Getting Around: Christopher Bonanos

A Whole New Fifth Avenue And it's about time.

IN THE LATE 1930s, new yorkers barely into middle age could remember a very different Fifth Avenue. The boulevard, a mere decade or so earlier, had been a residential neighborhood of immense Gilded Age houses. It had since been fully given over to commerce, represented by department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman as well as the immense Rockefeller Center complex. In March 1939, the city tried to restore a wisp of grace to the limestone canyon. “That business section of Fifth Avenue, which has not known the sight of trees since the days of the stately mansions and the horse and buggy,” one press outlet wrote, “took its first step in arboreal recovery” when a “50-foot elm tree, the first of eight to be planted at Rockefeller Center, was placed into the huge pit prepared for it at Fifth Avenue and 51st Street.”

The elms didn’t last, although there are more trees along the sidewalks today, including one in that same curbside spot (honey locust). Nor did the instinct to humanize Fifth Avenue, which in the 85 years since has grown ever more off-putting to any method of movement that isn’t on four wheels. It took about 50 of those years before New York City’s planners grasped that prioritizing cars is a disaster for a city like ours, and another decade or so before they started to act on this dawning principle. Robert Moses and his literally my-way-or-the-highway attitude was a major reason for that, but a lot of the Establishment agreed with him. The auto-centric avenues we ended up with do not even work for drivers: It is not uncommon to see crawling traffic in front of Rockefeller Center at midnight. Pedestrians are uncomfortably packed on the sidewalks, too, especially during summer-tourist and holiday-shopping seasons. Fifth Avenue, you could argue, is a victim of its own success. Everyone wants a piece of it, and there isn’t enough to go around.