Make it a triangle of gladness.
A Tribeca pedestrian triangle deserves an upgrade from a sad concrete island into a green-filled pedestrian refuge, according to neighborhood residents and the local City Council member, who want the departments of Transportation and Parks and Recreation to spruce up the area.
Located across from the Roxy Hotel south of White Street between Sixth Avenue and Church Street, sparce Barnett Newman Triangle offers little for pedestrians beyond one lone bench and some space for pedestrians to wait to cross the street. People fill up the space despite its small footprint and few amenities. Council Member Chris Marte and other locals hope repurpose the 12 or so parking spots surrounding the space to for a lush pedestrian-first park.
“We feel that that plaza could be improved,” said Alice Blank, the chairwoman of Friends of Barnett Newman Triangle. “If you stand out there, it’s really used, and to have two sidewalks rather than one straight path down the center seems useless when you could have a zone on either side of a path that’s green and acts as both a buffer and an extension of the green space.”
“It’s lovely to close down a traffic lane or a parking space, but it’s even lovelier when it becomes a green space, something that actually could be useful in terms of the city’s mission to make things a little more resilient.”
On the left, Barnett Newman Triangle as it currently exists. On the right, a vision for it that adds green space (the grayed areas) to create one center-running path.
The underused traffic island is currently nothing more than a slab of concrete between two lane Church Street and three-lane Sixth Avenue. That width encourages driver to gun it — the nearest speed camera, at Canal Street, catches an average of 10 speeders per day.
Marte, the local Council member, said he’s already met with DOT and Parks to push the changes and allocated funds to get pipes to the spot to make it easier to water its plants.
A vision for what Barnett Newman Triangle could be.
“We have been asking DOT and the Parks Department to find out how we can expand the greenery, add a tree that was taken out a few years ago and just make it much more livable and pedestrianize it,” he told Streetsblog. “They’re definitely interested in it. We’ve had a few meetings with both agencies together about short term work that can happen, like painting some of the streets to just test out what the space can look like.”
Beyond removing parking, Marte thinks the city should also consider eliminating a travel lanes on Church Street as part of the effort to expand the triangle.
“There isn’t much traffic that goes up that that part of Church Street. I think most of the traffic is on Sixth Avenue trying to get into the Holland Tunnel,” he said. “We could take up that lane to to expand the green space, without the disruption to what’s going on on Canal Street.”
The triangle is part of the “Greenstreets” program jointly run by the departments of Transportation and Parks, despite being mostly concrete. Both agencies would need to participate in any potential changes — and DOT, for its part, expressed interest in a statement.
“We look forward to working on the plaza proposal with the Friends of Barnett Newman Triangle and Parks,” said DOT spokesperson Vin Barone.
DOT actually included Church Street between Franklin Street and Canal Street, including the block that runs alongside Barnett Newman Triangle, in the scope of its multi-year, multi-phase effort to make Canal Street safer and less car-dominant — but that’s not set to wrap up until the spring of 2028 at the earliest.
Marte wants to see the triangle upgrade as a standalone project.
“I want this to be its own standalone initiative by both agencies, just because we waited a long time for the Canal redesign and now the process seems to be taking longer than than some have hoped for,” he said. “This is a project that already has community support and elected official support.”