Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Upper East Siders Battle Newspaper Boxes

By Amy Zimmer | March 29, 2011 3:16pm

By Amy Zimmer

DNAinfo News Editor

UPPER EAST SIDE — Neighborhood residents are launching an attack against grimy newspaper boxes cluttering their sidewalks.

"They're used as garbage receptacles. They're not maintained. They're covered with stickers and graffiti. They're often located near bus stops and subway entrances," said Hunter Armstrong, executive director of Civitas, a 30-year-old East Side civic group leading the latest push to clean up the boxes.

Armstrong singled out blue metal A-1 News boxes as the No. 1 offender. He claimed his group counted 12 abandoned boxes between East 57th and East 96th streets belonging to the mysterious publication, and has never seen a newspaper in any of the boxes for nearly two years.

"It's unclear to us why these boxes are still in the public realm if they've never had any publications," Armstrong said. "They're being used as anything but a receptacle for publications."

The Department of Transportation told DNAinfo it plans to address the community's concerns about the A-1 boxes and remove them this week — but the Civitas campaign covers more than this one company.

The organization, which has been focused on this issue for nearly a decade, wants the City Council to hold a hearing on the boxes, and has been trying to build grassroots momentum by taking its Power Point presentation to community board's, starting with the Upper East Side's CB8 on April 6.

A website for A-1 News has a few articles on it from April 2009. There's no section describing the company or giving any contact information, but there was a phone number listed to the registrant of the domain name.

"It's a newspaper, like any newspaper," said a woman who answered the phone and said she did distribution for the roughly 32-page monthly publication with a circulation of 15,000 – 20,000. She only gave her first name, Mary, saying, "that's enough for you."

When asked about the empty boxes, she said, "I'll check it out."

She didn't know how many boxes the paper had on the streets, saying, "I don't have the list. I have maybe 2,000 boxes, but some are in storage."

A DOT spokesman said his agency was aware about the complaints against the A-1 boxes "and had already established a plan for their removal, which will begin this week."

Rita Hirsch, a board member for Civitas, said part of the problem was the haphazard nature of where various news boxes are placed. "The publishers don't even know where their own boxes are because they get moved around," she said.

Hirsch was envious of the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District's push to replace the hodgepodge of newsracks with well-designed multiracks.

"But the boxes didn't disappear," she said. "They moved to First, Second, Third avenues" — areas with no BID overseeing the streetscape, she noted. "We are inundated with boxes."

She wished the city would create a uniform design for the boxes. "We want order. There's such chaos," Hirsch said.

Since 2004, the Department of Transportation has only required news box owners to certify every four months "that each newsrack under his or her ownership or control has been repainted, or that best efforts have been made to remove graffiti and other unauthorized writing, painting, drawing, or other markings or inscriptions at least once during the immediately preceding four month period."

The self-certification process was a response to newspaper publishers' complaints about being "twice victimized" when their boxes were vandalized — they'd have broken boxes and have to pay fines — explained City Councilman Dan Garodnick.

But it "doesn't have much teeth," said Garodnick, who supports Civitas' efforts and also called for a Council hearing. "The question is whether we've gone to far in the other direction."

He added: "In a city like New York, every inch of sidewalk space is valuable, and we need rules that are clear and enforceable and also fair."

Civitas will make a presentation about newsracks at Community Board 8 on Weds, Apr. 6, 6:30 p.m., New York Blood Center, Conference Room 1, 310 East 67th St.