We'll turn Manhattan into an Isle of joy—Rodgers & Hart.
Manhattan has enough city plans on hand to paper Broadway from end to end. This week it got one more. The plan's author is Engineer-Architect Hermann Herrey. He was a widely famed city planner in Britain and on the Continent before the war, organized a national road-plan exhibit for the Royal Institute of British Architects, is now studying U.S. city problems on a grant from the American Philosophical Society. His collaborators are his wife—a physicist teaching at Queens College—and a Harvard architect, Constantin Pertzoff.
Great Circles. No starry-eyed planners, they started with a practical engineering study of traffic and congestion in the city. Their studies convinced them that Manhattan's basic trouble is hardening of the arteries—a creeping paralysis of transportation. Kerrey's plan begins, therefore, with reorganization of Manhattan's streets to restore circulation. Around the central part of the island would run a belt highway. It would carry all through north-&-south traffic, would be fed by widely spaced cross streets at about 15-block intervals. About 90% of the present crosstown streets, and Madison and Lexington Avenues, might be eliminated; all remaining streets and avenues would be one-way. North-&-south avenues (except Broadway) would carry no through traffic, would be broken at intervals to permit division of Manhattan into a series of huge, self-contained blocks, each circled by a "ring street." The sides of each oblong block (about 15 present city blocks long) would be two avenues; its ends, two cross streets. This system of ring streets and one-way traffic, like a highway cloverleaf, would eliminate all traffic intersections.
The general character of the present midtown and downtown business sections, the theater district, Central Park, and Broadway would be undisturbed. But the rest of Manhattan, now "all mixed up," would be reshuffled in a more orderly scheme: placing industry along the belt highway, housing in separate areas and parks around the riverfront fringes. In the now-blighted downtown area between Canal Street and Washington Square, Herrey's plan proposes a great, permanent Fair, which might include a proposed fashion center.*
Great Hopes. Planner Herrey's belt highway, some 80 ft. high, would have six separate levels—for truck, bus, passenger and express traffic, two levels for parking. It would run between 9th and 10th Avenues and between 2nd and 3rd. Crosstown streets, much wider than present ones, would be laid out in pairs (e.g., an eastbound highway on the site of 40th Street, westbound on 42nd Street).
Freed of traffic lights (except at pedestrian crossings), the ring streets would supposedly allow a smooth flow of traffic. The block plan would place all residents within easy walking distance of schools, shops, etc. Herrey proposes a new type of apartment house, with a terrace and garden for each apartment.