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[msarcher]

On Monday there was a shooting starting at Marcus Garvey Park and running up Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Six kids were shot in this spree and four more were injured in other incidents around the same time. It feels incongruous with the neighborhood as I've known it in the brief two years I've lived nearby. I've walked that street at night and gone

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

Too commercial, not residential enough.

You should be more careful. It's not like those shootings are really an aberration. 125th St is not actually all that safe - especially once it quiets down at night.

(Um, when you move north for the fall, you won't wander around at night, right? At least not more than strictly necessary? Because some of us will worry.)

[ccommack]

Second all of this. 125th St. is almost a 100% pure low-rise retail corridor, so when the autogates go down at 10:00p or midnight, then Ghod help you, because there are now zero eyes on the street. That's why a lot of people were in favor of the recent rezoning of 125th St. to allow way, way more height; re-architecting the neighborhood for denser commercial and residential use will do a lot to drive down the crime that's still endemic to that part of the neighborhood.

[msarcher]

125th is bad like that, but Lenox is not-- many of the buildings up that street have residential spaces on top. Lenox is one of those big broad avenues with trees in the middle, though which means that you don't really have cross street visibility/security. The space and sightlines are broken up without impeding the movement of groups of people that might want to sweep through.

[msarcher]

Where I'm moving to is really a semi-suburban, car-based community. There's considerably less point to wandering around at night. According to the crime stat's map there hasn't been anything in the immediate vicinity since January, an assault on the other side of the subway station (which is a 10min bus ride away) and a bank robbery to the north are the worst they've got. Looks considerably safer than our territory.

[aridice]

Listen to your spidey senses. Be safe.