Au revoir, Cartier? Arrivederci, Gucci?
It could happen to Fifth Avenue, if Mayor Eric Adams’ bid to “reimagine” the Big Apple’s premier shopping boulevard goes anywhere — along with a return of the phony GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs that marred the “world’s greatest shopping street” just a few decades ago. Did I mention an Elmo infestation as well?
Despite a promised yearslong study that will seek input from “stakeholders,” City Hall’s scheme to “prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, mass transit and the public realm” amounts to one big mistake: banning cars except for one measly lane on Fifth Avenue between Bryant Park and Central Park South.
The other traffic lanes will be used only for bikes and buses. Preliminary sketches show sidewalks enormously widened and planted with trees (which defeat the purpose of giving pedestrians more elbow room). They’re too close for comfort to the chaos-inducing plazas that brought Times Square to the brink of ruin — and could end up just like them by the end of the design process.
The mayor, who usually shows more common sense, is buying into the woke world’s pathological hatred of cars.
That America’s “car culture” is a manifestation of our society’s evil, earth-destroying ways has become an article of faith among elitists who can afford hot and cold running Ubers to steer them through the traffic horrors their policies inflict.
Fifth Avenue today is very successful. And, yes, it’s congested, as it should be during the holiday shopping season. But it faces a miserable, DNA-altered future if Adams’ folly is allowed to become a reality.
Most pedestrian plazas cheapen everything around them, while providing a consequence-free lolling ground for low-spending tourists and vagrants.
For a look at the damage these asphalt, so-called oases cause, you need go no farther than Times Square, where they took root in 2009. They are the under-recognized, root cause of the Bowtie’s current decline.
Times Square faced challenges even before the pandemic. Brick-and-mortar retail was staggered by online shopping and corporate bankruptcies.
Today, crime and a shortfall of international visitors have a lot to do with Times Square’s precarious state, but it started with the plazas. Hailed by the Michael Bloomberg administration’s deep thinkers — and even by some store owners — as a humane instrument to tame vehicular and human crowding, they eventually had the inevitable, opposite effect.
The plazas to this day enjoy cheers from the cycle-loving, car-hating peanut galleries. It’s impermissible in politically correct echo chambers to question them, regardless of their obviously destructive effects.
But after the iconic Toys R Us between West 44th and 45th streets closed in 2014, the Bowtie’s plazas were overrun with “desnudas,” predatory cartoon characters and Big Mac-chompers. The debased environment is surely a reason why the landlord has yet to fully fill the space once occupied by the world’s tallest indoor Ferris wheel.
Gap and Old Navy stand next to an empty storefront and a large “NY Gifts” shop selling T-shirts and other tacky goods — an eyesore at the very heart of the action.
The former site of Forever 21 at 42nd Street (it has since relocated two blocks north) is now taken up by JD Sports, a “sportswear” chain which sells mostly sneakers, heralding a return to the area’s bad-old-days retail mix of “fast food and fast feet.” Taco Bells and other grab-and-go spots are slowly but surely replacing actual stores.
Ray-Ban and Oakley closed. Several others, including American Eagle Outfitters, are rumored to be on their way out when leases expire.
The plazas wrought havoc, too, on Broadway north of Times Square. Caroline’s on Broadway will close after Dec. 31, due in part to miserable sidewalk conditions caused by a junkie-trafficked “plaza” outside its doorstep. Most of the blocks between West 49th and 57th streets have as nearly as many vacant storefronts as occupied ones.
Adams might think that the likes of Bergdorf Goodman and Versace can shrug off any bad effects of plazas. Perhaps customers will come by helicopter?
But he needs to get out of the clubs and spend time in the “Crossroads of the World” before he condemns Fifth Avenue to the same fate.
