East 69th Street is mobilizing to halt the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's plan to add subway entrances on their tony block - needed to handle displaced crowd flows from adding required ADA elevators at the 68th Street entrances.
The Lexington Ave. #6 line is one of New York's busiest. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires MTA to install elevators at the 68th St./Hunter College stop, which in turn results in the need to construct new entrances/exits on 69th St.
"Some New Yorkers can only dream of having a subway train ferry them straight to their front door, but residents of East 69th Street say the entrances have no place on what they believe to be one of the prettiest streets around. They have formed a block association and hired lawyers, and they plan to tap an engineering firm to conduct transportation and environmental assessments that will likely show that the entrances can and should go elsewhere, or perhaps are not needed at all."
Cara Buckley writes that much of the block's argument against the subway entrances is that their "block is just too pretty" for them. She also notes that "residents of a building on East 86th Street sued the transit authority a year ago in an effort to stop the construction of entrances to the coming Second Avenue subway outside their front doors," which was eventually dismissed.
Read the full story: Subway Entrances? Not on Our Block
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City of Rosemead
Rutgers University, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
One Hundred Miles
University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS)
Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY)
The Architects Foundation
City of Cambridge
Montrose County
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