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Seen & Heard: Bike-Share Stations
••• A very welcome addition to the block of Church between Duane and Reade: Elena Ab Gallery. From the website: “Elena envisioned a place where her friends, artists and collectors could gather and present their artistic visions to visitors and residents of lower Manhattan, New York. For years Elena maintained a studio space on Broadway in Tribeca, and has now moved to a street level space at 185 Church St., where exhibitions will be more accessible to the general public.”
••• Matt Bernson‘s Harrison Street boutique is celebrating its first anniversary with a party this Thursday, and you’re invited. Says Matt: “The hair style bar will be offering complimentary hair styling: beachy waves, glamor curls, and bohemian braids. Nail art: Matt Bernson–inspired custom art. Tattoos: inspired by the graphics from our spring campaign.” (That’s it at the top of this page.) The invite is above right; click on it for the details.
••• You’ve probably noticed at least one of the Citi Bike docks around the neighborhood. I’ve done my share of complaining about the process, but I’m generally getting excited about the program. That said, don’t the docks seem rather huge? Was there really no more compact way to arrange the bikes? And could they not have gone on the sidewalk? In other neighborhoods, that may not be an option, but Tribeca has extraordinarily wide sidewalks and little foot traffic. (Obviously, some streets are exceptions.) I guess what I mean is that I find the docks really ugly. (Also, the one in front of the Citigroup building on Greenwich made me wonder: Does Citigroup really need security bollards?) Anyway, the station map is here. Doesn’t it seem like Battery Park City could’ve used a few more?
••• The Other Woman shoots in the W. Broadway/N. Moore area today. According to IMDB: “After realizing she is not her boyfriend’s primary lover, a woman teams up with his wife and plots mutual revenge.” The director is Nick Cassavetes and it stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Leslie Mann, and Cameron Diaz. I still think fondly about Leslie Mann even though I suffered through This Is 40, or as I call it, This Is 40 (Minutes Too Long).
••• No one guessed it, so I posted the answer to last week’s Where in Tribeca…? (It was the one with the yellow birdhouse.)
••• Want to volunteer? “Tribeca Trust has formed a research committee to do background research on individual buildings that are outside our historic districts but merit inclusion in them. We have a list of the buildings and will be developing a 1-2 page briefing sheet on each one. Gregory Dietrich, a well-known preservation consultant, will be ‘training’ us on May 7 from 1:30-3:30 in Tribeca. [… Research] can be done from home via laptop, with the occasional visit to the Municipal Archives on Chambers Street. […] Potential volunteers should rsvp Lynn Ellsworth at lynnellsworth@tribecatrust.org.”
••• The Gaslight Anthem is playing Pier 26 on July 26 (with the Bouncing Souls) and July 27 (with the Hold Steady). I’ve never even heard of Gaslight Anthem, so I guess I’m more out of it than I thought. Tickets are on sale now.
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Erik, if you think about it for one minute, you should be able to guess why the citibike stations are so long and mainly on the streets. It’s to remove parking spaces as part of the general DOT/Bloomberg campaign against cars and trucks and punishment for not accepting congestion pricing and tolls on the east river bridges. If there are actual benefits for residents, well, all the better to sell it to the public as an improvement.
Less cynically, at least in Tribeca and Soho, putting them on sidewalks would be problematic in many of places because the sidewalks have vaults underneath and aren’t constructed to take lots of weight (not sure how much that kiosk weighs). And, in the case of your top picture, I bet that Landmarks would have a thing or two to say about putting something on top of the landmarked granite slabs and close to any of the landmarked glass eye metalwork along the north end of the block alongside the building.
@Nicole: While I take many of your points, I doubt that thinking about the matter for a minute (or even longer) would have led me to conclude that the bike stations are punishment for the failure of congestion pricing.
I heard that from a long-time member of CB1 (and no, it wasn’t Jacques)
Sweet conspira-jeeezus! – Sounds like that CB1 member has been there tooooo long.
Tribeca Trust, Friends of Finn Square, and a scattershot of residents from North and East Tribeca Historic Districts wrote DOT a collective, friendly letter a month ago. We had created our own map of where the bikeshare stations ought to go around Tribeca’s historic districts, pinpointing spots that would not create anger at the program. We asked DOT for the opportunity to walk through Tribeca to discuss the rack locations and invited them to take a look at our more-considered choices. DOT just ignored us until the night before the current racks arrived in their ill-considered locations. Their late-arriving last minute response was just to tell us thanks but no thanks.
I saw some bike racks installed on a very narrow street in Soho where the individual racks were angled so that the bikes wouldn’t stick out so far into the street. Shouldn’t DOT be doing that everywhere, especially in places like the corner of Duane at Greenwich Street where cars are turning onto Duane Street? This is just an accident waiting to happen. And does anyone know why we need over a hundred bike racks within a 3 -4 block radius? I like the idea of Citibikes, but the installation locations seem ill-conceived.
I am merely speculating here, but since it is illegal to ride a bicycle on a sidewalk (you should be riding in the street and obeying all vehicle traffic laws and signals), I am guessing it would be confusing to then dock these bicycles on sidewalks.