Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner, sent a letter yesterday to Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer stating that signs that he had seen "incorrectly" identifying cross streets on the west side of Fifth Avenue as having the "west" prefix would be removed and replaced with ones with the proper prefix, "East," by the end of this month, according to an article in today's edition of The New York Times by Michael M. Grynbaum.
"A geographic tiff broke out last week after Scott M. Stringer, Manhattan's borough president, noted that the bus signs along Central Park on Fifth Avenue identified the streets as west, not east. This seemed peculiar for an area normally known as the Upper East Side. But students of the street grid insisted that the signs, on the western side of the avenue, were correct: anything west of Fifth Avenue, after all, is technically the West Side of Manhattan," article said, adding that "On Thursday, an official verdict was issued: East it is!"
Mr. Stringer, reached by telephone on Thursday, declared himself pleased, the article said.
The article said that the "Transportation Department has received tens of thousands of service requests from the public since the signs first went up in 1997, but, Ms. Sadik-Khan wrote, 'We are unaware of previous requests to make this particular change.'"
"The Department of Transportation is putting practice above principle," said Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, the article said, adding that he said "This reflects the way New Yorkers perceive the city, not the rules of the grid."
"A geographic tiff broke out last week after Scott M. Stringer, Manhattan's borough president, noted that the bus signs along Central Park on Fifth Avenue identified the streets as west, not east. This seemed peculiar for an area normally known as the Upper East Side. But students of the street grid insisted that the signs, on the western side of the avenue, were correct: anything west of Fifth Avenue, after all, is technically the West Side of Manhattan," article said, adding that "On Thursday, an official verdict was issued: East it is!"
Mr. Stringer, reached by telephone on Thursday, declared himself pleased, the article said.
The article said that the "Transportation Department has received tens of thousands of service requests from the public since the signs first went up in 1997, but, Ms. Sadik-Khan wrote, 'We are unaware of previous requests to make this particular change.'"
"The Department of Transportation is putting practice above principle," said Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, the article said, adding that he said "This reflects the way New Yorkers perceive the city, not the rules of the grid."
Architecture Critic
Carter Horsley
Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.
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