On a recent visit to Barcelona, my husband and I stayed in Poblenou, a part of town we had chosen because of its relative isolation from the mass tourist draws like La Rambla and the Sagrada Família. Upon our arrival, we discovered that we had landed in a 21st-century neighborhood: an old industrial zone that had been aggressively and creatively redeveloped in recent decades and had emerged as a startling blend of past, present, and future. Its Encants Market, a ragtag hive of secondhand merchandise that has been in operation since the 14th century, had been relocated in 2013 from a nearby plaza and was now housed in a humongous, multilevel high-tech shed with a lofty, free-form mirrored metallic ceiling. Even the street outside our hotel was a surprise. The Avenue Diagonal, which runs (as the name suggests) on the bias across a wide swath
of Barcelona’s grid, was once a normal boulevard carrying six lanes of car traffic. But now it has been remade into the ultimate 21st-century arterial. The section near the hotel has two exterior lanes for cars, a tram line, and a broad central concourse reserved for pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, and also trees; the goal is to cover 30 percent of the city’s surface with trees by 2037.

When I began taking my morning run up the middle of the Diagonal—along with all the local runners—I entertained the thought that has plagued countless American visitors to Europe since time immemorial: Why can’t we do this? My case of Europe envy was exacerbated by recent events in New York City: for example, the plans for radically reimagining the section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs along the edge of Brooklyn Heights—the so-called triple cantilever—that went exactly nowhere. And then, of course, there was New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s last-minute decision to shut down congestion pricing, a system (for which $500 million worth of sensors had already been installed) that would have charged drivers a $15 toll for entering Manhattan below 60th Street during peak hours. The billions of dollars collected were supposed to fund a variety of much-needed mass transit projects. Instead, this bold change, along with so many others, had seemingly evaporated on the brink of implementation.

Upon my return from Spain, I resolved to look for evidence of positive change closer to home and almost immediately found one: a website proposing a Broadway Linear Park. It had been posted by a group advocating for Manhattan’s own diagonal avenue to become “a green car-free space from Union Square to Central Park.” Perfect, I thought: Here was a big, transformative initiative that was eminently doable. Granted, the proponents were not city agencies but activists, led by Katherine Nessel, a recent graduate of Barnard College and an urban-planning fellow at the Department of City Planning, and a software engineer by the name of Andrew Hyatt. I contacted them and made a date to take a walk with them down Broadway.

Broadway has been in the midst of a transition for 15 years. In 2009, during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, who made it her mission to commandeer blacktop and hand it over to nondrivers, closed Broadway to traffic between 42nd and 47th streets. This move turned Times Square, New York City’s most famous attraction, into something it had never been before: a genuine public place. Pedestrians were given permission to linger, lounging in hastily procured beach chairs on the newly car-free pavement. News photos at the time made it look like a practical joke, but it was more akin to a miracle. Traffic on Broadway in Midtown dropped from 1,500 cars an hour during peak periods to more like 300. Further transformation of the streetscape was prompted by the arrival of the bike-share system in 2013 and a new demand for outdoor gathering places during the Covid pandemic.

Still, I was unprepared for what I saw when I arrived for my rendezvous with Nessel and Hyatt. I found myself in a sort of place I didn’t know existed: a fully pedestrianized Midtown block. This wasn’t Times Square or even Herald Square; it was Broadway between 39th and 40th streets, your basic workaday chunk of Manhattan. One side of the street was occupied by an unremarkable office building, and the other side featured an unexceptional range of shops: a kratom dispensary, a Just Salad, a CityMD. In between was an expanse of pavement treated as if this were someplace special.

A massive abstract sculpture resembling a dystopian jungle gym occupied the middle of the street. Clustered around the sculpture were the type of high tables and chairs typically found in bars, most of them occupied. Loads of people were simply hanging out. Some appeared to be office workers, and others, judging by the proximity of their heavy-duty electric bikes, were delivery guys taking a break with colleagues. No one looked like a tourist. A southbound bike lane ran along the west side of the street. The sole automobile on the block was a parked New York Police Department SUV, its lights flashing for no obvious reason; the police officers were also standing around gabbing. I later learned that the block is one of five maintained by the Garment District Alliance, a business improvement district, which calls these stretches of roadway “esplanades.”

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Nessel, Hyatt, and I sat down on a bench in the office building’s front plaza. They told me that they had both gotten interested in rehabbing Broadway through their involvement with Transportation Alternatives, an organization that has been advocating since 1973 for fewer automobile-filled streets. Nessel became engaged with the Broadway project during the summer of 2020, when the pandemic created a demand for car-free “Open Streets” in many New York City neighborhoods. The Department of Transportation, she recalled, had just launched a plan to “open” Broadway. Hyatt, who lives in the neighborhood, signed on in 2022 after he stumbled across the aftermath of a crash: A taxi had jumped the curb on Broadway and mowed down a bicyclist and a couple of pedestrians.

The city’s concept, released in 2020 and largely engendered by the pandemic, was called simply Open Broadway. “They had some blocks they would designate as plazas,” Nessel explained. “Some would be slow streets; some would be shared streets.” The plan, hatched by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, was “a step in the right direction.” But she and Hyatt wanted the city to go farther, so they came up with a grander plan: a Broadway Linear Park that went “beyond just pedestrianization” and asked, “What can you do with this space once you take away the cars?”

One answer they found was a 2015 proposal for turning Broadway into a “Green Line.” It originated with a young architect, Jung Hyun Woo, who was on a fellowship at the New York architecture firm Perkins Eastman, and Jonathan Cohen, who was a principal architect there. That plan, driven by the idea that “Central Park may in fact be too small at this point,” according to Peter Cavaluzzi, currently a principal architect at the firm, advanced “the notion of Broadway as being the next great public space.”

The idea of making Broadway into a linear park may have started out as a quixotic dream conceived by a set of people outside the halls of power, but it has since edged its way into New York’s official fantasy life. In a document released in late 2022, “Making New York Work for Everyone,” drawn up by a large interdisciplinary group charged by Governor Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams with generating ideas for the revitalization of Midtown, the same two-mile stretch of Broadway that Nessel and Hyatt have focused on was reimagined as “a grand promenade passing through some of the city’s most iconic sites.” Nessel and Hyatt’s quiet strategy of engaging various stakeholders, such as local architects and business owners, seems to have paid off, nudging their vision into the mainstream of New York City discourse.

To illustrate how, Nessel and Hyatt took me on a slow walk from 40th Street down to Union Square. What I found is that Broadway has, in fact, already been transformed to a remarkable extent. The first blocks, still in the Garment District Alliance’s turf, are decorated with medallions by the artist Xin Song, which hang from an overhead network of wires. And there are unexpected amenities: For instance, just north of 33rd Street, an expanse of car-free pavement features a couple of Ping-Pong tables, both in use as we strolled by. But, of course, it’s still not a park. Unlike the Avenue Diagonal in Barcelona, Broadway’s designated pedestrian paths are jarringly inconsistent; even the lanes meant for traffic of one kind or another are a mismatched jumble. From 32nd to 31st, for example, there’s a two-way bike lane taking up much of the street; cars still have access to the block, and there are legal parking spots; and then there’s an expanse of pavement occupied mostly by planters. A block farther down, southbound bikers share a lane with cars, and northbound bikers get a dedicated lane. Meanwhile, pedestrians are entitled to the sidewalk plus an amorphous wedge of street space sheltered by reflective posts, planters, and big hunks of stone. Farther along, south of 27th, half of the street is devoted to restaurant tables and half to a two-way bike lane. The territorial divides keep shifting, and the pavement is reconfigured again and again. The most jolting block is the one between 19th and 18th streets, where the vehicular traffic on Broadway is suddenly routed north instead of south.

The shifting traffic patterns suggest that the Department of Transportation is playing a game with New Yorkers, Sim City meets Frogger. When I asked Nessel about it, she replied that it might be that the DOT “wants it somewhat chaotic.” Maybe, I ventured, they’re trying to confuse us so that everyone moves more cautiously. Documents supplied by Community Board 5, the civic body that oversees land use and planning along this stretch of Broadway, suggest that there is some method to the madness: The DOT is currently testing a variety of strategies, using Broadway to determine which “block types from basic, to slow, to shared, to pedestrianized plazas” might work.

No matter the reason behind a streetscape with rules that appear to change from block to block, what is clear is that, with the exception of the blocks within Times Square, the experiments on Broadway all remain works in progress. The Department of Transportation is currently using “paint and gravel” to test various configurations and, in theory, might one day lay down a more permanent version. But there are currently two New Yorks: one in which change stubbornly refuses to happen, and one in which change happens almost overnight but tentatively, without conviction.

The approach to foliage is equally provisional. I know that tree planting along Broadway is limited by the tangle of infrastructure running directly below the street’s surface, but other plantings are surely possible. Yet on many blocks, all we tend to get are token gestures: a tree in a sad planter at the north end of a block and another at the south end. There is the occasional oasis managed by the Parks Department, most notably in Herald Square and Greeley Square, which are so generously planted that I instantly feel the temperature drop when I wander in from the adjacent plazas.

Indeed, among the many design concepts found on the Broadway Linear Park website is a proposal for a block-long re-creation of the Wickquasgeck Trail. This footpath, created by Manhattan’s original pedestrians, the Lenni Lenape tribe, predates the 1811 imposition of Manhattan’s current street grid by centuries and is commonly thought of as the basis for Broadway’s unusual diagonal route. But what is needed is not a mere block of the Wickquasgeck but the full two and a half miles from Columbus Circle to Union Square. It’s exactly what Woo and Cohen and Perkins Eastman advocated in 2015. Actually, Cohen continued to promote the Green Line for a number of years after, once describing it as “a new type of public space for the city. Lush planting, bioswales, playgrounds, dog runs, permeable pavers, jogging and bike paths, performance areas, and plenty of seating.”

Sounds utopian, right? But in recent years, as the city continues to heat up and as even seemingly routine rainfalls have proved disastrous, a regreening of New York becomes all the more imperative. Indeed, the Department of Transportation issued a request for proposals in August from landscape architects interested in transforming 11 blocks of Park Avenue into something more like a linear park. Perhaps it will be another half-measure, but I prefer to think of it as a harbinger, a sign that we’ve arrived at the moment when utopian ideas become the pragmatic ones.