Brooklyn Bridge Improvement Improvements
June 29th, 2008
The new additions to the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side are welcome and long overdue. Especially welcome are signs directing pedestrians on the bridge walkway, down the stairs to Washington St./ Cadman Plaza East. I often grimaced when I saw more than a few tourists heading out towards the banal no-mans-land of Tillary and Adams St, rather than going down the rather mysterious stairway to the places they really wanted to go to. The brass lettering in the sidewalk is a rather beautiful way of letting the tourists know where they are and how far they have to go.
OK so here’s the Improving the Improvements part. There are a few, and I’ll talk about the most critical one last. First and second have to do with getting to the walkway on the Brooklyn side. The new signs are great, but they have one very serious gap. People coming out of the A Train High St. Station at Adams St. don’t have a clue where they are or which way to go, either inside the station or outside. I think tourists who take the tunnel to the east side of Adams St should be considered terminally lost, but can’t a few more directional signs be made and set up on Red Cross Place directing those tourists who emerge there to the bridge walkway stairs ?
The exit from the A Train on Cadman Plaza is OK although I don’t know remember if there is a sign on the west side of the street or not. A much bigger question is why there is no pedestrian walkway with traffic light at the subway entrance. At least 90% of the people who cross to the park cross there. Mark my words - someone is going to get hurt.
Anyway back to the Bridge. The signs are great, the light installation looks a little limp, were all those light tubes supposed to hang down like that? but overall OK. Hurray, there are a lot of tourists there, and Boo, the place smells like a bus garage because the crowds have attracted new truck-born venders. — Isn’t it a security threat to have big trucks parked directly under the Brooklyn Bridge roadway?
— But the bee in my bonnet here is the map. A big beautiful map of about 25% of Brooklyn in all it’s glory.
But then why are so many tourists standing in front of it, scratching there heads and then going off in the totally wrong directions? The problems are multifaceted, but lets wade in. The first and most disorienting problem is that the map is rotated almost 180° degrees from the orientation it should have. So much so that people, and I have redirected several groups of tourists, go off in the exact opposite direction than where they want to go.
Part of the problem is here.
So how should the map be oriented? Like this:
Now Cadman Plaza East and Washington St. go directly left and right on the map just like in real life. The Brooklyn Bridge extends out in front of the reader and off to the right. The Manhattan Bridge which is in back of the viewer in real life is on the lower portion of the map. No mental gymnastics are required to get around, the tourist heart is put at rest and can now concentrate on buying things at the local galleries.
But this doesn’t mean that the Dabbler has finished kvetching. There are a couple of other things that are glaringly wrong too. Like the Star on the map and the Brooklyn Bridge!
The star on the map is on Prospect Street not on Cadman Plaza East and the whole Brooklyn Bridge roadway, just nicks the corner of CPE and Prospect St. it doesn’t go over the intersection. The added arrow shows where “Here” really is. These may be small points, but they are just two more disorienting factors getting in the way of helping new visitors figure out where they are. And then the area under the bridge where the map is located is colored green, while across the street where the Tom Otterness statue is sitting in the grass is orange, while across Prospect Street the equally grassy wedge of land is green on the map. My goodness who knows how many other errors are on this map?
So lets hope that since there have been tremendous improvements made to the Bridge walkway entrances and signage that these final details can be corrected soon.
