Despite multiple ongoing lawsuits and after months of flip-flopping, Gov. Hochul incredibly forged ahead with her unpopular congestion pricing plan on Sunday — promising on X, “Less gridlock. Cleaner air.”
But for whom?
While some of the most vociferous opposition to Hochul’s new tax scheme comes from New Jersey and the outer boroughs, Manhattanites in my neighborhood aren’t too happy either.
Working-class families like mine, raising children in Manhattan’s overdeveloped Lenox Hill in the East 60s, have for decades been trying to stave off encroachments on our quality of life.
But on Jan. 5, Manhattan was magically split in two by an arbitrary border separating us from the area below 60th Street, the “Congestion Relief Zone” — a bucolic utopia where car fumes will no longer harm health.
Our area just north of the dividing line is apparently not worthy of such consideration, although the impact on us will inevitably be immense.
Though it’s barely mentioned in the MTA’s official environmental assessment, common sense and life experience suggest our local streets will be overrun with cars circling our blocks for impossible-to-find parking and slammed with unprecedented traffic backups from southbound drivers taking their last chance to get onto the FDR Drive and avoid the new downtown toll.
All of it will make the air quality in this part of the city appreciably worse — and not a peep from our local Manhattan elected officials, other than to repeat Hochul’s celebratory mantra of less gridlock, cleaner air.
When I called state Sen. Liz Krueger’s office to find out what mitigation plans were in place to meet this expected increase in traffic in our neighborhood, I was told no mitigation measures, none at all, were being considered for Manhattan.
No air quality monitoring, no asthma centers, no noise mitigation, no HEPA air filtration systems for schools along the border, no tree plantings . . . nothing for the vulnerable elderly and young residing just outside the Congestion Relief Zone, an area already marred by constant construction, road work and traffic jams.
Instead, I heard a blissful insistence that New York will be just like London, where traffic has allegedly been reduced outside relief zones.
In the meantime, residents here are the forgotten guinea pigs, with our health and that of our children sacrificed for the greater good promised by congestion pricing.
There’s no better example of our representatives’ absurdly hollow concerns for clean air and our children’s health than 24 Sycamores Park.
A sad little concrete playground located under the FDR Drive between 60th and 61st Streets, separated by just a chain-link fence from the 61st Street FDR off-ramp, its location is almost allegorical as the nexus of bad civic decision-making — and it stands to bear the brunt of Hochul’s grand experiment.
Named for the tough native trees unusually capable of withstanding urban pollution, this little plot of land was once submerged under the East River until landfill reclaimed it in the 1930s.
It lay vacant for years before the city Parks Department took it over to build one of only two playgrounds in our neighborhood with structures for children under 5.
But unlike the park’s sycamore trees, our children’s lungs are not so resilient.
Here at the very edge of Manhattan is one of the few open spaces where children of working-class families, kids like mine who don’t have luxury-building amenities or weekend houses upstate, can play — skirting the sinkholes that open up there every so often, a relic of the land’s instability.
This half-square-block park, a stone’s throw from the FDR, already surrounds our children with constantly honking horns and exhaust from thousands of vehicles — not just on the elevated roadway but also on York Avenue and, depending on the direction of the wind, wafting down from the Queensboro Bridge just overhead.
Now, with congestion pricing, those hazards have the potential to get worse. Exponentially worse.
But when I asked my City Councilmember Julie Menin what plans had been made to protect these children who have the misfortune of living just north of the “Congestion Relief Zone,” her staffers merely shrugged — while Menin herself boasted about a deal she recently negotiated to sink $4.3 million into renovating 24 Sycamores’ playground equipment and basketball court.
Yes, she’s actually pouring in money to encourage more children to damage their developing lungs here.
The disastrous environmental impact of congestion pricing on families in border neighborhoods like Lenox Hill has been ominously ignored.
Hochul says her plan will provide less gridlock and cleaner air.
Just not for us.
Yasmina Palumbo is a Manhattan public-school parent and co-founder of Lenox Hill Families Advocating for Children to Thrive. X: @LenoxHillFACT