Clean and Safe Public Spaces

Commuting with the Commissioner on NYC’s Bike to Work Day

Ambassadors Set to Hit Downtown Streets

May 8 -- A family on the Promenade needs help finding the movie theater. A tourist on Second Street can not find the way to his hotel. A merchant on Broadway needs guidance with an aggressive panhandler. A large crack has appeared in the sidewalk on Sixth Street, and graffiti is popping up in the public parking structures. Who’s there to help?

Beginning next month, Downtown’s new ambassador guides will take care of handling these sorts of situations. As Downtown's ambassadors on the street, the guides will cover the district on foot and Segway, scheduled to start June 1, 2009.

The goal of the new program is to provide Downtown users with a friendly resource that will enhance and promote the entire district, Bayside officials said.

“The ambassador program will make a huge impact in Downtown,” said Andrew Thomas, operations manager for the Bayside District Corporation (BDC). “It brings in a hospitality element that currently doesn’t exist.

“It will bring eyes and ears for reporting maintenance issues and enhance safety and comfort Downtown by reporting quality of life concerns,” he said.

OUTRAGE! Nasty News Racks

OUTRAGE! Nasty Newsracks Video from MAS on Vimeo.

MIDTOWN; News Boxes: All for One, Or One for All?

TOURISTS seeking the tidiest spot to grab a newspaper might consider the large box on the northeast corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. The box, a ''multirack'' version that holds several publications, is well tended by the 34th Street Partnership; one recent afternoon, a maintenance worker was busily removing stickers and scrubbing away at the graffiti on the little windows.

News boxes that hold only one publication don't get the same attention; for more than a decade, Dan Biederman, president of the partnership and the Bryant Park Corporation, has been trying to get rid of them, urging publishers to use his snazzy multirack boxes and discard their single ones.

''If you were to look around at everything that's ugly here that you'd be embarrassed to show to a visitor from Maine or Nebraska or Paris, it's the news boxes,'' he said.

Standing in Herald Square one recent afternoon, Ed Janoff, the partnership's streetscape maintenance manager, consulted a census of single news boxes. The Union Square Business Improvement District led the list, with 284 offenders. The Grand Central and Madison Avenue districts had only 19 and 18. The 34th Street district now offers 35 multirack boxes, but it still has 68 single boxes, by Mr. Janoff's count. Indeed, about 20 feet from the multirack box at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue stood three single boxes.

Some publishers agree to the district's request that they use the combined boxes, but others, like Daniel Magnus, the publisher of Metro New York, resist. It's a matter of branding, Mr. Magnus said; his readers are conditioned to look for the paper's orange box.

Still, the 34th Street Partnership and other champions of multirack boxes want the City Council to keep single news boxes at least 300 feet from the multirack versions.

''It's not right for a BID to spend millions of dollars on a multirack program and then find that the single racks can set themselves up right next to them,'' said Vanessa Gruen, director of special projects at the Municipal Art Society, which conducts an annual ''Nasty News Rack'' photo contest.

The multirack boxes are costly, running the 34th Street Partnership $10,000 apiece, but Mr. Janoff judges the war against the single boxes worth it. ''They're filthy, covered with stickers and graffiti, sometimes broken,'' Mr. Janoff said. ''They're a sore thumb.''