Hell’s Kitchen dreams a new Ninth Avenue

Volume One, Issue 31, April 20 - 26, 2007

By Chris Lombardi

Project Find Coffee House, a senior center across Ninth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, was empty Wednesday evening. The seniors who eat breakfast and lunch there had gone home, but two other seniors, residents of nearby Manhattan Plaza, arrived right at 6 p.m. and sat firmly by the window, reminiscing about the good old days. “It was better then than it is now,” said Mary Lettieri, who has lived in the neighborhood for 50 years. “Now you can’t walk!,” she exclaimed, between traffic from the nearby Lincoln Tunnel and bus traffic into the terminal.

“You go to Ninth Ave., it’s packed. You go to Seventh Avenue, it’s bam! If we wanna go to a fish store on 40th [Street], we can’t do it—you can’t cross,” said Actieri, a vivid sixtysomething woman with large glasses. “What they need is an overpass,” she said, “like the old days when we had the elevated.” She and her friend, Louise Raquet, knew they wouldn’t get the old IRT elevated trains back, but they were here, she said, to see what “Ninth Avenue Renaissance” really meant.

On Wednesday, Project Find became the office of Ninth Avenue Renaissance, courtesy of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association (HKNA), the Clinton-Hell’s Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition (CHEKPEDS), the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. Last September, HKNA and Stringer’s office commissioned PPS to help the community develop ideas about how to address the traffic, pollution and degradation of Ninth Avenue street life in the neighborhood; after a series of well-attended January “street workshops and significant community feedback, PPS developed a report unveiled on Wednesday by one of its senior associates Thor Snilsberg, including three separate designs for Ninth Avenue. Many who had been to the January meetings were pleased to see their concerns reflected in the designs; others still bemoaned the exclusion of other ideas such as light rail on 42nd Street, while allowing that certain compromises made sense. Meanwhile, advocates and neighbors directly asked public officials at the meeting to take action to make life more livable on the avenue right now.

Many found themselves dodging N.J. Transit buses and SUV-taxis to get into the meeting room on Wednesday, which was filled with large drawings laid out neatly and labeled “Option A,” “Option B,” “Option C.” Christine Berthet, C.B. 4 Transportation Committee co-chair and co-founder of the two Hell’s Kitchen groups, was bursting with energy, greeting local officials, from Kevin Oldlinger of the Department of City Planning to aides of Borough President Stringer, State Senator Tom Duane, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. She then hugged neighbors like Actieri and Raquet, as well as HKNA members such as Martin Treat, a fellow member of C.B. 4’s Transportation Committee.

For Treat and Berthet, the evening was the culmination of years of hard work that began with a 2005 demonstration protesting the death of a pedestrian on 45th Street and Ninth Avenue. “We mean to reclaim Ninth Avenue as a vibrant, affordable main street,” Treat told Chelsea Now just before the forum began. “In my 10 years of involvement on this issue, this is the first time we’ve seen a ground-up offer of a solution.” By “ground-up,” Treat meant community-generated, speaking to the hours spent by hundreds of local residents who had attended previous forums, including one in January where residents went out to Ninth Avenue, came back and drew on huge base maps—bike lanes, bus lanes, turn lanes, green spaces, even sidewalk cafes.

The results of that six-month “community revisioning” were then presented by Snilsberg, who began by reminding the crowd of 30 of what many of them knew: that local residents feared traffic far more than crime, with 79 percent saying that they change their schedules to avoid going out during high-traffic times, that “Drivers do what they want...pedestrians have to weave themselves in,” and that the area suffers more than the rest of Manhattan from a lack of green space, with a commensurate higher rate of deaths from chronic lung disease (70 percent higher than the relatively verdant Upper West Side).
Given those realities, said Snilsberg, a new Ninth Avenue needed to address public safety, traffic congestion, unhealthy conditions and a lack of public spaces. They called for proven traffic-calming methods such as shortening pedestrian crossing times and creating wider crosswalks, along with public benches, parks, parking for small businesses and curb extensions (small pedestrian gathering places near curbs).

The result was reflected, said Snilsberg, in the three street designs developed by PPS that aim to improve access, regulate traffic and promote pedestrian-friendly spaces.

“Around the room, you’ll see Option A, Option B. Option C,” he said, all of which would include wider sidwalks and a shorter “crossing width,” making it easier for pedestrians to cross the Ninth Avenue more quickly:

• A: three lanes for mixed traffic, two parking lanes, a shared bus/bike lane and sidewalk widened by 20 percent, and an overall crossing width reduction of 35.5 percent.

• B: Three mixed-traffic lanes, one parking lane, one bus lane separated by a median from one bike lane, 33 percent sidewalk reduction, crossing width reduced by 33.3 percent.

• C: two lanes, two parking lanes, bus-lane bike lane, sidewalk reduced by 33 percent, crossing width cut by 47.2 percent.

After a few minutes, people began to get up and peer at the illustrations. Many, like Treat, were entranced by Option C. “It’s most restrictive of traffic, “ he said, “while still providing lots of parking for our small businesses.”

But many, like Linda Ashley, found C too “pie-in-the-sky,” too restrictive. “I’m leaning toward B as being the most practical for businesses and pedestrians,” said Ashley, who lives on 44rd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Ashley said that she did participate in the January brainstorming workshop and is glad to see the process moving forward now.

“I run a small business, “ Ashley added, “and when they [cars] turn out of the Lincoln Tunnel and go whooshing by…. There are times when I’m on the phone, that I have to say, ‘I’ll call you back,’ because I just can’t hear anything.”

The Lincoln Tunnel traffic was the subject of the last part of the meeting. Christine Berthet took the stage and presented some ideas, again based on community input, for new pathways that might keep some of that Lincoln Tunnel traffic away from Ninth Avenue entirely. Flashing a map full of arrows and colored sections, she pointed to all the arrows on the Eleventh Avenue section, saying triumphantly, “If the cars want to go north or south from the Tunnel, why not have more entrances on Eleventh Avenue, which is wide open, instead of on our main street?”

To advance the latter concept, HKNA has secured $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Transportation for a two-year study on traffic issues relating to the Lincoln Tunnel entrances. When a neighbor asked, “Why two years?” Berthet said with a small smile, “Because in order to believe what we all know, they have to spend a lot of money on it.”

The meeting ended with residents and advocates asking local officials, especially the Public Advocate’s office, to continue to press for more staggered street lights and other safety improvements. Then the crowd dispersed, each to make their own way across the bus-strewn streets.