this is Street WarsA weekly series looking at the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
The intersection of West 12th Avenue and Washington Street in Manhattan offers a glimpse into New York City history. Cobblestone-like Belgian blocks that look like they were built in the 1870s line the street. A three-story Federal-style brick building on the southeast corner was built in 1842, and a 1920s Art Deco building on the northeast corner makes it easy to imagine arriving by horse-drawn carriage, or even a Model T.
So when the city proposed installing a new 5G tower on the corner there, neighbors weren’t happy.
“Greenwich Village is known and beloved throughout the world for its fascinating architecture,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, a group that works to protect the cultural heritage of Greenwich Village, the East Village and NoHo.
“It’s detrimental to have futuristic, 32-foot-tall towers, often housing large video display terminals, rising in residential areas of historic neighborhoods,” he said.
Thousands of residents have joined a letter-writing campaign opposing the proposed tower, Berman said, and the state’s historic preservation office recently warned that the high-rise tower would negatively impact a landmark block in the Greenwich Village Historic District. Officials said Paul’s “non-conforming design” would “create visual clutter.”
The fate of the West 12th Street tower is still under review by the Federal Communications Commission, but a number of 5G “smart poles” are set to be built.
The towers, which have been built in New York City since 2022, are part of the city’s efforts to improve wireless service. Nick Colvin, CEO of LinkNYC, the communications network in charge of the Link 5G towers, said more than 150 of the 32-foot-tall towers have already been installed, with about 2,000 more planned.
Colvin noted that most people’s cell phones these days are capable of much more than just voice calls, so if you’ve ever experienced emails not coming through, issues finding places in a maps app, or just no smartphone service at all, it’s because the city’s network is in dire need of an upgrade, Colvin explained.
“The demands being placed on the existing infrastructure exceed the capacity of the built network,” he said.
Colvin took some umbrage at the complaints about the design: “I’m a New Yorker. I value public space,” he said.
He noted that installation of display screens on Link5G smart poles in residential areas of the city is not permitted.
The tower is silver and grey, much like a New York streetlight pole, and is topped by a series of transmitters, all covered by a “shroud” to maintain a clean look.
Colvin says other designs were considered but rejected — “they just didn’t look right,” he said — so Link5G worked with Antenna Design, the firm that designed MetroCard vending machines and the new subway cars, to design a tower specifically for New York.
Needless to say, not everyone respects them.
“First of all, people don’t want these monsters in their neighborhoods,” said Odette Wilkens, executive director of the New York City Coalition for Safe Technology.
She is concerned about plans to build a so-called “mega” tower near the historic Addislee Park neighborhood in Jamaica, Queens.
At least 16 community boards across New York City, representing roughly 2 million New Yorkers, have voiced concerns about the rollout of 5G towers, and city officials including Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Congressman Jerry Nadler have written letters of support.
Although the FCC has said 5G technology is safe and poses no health hazards, Wilkens still worries the towers could pose a threat to public safety. In an email newsletter, he called on New Yorkers to speak out against the towers. “We need to act now. 5G towers are killing us,” he wrote.
But the city government argues the towers are part of a “critical” effort to provide all New Yorkers with access to high-speed internet.
“This Administration will not succumb to NIMBYism and will continue to prioritize democratizing access to technology and building a more connected, livable City for New Yorkers,” said Ray Legendre, New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation.
Many of the locations for Link5G towers (and tower-less LinkNYC Wi-Fi kiosks) were previously pay phone locations.
A few years ago, pay phones needed to be 15 to 20 feet long on the sidewalk to allow six people to make calls, Colvin said.
Colvin said 8,000 pay phones have been removed from New York sidewalks so far, and the new 5G towers will take up a much smaller space. Colvin said the design is as “future-proof” as possible. “Like pay phones, we expect these to be there for decades to come.”
Can New York City move into the future while preserving parts of its past? Colvin hopes so.
“The mission of LinkNYC and the 5G program is to provide free digital connectivity to everyone in our city,” he said.
“Internet connectivity is increasingly necessary to participate in the economy, apply for jobs, interact with government, pay parking tickets — it’s essential to life,” he said.
But he understands the challenge he faces: “In a city like New York, it’s always hard to change things.”
Introducing the utility pole, the ancestor of 5G towers
While 5G towers are new, the idea of cluttering streets to accommodate the technology isn’t new. In the 1880s, New York residents had to deal with another type of pole on their sidewalks: telegraph poles.
An 1881 New York Times article detailed the sudden appearance of “unsightly” telegraph poles on Manhattan’s Pine Street, explaining that “troupes of workmen” had “ripped up the sidewalk” and begun erecting telegraph poles “of a size and awkwardness seldom seen outside the woods of Maine.”
The poles were not just “crooked and untidy,” but were described as “huge, ugly protuberances taking up space on the sidewalk” and “resulting in the condemnation of unfortunate pedestrians into the muddy gutters.” The state attorney general sued to have the poles removed. In 1882, The Times reported on another lawsuit aimed at removing the poles from West 21st Street.
In 1876, a Times reporter wrote, “One of the first things that strikes a foreigner on landing in New York is the presence of telegraph poles so densely packed together that they block the streets.”
But after 1900, telephone poles became so common that this reporter found not one but two reports of men sleeping on top of them (in both reports, the men had been drinking).
David Schley, a professor of urban history at Durham University in the UK, was researching 19th century New York for a project and noticed a lot of discussion about telephone poles.
In the media, he says, “it was used as one of many analogies to show the workings of power,” for example, when he saw a newspaper article comment that the volume of telegraph wires “got thicker as you got closer to Wall Street, because that’s where all the wires meet, the financial center of the city. Wall Street connects to London, which connects to places all over the world.”
Schley said there were also discussions about connectivity as it exists today.
“A severe storm hit New York in December 1874,” Schley says. “The Times saw it as an opportunity to reflect on the interconnectedness of modern life, writing, ‘Before the invention of the railroad and the telegraph, life was much simpler and households less dependent on communication with the outside world.'”
Was that the good old days?
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Quote of the week:
“The three men entrusted with their pet project had not thought deeply about the impact of what they were about to unveil. These were not Haussmanns who designed the boulevards of Paris. They were not urban planners. To the eternal disgrace of New York City, they were not people who took these kinds of projects seriously. None of the three commissioners seemed to pause to consider that what they were doing here was so important that it would change the shape of the city forever.”
— Gerald Keppel, “A City on a Grid: How New York Became New York“of Committee Members The man who laid out the streets of Manhattan in 1811.
