Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Monday that he is planning to change the structure of the streets around the famous Civil War Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. This is the second largest Civil War memorial in New York City and one of the most visited Civil War sites in the country. The Plaza was originally designed to function as a walkable area that was an entrance to Frederick Law Olmstead’s Prospect Park. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers of the plaza and Prospect Park had intended for the Grand Army Plaza to be the entrance to the park. In later years Grant Army Plaza was surrounded by roadways and to cross from the Park to the Plaza had become a traffic disaster with dozens of injuries when cars and trucks hit pedestrians.
Last year the City completed an $8.9 million rehabilitation of the Arch. My photo tour of the site is here.
Here are excerpts from the New York Times on the proposal that Mamdani is working on:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Monday a plan to eliminate a treacherous stretch of road surrounding Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, part of a long-sought redesign of one of the borough’s most iconic, and hazardous, landmarks.
The plan would effectively reconnect the oval-shaped plaza’s most prominent feature, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, with Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s emerald jewel, restoring the 80-foot-tall arch as a grand entrance to the park, as its designers intended.
Cars would be banned from the parts of the southern end of the plaza that border the park, from Union Street to Eastern Parkway, which would do away with a forbidding four-lane crossing, according to the city Department of Transportation.
“Grand Army Plaza is the gateway to Brooklyn’s backyard, Prospect Park — and it should welcome New Yorkers with a street design that puts safety first,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. “Anyone who’s tried to cross here knows how dangerous and chaotic the streets can be. This redesign is long overdue and will provide a sense of ease and enjoyment to one of Brooklyn’s most important public spaces.”
The redesign, which would also include upgraded bike lanes and walking paths, is expected to add about three-quarters of an acre of public space to the plaza, a 42 percent expansion…
The 14-acre plaza is one of the most visited — and most chaotic — places in Brooklyn, at the congested crossroads of several affluent neighborhoods, including Park Slope and Prospect Heights.
A project timeline and budget have not yet been finalized, and the department declined to say whether the project would be completed during Mr. Mamdani’s term.
Between 2021 and 2025, there were 219 traffic injuries along the plaza’s central roadways and outer ring, according to the Transportation Department….
Thousands of people visit the plaza each day to gaze at the memorial arch dedicated to Civil War veterans and lounge on benches near the Bailey Fountain. The annual West Indian American Day Parade culminates in celebrations at the plaza, which is also home to one of the city’s largest year-round greenmarkets.
“It’s totally weird that this beautiful public space is on the far side of multiple lanes of zooming traffic,” said Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a safe-streets advocacy group that supports the redesign. “It’s just so obvious that this should be a pedestrian space.”
The city began planning changes to the plaza in 2022 under Mayor Eric Adams, but the effort stalled. After public feedback, much of which favored more dramatic changes to the area’s roadways, the Mamdani administration selected a plan that would remove cars from the lower tip of the plaza and divert some traffic to other streets.
“Every time N.Y.C. D.O.T. has provided more space to pedestrians at the park, it’s been an instant success, and it becomes impossible to think of how the space could have functioned before,” Mike Flynn, the transportation commissioner, said in a statement about the plan.
The illustration below, form the Mayor’s office shows the existing streets on the left and the new design on the left.
All color photos were taken by Pat Young.
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