Call to Turn Tiny Street into Plaza Refuge for Coming FiDi School Kids

Lightly trafficked Edgar Street, one-block long between Greenwich Street and Trinity Place, could offer families additional needed space to assemble before and after school, according to school advocates. The building at right will be converted into a portion of the school building, with an entrance at the far right. At left is the northern edge of Elizabeth Berger Park. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

It will be at least another four or five years before a planned new elementary school for the Financial District opens on Trinity Place. But Lower Manhattan school advocates are already sounding the alarm about what they say is dangerously too little sidewalk space for children and parents to assemble in the morning or, worse, evacuate in an emergency.

“There’s no way that this area can accommodate these children being dropped off,” said Tricia Joyce during a presentation to the School Overcrowding Task Force on Nov. 17. Pedestrian and street traffic around the school, especially a heavy flow of commuter buses traveling up Trinity Place, make the area unsafe, she said.

“This is northbound traffic out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and this is where our children will be walking,” Joyce said, showing a slide of buses and cars on Trinity Place. “This is what they will be faced with.”

The school is expected to have a capacity of 476 students and Joyce estimates that as many as 500 to 600 children and caregivers could be crowding the area in the morning. There will be a fenced “entrance court” in front of the school, but with enough space only for the equivalent of one class, she said.

Maggie Siena, the principal of the Peck Slip School, found herself with a similar problem before her new school opened in 2014. With only a narrow sidewalk outside the school, she and Community Board 1 lobbied the city—successfully—to close the street in front of the school to traffic during pick-up and drop-off times.

“We’ve seen the ramifications of not planning for enough space,” said Joyce, who chairs Community Board 1’s Youth and Education Committee.

Joyce said she has made several visits to the school site in the morning, when children would be arriving, and she is convinced that a solution lies just to the south of the school, on tiny Edgar Street.

The street, which borders the school and runs a single block between Greenwich Street and Trinity Place, is lightly trafficked. That presents the possible opportunity, Joyce and others on the task force believe, to convert the two west-bound lanes into a plaza-like extension of the school’s sidewalk. Even better, she noted, would be to turn all of Edgar Street into a plaza that would connect to Elizabeth Berger Park, which is opposite the school and slated for a major renovation.

Such actions of course, would require approval of the city’s Department of Transportation. A DOT project manager at the meeting, Jennifer Leung, was anything but optimistic. “Eliminating the street,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

But a recent DOT traffic study, yet to be released, may shed light on whether the west-bound lanes, which lead to the Battery Parking Garage, can be eliminated. State Sen. Daniel Squadron, who hosted the task force meeting, said he is requesting the DOT to make the study public and give its analysis of the impact of closing the lanes.

“Potentially, which is rare in New York, there is actually extra real estate right there to make better use of,” Squadron said.

The DOE and DOT did not respond to questions for this article.

The new school is part of the planned development of a 500-foot-high residential tower on the site of the former Syms clothing store. The school will be housed in a newly constructed building and a connected landmark building, the four-story, 204-year-old Robert and Anne Dickey House.