Cars Return to a Queens Park, Rankling Some

Car-free parks advocates say the city reopened Freedom Drive, in Forest Lawn Park, to vehicles earlier than planned and without notice.

Good morning. It's Friday. Today we'll find out about why some Queens residents are unhappy that the city reopened a road through a park to cars. We'll also get details about how toxic dust permeated apartments in Lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center collapsed in the terrorist attacks 25 years ago -- and how it took officials months to come to grips with the problem.

The day that Andrew Smith hoped would not come came sooner than he had feared.

That day was Wednesday, the day on which the gates to Freedom Drive in Forest Lawn Park in Queens were opened, allowing traffic on a roadway that is only about a third of a mile long.

Freedom Drive had been car-free for several years, until January. But it was closed again at the end of March, and parks and transportation advocates wanted the traffic ban to become permanent again. They held a rally in April to celebrate the closing. Some formed a group called Safe Streets Richmond Hill and circulated a petition to keep the road closed.

That coincided with a citywide campaign that called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and city officials to ban personal cars from all 2,000 city parks. Central Park and Prospect Park are off-limits to cars, but traffic winds through many other parks, bringing noise, pollution and the jockeying that comes when drivers, pedestrians and cyclists share the same urban space.

The car-free parks campaign began with two advocacy groups, New Yorkers for Parks and Transportation Alternatives, which say the city should build on the success in Central Park and Prospect Park.

"This administration has come in with strong rhetoric about streets as the envy of the world and re-upping Vision Zero," said Adam Ganser, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. "Reopening a street in the park is flying in the face of that rhetoric. If it's good enough for Central Park, if it's good enough for Prospect Park, it's good enough for Queens and Forest Park."

Forest Park was laid out in the 1890s by the landscape design firm started by Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Smith, who started Safer Streets Richmond Hill and the petition drive against reopening Freedom Drive, said that Forest Park was different.

"Prospect Park is more manicured," he said. "It's like Central Park -- it's got the fields, it's got the meadows, it's curated. Forest Park is really wild. It's a forest, basically, that is allowed to be. It's a great place to get lost."

It is also a place where television shows go when they need out-of-the-way settings. "I've shot scenes in there where they're supposed to be burying a body," said Smith, a camera operator who has worked on "Law and Order: S.V.U.," "Person of Interest" and "The Gilded Age."

He said that signs -- posted when traffic was barred in April -- said that Freedom Drive would remain closed through October. "We all assumed that 'through October' would mean the last weekend of October or even the first week of November," he said.

A spokesman for the Parks Department said it had initially anticipated reopening Freedom Drive to cars closer to the end of the month but was able to do so sooner. Smith said that there were safety concerns about making Freedom Drive a roadway again after six months as a walkway.

Last year the local community board approved a resolution calling for the Parks Department to allow traffic on Freedom Drive all year long. Joann Ariola, a City Council member whose district includes the park, and Sherry Algredo, the chairwoman of the community board, had written to the parks agency in 2024, saying that "the continued closure of Freedom Drive has become a constant headache" for their constituents and "forces them to take unnecessary detours around the park."

This year, as spring approached, the department opted to close Freedom Drive in warm weather, starting in April, and let traffic in during the colder months. The Parks Department spokesman said the arrangement followed "a mutual decision with the community board and extensive community engagement."

"When it's closed, it's great," Smith said. "You can hear the crickets. You can hear the birds. You don't hear cars when it's closed. It's a great break from city life. That's what Forest Park is about."

Weather

Expect a sunny day with a high near 72. It will be mostly clear tonight, with a low around 51.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Monday (Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples' Day)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"It's amazing how talented people are just waiting to be discovered here. Maybe we'll see the next Hugh Jackman." -- Mike O'Brien, visiting from Boston, at Diner24, a new theater-district restaurant that is providing competition for Ellen's Stardust Diner, where waiters been breaking into song since 1987.

The latest Metro news

* New charges for Maduro: Federal prosecutors in Manhattan outlined new charges against the ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, accusing them of torturing detainees, including American citizens. Maduro and Flores, already facing narco-terrorism and trafficking charges, are scheduled to go on trial next June.

* A call for James's removal in the Cornell case: Gillio Lopes, one of the men accused in the Cornell University sexual assault lawsuit, filed a petition seeking to have the state attorney general, Letitia James, replaced as special prosecutor because of comments she made on social media.

* Child care survey raises questions: A survey found that many New York City parents would prefer time off to care for babies themselves as Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to expand free child care programs to cover children as young as 6 weeks old.* How much for how little: A market study found that a home buyer with a $400,000 budget could expect to get 267 square feet in Manhattan or 476 square feet in Brooklyn. The same budget in Detroit could fetch more than 4,900 square feet.

* What We're Watching: On "The New York Times Close Up," Jeffery C. Mays talks with Mike Abrams and Megan DiTrolio, editors on The New York Times's Trust Team, about The Times's coverage of rape allegations at Cornell University. And Yume Kitasei, the commissioner of the city's Department of Citywide Administrative Services, discusses the new Jobs NYC Center. The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

The toxic dust that was everywhere after 9/11

Newly released records show how toxic dust from the World Trade Center coated the insides of apartments after the Sept. 11 attacks 25 years ago.

But city officials allowed residents to return to their homes in what had been the frozen zone in Lower Manhattan. The city provided little more than advice -- clean up the dust with wet mops.

The dust was a powdery mixture of pulverized concrete, fiberglass, asbestos and a long list of toxins given off from burning plastic and jet fuel. It seeped through air-conditioning units, rooftop vents and windows that weren't tightly sealed. It settled on window sills and in carpets. Sweeping could send the dust into the air again.

My colleagues Joseph Goldstein and Nina Agrawal write that city officials did not come to grips with the problem of toxic dust until months later. But samples of air and dust in two apartments taken a week after the terrorist attacks were alarming: The two apartments -- one near ground zero, the other a few blocks away -- had elevated concentrations of asbestos. The industrial hygienists who had collected the samples cautioned that residents who dusted or vacuumed their homes would breathe toxic air.

At the time, the documents show, there was confusion and finger-pointing among local and federal officials -- and a halting realization that indoor dust posed a health threat.

"You see the wishful thinking of decision makers saying, 'Let's get back to normal,'" said Andrew Carboy, said a lawyer for 9/11 Health Watch, an advocacy organization that sued to force the release of the documents.

The newly released documents include more than 170,000 pages of air quality reports and contamination records, along with correspondence among city officials. The city's Department of Environmental Protection, which was responsible for overseeing the cleanup beyond ground zero, did not respond to a request for comment this week.

METROPOLITAN diary

By the East River

Dear Diary:

My wife and I were sitting on a bench overlooking the East River when a tall, burly man walking a Samoyed stopped and began to stare at me.

As he stood there eyeing my commemorative U.S. Army baseball cap, I thought he might be a fellow veteran. Then, with outstretched arms, he beckoned me toward him.

I stood and approached him.

He embraced me in a bear hug.

"You look just like my grandpapa!" he shouted. "And your after-shave even smells like his."

-- Theodore Jerome Cohen

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. -- J.B.

Luke Caramanico, Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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