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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Open streets, depending on your preferred mode of transportation, they either mean more room to stroll or less room to drive and park, and that is causing conflict in New York City between car owners and pedestrians. According to a story on Gothamist, some community members in Greenpoint are battling it out over one particularly fraught street closure, with one group of volunteers working to keep the street barricades up, while another small but vocal group keeps taking them down.

There has been at least one assault, locks sabotaged with glue, and barriers thrown under the BQE and into the Newtown Creek. Such conflict is possible because up until now, the city has left it up to volunteers to keep the open streets open and maintained, offering little in the way of protection and additional infrastructure support. It's an issue. The Biden administration-- the Biden. The de Blasio administration seems to acknowledge this as an issue now.

Yesterday in his budget proposal, the mayor proposed giving $4 million to the program up from $0 this past year. With me now is Christopher Robbins, reporter and editor for Gothamist. He recently wrote a piece called Greenpoint Open Streets War Escalates as Saboteur Tosses Barricades into Newtown Creek. Hi, Chris. Welcome back to the show.

Christopher Robbins: Hey, Brian, thanks for having me.

Brian: Before we get into this so called war, so we're all using the same definition, when we talk about open streets, what are we talking about? Is it the same thing as outdoor dining?

Christopher: Well, that's definitely a part of it. I guess for the purposes of this conversation, open streets are designated streets where generally from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, vehicular traffic is limited so that pedestrians and cyclists and other people can just enjoy the street. Part of that is open streets, restaurants, that's under the same umbrella, part of the same program, but all of this takes volunteer labor and all of this is considered an open Street.

Brian: In April of last year, the mayor promised 100 miles of open streets. Where are we today?

Christopher: It was actually exactly one year ago today that de Blasio made that decision, and he was actually prodded by the City Council because they were going to pass a bill to make the open streets for him. We are at 70 miles of open streets, not quite 100 miles, but to give you some perspective, there is around 6,000 miles of roadway in New York City. Still a small fraction that, but it's the biggest open streets program in the country.

Brian: For listeners in whatever neighborhood thinking right now, "I want one I want one." How do you apply for open streets? Can anyone do it? What agency approves it?

Christopher: You have to apply to the DOT. Anyone can do it, yes, but the city requires you to have thought this out. You have to do all your own outreach in the neighborhood that you want the Open Street to be in. You have to provide plans for how the Open Street barricades are going to be set up. If you want to have an open restaurant set up, you have to really submit a lot of planning beforehand and the city approves it and then the city basically turns the program over to you and says, "Okay, keep this street open as best you can." That's where some of the problems are cropping up.

Brian: All right. Tell us about this specific open street you wrote about in Greenpoint. Where is it exactly and how did you hear about what's going on there that might be characterized as an open street war?

Christopher: Well, it's it's one long block of Russell Street right next to Monsignor McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, and then it's around three blocks of Driggs Avenue, abutting McGolrick Park up there. I'd heard about this because I had seen on social media that there was a vocal group of people who were taking the barricades down off of those streets, especially Russell Street. Those barricades went missing after someone's camera on the street caught a person wearing orange and flip flops, loading the open streets barricades, these heavy metal barricades, into an Amazon van and driving them away and they just disappeared. That open street was no longer an open Street.

Brian: Let me interrupt you for a second, because if you want to be clandestine and steal these barricades and go dump them somewhere, you wear orange and flip flops?

Christopher: Well, this was the tantalizing bit of this story is like you have this controversy in this neighborhood over these open streets. You have a really brazen theft of city property done on camera and then it's done by someone wearing orange and flip flops and driving what appeared to be an Amazon van. Although Amazon has disavowed the van, said it was a counterfeit van, to use their language. But that intrigued us and so we peeled back more layers and we later found out that the barricades had been dumped into Newtown Creek, which is a Superfund site that's a few blocks away.

Brian: Yuck. All right anyone listening from that area in Greenpoint and want in on this. Have you taken part in the open streets war on Russell Street near McGolrick Park, as Chris was just describing it, and what side are you on? Pro open streets or against? Discuss. Tell us why. 646-435-7280. We can also take your calls, if you want to talk about any other Open Street in the city. Did you apply to open one yourself or do you volunteer to help keep it open? What's been your experience? How often do barriers get moved? Is it the same guy with the orange jumpsuit and the flip flops in your neighborhood?

What support or resources do you want from the city or anything else related. 646-435-7280. Let's go right to a Greenpoint caller. Here's Katie in Greenpoint. You're on WNYC with Chris Robbins from Gothamist, who's been reporting on this. Hi. Katie, are you there?

Katie: Hi, can you hear me.

Brian: Now we got you. Yes. Hi.

Katie: Great. So my name is Katie. I'm calling from the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance. We've been part of the Open Streets Community Coalition since the beginning. What we're seeing on the ground is sort of a difference. What Christopher is talking about on Russell Street is much different than the challenges that we're seeing, probably on other open streets in the city and indeed in our neighborhood, like Berry Street, for example. People are concerned about emergency vehicle access. They're concerned about partying when the streets are closed down.

Those are things that the mayor's funding announcement are really going to help make community members feel more positive about the open streets in their neighborhoods. What we're seeing around McGolrick Park is quite different and it's actually a history in McGolrick Park of vandalism and this sort of self proclaimed nativist approach to the neighborhood. You have to remember that despite Brooklyn being fairly progressive, it's actually Greenpoint where the Proud Boys were formed, right? What we're seeing now is a anti-government cultural difference, where there's a call to action to prevent the community from "taking over the streets and taking away our space".

That's quite a different challenge to overcome with something like resources or city personnel. I'm very curious to better understand how the city can help with these deeper divides, rather than just management, to be able to help the community feel comfortable and safe, and much less divisive with these cultural differences that's really, really unfortunate in dividing our community in ways that nobody wants to see.

Brian: For car owners in the neighborhood who just might want their parking spots back, or the ability to drive through a certain street because it's the most direct route perhaps, is it a little insulting to compare them to the Proud Boys, the white supremacist group?

Katie: Are you asking me?

Brian: Yes.

Katie: I would say yes, if I didn't see some of the rhetoric that has been posted. We actually have had an increase of assaults and derogatory comments specifically about volunteers of color that have been well documented. You have people who, again, they have been using the tagline "Let's protect our homeland. We are the Greenpoint native." That kind of rhetoric rings too close to home to some of the other rhetoric that we've seen in the last four or five years, and indeed before. I would think that it would be a stretch if I hadn't seen some of these comments, especially on social media, firsthand.

Brian: That's really interesting and distressing. Of course, when people say Greenpoint natives, they're talking about immigrants from Poland, right? Immigrants themselves, by and large an immigrant community, and so that's pretty horrifying what you just described. Katie, thank you very much. On the other side of the Greenpoint open street war, I think, is Gary calling in from Greenpoint. Gary you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Gray: Hey Brian, thank you for taking my call. I live in the McGolrick Park area and I'd like to say first and foremost, the divisiveness really boils down to the group of people that have become extremely militant that are actually managing the barrier program in our neighborhood. They're trying to spin this as some kind of a race issue or something like that, but really what it's coming down to is an actual issue of the people in the neighborhood using the actual streets.

You have the group that manages the barriers yelling at delivery drivers, just guys trying to do their job. Harassing people trying to park, and they're trying to spin this thing like it's a cars versus bikes thing, and then even further beyond they're victimizing themselves in a way that nobody else could have even imagined.

There was a two-alarm fire on Driggs Avenue last Sunday and thank God those stupid barriers weren't up because had they been, firetrucks probably would have wasted 20, 30 seconds of their time getting out, moving the barriers and they wouldn't have saved that old man from that fire. What this is coming down to is a group of people that have become militant, that are not listening to the community, not listening to feedback, trying to push their agenda on everybody.

It's just frustrating the entire neighborhood, because what you see is [unintelligible 00:11:45] cars being forced to divert onto the more narrow streets in the neighborhood and it's actually more dangerous. This is a huge liability and it's a group of people pushing this on a neighborhood without any study from the DOT, without any factual information.

They're planning it like they're the victims and it's absolutely not the case. People want open streets, they make sense. But in this particular area it's causing more headaches than it's doing good and it's next to a park. This is a year past the pandemic and you have this group of people that are trying to smear residents and it's not fair.

Brian: Do you yourself have a car, have lost a parking space, prefer to drive through that street. Anything for yourself?

Gray: Personally, from what I've seen myself, has just been traffic diverted and chaos in the neighborhood without any actual feedback. If you look at the Driggs Avenue exit, it's backing up traffic all the way to the [unintelligible 00:12:40] Bridge exit, which is causing traffic on the highway. Everything that you hear in the news right now is just a smear, and residents are extremely frustrated because nobody's getting the chance to get their voice out.

Brian: Gary, thank you for getting your voice out. Christopher Robins from Gothamist, we heard pretty polar opposite callers there. For you as a reporter on this story, is there anything to fact-check first of all, from either caller, or how would you put this into context?

Christopher: I would say a few things. The first thing is that, the fact that the open streets are next to the park, some people might find that puzzling. Why put an open street next to a park like that? Well, there's an elementary school that's also right next to the park. Talking to people in McGolrick Park, people with children, they talked about how you let your kid play in the park, they're running around, they're bursting out of the park, they're running onto the street and they feel safer if they know that that street is closed and their children can play there and not have to look both ways for speeding cars.

Another thing I would point out is that there was some posts on social media about the fire that Gary mentioned last week. They attempted to link the open restaurants, open streets program, to a delay in getting help to that fire in the FDNY and I asked the FDNY if that was true and they said, no, and that there was no delay to their response because of the barricades, because of course these barricades hadn't been up since they'd been dumped into Newtown Creek. As for traffic backing up, that is happening and I think that that is something that the DOT clearly is aware of and they need to work through, but also, that speaks to a wider issue than just the open streets.

That speaks to a traffic issue. That speaks to why are so many cars coming off the BQE there in that neighborhood. Is it better to have cars coming off the BQE at high rates of speed through this neighborhood? Is it better to reroute them some way? I think these are all bigger questions for the department of transportation.

Brian: Which means there are cultural conflict or pedestrian and bicyclists versus car conflict, that are ongoing, predate the pandemic, and are being expressed through this program that was initially rolled out as an emergency accommodation.

Christopher: Yes, I think on one hand, people who normally would drive through these open streets and not have to get out of their car, move a barricade, drive back into the street, move the barricade back, find a parking spot. I think that it's already annoying and frustrating enough to drive a car around New York city. That added hurdle probably angers them.

I would also say there's a generational thing, perhaps, that's going on here. There was a Siena College poll that [unintelligible 00:16:00] Alternatives commissioned in January and it was something like 63% of voters supported open streets. That number rose to 76% of voters under the age of 35. Perhaps there's a generational thing here and I also think this is sort of a proxy war for the changing neighborhood, the people who've lived in Greenpoint a long time and the neighborhood itself just changing with more and more people moving in.

Brian: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio.

A few more minutes to talk about conflict, breaking out around various open streets, especially in Greenpoint, the open streets program where they're actually closed streets to traffic and the conflict that that's creating during the pandemic. Christopher Robbins, from Gothamist reported on the conflict that's gotten very hot as we've been hearing from him and from our callers in Greenpoint. Here's Jim in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jim.

Jim: Hi, good morning. I love the open streets. I've been volunteering every day for almost a year. Our neighbors universally love it, and of course we have some old timers that because of the status quo, any change is going to be hard for them. But even them, they have specific complaints like, oh, vendors are going to come, it's going to be dirtier. So we address that. We have people who clean up and volunteer to clean. We have about 130 volunteers, 40 of which each day close 1.3 miles.

We have Zumba and Salsa and tons of kids programming, seven days a week. We get 20, 40, 50, 60 participants. I've lived here for two decades and I've met more people in this year than I have in the two decades previously. It's been wonderful. Right now, my windows open on 34th Avenue. It is completely quiet. I hear birds. Later on when the kids could start playing, I'll hear kids laughing. It is absolutely the best thing that's ever happened to our neighborhood and it should be all over the city. We should have an interconnected network. The amount of crashes has dropped like 85%. It's so much safer to go to school. Little kids can ride their own bicycles to school. It's 100% better.

Brian: Do you have friends in the 34th Avenue area who are car owners and dissenters?

Jim: We are car owners. We have to access our garage. We go around, it takes us a few extra seconds to get into our garage for our building. There are dissenters, but mostly, it's a little longer. We haven't taken away one parking space. That's a thing to know. There's no parking spaces that have disappeared. It's only from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and most of the neighborhood has adapted.

Brian: Jim, thank you so much for that report from the Jackson Heights, 34th Avenue, open streets. William, an Uber driver currently in the Bronx. William, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

William: Hi. Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I used to listen to your show while I was deployed and whenever I felt homesick and it always helped. Your show is always great to listen to. I'm an Uber driver and I've seen these conflicts all over the city, Brian, in every borough, and it's definitely becoming a problem. Even though I drive in the city for work, that's my main source of work, I still love the program. It's brought life to the entire city. It's the best thing that's de Blasio could have done. However, we need a massive educational campaign to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

I've seen these conflicts happen right in front of me with other Uber drivers, Amazon drivers, pedestrians, restaurant owners, and it's not what we want to see. It reminds me of back in the day, a block party, where everyone got out in the community and mixed and everything like that. It's a great thing that we're doing, but we need the city to do their best to just make it feasible for everyone to be on the same page. That's all I want to say. Thank you.

Brian: William, thanks for being our eyes and ears and not just our wheels all around the city. I appreciate that. To his point, Chris, to wrap this up, another criticism of Open Streets is that it's not equitable. That ironically, the neighborhoods that would benefit most from Open Streets, potentially have reaped the least benefits from the program. For example, areas of Brooklyn with the highest concentration of COVID-19 cases, Borough Park, Canarsie, where without any Open Streets, at least as of September last year when a survey was taken. Has the city acknowledged that reality so that Open Streets just don't become a gentrifiers delight?

Christopher: They've halfway acknowledged it. You mentioned at the top that the mayor's budget calls for $4 million in this next budget cycle for Open Streets funding. If there's 235 Open Streets locations, that's around $17,000 per location per year. If you look at some of the more successful Open Streets programs like on Vanderbilt Avenue, that's run by the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council. They just recently did a GoFundMe, they raised $25,000. They have 50 or so volunteers. It's a huge undertaking for these organizations. Not only is the city's absence in enforcing open streets creating this conflict, it is exacerbating this inequity.

It's neighborhoods in places that have money, that are wealthier, that have community organizations that can step in and fill the city's void, they can have open streets and everyone else is out of luck. Gothamist asked all of the Democratic candidates for mayor if they supported Open Streets, if they would expand it. They all did. They uniformly said that they did. One thing that also stuck out to me is that they all said that like, "Look, if this is a city program and this is a signature city program, we should administer it as a city and we should do it fairly."

There shouldn't have to be these gray area conflicts over whether someone's allowed to rip open a barricade or drag a barricade out of a street and have volunteers have to rush in and drag it back. I think the de Blasio administration is beginning to acknowledge this, but there's still a lot of unanswered questions into how this program is going to be made permanent because it doesn't seem feasible or tenable to have a permanent Open Streets program that's permanently managed by volunteers.

Brian: Well, I'm glad I'm not the guy who had to pull the barricades out of the Newtown Creek. Talk about wash your hands for 20 seconds while singing happy birthday twice. We leave it there with Gothamist reporter and editor, Christopher Robbins. His story on this, Greenpoint Open Streets War Escalates As Saboteur Tosses Barricades Into Newtown Creek. Thanks for your reporting, Chris. Thanks for coming on.

Christopher: Thanks so much, Brian.

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