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Nosy Neighbor: Why have these concrete barriers been on Chambers for ages?
Ok, I’ll admit it, it is my own nosiness that got me writing to the Department of Transportation early last month: “These concrete barriers have been on the corner of Chambers and West Broadway for a few years, and they make the corner a bit dangerous, since everyone funnels through the small cuts. (The sidewalk bridge doesn’t help either, but I know that is not your structure.) Can you tell me why they are there and how long they will be there?”
And the answer is, they are gone! Who knows why they were there (I never got a response) but they were loaded onto a flatbed this morning as I walked by. Et voila.
Now to get to that dang sidewalk bridge for 90 West Broadway and my other Nosy Neighbor question to DOB: why are businesses and even the City of New York (Board of Elections) allowed to paint or sticker up the sidewalks with advertisements?
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BRAVO, TC 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Talk about impact!! Way to go!!
Q: “Why are businesses and even the City of New York (Board of Elections) allowed to paint or sticker up the sidewalks with advertisements?”
A: “Such conduct is illegal, but D.O.T. seems to enforce it in only the most egregious cases.”
NYC Administrative Code § 19-138 (b) “Defacing. Except as otherwise provided by law, it shall be unlawful for any person to deface any street by painting, printing or writing thereon, or attaching thereto, in any manner, any advertisement or other printed matter.”
This prohibits decals and even graphic (light) projectors.
The painting and stickering are visual pollution and vandalism pure and simple, just like the infection of graffiti (and its scratch and acid variants) that is spreading since the pandemic.
(Gum is another annoyance as well…all those nasty sticky black stains on the sidewalks, that then get on the shoes, etc….is it too much to ask that gum be disposed of in trash cans?).
It should be easy enough to track down the sources of such “advertising”, fine the “advertisers”, and use that money to clean up the mess.
Spray paint is bad for the environment as well.
So here’s a radical thought: Ban the manufacture (not just the sale) of spray paint. Somehow humanity survived just fine before this invention appeared. Can’t we live without it?
The barriers are there to protect the apparently very shy trashcan….?
Speaking of trashcans (shy or not so much), what is our neighborhood going to look like when Adams new trash policies go into effect? Laughing Man has just added some pretty ugly boxes behind their seating on Duane Street which is narrowing the road even more. If all buildings put out ugly trash receptacles once they receive two summons for rats, are we just piling up ugly and smelly boxes on sidewalks to go with the ugly and dirty dining sheds?
Good questions. How do other cities deal with this? I don’t recall ever seeing mountains of trash bags in other cities. But maybe the difference is that other cities don’t have the density, or that they tend to have back streets/alleys where they can keep the trash out of sight…?
There must be a creative, sanitary, and aesthetic solution (I hope)…
Most other major cities intentionally designed alleys for this purpose.
The commissioners who devised the 1811 street grid wanted to maximize the amount of real estate available for development, hence no alleys.