New York, the saying goes, will be a great place if they ever finish it.
And it’s worth keeping in mind as we behold the new makeover for Times Square that Mayor Bloomberg has announced as one of his last acts before leaving office.
Last week, the mayor unveiled the first phase in his three-year plan. Granite pavers for pedestrians have replaced roadway from 42nd to 43rd streets, and granite benches are to follow. When all five blocks up to 47th Street are finished, the project will have cost $45 million.
We’ll get back to that price tag in a minute. It’s no secret that we have been skeptics of the plaza for a while. And we still would like to see more independent evidence backing the Bloomberg claim that he’s managed to improve traffic flow with his new pedestrian square.
We will say this: The new, redesigned Times Square is a huge improvement over the Times Square we’ve had since 2009, when Bloomberg imposed his design with almost no oversight or transparency. You know, the one that looked like a vast prison yard, occupied by so many junk-food-chomping tourists that late-night TV host David Letterman called it a “petting zoo.”
The new design is urbane, and is surely an improvement over the blue-painted asphalt we’ve been living with.
But again, it costs $45 million.
Maybe Mayor Bloomberg and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan knew how ugly it was all along — but just didn’t want to tell us it would cost more than $45 million to make it pretty.