By Patrick Hedlund
Railing over trip hazards
A lawsuit filed by a woman who allegedly tripped while walking along the High Line has led local park advocates to call for more safety precautions on the former elevated railway-turned-green space.
According to a statement from the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates, visitors to the first section of the nearly five-month-old High Line have been stumbling over concrete slabs and curbs along the length of the park, resulting in one woman’s suing the city for tripping and breaking her ankle there in June.
“This is a major design flaw that should have been corrected long before a single person stepped foot on the High Line promenade,” said Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates, citing the 3-inch raised curbs bordering planting areas that “lack color differentiation or gradation warnings,” the statement read.
Croft noted that the park’s faux-railroad spurs also present a trip hazard, despite the installation of temporary rope barriers around the concrete slabs in July to prevent visitors from stepping in the planting areas.
“Trip hazards can be very dangerous,” Croft continued, “and I’m sure this lawsuit won’t be the last.” The injured party, 66-year old Paula Meinetz-Shapiro, has named the city and the Department of Parks and Recreation in her $2 million claim.
NYC Park Advocates even quoted an anonymous employee of Friends of the High Line — the nonprofit organization that oversees the park and its maintenance jointly with the Parks Department — as saying that “[p]eople are tripping all the time” on the public walkway, which currently runs between Gansevoort and W. 20th Sts., with plans to expand.
The watchdog group added that this “basic design flaw” covering hundreds of thousands of linear square feet “has rendered the vast majority of the first section of the new $83 million High Line promenade a hazard.”
Both the Parks Department and Friends of the High Line did not comment on the issue due to the pending litigation.
Rents rise below Houston
The city’s most expensive rental properties continue to remain below Houston St., with prices for Soho and Tribeca units rising despite a generally stable market citywide.
According to the Real Estate Group New York’s monthly rental market report, the most expensive rents for doorman and non-doorman studios and one- and two-bedrooms can be found in the two trendy Downtown neighborhoods.
Citywide, Soho took the top spot for the average monthly rent of both doorman one- and two-bedroom apartments, coming in at $4,522 and $7,241, respectively. Tribeca had the priciest monthly doorman and non-doorman studio rents ($2,777 and $3,119, respectively), as well as the most expensive non-doorman one- and two-bedroom rents ($4,592 and $6,465, respectively).
The two neighborhoods also benefited from average monthly rent increases for many of their unit types, with Tribeca seeing an 8.69 percent ($367) jump in the price of non-doorman one-bedrooms, an 8 percent ($232) uptick in the price of non-doorman studios, and an 8.5 percent ($297) spike in the price of doorman one-bedrooms over last month. Soho experienced a whopping 12.9 percent ($525) jump in the price of non-doorman two bedrooms since September.
In the East Village and Lower East Side, average monthly rents for all doorman and non-doorman units combined dropped an average of about 3 percent over last month. Rents stayed relatively unchanged in the Greenwich Village market, dipping by 0.38 percent for all unit types since September. The Financial District also remained steady, increasing by 0.45 percent for all unit types.
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