District-7

The Upper West Side is full of trendy cafés, restaurants, bookstores, and shops up and down the main thoroughfares: Amsterdam and Columbus avenues, and Broadway. The neighborhood is also considered one of the most politically involved and active communities in Manhattan—many high-level city politicians started their careers in this neighborhood, and this year, its Community Board 7 received more than double the number of applications of any other Manhattan community board.

New York City has countless places where the movement of motor vehicles takes precedence over the safety and convenience of pedestrians, but the intersection of 96th Street and Broadway is a particularly striking example of our skewed street-design priorities. It took three deaths at or near that major crossroads last month for the city to propose long-needed fixes there. If we are serious about Mayor de Blasio's Vision Zero initiative—the eventual elimination of traffic fatalities on our streets—we must do better than wait for tragedies before making life-saving changes. We must boldly proceed with the work begun by the Bloomberg administration that puts the safety of the pedestrian supermajority first.

Whatever ends up filling the vacant Metro Theater building on 99th Street and Broadway, it's not going to be the community arts space envisioned by City Council member Mark Levine and announced in a DNAinfo article last month.

Community leaders are not giving up in a multiyear fight against plans to build a high-rise nursing home on the Upper West Side.

In the seemingly perpetual squabble over the future of Saint John the Divine, it is not difficult to conjure up doomsday scenarios. In one scenario, the cathedral, which ranks among the largest Christian churches in the world and is a regular stop on walking tours of Morningside Heights, crawls helplessly into the insatiable maw of neighborhood development and gentrification, dwarfed by towering developments as the side chapels are transformed into luxury condominiums. In another world, a money-starved cathedral, having lost the income it would have generated from the controversial apartment complex developers are building on its north side, collapses into insolvency and robs the neighborhood of one of its most precious historical treasures.