People complain about a “lack of sidewalk access” nowadays due to all the pandemic-emergency dining shacks that are still out there by the thousands. Well, this was 14th Street in the 1970s, way before the busway. It was taken between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, looking east.
As for what all the congestion was about in the 50-year-old shot, the photographer, Harry Pincus, didn’t recall exactly.
“It looks more like a three-card Monte game than an accident or a crime,” he said. “I think I see a cardboard mat or something on the ground. Fourteenth Street always looked like that!
“That was spontaneous. It wasn’t expensive restaurants setting up permanent barriers. I don’t recall encountering any maître d’s out there!”
But, but, but…cars!!!
Were these same people complaining about the potential increase in traffic when Bloomberg allowed Uber to operate in a city that already had a T&LC that simply needed modernization and enforcement with regard to racial profiling of fares/customers/locations?
Or when Dumblasio decided to remove a lane of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, where now drivers don’t make the decision to make the right to the FDR or enter Manhattan until it’s too late, causing backups all the way back to the other side of the bridge?
Nope, because the Avocado Toast and Patchouli Class were glad to have cheap rideshares that took you wherever you needed to go in an instant.
Now I guess everyone is part of the downtrodden proletariat