Pedestrian walk in NYC? 'Hey, let's try it'

Apparently that was the attitude of New York's (DOT) Department of Transportation, a powerful entity in any state, when approached about turning this street into what you see above. According to Streetblog's Ethan Kent,

"They've created a destination for downtown office workers, for people from all over Brooklyn, to come and spend some time in a way they hadn't been able to before. They great thing about this is they just went ahead and did this. It wasn't a lot of studies. It wasn't a long plan. They just said, 'Hey, let's try it. Let's experiment, see if it's possible.'"

Check out the video here, on YouTube of course. There's a nice little crowdsourcing trend here of locals taking matters into their own hands to build the kinds of places they want to be in, the latest being the Meatpacking District's new public square.