In 2009, then-NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan put out some traffic cones and beach chairs in Times Square, and a great city’s relationship with its streets began to change. What had been a chaotic tangle of cars became one of the most visited public spaces on earth. Pedestrian injuries dropped. Traffic flowed better. Business boomed.
Sadik-Khan’s simple action showed what’s possible when a city government decides to revisit our streetscape with an eye toward increased pedestrian spaces. Over the following years, new plazas transformed DUMBO, the Flatiron district, and dozens of other neighborhoods.
Mayor Mamdani was elected with that spirit at the center of his agenda. Voters gave him a mandate to make buses faster, biking safer, and walking more enjoyable. The 14th St. improvements, Flatbush Ave. bus priority, and Fordham Road redesigns signal a serious commitment.
Mamdani proved that vision applies to Brooklyn too — announcing a long-overdue redesign of Grand Army Plaza. Now we need to make sure it actually gets built.
Grand Army Plaza is one of the great civic spaces of New York. Together, its soaring arch and Prospect Park form Brooklyn’s answer to Washington Square. Each Saturday, thousands of New Yorkers pour through for one of the city’s best farmers markets. Families walk from surrounding neighborhoods. The Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Public Library anchor the nearby blocks.
And yet, the plaza itself is harrowing. Lanes of fast-moving traffic divide the space. Crossings are long, crowded, and frightening —especially with children. Between 2021 and 2025, 219 people were injured along the plaza’s roadways.
This isn’t news to anyone who uses the space, and it isn’t news to the city. DOT has been studying a redesign of Grand Army Plaza for years, conducting multiple rounds of community outreach and investing $1.8 million in planning. The feedback has been clear. In a survey of more than 2,000 respondents — the majority of them Brooklyn residents who live within a mile and a half of the plaza — 78% said their top priority was additional protected pedestrian space. Their top complaint was interaction points with vehicles. In the poll, 87% of respondents said they arrive by foot or bike.
These are not ambiguous results. The community has shown up, spoken up, and waited patiently through workshop after workshop, survey after survey. The mayor has heard us and the planning is largely done. But what comes next is the hard part: making sure this announcement becomes a completed and funded project without unnecessary delay.
The Mamdani administration’s plan would remove cars from the southern end of the plaza, restore the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch as a true gateway to Prospect Park, add three-quarters of an acre of public space, cut dangerous pedestrian crossings, and speed up the B41 bus for 27,000 daily riders. It would signal to the entire city that Brooklyn’s great civic spaces deserve the same ambition that transformed Manhattan’s public realm two decades ago.
The Bloomberg-era street transformations weren’t popular at first, and pushback was fierce. But once New Yorkers experienced the change, they didn’t want to go back.
Now, Grand Army Plaza is ready for its moment. We cannot afford to let budget pressures or opponents slow-walk a project that should have happened years ago. Now is the time for everyone who uses this plaza to show up, speak up at the upcoming public workshops, and make clear that Brooklyn is behind this plan. We’ve waited long enough. Let’s build it.
Timm is a father and transportation advocate who lives blocks from Grand Army Plaza.