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Steve Cuozzo

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Mayor Adams wants to turn Fifth

Avenue into the next Times Square 26 best last-minute Christmas gift
By Steve Cuozzo December 19, 2022 6:15pm Updated
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Mayor Eric Adams is pushing a scheme to pedestrianize -- yes, ban cars -- Fifth Avenue from 42nd to 59th streets.
NY Post photo composite

Au revoir, Cartier? Arrivederci, Gucci?

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More On: Christmas tree' at De Niro's home as
fifth avenue Itcould happen to Fifth Avenue, if Mayor Eric Adams’ bid to he slept
“reimagine” the Big Apple’s premier shopping boulevard
Adams touts plan to ‘reimagine’ goes anywhere — along with a return of the phony GOING
Fifth Avenue — here’s what’s in 80,776
store OUT OF BUSINESS signs that marred the “world’s greatest
shopping street” just a few decades ago. Did I mention an
11 blocks of Fifth Avenue Elmo infestation as well?
become ‘car-free’ holiday
shopping plaza
Despite a promised yearslong study that will seek input from
“stakeholders,” City Hall’s scheme to “prioritize pedestrians,
Nearly 100-year-old Eisenberg’s
Sandwich Shop makes its return cyclists, mass transit and the public realm” amounts to one
with new name big mistake: banning cars except for one measly lane on Kim Kardashian roasted for
'ridiculous' outfit at Paris Hilton's
Fifth Avenue between Bryant Park and Central Park South. Christmas party
Louis C.K. buys a $3.85M home
in a celeb-heavy NYC address The goal will be achieved by installing “plazas” like the ones
that have helped bring a revitalized Times Square back to 67,875
the brink of ruin .

The mayor, who usually shows more common sense, is buying into the woke world’s pathological hatred
of cars.

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Fifth Avenue during this year’s Open Streets.

G.N.Miller/NYPost

That America’s “car culture” is a manifestation of our society’s evil, earth-destroying ways has become an Now on
article of faith among elitists who can afford hot and cold running Ubers to steer them through the traffic
horrors their policies inflict.

Fifth Avenue today is very successful . And, yes, it’s congested, as it should be during the holiday
shopping season. But it faces a miserable, DNA-altered future if Adams’ folly is allowed to become a
reality.

Most pedestrian plazas cheapen everything around them, while providing a consequence-free lolling
ground for low-spending tourists and vagrants.

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The Cartier store on Fifth Avenue.

Getty Images

For a look at the damage these asphalt, so-called oases cause, you need go no farther than Times
Square, where they took root in 2009. They are the under-recognized, root cause of the Bowtie’s current
decline .

Times Square faced challenges even before the pandemic. Brick-and-mortar retail was staggered by
online shopping and corporate bankruptcies.

Today, crime and a shortfall of international visitors have a lot to do with Times Square’s precarious state,
but it started with the plazas. Hailed by the Michael Bloomberg administration’s deep thinkers — and even
by some store owners — as a humane instrument to tame vehicular and human crowding, they eventually
had the inevitable, opposite effect.

The plazas to this day enjoy cheers from the cycle-loving, car-hating peanut galleries. It’s impermissible in
politically correct echo chambers to question them, regardless of their obviously destructive effects.

A man loiters in Times Square.

Stephen Yang

Times Square has become overrun with “desnudas” (above) and predatory cartoon characters.
Stephen Yang

But after the iconic Toys R Us between West 44th and 45th streets closed in 2014, the Bowtie’s plazas
were overrun with “desnudas,” predatory cartoon characters and Big Mac-chompers . The debased
environment is surely a reason why the landlord has yet to fully fill the space once occupied by the world’s
tallest indoor Ferris wheel.

Gap and Old Navy stand next to an empty storefront and a large “NY Gifts” shop selling T-shirts and other
tacky goods — an eyesore at the very heart of the action.

The former site of Forever 21 at 42nd Street (it has since relocated two blocks north) is now taken up by
JD Sports, a “sportswear” chain which sells mostly sneakers, heralding a return to the area’s bad-old-days
retail mix of “fast food and fast feet.” Taco Bells and other grab-and-go spots are slowly but surely
replacing actual stores.

Ray-Ban and Oakley closed. Several others, including American Eagle Outfitters, are rumored to be on
their way out when leases expire.

Costumed characters, like Elmo, are a part of Times Square.

REUTERS

The plazas wrought havoc, too, on Broadway north of Times Square. Caroline’s on Broadway will close
after Dec. 31 , due in part to miserable sidewalk conditions caused by a junkie-trafficked “plaza” outside its
doorstep. Most of the blocks between West 49th and 57th streets have as nearly as many vacant
storefronts as occupied ones.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Adams might think that the likes of Bergdorf Goodman and Versace can shrug off any bad effects of
plazas. Perhaps customers will come by helicopter?

But he needs to get out of the clubs and spend time in the “Crossroads of the World” before he condemns
Fifth Avenue to the same fate.

Filed under crime elmo fifth avenue midtown midtown east naked cowboy
pedestrian safety pedestrians plazas times square 12/19/22

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