Vanessa Gruen
Dream on. In cold fact, CIVITAS has struggled for years to bring violations of newsrack regulations to the attention of the Department of Transportation (DOT), our city’s protector of streets and sidewalks. But thanks to the city’s desultory enforcement, newsracks remain as great a scourge as ever.
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| A Learning Annex newsrack box on 60th Street and Second Avenue. |
The fight began when Gorman Reilly of CIVITAS organized a coalition of civic groups, including the Municipal Art Society, to deal with a massive proliferation of newsracks. This began with USA TODAY’s early success in the 1980s using newsrack boxes as a primary means of distribution. In 2003 the coalition was instrumental in getting the City Council to adopt some stringent regulations governing design and permissible locations on city sidewalks. A year later, the Council weakened the regulatory regime by allowing publishers to self-certify that their newsracks were clean, free of graffiti and stocked with their publications. Today, many newsracks throughout the city are filthy, covered with graffiti, and devoid of publications. Some publishers disdain both the regulations and their obligation to self-certify, and DOT has relegated its duty of enforcement to a low level of priority.
Streets and sidewalks occupy one quarter of all the public acreage in the City, more than all our parks put together. This public space deserves more attentive guardianship. Sidewalks should be kept free of unnecessary clutter and should allow for easy and pleasant pedestrian flow. Many essential items vie for space on our sidewalks. These public necessities are carefully regulated by DOT and other public agencies. Planters, bollards, newsstands, bus shelters, benches, trash receptacles, phone booths, etc. must all go through a permitting process or must obtain revocable consents from DOT before they can be placed on our sidewalks. Not so with newsracks. The regulations permit newsracks subject only to registration with DOT (a prerequisite that many vendors do not bother with) and compliance with certain design and location standards (which, experience shows, are honored primarily in the breach). City officials typically say that the First Amendment ties their hands. CIVITAS disagrees with this assessment, and the courts have upheld a city’s right to regulate their public sidewalks for the public’s safety and aesthetic reasons.
DOT has adopted a passive stance towards enforcement. At best, it responds laconically to complaints from the public. CIVITAS recently sent DOT a list, compiled with the aid of CIVITAS member William Marquardt and interns, that specified 162 locations between 59th Street and 96th Street from Fifth to York Avenues where newsracks were in violation of the law. The response was disappointing. What we got back is a list of how many Notices of Correction were issued for a variety of infractions, and does not include which specific newsrack was, in their judgment, in compliance and which was not. CIVITAS was also told that complaints of underused or empty newsracks must be addressed directly to the publishers because Local Law 36 of 2004 does not provide an enforcement provision for such complaints. So is the public required to do the city’s job and call the publisher and tell him that his newsrack that is sitting on our public sidewalk is empty, full of garbage and needs to be restocked? Of the list of 162 errant newsboxes that CIVITAS forwarded to DOT they removed ONE newsrack because it lacked proper identification. According to DOT, they removed a paltry 51 newsracks in 2012 throughout the city.
Recently several CIVITAS Streetscapes Committee members have undertaken some of their own sleuthing. Rita Hirsch brought to the Committee’s attention the fact that the Learning Annex boxes have a discontinued telephone number on their rear side. All newsracks are required to display proper identification. Learning Annex informed a Committee member that its New York City headquarters office is no longer occupied. It is clear that Learning Annex has abandoned these boxes. There are roughly 1,400 Learning Annex boxes throughout the city, and both the Learning Annex and DOT have not removed those in violation.
The time has come to rethink whether the newsrack law should be totally revamped to ban racks altogether, or to allow only multi-racks in selected locations. DOT’s disinterest in enforcement coincides with a sharp decline in publisher interest in stocking newsracks. Publishers of newspapers and other once-print media increasingly look to the Internet as the primary vehicle for distribution outside of home deliveries and newsstand sales. As best we can determine, the New York Times no longer uses newsracks in New York City. The Learning Annex apparently now relies primarily on Internet advertising of its courses. If countless newsracks appear to be abandoned, there is good reason: time has passed them by as an effective means of distribution.
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| One of hundreds of poorly maintained and empty newsrack boxes. |
Attorneys consulted by CIVITAS advise that it is almost certain that the courts would uphold a law banning newsracks on public sidewalks from a challenge under the First Amendment. Laws banning newsracks from Beacon Hill and Back Bay in Boston have been sustained, and courts (including the Supreme Court) have assumed that flat bans throughout a municipality would not be deemed unconstitutional.
Alternatively, New York City could revisit the idea that newsracks be included in the coordinated street furniture franchise. Several years ago the city first proposed such a franchise that would include bus shelters, automatic pay toilets and newsstands, and a Request For Proposals was issued that included the design of a multi-newsrack. Cemusa was awarded the franchise; however the multi-rack was omitted from the franchise before a contract was signed. The city should review its thinking on whether to incorporate multi-racks into the coordinated street furniture franchise and to ban all other newsracks. Cemusa would be asked to install multi-newsracks in all city neighborhoods, to keep them clean, and to assure that they are properly stocked.
Now is the time for mayoral candidates to commit: tighten the law and enforcement, substitute multi-racks for individual boxes, or ban all racks on our streets.
To read the complete spring 2013 issue of CIVITAS News, visit http://civitasnyc.org/civitas-newsletters/
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