Rendering of the first-ever Open Street gate. Photo by Open Plans/Project for Public Spaces
For years, keeping cars off a school street in this city has meant the same low-tech routine: somebody drags a metal barricade into the roadway in the morning, drags it back at dismissal, and does it again tomorrow. The hardware is free. The labor is not — it falls to volunteers and to school staff, over and over, every school day.
One block downtown is about to stop doing it that way. The city’s transportation department will install New York’s first permanent gate on a school Open Street this month — a swing-arm barrier across the mouth of Clarkson Street, borrowed more or less directly from Paris. The Mayor’s Office announced the project this week as part of a citywide back-to-school package, alongside hundreds of new 15 mph school zones and street redesigns near more than 300 schools.
The gate is going up at the Hudson Street end of Clarkson, outside City-As-School, a progressive public high school that has been operating since 1972, Streetsblog reported. During Open Street hours — school days, 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. — it blocks drivers from turning left off Hudson onto the block. It swings open for emergency vehicles, and otherwise it stays put, which is the whole point.
The model is the rue aux écoles, the gated school street Paris has been building out for years. The city is treating Clarkson as a pilot, with an eye toward putting gates on other Open Streets if it works.
The gate arrives as part of a broader redesign of Clarkson between Hudson and Varick streets, done in partnership with City-As-School, M.S. 721 and the advocacy group Open Plans. The City says that work will add public seating, expand the space for people on foot, make the crossings safer, improve visibility and slow drivers down. One of the new seating installations will include space for students to garden.
“Every student deserves to feel safe when they make their way to school, and every parent deserves the same peace of mind,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in the announcement.
Council Member Carl Wilson, who described the gate as arriving “to our community,” called it part of a package — wider sidewalks, new seating, safer crossings — that “put kids first.” Assemblymember Deborah Glick tied it to the city’s broader school-zone speed work, saying the combination “will help keep students, families, school staff and surrounding communities safer.”
Sabina Sethi Unni, a community planner at Open Plans — which shares a parent company with Streetsblog — said the block “will be a model for schools across the entire city,” and argued that permanent hardware does something barricades can’t: it takes the staffing burden off the school. The gate and its installation are funded through a Project for Public Spaces placemaking grant, which is supported by General Motors.
Darius Nazario, who directs the Beacon program at City-As-School, put it in terms of the students who pushed for it. “The school street extends beyond the corners of Varick and Houston,” he said. “This shows our students what their voices can really do.”
Clarkson is one of 77 school Open Streets running citywide this school year — up from 69 earlier in 2026, per Streetsblog, an increase that still leaves New York far behind its peers. Paris, with a quarter of the population, has about 200 school streets. London, roughly New York’s size, has at least 800.
