Mayor Zohran Mamdani had little to say Wednesday about calls to again close a Staten Island park road to car traffic.
That’s despite advocates sending his office a letter Jan. 12 calling for him to reverse a decision of his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, and restrict car traffic from Silver Lake Park Road.
“That’s something I’m going to follow up with and get back to you on,” Mamdani said when asked about the advocates’ request. “I want to take very seriously the request from Staten Islanders themselves and also get you an answer that I can hold myself to.”
If Mamdani decides to shutter the road to cars, it would be a win for the advocacy group in line with Mamdani’s less car-centric approach to city roads but would also put a thumb in the eyes of three of the Island’s top elected officials.
District Attorney Michael McMahon, Borough President Vito Fossella, and Councilmember Kamillah Hanks have all called for the road to remain open to car traffic during the week and closed on weekends.
“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, a Democrat representing the North Shore, said Thursday. “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.”
Cars drive on the recently reopened Silver Lake Park Road on Saturday, May 3, 2025, in Silver Lake.(Owen Reiter for the Advance/SILive.com)
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.
Adams reopened Silver Lake Park Road last year in the final months of his administration, in part as a safety effort after an attempted rape of a woman in Silver Lake Park on April 3.
McMahon 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 tying it to safety efforts in the park.
Rose Uscianowski, a Staten Island activist with the Transportation Alternatives organization and an opponent of vehicular traffic in Silver Lake Park, said last week 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.”
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.