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Streetsblog reported last week that Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue Open Street, one of Brooklyn’s most popular, has lost its sponsor and is now in search of a new one in order to open as planned this year. Another, Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, will be cutting its overall operating hours by 40 percent, reducing its season by two months (from May to September instead of April to October), and ending five hours earlier on Sundays. The programs, which close blocks to traffic to create more public space, have been celebrated, somewhat controversial, and undeniably successful. They are also expensive to maintain.
The Department of Transportation funds Open Streets, but local business groups and volunteers share costs for staffing and programming. With the expiration of pandemic grants, those partners say coming up with the money to run a thriving Open Street has become a challenge. The head of the Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, which is bowing out of the program, told Streetsblog that the group had to kick in about half the costs of the open street. Last year, that was $40,000. “All those pots of money have gradually dried up,” the group’s executive director, Joanna Tallantire, told Streetsblog, “so we don’t actually have any money to do the program this year.” (Another group is trying to step in and raise funds, and the Department of Transportation says it intends to find a new partner.) The head of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council cited a similar strain, telling Streetsblog that the funding it receives from the city “is only a fraction of what’s necessary to run something like Vanderbilt Avenue.” The people behind the 31st Avenue Open Street in Astoria told me they would likely also have to scale back this year. “We may need to consider operational changes,” they wrote in an email. “We’re collecting donations from the local community and taking out personal loans to keep the Open Street going as strong as possible while waiting for the city funds to come through.” (Others, like Jackson Heights’ 34th Avenue Open Street, which is owed $20,000 from last year, are waiting for reimbursement from the city, according to Streetsblog.)
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Photo: Photo: New York City Department of Transportation/Flickr, Mural: Cara Lynch
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