Will NYC again restrict traffic at Silver Lake Park Road? Some hope so

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A group of Staten Islanders want to see the road through Silver Lake Park again closed to motor vehicle traffic full time, and they might have a friend in City Hall.

Former Mayor Eric Adams reopened Silver Lake Park Road last year in the final months of his administration, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a decidedly different attitude toward cars than his predecessor.

Shortly after taking office, Mamdani relaunched a cyclist- and pedestrian-focused redesign of McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint section that Adams had overturned after facing backlash from a neighborhood film studio.

Hoping for a similar local attitude, a group of Staten Islanders has teamed with some Queens residents asking the city to re-shutter Silver Lake Park Road and a similar park thoroughfare in The World’s Borough.

“We urge the City to reverse these decisions and establish permanent, year-round car-free use on both roads, prioritizing people over motor vehicles,” the group wrote in a Monday letter to City Hall. “Both of these decisions were hastily made and implemented during the last nine months of the Adams administration in response to unsubstantiated claims that motor vehicles would help prevent crime in parks, and with little to no input from neighbors and members of the surrounding communities.”

The city reopened Silver Lake Park Road last year, in part as a safety effort after an attempted rape of a woman in Silver Lake Park on April 3.

District Attorney Michael E. McMahon, a proponent of reopening the park road, penned a series of letters to city officials and his Silver Lake opponents at the time laying out his position on the road’s reopening during work week hours Monday to Friday.

“As the chief law enforcement official on Staten Island, my interest in reopening Silver Lake Park Road was and continues to be vested in the protection of public safety,” McMahon, a Democrat, wrote in one of his letters. “The potential for criminals to exploit the desolate nature of Silver Lake Park and threaten the safety of unsuspecting park users has been a concern of mine and the police department that is substantiated by data from RCDA’s Crime Strategies Unit and the NYPD.”

Opponents of the road’s opening to vehicular traffic aren’t buying the public safety argument from the Island’s top law enforcement official. They point out that crime in Island parks is generally low and that motor vehicles pose a more consistent threat to pedestrians and cyclists.

Mike Cassidy, an avid runner who has used the park for decades, said the roadway’s reopening has caused him and his family to look elsewhere for their outdoor time.

“I basically don’t run in Silver Lake on the weekdays anymore, which is really terrible,” Cassidy said. “The roadway in that park is so close to the sidewalk, the sidewalk is so narrow, and there’s not much of a gap with the cars speeding through there. It’s hard to relax and get into a rhythm.”

Cassidy said that his children also learned to ride their bikes along the road, something they’ve been doing less of with the return of vehicle traffic.

Rose Uscianowski, a Staten Island activist with the Transportation Alternatives organization and an opponent of vehicular traffic in Silver Lake Park, said that an actual park safety investment would come with more funding.

“Bringing cars into a park is not going to make it safer,” Uscianowski said. “Bringing better facilities in the park and better lighting to the park and up-keeping the trails in the park, that’s to me, a much better way of making the park safer.”

Borough President Vito Fossella, a Republican, and Councilmember Kamillah Hanks, a Democrat representing the North Shore, both supported last year’s push to reopen Silver Lake Park Road to vehicle traffic during the week.

Hanks and Fossella both said Thursday that they continue to support the current arrangement that has the road open to vehicles during work week hours and closed on the weekend.

“We reached a compromise, and we know that there’s two sides to every story, and we had…residents and constituents that let us know that they would like to keep the road open,” Hanks said. “This has been something that’s fairly recent because of COVID, and we wanted to expand our public realm and our public open space due to the pandemic. However, everybody has to compromise, and I think that we rightfully made a decision to close it on weekends.”

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration shuttered the road in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic as a way to promote the usage of open space. Before its COVID closure, the road had generally been open to vehicle traffic.

What Mamdani plans to do with the park roads in Silver Lake and in Queens remains to be seen.

A Parks Department spokesperson said they are in receipt of the request letter and are reviewing it. Spokespeople for the Mamdani administration did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.