In the midst of the Bloomberg-era "bikelash," when the public’s response to the city’s first real bike lane boom was so fraught that a newspaper deemed one project off Prospect Park West "the most controversial slab of cement outside the Gaza Strip"—no, really—a videographer, host, and activist named Clarence Eckerson Jr. started rolling.
In one of his videos from 2010, grainy clips of Grand Army Plaza are interspersed with a mix of muzak, explanatory voiceovers, and before-and-after shots—before: car traffic; after: car traffic, but with slightly more space for pedestrians and cyclists.
Today, when social media is awash in infrastructure influencers, these clips may seem unremarkable. But in the late aughts, they marked the first time New Yorkers had seen their streets substantively change in decades.
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