(The proximity of many of these signs to FBI, DEA, and Secret Service offices provides a clue about whose identities he was helping to conceal.) And for good reason: Schwartz made them up. The fact that those letters fail to correspond to any government agency-at any level of government-has long puzzled many New Yorkers. To this day, some Manhattan curbs are posted with No Standing signs whose exemption for “authorized vehicles” is governed by the cryptic initials AWM. Eliminate a parking lane there”-Schwartz’s street-sign oeuvre occasionally had a cloak-and-dagger side. (Which, of course, was the point of cracking down on parking scofflaws, whose lane-blocking ways exasperated hundreds of people behind them.) Befitting a bureaucrat who boasts of committing “low-level sabotage” during his peonage in the Traffic Department-“I would widen a sidewalk to a decent size here. Yet he could be equally creative in his efforts to improve life for drivers. When Schwartz tried it, it was too far ahead of its time to last. Today, urban planners have a catchphrase for this ethos: “Complete Streets”-and Broadway Avenue has become an exemplar. Four years before the horsewalk, Schwartz had built curb-protected bicycle lanes on the avenues linking Central Park to Washington Square. That rhetoric matched his record-and it suffuses Street Smart, which begins with an impassioned ode to the history of public roads that laments their 20th-century domination by private automobiles. ‘‘After all, horses were here way before cars.’’ “It’s about time,” he told The New York Times. In 1984, as traffic commissioner, Schwartz had lines painted and signs posted around Brooklyn’s Park Circle rotary-one of the borough’s busiest intersections-designating a horse crossing, to help the animals access Prospect Park trails from a nearby stable. After orchestrating its restoration in the late 1980s-against the will of city budget honchos who wanted to tear it down and build a modern replacement with federal money-Schwartz hung a placard reading: “ORDINANCE of the City | Any Person Driving over this Bridge Faster than a Walk will be Subject to a Penalty of Five Dollars For Each Offense.” One of his personal favorites adorns the Carroll Street Bridge, one of four remaining retractable bridges in the United States, whose sliding wooden deck spans the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Indeed, a cheeky obituarist might be tempted to tell Schwartz’s life story entirely through traffic signs. (Both were deployed extra high up on poles to discourage theft, but nonetheless became coveted collector’s items virtually from their debut.) Same goes for their Koch-era cousins: NO PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING, NO KIDDING. But it will leave plenty of nuggets jostling for the second line.Įver wonder about those Manhattan street signs warning DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE? Schwartz’s idea. “I’m pretty sure that the first line in my obituary is going to mention it,” he writes in his new book, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars, which splits the difference between memoir and urban-transportation manifesto. The word first appeared in print in a 1980 memo he authored as the city’s chief traffic engineer, and though he has tried to share credit with a reluctant colleague, the coinage has clung stubbornly to him ever since. Schwartz, a fleet-minded Brooklyn native creeping up on 70 years of almost unreasonable devotion to New York, is better known as Gridlock Sam. Traffic jams are not my idea of fun, but how many times do you get to battle gridlock alongside the man who coined the term? Yet it doesn’t materialize-at least nowhere in our path-and for a minute I curse my luck. Everything’s moving smoothly when we hit toll-plaza signs flashing warnings of impending gridlock. Fort Lee slips by on the opposite bank-you can still buy “I Survived Bridgegate” T-shirts commemorating the traffic scandal that kneecapped Governor Chris Christie-replaced by swiftly scrolling views of the Hudson River Palisades. New York may be bumper-to-bumper with drivers who know better than their GPS Sherpas, but Schwartz has a special claim to mastery, so we shoot past the George Washington Bridge. “I don’t like the way she’s going,” he says, in a mild Brooklyn accent. Schwartz pauses mid-sentence and cocks his head slightly. In two miles, intones the halting yet serenely unflappable voice of Default Female, bear right … onto I … Ninety-Five … North. Upper West Side brickwork flickers through the bare-branched plane trees lining Riverside Park. It’s half past nine on a Friday morning and the Henry Hudson Parkway is wide open when Sam Schwartz GCE’70 receives his first GPS instruction. Can his final campaign reshape the city’s transportation future?īY TREY POPP | Photograph by Don Hamerman “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz is an icon in New York’s century-long war with traffic.
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