Is New York finally — maybe — groping its way to giving the millions of people who descend upon Midtown for the holidays a reasonably pleasant experience?
Raise a glass of eggnog to Mayor Adams and his transportation department for pulling off a major success Sunday — “The Gift of Fifth” event on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, which can point the way toward a more livable Midtown.
Through 2019, New York’s core holiday experience — the Rockefeller Christmas tree and its environs — was careening toward misery.
It wasn’t the record number of tourists — nearly 67 million that year — but the fact the city had no idea what to do with them.
The city’s response to people packing onto overcrowded sidewalks was to throw up metal gates everywhere to impede their movement across streets.
Drivers were faced with unpredictable road closures.
That year, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio actually did something enlightened and closed off 49th and 50th streets around Rockefeller Center for the seven-week season.
He blocked two lanes of Fifth Avenue traffic, too, in favor of pedestrians.
This had an immediate de-stressing effect for everyone: residents, commuters, tourists, drivers, police.
People could stay out of each other’s way as they snapped a family photo or walked to work.
Drivers had plenty of warning to avoid the area.
Last year, Adams went even further, opening all of Fifth Avenue to strollers for three December Sundays for the first time in nearly half a century.
This, too, was an instant success, but, thrown together quickly, it didn’t offer much to do but wander around some food trucks and haphazard entertainment.
This year, the city repeated the three closures, stretching from 48th Street up to the Plaza Hotel.
The Fifth Avenue Association, which represents businesses along the stretch, had months to plan.
Alas, the first two Sundays were rained out (with one entirely canceled, due to gale-force winds — it’s been that kind of year for the mayor!).
But this Sunday, the rain held off long enough for all that planning to pay off.
A healthy mix of locals, domestic tourists and global visitors strolled the perfume-infused avenue (yes, really, thanks to misters hidden in the tree plantings), as Emmy-winning jazz musicians played from a stage and carolers sang from the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian steps.
Families could stop by a Schrafft’s popup across from Tiffany for a hot chocolate and Danish or stop at a tent for an eggnog or candied-fruit kebab.
Around St. Pat’s, visitors had plenty of room to peruse the Saks windows or take their snapshots of the tree.
(Tishman Speyer, which owns the property that hosts the tree, is still continually perplexed about how to manage its own foot traffic, but there is always next year!)
And the city managed to keep illegal counterfeit vendors, aggressive panhandlers and other quality-of-life nuisances off the whole strip for the whole day.
This marquee stretch of the avenue is also remarkably free of sidewalk sheds compared with the rest of the city.
On nearby Sixth Avenue, which has its own array of Christmas trees, police were even keeping the counterfeit-pocketbook vendors, if not exactly on the run, at least mildly uncomfortable for the afternoon.
The Gift of Fifth’s success should be heartening for Adams: It shows him it wouldn’t take much to transform Midtown from a quality-of-life embarrassment into an appropriate backdrop for some of the city’s most valuable assets.
Indeed, viewing Fifth from the center of the street is a reminder that despite the past few years’ travails, a robust base remains.
Fifth’s main blocks have few retail vacancies and offer a mix of stores for everyone, from $200,000 necklaces at Harry Winston to $5.90 underwear at Uniqlo.
And you don’t have to spend anything to enjoy the lights and windows.
Not that things are perfect. The city still insists on strewing metal gates everywhere, making mazes and walls where open stretches of street should be.
Adams can fix that, though, in his Fifth Avenue redesign and reconstruction, in the planning stages now (if it goes well, it will be one of his main legacies).
The mayor can ensure that permanent features, from wider sidewalks to retractable metal poles for traffic control, replace all the temporary junk.
Still, it was easy, for at least an afternoon, to agree with the mayor’s assessment Sunday: “There’s no better place to be in the country around this holiday season than in New York City.”
This is the administration he should be running.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
