"Following vehement opposition from residents, business owners and politicians," the city has decided to use the $30 million earmarked to overhaul Chatham Square in Chinatown where seven streets meet for other Lower Manhattan projects instead, offcials said last week, according to an article today at DNAinfo.com by Julie Shapiro.

"The money will likely help the Department of Transportation manage the 9/11 memorial buses expected to flood downtown starting this fall, and it will also likely go toward improvements on Water Street, one of downtown's main commercial corridors, said Andrew Winters, director of the Mayor's Office of Capital Projects," the article noted.

"A reconstruction of Chatham Square is not an option for at least five years given the Brooklyn Bridge reconstruction detours, and we're not going to wait to invest the $30 million in lower Manhattan," Winters said.

The Brooklyn Bridge project, which started last year, frequently routes extra traffic over the Manhattan Bridge and into Chatham Square, so the city did not want the two jobs going on simultaneously, Winters added.

"The Chatham Square project would have reconfigured the complicated intersection with the goal of improving traffic flow and pedestrian safety. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. pledged $30 million of the total $50 million price tag, making an otherwise prohibitively costly project feasible," the article said, adding that "residents objected to the proposal because it would have permanently closed Park Row, a street running beneath NYPD headquarters that has been shut since 9/11 but that residents and business owners hope will reopen soon."

Jan Lee, a leader of the Civic Center Residents Coalition, a group that strongly opposed the Chatham Square plan, suggested that "the city put the money toward an independent study on the feasibility of reopening Park Row, which was once a key bridge between Chinatown and the Civic Center," the article said.