Congestion pricing or not, the Bloomberg administration is impressively committed to altering the flow of traffic through the center city. Such is its determination, in fact, that it has now reduced Broadway, the original Manhattan highway, to a series of what the Department of Transportation is calling “pedestrian living rooms.” From Times Square to Herald Square, the blacktop has been decreased by a third, replaced on the eastern side with a pebbly mixture of light-colored gravel and epoxy that could pass, from the upper deck of a CitySights tour bus, for a jute rug. (Think of the inevitable flattened chewing-gum spots as red-wine stains.) Tables and chairs and umbrellas will be arranged to form makeshift cafés in the middle of the street. A green bike lane separates the domesticated zones from the curb, like a moat patrolled by speeding bicycle messengers.
“This is Broadway Boulevard,” Barbara Randall, the executive director of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, said last week, while standing in the center of what used to be, simply, Broadway, at Forty-first Street. Randall’s B.I.D. is responsible for the gardening and the interior decorating along the boulevard, and she was surrounded by dozens of giant flower pots and boxes, marked “Live Plants,” that had been trucked in from Long Island. “Every now and then, you get the New York Naysayer,” she said. “This morning, I was walking to work and I stopped to talk to one of my guys, and a naysayer came along. He said, ‘You’re crazy. I can’t believe you’re doing this. Somebody’s going to get hit by a car.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, no place in New York is exempt from getting hit by a car.’ So then he starts telling me, ‘No, a truck’s going to plow through here,’ and I gave him my whole speech about how these are going to be full of dirt—very, very heavy.” She gestured toward the pots, which will double as protective walls, before continuing. “And he said, ‘You’re an optimist.’ ”
Randall began walking south, past employees who were bolting blue benches to the ground within easy sniffing distance of idling-truck exhaust, and past countless unopened bags of potting soil. (One of the gardeners was less optimistic when asked about the green-painted bike lane: “They say green is the most calming color, but I don’t think most people around here want to be calm.”) At Thirty-ninth Street, she came upon a D.O.T. project manager named Sean Quinn, who explained that the “pebble-like surface” was guaranteed to last for five years. “Tourists can observe the real New Yorkers in their daily grind,” he said. (A description on the D.O.T.’s Web site reads, “No reservation needed, free front-row seating will be available to Broadway’s Sidewalk Catwalk Fashion Show.”) The models on this runway, then, may head south from the Gap, at Forty-second Street, or north from Macy’s. Dining is B.Y.O., for the time being, but takeout from the Mr. Broadway Kosher Restaurant offers the added benefit of spotting black-hatted Hasidim.
“Someone asked me, ‘You actually think people are going to sit in the middle of the street drinking coffee?’ ” Randall said. “I’m, like, ‘Yeah, I really think they will. New Yorkers sit anywhere.’ ” A few blocks north, at the so-called Crossroads of the World, where, on Armistice Day in 1918, Enrico Caruso sang from the balcony of the Knickerbocker Hotel, a man was slumped against the Gap holding a cardboard sign that read, “Why lie? I need a beer!” A group of break-dancers sat on buckets on the sidewalk. Tour-bus pamphleteers and Daily News hawkers jostled for pole position in front of the subway stairs. Suddenly, a couple of chairs began to seem like a welcome respite from the mayhem, so a pair of locals lugged their own from a nearby office building, for a test run and a bite.
“You’re very brave,” a woman said, crossing the street in front of them, as several fire engines, sirens blaring, struggled to make a left turn at Forty-second Street. (Caruso singing the “Marseillaise” it wasn’t.)
“I expect to see your faces covered in soot,” a pedestrian said. Bicycles swerved heedlessly around the planters. Before long, a camera crew had descended to ask questions for a pop-culture survey. (“What did you think of Bernie Mac’s death?”) Another man talked into his cell phone while waiting for the light to change: “They closed half of Broadway. Bloomberg’s ridiculous.” The sunlight, at least, was ample.
Thus far, the begonias and impatiens and kalanchoes in the planters all looked to be intact. “If you’d put these out fifteen years ago, you’d have no plants by the next morning,” Randall said. “I mean, everything would just disappear.”
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