Some members of the Astor Place Task Force committee of Community Boards 3 and 4 have said that plans by the city to redesign parts of the Astor Place and Cooper Square intersections in the East Village were, according to an article by Albert Amateau in this week's edition of The Villager, "an invitation to crowds of noisy drunks from neighboring nightlife venues to hang out until the early hours."

The article said that members of the task force "were appalled last week at the city's proposal to include public, 24-hour seating in the redesigned spaces.

The redesign presented at the January 6 meeting of the task force "calls for benches outside the gates of Peter Cooper Park and seating areas in a new public open space to be created in the triangular roadbed area just south of the park," the article said, adding that designers and agency officials called the plan "an extraordinary opportunity to green, soften and beautify" a harsh intersection."

David Crane, the chair of Community Board 3's Transportation and Public Safety/Environment Committee, conducted the meeting and said that "benches in public areas will encourage drunken hooligans to congregate in an area that already has a lot of bars and hotels and will be getting more," the article said.

"You have a very beautiful design, but you're creating problems for people living here," Susan Stetzer, C.B. 3 district manager, told the city representatives, the article said. "We have two major issues - noise and rats," she said, suggesting that the innovative and extensive green areas proposed for the redesign could harbor rats and adding that she wanted the park "locked at night and places not locked to have no seating."

Many task force members, the article said, "acknowledged the aesthetic and environmental benefits of the redesign, which would transform Cooper Square at the intersections of Bowery, Fourth Ave., Astor Place and Lafayette and E. Eighth Sts."

Under the project, Astor Place between Lafayette St. and Cooper Square (Fourth Ave.) would be closed to vehicles and incorporated into the new plaza. Decorative paving would mark the route of the former road segment.

The task force voted to give the plan a qualified approval, including a recommendation that there be no open public seating, except behind gates that would be locked at night.

The Department of Design and Construction, the lead agency in the project, intends to submit its preliminary plans for the project, including the task force resolution against open 24-hour public seating, to the next meeting of the city Design Commission for approval.

But the project, which has been on the city agenda for at least six years, is not likely to begin before 2013.

"The impetus was the construction of New York City's Third Water Tunnel," the article said, "an important section of which is on E. Fourth St. just south of the Astor Place / Cooper Square project. The redesign was put on hold when the water tunnel project was delayed for budget reasons. Now back on track, the water tunnel project is expected to be completed in a year or so....Although the federal government has withdrawn funds originally earmarked for the Astor Place project, city funding for it is now in place, he said."