BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC | The everyday items that make up our streetscape have now been quantified and mapped — at least for District 3.
City Councilmember Corey Johnson’s office has just released “Mapping Report: An analysis of street furniture and public spaces on Manhattan’s West Side.”
“Street furniture” includes trash cans, empty tree pits, public phones, bike racks, news stands, trees (with or without guards) and news boxes.
Johnson said his office hears from constituents, businesses and schools on a regular basis about different street furniture issues — for example, a corner that doesn’t have a trash can.
“But it was really just randomized when we would hear about it,” said Johnson in a phone interview. “We had no real data set to inform us about the locations and needs of all these things that are important to residents in the district.”
Geographically, District 3 is pretty large, Johnson noted — running from Canal St. to 63rd St. on the West Side, covering the neighborhoods of the West Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, as well as parts of West Soho and the Upper West Side.
The genesis of the project started soon after Johnson took office in January 2014.
“Just six months in we realized we wanted to have a better sense of the district,” he said. “I wanted to understand, well, are there areas that have less trash cans than they should? Are there areas that have [fewer] trees than they should? And so, we mapped over 11,000 locations of street furniture.”
The mapping took a lot of time and effort.
“This [was] a very labor-intensive project,” he explained, requiring “about 15 people walking the district for five days a week for over two months.”
Interns from his office walked the district block by block, itemizing each piece of street furniture with a pen and paper. The district was divided into 36 zones, which were surveyed individually or in pairs, according to the report.
The closest building address was taken down for each item, the report stated. If an address wasn’t evident, an approximation was made using Google Street View, according to the report (an all-volunteer effort which, noted Johnson, required no funding).
The report found that Chelsea has fewer bike racks, trees and trash bins than the West Village and Hell’s Kitchen.
Johnson said he was struck by how many bike racks (1,164) there are throughout the entire district.
“There’s a huge number of bike racks in Chelsea and in the West Village and West Soho,” said Johnson.
According to the report, Manhattan has 83 miles of bike lanes and paths, and the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT) has estimated that since 2000, the number of cyclists has doubled.
Bike racks are important because if they are not available, people may lock them to street signs, scaffolding or trees (which could damage them). Bike racks often came in clusters, according to the report, suggesting that groups were using the bulk request feature that the DOT runs.
“I was also surprised that there were considerably not as many empty tree pits as I would have thought,” said Johnson.
There are 153 empty tree pits in the district, according to the report, which for some, could be perceived as an eyesore.
“It is important to see where the empty tree pits are located in the district to understand where constituents might need assistance in either covering them up or requesting a new tree,” the report stated.
Interestingly, the report found there was no correlation between the wealth of the neighborhood and the frequency of empty tree pits.
There are 6,817 trees in the district, according to the report, with 4,218 of them having a guard.
Guards can extend a tree’s life span, according to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Through Parks, requests can be made for a free tree, dependent on certain requirements, but tree guards are not installed free by the city, the report said.
Most of the trees are clustered in Hell’s Kitchen and the West Village, which had the highest tree density, the report stated.
Certain factors play a role in tree population — such as whether a given area has been a longtime residential neighborhood, or if it has strict historic district zoning regulations, according to the report. The Greenwich Village Historic District, Chelsea Historic District and the Clinton Special District have dense tree populations, according to the report.
Trash cans are most noticeable when they are not there. In District 3, there are 1,398 trash cans — with a high density of them in Hell’s Kitchen and the West Village, the report stated. The receptacles are managed by the Department of Sanitation (DOS), often in conjunction with Business Improvement Districts.
As neighborhoods in the district become tourist destinations, trash cans fill quicker, the report stated, and DOS has not kept pace with use.
Johnson has allocated almost $70,000 for new trash cans and there will be increased pickup service for certain parts of the district.
The number of public phones in the district (671) also surprised him.
The Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) does have plans to repurpose the phones into WiFi hot spots, but Johnson said that they haven’t announced the locations yet.
Much of the data will be turned over to the relevant city agencies. The pay phone information will be handed to DoITT, empty tree pit locations to the Department of Parks and Recreation and the street furniture locations to the DOT, Johnson explained.
The report also counted and mapped the number of news stands (51) and the number of news boxes (411).
Community boards and organizations will also be able to access this information. District 3’s boundaries overlap with Community Boards 2, 4, 5 and 7.
Johnson recalled his experience as a CB4 member for eight and a half years.
“I remember we would always talk about certain neighborhoods — feeling like there were more newsstands or feeling like there were more pay phone booths,” he said. “Now we actually have that data so it’s not a guessing game anymore.”
To access the Mapping Report, visit coreyjohnson.nyc. For more info, contact Councilmember Corey Johnson’s District 3 office, at 212-564-7757.
