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52 MARCH | APRIL 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Street Fighter “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz is an icon in New York’s century-long war with trafﬁ c. Can his ﬁ nal campaign reshape the city’s transportation future? BY TREY POPP 53 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2016 PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 201653 half past nine on a Friday high up on poles to discourage theft, but ernment agency—at any level of govern- morning and the Henry nonetheless became coveted collector’s ment—has long puzzled many New Yorkers. It’s Hudson Parkway is wide items virtually from their debut.) And for good reason: Schwartz made them open when Sam Schwartz GCE’70 receives Indeed, a cheeky obituarist might be up. (The proximity of many of these signs his first GPS instruction. We’re speeding tempted to tell Schwartz’s life story entire- to FBI, DEA, and Secret Service offices north out of Manhattan. Upper West Side ly through traffic signs. One of his per- provides a clue about whose identities he brickwork flickers through the bare- sonal favorites adorns the Carroll Street was helping to conceal.) branched plane trees lining Riverside Park. Bridge, one of four remaining retractable Which is not to say that he reigned by In two miles, intones the halting yet serene- bridges in the United States, whose sliding catering to the mighty. The finest mo- ly unflappable voice of Default Female, wooden deck spans the Gowanus Canal in ment of his scrappy civil-service career bear right … onto I … Ninety-Five … North. Brooklyn. After orchestrating its restora- came when a hundred-odd countries de- Schwartz pauses mid-sentence and cocks tion in the late 1980s—against the will of clared war against his towing fleet, which his head slightly. “I don’t like the way she’s city budget honchos who wanted to tear it Schwartz had sicced on diplomats who’d going,” he says, in a mild Brooklyn accent. down and build a modern replacement collectively dodged tens of millions of “I’m going to go a different way.” with federal money—Schwartz hung a plac- dollars of illegal-parking fines under the New York may be bumper-to-bumper ard reading: “ORDINANCE of the City | Any shield of diplomatic immunity. Like a with drivers who know better than their Person Driving over this Bridge Faster grade-school miscreant sent to the prin- GPS Sherpas, but Schwartz has a special than a Walk will be Subject to a Penalty of cipal’s office, he was summoned to the claim to mastery, so we shoot past the Five Dollars For Each Offense.” United Nations. George Washington Bridge. And glide In 1984, as traffic commissioner, Schwartz “I’m told it was the best session of the along. Fort Lee slips by on the opposite had lines painted and signs posted around General Assembly countries—not an bank—you can still buy “I Survived Brooklyn’s Park Circle rotary—one of the empty seat in the place,” he reminisced Bridgegate” T-shirts commemorating the borough’s busiest intersections—desig- as we drove. “The Israelis and Arabs were traffic scandal that kneecapped Governor nating a horse crossing, to help the ani- pouring coffee for each another. Iran and Chris Christie—replaced by swiftly scroll- mals access Prospect Park trails from a Iraq were unified against me. I felt I had ing views of the Hudson River Palisades. nearby stable. “It’s about time,” he told brought peace to the world.” The State Everything’s moving smoothly when we The New York Times. ‘‘After all, horses Department felt otherwise—especially hit toll-plaza signs flashing warnings of were here way before cars.’’ once other countries retaliated in an impending gridlock. That rhetoric matched his record—and it outbreak of parking-privilege brinkman- Yet it doesn’t materialize—at least suffuses Street Smart, which begins with ship. It quashed Schwartz’s hometown nowhere in our path—and for a minute I an impassioned ode to the history of public crusade in favor of global détente. curse my luck. Traffic jams are not my roads that laments their 20th-century Even after David Dinkins’ rise to the idea of fun, but how many times do you domination by private automobiles. Four mayoralty ended Schwartz’s government get to battle gridlock alongside the man years before the horsewalk, Schwartz had career in 1990, he continued to fight traf- who coined the term? built curb-protected bicycle lanes on the fic. Through his consultancy, he advises Schwartz, a fleet-minded Brooklyn native avenues linking Central Park to Washington cities all over the world on transportation creeping up on 70 years of almost unrea- Square. Today, urban planners have a catch- strategy. He started a traffic column for sonable devotion to New York, is better phrase for this ethos: “Complete Streets”— the New York Daily News, which he still known as Gridlock Sam. The word first and Broadway Avenue has become an exem- writes. “William Safire, Thomas Friedman, appeared in print in a 1980 memo he plar. When Schwartz tried it, it was too far and E.R. Shipp are all fine as they go, but authored as the city’s chief traffic engineer, ahead of its time to last. for my money, the best newspaper col- and though he has tried to share credit Yet he could be equally creative in his umnist in New York is Gridlock Sam,” with a reluctant colleague, the coinage has efforts to improve life for drivers. (Which, asserted New York magazine’s Richard clung stubbornly to him ever since. of course, was the point of cracking down Turner in the mid-1990s. “I read it every “I’m pretty sure that the first line in on parking scofflaws, whose lane-blocking day, and I don’t even drive.” my obituary is going to mention it,” he ways exasperated hundreds of people “Perusing his column is a way to structure writes in his new book, Street Smart: The behind them.) Befitting a bureaucrat who your life, to achieve dominance over the Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars, which boasts of committing “low-level sabotage” city,” Turner mused. “With the counsel of splits the difference between memoir during his peonage in the Traffic Depart- Gridlock Sam, one can map out the day like and urban-transportation manifesto. ment—“I would widen a sidewalk to a Napoleon planning the Russian campaign.” That’s a fair bet. But it will leave plen- decent size here. Eliminate a parking lane It’s a telling comparison—as though a ty of nuggets jostling for the second line. there”—Schwartz’s street-sign oeuvre occa- driver’s best hope when battling New York Ever wonder about those Manhattan sionally had a cloak-and-dagger side. To traffic was momentary triumph on the street signs warning DON’T EVEN THINK this day, some Manhattan curbs are post- way to a catastrophe of empire-crippling OF PARKING HERE? Schwartz’s idea. ed with No Standing signs whose exemp- proportions. The irony of Schwartz’s nick- Same goes for their Koch-era cousins: NO tion for “authorized vehicles” is governed name, of course, is that gridlock is pre- PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING, by the cryptic initials AWM. The fact that cisely what he has spent his entire profes- NO KIDDING. (Both were deployed extra those letters fail to correspond to any gov- sional life trying to eliminate. 54 MARCH | APRIL 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE amuel I. Schwartz was born in 1947, the youngest of four children sar- Sdined into a kitchen-and-two-bed- room apartment in Brooklyn’s rough-and- tumble Brownsville section. His parents were Polish immigrants. When Sam was four years old, they moved across the borough to Bensonhurst, where his father ran a small grocery. Insofar as they were trading up, it was for the “orderly vio- lence” of a mob-controlled neighborhood. “People did not mug old women in Bensonhurst,” as Schwartz puts it. But gangs of kids clashed with chains and zip guns until some of them graduated to the ranks of organized-crime groups that otherwise enforced a fearful peace. It was the sort of neighborhood whose grittiness, to a kid who mastered it, instilled enduring devotion. Sam worked at his father’s store, played stickball on 83rd Street, and worshipped the Brooklyn Dodgers. His oldest brother, Brian, tells a story about the time he and Times Square traffic, then and now. Which brings us to what may be the most prized traffic sign in his personal collection. At a glance, it doesn’t seem that re- markable: RED ZONE | NO CARS 11AM-4PM MON THRU FRI. But the zone in question, which he helped to outline in the early 1970s under Mayor John Lindsay, was to have covered some 120 blocks in Midtown Manhattan. The project got far enough along that signs were manufactured, but “just weeks away” from planting them, as Schwartz tells it, “the mayor got cold feet.” (Later, Schwartz worked on another plan Lindsay championed: convert- ing Times Square into a pedestrian plaza. It failed to gain traction amid public opinion typified by a 1977 New York Times editorial that deemed the creation feurs expected to benefit, and plow a his two younger brothers went to Ebbets of “a nice pimp and prostitute prome- projected $1.5 billion in annual revenues Field on “Meet the Dodgers” day in 1956. nade” a poor trade for subjecting auto- into boosting mass transit services and “We were able to buy box seats on the mobiles to “certain chaos.”) improving roads and bridges.

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