Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a proposed 5G tower that has drawn fire from some Upper East Siders.
How crowded is it where Madison Avenue meets East 86th Street?
“This intersection hosts six bus stops,” said Mary Ellen Bianco, who has lived in a building on one of its corners for 40 years. “We’ve got a falafel guy and a coffee guy. We’ve got street furniture. The free newsletter distributors have a big installation, and there’s a Chase bank with an A.T.M.”
That is more than enough, she said. A proposed 5G tower for the LinkNYC program would add to the clutter — and bring an industrial look to a neighborhood of prewar buildings. “You could do no worse than to go to the Jetsons for inspiration, and it looks like that is what they did,” Bianco said, calling the proposed tower “ugly.”
Neighborhood groups on the Upper East Side are waging an 11th-hour campaign against the tower. One group, Friends of the Upper East Side, is circulating a petition that says that the tower will “clash with the special character” of Madison Avenue and that it will be “redundant” because there is a Wi-Fi kiosk across the from the site.
The opponents’ efforts took on new urgency after the New York State Historic Preservation Office said last month that the tower posed “no adverse effect” on the neighborhood. But the preservation office strongly recommended “mitigating the height, bulk and appearance of the tower through design changes,” a spokesman said. The office suggested “a ‘wrap’ in a darker color” instead of silver at the top.
Several officials — including Representative Jerrold Nadler and the Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, who are Democrats — wrote to the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, urging the city to find another location for the tower.
They mentioned a lamppost in the same block of Madison Avenue that 5G infrastructure “could potentially be placed atop.” They said that 5G equipment had been mounted on lampposts in other neighborhoods and that putting the setup on a lamppost “would be welcome here.”
The Office of Technology and Innovation, which has the power to give final approval for the tower, says it is evaluating feedback about the site.
5G towers have been appearing around the city since 2022 as part of an effort to upgrade wireless service. More than 150 have already been installed. CityBridge, a consortium of telecommunications companies that owns and operates the LinkNYC program, has an agreement with the city to install 2,000 towers over the next several years. The towers, along with fiber cables underground, will provide the infrastructure for carriers like AT&T and Verizon.
LinkNYC also operates Wi-Fi kiosks on city streets. It says that the kiosks have become “an icon of New York City’s streetscape” and that last year its network provided more than 205 million Wi-Fi connections. It handled 760,000 Wi-Fi sessions and more than 13,000 calls when AT&T’s wireless service was out for more than 12 hours on Feb. 22, 2024.
Under the city’s agreement with CityBridge, most of the 5G towers are to be concentrated in underserved neighborhoods to eliminate “internet deserts.” Opponents like Bianco say that the Upper East Side is anything but that: “This is not only not a desert — it’s a flood plain for 5G service,” she said.
LinkNYC says that the towers are for the future and that the demand for service is already pushing existing infrastructure close to its limits. Its network needs to be built out in a way that provides access to neighborhoods that don’t have it, the company said — and that means using locations like Madison Avenue and East 86th Street, even though LinkNYC says the signal from the 5G towers travels only several hundred feet.
Another Upper East Side group, Carnegie Hill Neighbors, has urged that the proposal be withdrawn, calling the location in front of 1150 Madison Avenue “wholly and completely unnecessary to meet the city’s laudable concerns about bridging the digital divide.”
Matthew Bauer, the president of the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District, said that there was a “united neighborhood feeling” and that the proposed towers would be “harmful to the streetscape.”
“It will stand out like a sore thumb,” he said. “There have to be other ways to deliver 5G service.”
Rick Mason, the executive director of management at the Brodsky Organization, which owns the building next to the site of the proposed tower, said the design “is not compatible with our neighborhood’s character.”
But Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, an influential consortium of corporations and business leaders, said objections to the tower would prove fleeting.
People in the neighborhood “won’t notice after a week,” she said, mentioning the gantries that were put up for congestion pricing. She said they had already faded into the background like streetlights and other elements of the cityscape.
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Expect rain and gusty breezes up to 25 miles per hour with temperatures in the mid-50s. At night, rain will continue and temperatures will drop to the mid-40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
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Tortoiseshell comb
Dear Diary:
I was on a bus going up Madison Avenue on a very slow weekday afternoon. We were averaging about a block per red light, and I had nothing to do but study the other passengers.
One thing that caught my eye was the back of the head of a woman sitting several seats in front of me. She had an elaborate upswept hairdo with a fancy tortoiseshell comb holding it in place.
I eventually summoned the nerve to approach her. I told her how pretty her comb was and asked where I could buy one.
Turning around, she said in a thick accent that she had gotten it in Argentina. After apologizing for bothering her, I returned to my seat.
A half-hour later, she passed me on her way to the exit door at the back of the bus.
Reaching up to her head, she whipped out the comb, and her long, auburn locks flowed down to her shoulders.
She dropped the comb in my lap, wished me a happy day and disappeared from my sight forever.
— Jill Newman Iversen
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.