New York City Announces Proposed Designs for Park Avenue Overhaul

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New York City Announces Proposed Designs for Park Avenue Overhaul

The city plans to widen the median on an 11-block stretch of the boulevard, removing two traffic lanes, to provide space where people can stroll or linger.

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The median along Park Avenue is already planted with trees, grass and flowers, but is not welcoming to pedestrians.

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Madison Swart for The New York Times

By

Andy Newman

April 29, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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Standing in the skinny strip between the northbound and southbound lanes of Park Avenue, surrounded by honking horns and whizzing or crawling traffic, it is a little hard to picture it as a place to sit and relax.

“Right here in the middle of the road?” Pooja Ranganathan asked as she was passing by on Tuesday afternoon.

But that is what New York City is planning: On Wednesday, it will unveil two possible redesigns for an 11-block stretch of the boulevard, from East 46th Street to East 57th Street, both aimed at transforming one of the city’s least inviting green spaces into, at the very least, a decent place to eat a sandwich. Two traffic lanes, one in each direction, will be sacrificed to make the median about twice as wide.

Renderings of the plan show broad, sweeping walkways; rows of trees; benches; and, in one of the two versions, bicycle lanes. The city is also promising “innovative streetscape amenities,” which the Transportation Department said included creating “sort of an urban forest on the median.”

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A rendering of one of the proposed redesigns of the Park Avenue median, which would remove car lanes but add a protected bike lane.

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Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners

Looking at the plans, Ms. Ranganathan, 31, who works in advertising nearby, started to warm to the idea.

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