Day: November 5, 2020

Late Tuesday afternoon, New York’s City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, was on a nine-mile walk, one the current crisis has him taking everyday — the quest for fresh air and decompression. Beginning from his boyfriend’s apartment in Williamsburg, he heads north into Queens over the Pulaski Bridge and through Hunter’s Point South Park. That is where he was when I caught up with him by phone, watching people for the most part diligently perform the choreography of social distance without, he noted, the interventions of the police.

For several weeks, Mr. Johnson had been pushing to close miles of city streets to cars as a means of accommodating what would only become a growing desperation to safely and more comfortably walk and bike outside as warmer weather approached. Mayor Bill de Blasio resisted for a long time, initiating a small pilot program and then abruptly shutting it down deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble. He maintained that the Police Department, itself badly hit by the pandemic, was too depleted to enforce the plan, which implied that law enforcement was essential to carrying it out.

This week the mayor announced that he would indeed set aside up 100 miles of road in phases, the first 40 miles over the next month. Though many of the details have yet to be finalized, the police will monitor closings in some capacity. Advocates for livable streets have had a hard time understanding why the police would be so critical to the venture given that other cities like Oakland, Calif., have largely managed to ban traffic from select locations with barricades and signs.
Crises of the kind we are experiencing require nimble and innovative thinking, the willingness to break with frameworks of the past. The slow implementation of a measure that seems at once relatively simple and destined to provide so much good, offers one more example of the bureaucratic inertia that has distinguished management of the corona outbreak at so many different levels of government. If we can’t quickly summon cars off the street — and only some of them and just provisionally — at a time when no one is going anywhere, how can we expect the city to brilliantly and flexibly reimagine itself once the pandemic is over?
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, public-health catastrophes managed to inaugurate the wholesale re-engineering of societies. Ingenuity was the hallmark of a time in which public health was intricately linked to urban planning and design. The continued eruptions of cholera and other diseases ultimately brought about transformative infrastructural changes to deliver clean air and water to places marked by filth, stench, pestilence.
The Paris that Georges-Eugène Haussmann famously conceived — a city of wide boulevards, parks, fountains — arose in response to a cholera outbreak that had moved the French government to demolish medieval buildings where illness was thought to spread too easily.