Maiden Lane gets a few plants, art to follow

The Downtown Alliance has been able put up 20 plants on scaffolding and is trying to get permission from more Maiden Lane property owners.

By Jennifer Milne

The revitalization of Downtown’s Maiden Lane may be well underway, but it’s not close to being finished. On a walk down the street Friday evening, there were trash bags piled on the sidewalk in several locations and soapy water running down the pavement. Construction workers had left for the day, so the sounds of jackhammering and trucks reversing were held at bay — until Monday, at least.
“You can’t escape the noise down here, unless you go close the door and hide in the bathroom,” said Pam Chmiel, the owner of Klatch Coffee Shop at 9 Maiden Lane. “You have to keep doors closed with drilling and jackhammering, and even with the doors closed, you’re literally screaming trying to take orders at the counter.”

Chmiel is one of many business owners along Maiden Lane that the Downtown Alliance is trying to help by putting up signs and hanging planters to indicate that Maiden Lane is “open for business.”
“Maiden Lane is open and it’s accessible,” said Bruce Brodoff, spokesperson for the Downtown Alliance, which runs Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district. “We have an art project in Lower Manhattan [to decorate the street], and a couple of the artists have been selected.”

Thus far, Maiden Lane has received about 20 hanging fake plants at the northwest corner of the street, and only on one piece of scaffolding. Brodoff said the plants are on the first pieces of scaffolding to go up, and that the Downtown Alliance was unable to get permission from the property owners of the other scaffold-covered sites to put more plants up.

“The Alliance wanted to put as many plants up as we possibly could,” Brodoff said.

The Alliance’s efforts are appreciated, Chmiel said, but she also took matters into her own hands and hung multiple colored paper lanterns in front of her shop.

“I love the Downtown Alliance and I feel that they really have good intentions and want to try and do things,” Chmiel said. “I feel like a lot of times their hands are tied with trying to push things through with all the government’s red tape.”

Chmiel said with the never-ending construction projects on the street, the city needed to do a very large-scale project to attract the same level of business Maiden Lane enjoyed before it was shrouded in scaffolding.

“We need something that’s going to make a really big statement,” Chmiel said. “Supposedly Christo brought so much revenue to the city [with the 2005 installation of “The Gates” in Central Park]. That’s the scale they need to go to. I think they could decorate these things easily at little cost.”

The Downtown Alliance said it expects to announce the artists that will participate in decorating the scaffolding and other construction elements in the next week or two.