Fulton Street Reopening Good for (Nonfoot) Traffic By Barry Owens It was a sunny afternoon last month and the UPS man was smiling as he strolled slowly down the center of Fulton Street. He was wearing headphones and sunglasses, toting a pizza box and a salad, and had a newspaper tucked under his arm. He waved off this reporter with a wag of his finger—an unmistakable signal for “not now, buddy, I’m on a break.” Such is the lunch “rush” on Fulton Street between Broadway and Gold Street, where each weekday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. the narrow roadway is closed to traffic and Downtown workers and off-duty delivery drivers are free to roam from curb to curb at their leisure. But perhaps not for long. Last month Community Board 1, at the urging of the Alliance for Downtown New York, called on the city’s Department of Transportation to reopen Fulton and John Streets to vehicle traffic during lunch hours. The goal, the Alliance said, is to ease traffic congestion in a neighborhood overly taxed by street closures and construction. Facing years of development projects that will bring thousands of construction vehicles Downtown, the community board mounted few arguments against the Alliance’s position that the need to ease traffic flow in the neighborhood outweighs pedestrian convenience. “You want to walk? We’ve got Pier 17,” noted board member Arthur Gregory. “We’ve got the waterfront. Go walk there.” Only board member Joe Lerner, who lives at Southbridge Towers, near the affected streets, spoke out against the proposal. “It was a long hard fight to close that street,” Lerner said. “If we open it, we’ll never get it closed again.” While the plan will provide a measure of relief for Downtown drivers, the idea was naturally unpopular with walkers on Fulton Street whom the Trib caught up with one day late last month. June Morris, who works on Water Street, takes public transportation from New Jersey every morning and strolls down Fulton Street at lunchtime every afternoon, was disappointed to hear that the street could be reopened to traffic. “We have a mass concentration of people working in high-rise buildings down here, and we all have the same short amount of time for lunch,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to fight traffic to do the things we need to do in one hour. We struggle enough as it is.” John Chung, owner of a deli and lunch counter on the block, said that the pedestrian flow has been a boon to his business, funneling people past his door who might otherwise have skipped the street. And at least one sidewalk vendor took advantage of the stream by erecting two sets of bookshelves near the curb, one facing the sidewalk and one facing the street. “Whatever happens, I adjust,” he said. “How does more traffic make anything better?” wondered Gary Paul, who works at a FedEx store in the neighborhood and spent a good deal of his lunch hour on this afternoon standing and people-watching on the corner of Fulton and John Streets. “It’s like adding salt to a wound.” Told that more traffic on Fulton Street is supposed to ease congestion on neighboring streets, Paul balked. “It’s New York City,” he said. “It’s all congestion.” Shortly after a Downtown Alliance security guard opened the barricades at 2 p.m., the pedestrians parted as a silver Volvo eased down the street. Behind the Volvo, a delivery truck trolled for a parking space as an Access-A-Ride van honked twice and swerved past. Then came Alex Perez and his Lincoln Town Car. “I hope they do it, believe me” the 28-year-old driver said. “The way the streets are now, I’ve just been driving around and around and around.”