Park Avenue’s Park Is Coming Back. Partially. Eventually.

Coming soon(ish), except with electric cars on either side. Photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung/Alamy

For almost exactly a century, Park Avenue has been mostly avenue and not much park. In 1925, its open rail cut had given way to a closed tunnel and new luxury apartment buildings that lined the street all the way down to Grand Central Terminal. The most fashionable building in town was 277 Park, wrapped around an enormous courtyard with fountains and landscaping. It faced an avenue that was, like that courtyard, a place to promenade, to sit, to meet. In these years, the avenue’s center median was not 20 feet wide, as it is today, but 56 feet wide. It had curved walkways, benches, and elaborate plantings. It was a very pleasant place, a proper amenity rather than a mere traffic island. But the traffic on either side was getting heavy, and you know how the city decided to deal with that.

That year, the Manhattan borough president, Julius Miller, announced a plan to shave off a traffic lane’s worth of land from each side of the median. The median below 57th Street would be cut down by 18 feet on either side. Two years later, in 1927, Miller announced that a further stretch would be similarly narrowed, all the way up to 72nd Street. “The work,” reported the New York Times, “represents one of the most important groups of improvements undertaken by Mr. Miller since he began slicing off street encroachments and extraneous landscape of all kinds to provide more ample channels for traffic.” Eventually the rebuilding extended up to 96th, and the central strip became not much more than a space for tulips and holiday decor and sculpture shows put up by the Fund for Park Avenue. Only a tiny fragment of the old wider median still exists, between 96th and 97th Streets.

Mercifully, we are about to claw back some of that landscape, which (in terms of quality of city life) turned out not to be so extraneous after all. For the past several years, city officials — Dan Garodnick, now director of city planning, and Councilmember Keith Powers among them — have been pushing to (as the politicians’ language has had it) “put the park back in Park Avenue.” The medians will go back up to 48 feet wide, nearly as large as they were a century ago. The occasion for it all is that the enormous train tunnel under Park Avenue, which constitutes the largely invisible northern end of Grand Central Terminal, needs a new roof, and thus there’s a once-in-a-century chance to reimagine what’s on top of it. We’ve heard ideas about re-widening the median for several years, and early this morning at a press gaggle, Department of Transportation commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez — joined by Powers, State Assemblyman Alex Bores, and Representative Jerry Nadler — made it official.

Or at least semi-official. There is no finished plan in place: This was strictly an announcement the DOT has put out a request for proposals. The officials at the event took pains to note that there would be community engagement ahead, which means there will be expressions of irascibility over everything from parking spots to tree species. (At today’s announcement, Powers remarked that he and a colleague “have had, I don’t know, 150 conversations about this over the past few years,” and that was before the crabby neighbors even got into it.) This rebuild will also go up only 11 blocks, from 46th to 57th. It’s a wearying fact that even small improvements in New York infrastructure now require such a high level of consensus that they’re incredibly difficult to carry off. Ninety-nine years of inertia and precedent is not easy to overcome, and this group seems poised to do it. It’s praiseworthy for sure.

Now then, to anyone submitting an RFP: Can we please get assurance that there’ll be somewhere to sit down with a cup of coffee? Let’s not build another over-defended, misery-inducing Moynihan Station situation here. If we’re putting the park back in Park Avenue, it’s not asking too much for a park bench.