areas of Midtown have gentrified and Disneyfied. It is nowhere near as rough as it was in the 1980s, but it is not free of the disorder that ruled those years. Mr. Bottcher, whose smiling face often appears on electronic billboards up and down Eighth Avenue, asked the mayor to support legislation that would require social workers to be stationed at police precincts to connect people to mental health and other resources. That would be an improvement over the city's current approach, he said. Now, the city arrests people "sometimes dozens of times for low-level crimes with minimal progress made toward addressing those underlying issues" of mental health or addiction, he said.
Mr. Adams has not publicly responded to Mr. Bottcher's letter, but last month he expressed his own concerns over the state of Eighth Avenue after a walking tour organized by Broadway theater owners. Mr. Laks, Mr. Nederlander and Mr. Daniels said they accompanied the mayor on that walk and emphasized to him their concern over traffic. They blamed the congestion on what they called the "choke point" created by a bike lane, an expanded sidewalk, and the sheer number of vehicles that service the city's primary tourism district. Speaking to reporters last month, the mayor echoed those concerns. He said he was "a little concerned about the narrowing of Eighth Avenue," which was slimmed down from four lanes to two when the sidewalk was expanded. Mr. Adams supported the sidewalk expansion in the past but last month said the city would "need to re-look at what we're doing over there." "We're dealing with traffic congestion there, we're dealing with uncleanliness that's in the area, we're dealing with the overuse of mopeds and bikes that are everywhere and parked in disarray, we're dealing with the proper movement of people," he said. "Now we're sitting down and we're putting in place the strategy to correct each one of those issues." It is not clear what that strategy might include, but a solution to Eighth Avenue's problems seems very far away. And everyone who has a stake in its condition — from elected officials, to local businesses and residents, to Broadway bigwigs — has tried to keep expectations modest. Ken Sunshine, a celebrity publicist (his clients have included Barbra Streisand and Ben Affleck) who works with the Broadway League, said he knew that Eighth Avenue was "never going to be pristine." "It's always going to be funky, and it's always going to be a little weird, and that's good, that's what New York is," he said. "But we can do better than this."
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A glimpse of 17th-century New York
If Eighth Avenue in Manhattan is the city's most extreme example of 21st-century street mayhem, Stone Street is the opposite — a glimpse back in New York history, when even the idea of paved streets was something new. In 1658, Stone Street in Lower Manhattan became the first paved street in New York City, after residents pooled their money to pay for it. In 1693, it became home to the city's first printing press. The cobblestone street became a thriving commercial area in the early 1800s, but many buildings there were damaged or destroyed in the Great Fire of New York in 1835. Today's Stone Street buildings were built in the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s. The street almost closed in the late 1960s in order to build a 38-story skyscraper, but those plans fell through. It was designated as a historical landmark in 1996. Now, Stone Street is pedestrian only, filled with restaurants and a top destination for tourists.
On a recent afternoon, people had lunch at tables set up in the middle of the street. Tourists strolled by, stopping to take photos of the buildings or to glance at their New York City travel guidebooks. One group listened as a tour guide shared the street's history with them. Nearby, Francesca Hembury, 26, stood reading Elena Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" during her lunch break. Her office looks out onto Stone Street. "I think the pedestrian foot traffic is always nice to see," said Ms. Hembury, who lives on the Upper East Side. "I know people in my office enjoy seeing people back here and people coming and going, and I do too." When she's not reading during breaks from work, she's frequenting the restaurants or people-watching. "It's nice to get glimpses of what people are saying," she said. "So many different languages are spoken that I get to hear every day, some that I could never even guess what they are." Jonathon Matthews, 40, brought an out-of-town colleague to Stone Street to tell her about the history and to pick up lunch. He said he visits the street a few times a month for takeout or after-work drinks. It doesn't feel too swarmed by tourists, he said. "The city turned more streets into pedestrian-only centers and I love it," said Mr. Matthews, who lives in New Rochelle. "I don't drive into the city but I can imagine as a driver it stinks, but I think it's great for those that are OK walking."
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