Community Board 1 (CB1) has formally endorsed a proposal to close half of a seldom-used street in the Financial District, in order to create a pedestrian plaza in front of a new public school that is slated to open in 2022.
At the April 25 meeting monthly meeting of CB1, the panel enacted a resolution calling for, “the westbound lane of Edgar Street, between Greenwich Street and Trinity Place adjacent to the school, [to] be closed to traffic and paved to create an outdoor area for school children and their caregivers to safely gather next to the school.”
Before such a change can be implemented, City law requires that a formal study be conducted to gauge its impact. For this reason, the same resolution urges, “either the Department of Transportation or the School Construction Authority conduct the appropriate study to enable the closure of the westbound lane of Edgar Street to enable the creation of a student plaza.”
The site of the new school to be built on Trinity Place will draw hundreds of children, parents, and caregivers each day to an area with narrow sidewalks and heavy traffic congestion.
CB1 enacted the resolution at the prompting of State Senator Daniel Squadron, who is lobbying City officials to create the plaza as a safety measure for students who will attend the new public school, construction for which will soon begin at 42 Trinity Place, on the site of the now-defunct Syms Department Store. The school, which will occupy the first eight floors of a 500 foot residential tower, is slated to have 476 seats. Nearby, there are four subway entrances around the school’s perimeter, three of which are on Trinity Place, adjacent to the school’s planned entrance, which will render sidewalk space surrounding the building even narrower and more congested.
“With the size of this student body, there would be no way that parents with children will have enough space around this school even to be able to drop their kids off and stand outside,” Tricia Joyce, the chair of CB1’s Youth and Education Committee noted at a November meeting of the School Overcrowding Task Force — a joint panel convened in 2008 by elected officials representing Lower Manhattan, to ease the chronic capacity shortages created at local schools by Lower Manhattan’s skyrocketing population. “The school will have almost 500 kids. But this is an elementary school, so 500 children means that many people, plus their caregivers. This translates to something closer to 750 or 800 people congregating there, every morning and every afternoon. There’s no way this area can accommodate those children being dropped off.”
“This is a very narrow street, with a very narrow sidewalk, where there is almost never any traffic,” she said of Edgar Street, a one-block byway that connects Trinity Place and Greenwich Street, dead-ending at the Battery Parking Garage. (One reason that the street is so lightly trafficked may be that it leads to another dead end: the southern terminus of Greenwich Street.)
The westbound lane of Edgar Street, a one-block thoroughfare that dead ends at the southern terminus of Greenwich Street, appears to serve mainly as a parking lot for police vehicles.
Ms. Joyce also noted that Edgar Street seems to serve mainly as a parking facility for three-wheeled police scooters, saying, “I’ve never seen a police officer in one of these, and I’ve never seen one move. They just seem to park there.” Recalling that she and a team of volunteers conducted an informal traffic survey of Edgar Street, she added, “the police scooters are the only traffic I’ve ever seen at this location. I have yet to see a car enter or leave the Battery Garage by this route.”
She further observed that safety may provide a more compelling rationale than convenience. “This is right outside the exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel,” she said. “Just steps away, on Greenwich Street, you have waves of buses moving uptown at speeds of 25 miles per hour or more.”
The CB1 resolution passed at the April 25 meeting notes that, “given that there is no ground level gathering space inside the school, it is essential to have an outdoor space adjacent to the school for adults/caretakers to drop off and pick up the 450-500 students safely. Children at the school will be between the ages of four and 11 and are likely to also have siblings in strollers in addition to their caretakers.”