Will Adams’ post-COVID blueprint for NYC work? New Yorkers: Fuhgeddaboudit

Picture this: You live in a transformed Midtown. After a long day of working from home, you decide to step outside. You stroll out of your apartment onto a packed city street, and, feeling snackish, head to your corner deli to grab a sandwich.

You weave through throngs of people — tourists, ugh — and make your way, chopped cheese in hand, to a new outdoor plaza. You find a seat next to a grassy patch dotted with flowers and framed by skyscrapers blocking the sun.

This is Adams’ and Hochul’s slightly utopian vision for Midtown.

Monique S., who works at a restaurant on 41st Street, was less than inspired.

“No, nuh-uh. No,” she said, shaking her head.

The New New York plan, unveiled by Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul Wednesday, aims to transform Midtown and other business districts into 24/7 “live-work-play” destinations. It’s part of an extensive blueprint to revitalize a fundamentally different, slightly bruised, post-COVID New York.

Among the plan’s recommendations are proposals to change zoning for business districts in the city to convert now-empty office buildings into residential developments and to create more open spaces by building new parks and plazas, converting streets into linear parks, including the Grand Central viaduct, and widening sidewalks.

All of this is a big stretch of the imagination for New Yorkers who work and shop in Midtown. They questioned the practicality of the plan, who’d be able to afford to live in the area, if anyone would actually want to move there in the first place and the traffic implications of closing streets off for pedestrians.

“Why? What is the reason for wanting more residents in Midtown, not the business? That’s what they want?” Muhammad Ramzan, 52, asked incredulously.

Ramzan lives in Jackson Heights and worked in Midtown hotels for 25 years. The pandemic put him out of a job. Now, he works at a gift shop on 5th Ave.

“Who wants to live here? I never like to come to Manhattan,” Ramzan said. “I like to go to the places a little bit farther, [a] more peaceful life, a little bit different. A little bit of flavor. I look for Indian flavor, for Bangladesh flavor. You’re gonna look for some different flavor.

“That’s what people want! They don’t want this machine. Manhattan is like a machine. You have to go to work, sleep, go to work, sleep. No! You have a personal life, too.

“Manhattan should be like Manhattan in 2005 through 2010. That was Manhattan. This plan is not Manhattan. This is messed up,” Ramzan said.

Midtown has struggled to pick itself up from the ravages of the pandemic. More than 50% of office workers aren’t schlepping into the office every day. Pedestrian traffic on roads is still down 23% from before the pandemic, and retail is down 9%, according to the plan.

Peter Cruz, a bellman at The Algonquin Hotel, thinks that, barring an event of mass destruction, the plan won’t happen. Midtown should stay a commercial hub for the city, he said, especially with new industries like gambling soon popping up.

“We’re gonna need a fire like Chicago had a fire to redo the city the way they want to redo it,” Cruz, 62, said. ” … I don’t think Hochul has the pulse of the city in mind.”

Cruz, a resident of Grand Concourse, also had concerns about affordability.

“Let’s face it, it’s not gonna be cheap rent,” he said. “It’s not gonna be for Joe Schmoe. It’s gonna be for some elitist family. It’s not a good idea. Real estate prices are out of control as it is.”

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“These buildings aren’t made for apartments. There’s a lot of reconstruction involved, a lot of money thrown here or there.”

Malia Edney, 22, a Bushwick resident who works in film, said she doesn’t spend time in Midtown if she can help it.

Would she ever consider moving to Midtown? “Definitely not.” she laughed as she stood in a Bryant Park holiday market booth. “I feel like it would be so expensive. Even if they changed office buildings, it would be luxury apartments.”

Monique S., 41, the restaurant host who lives in Uptown Manhattan, is receptive to more open space for pedestrians. “That’s something different and exciting and refreshing, you know? Help to get people out, keep people together.”

But a residential neighborhood? She likes that the city’s main commercial hub is separate from the rest of the city.

“You have a designated spot for business, and then you’re going to mix the residential with the business? I like the separateness, to be honest,” she said. “When you come over here, you know what this is. You know what you’re getting into. You know what it’s about, you know what all the traffic is about. You start adding the two together and mixing it up?

“I don’t know, I think it’ll be a clusterf**k of craziness, even more than what it already is.”