{"id":798115,"date":"2026-05-15T11:58:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T11:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/798115\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T11:58:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T11:58:34","slug":"opinion-on-canal-street-i-just-dream-of-having-a-sidewalk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/798115\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: On Canal Street, I Just Dream Of Having A Sidewalk"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is every day on Broadway just south of Canal Street: police sirens cut through the normal chaos and people run chaotically across the street and through the intersections, dragging large laundry bins overflowing with handbags, tee-shirts and jewelry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"This vendor was one of the very few unlucky ones. Photo: Joseph Tedeschi<\/p>\n

On my most-recent visit, I watched two cops arrest a single street vendor. I asked one of the officers \u2014 name tag, Benedetto \u2014 why this man was being arrested when vendors on the other side of the street were not.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s only two of us,\u201d he said, looking around, \u201cand a lot of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and his partner left with their collar. Within moments, the sidewalk reset. Selling resumed. Business as usual.<\/p>\n

The sidewalks don\u2019t function<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a two-block radius around the Broadway and Canal intersection, sidewalks are routinely blocked by blankets covered in merchandise \u2014 handbags, t-shirts, watches \u2014 laid edge to edge. Vendors move goods in a coordinated system: vans and SUVs pull up, carts are loaded, inventory is distributed in waves. It is organized, constant, and massive.<\/p>\n

Some vendors are open about it. Others operate more discreetly, quietly showing prospective buyers glossy, high-color catalogues displaying handbags, sneakers and watches bearing the logos of luxury brands. When a customer agrees to buy, a runner disappears down the block and returns moments later carrying the item from a nearby van or truck. The parking lot at the corner of Lispenard and Broadway (and the abandoned building on the southwest corner of Broadway and Canal, which also benefits\u00a0from the cover of scaffolding) appears to serve as a kind of informal warehouse and dispatch center, with vehicles constantly arriving, unloading merchandise and redistributing inventory back onto the street.<\/p>\n

Canal Street no longer feels like a collection of isolated vendors. It feels like a fully functioning informal economy<\/a> \u2014 a parallel retail infrastructure operating just beneath the surface of the formal city.<\/p>\n

The scale is astonishing: thousands of items moving through a sidewalk ecosystem that seems at once improvised and highly coordinated. Watching it, one is left with the strange feeling that nobody but the vendors and the people who supply the illegal merchandise \u2014 not residents, not police, not City Hall \u2014 fully understands how this machine actually works.<\/p>\n

New York has always contained informal economies \u2014 think pushcarts, gray-market electronics stores, or unlicensed food vendors \u2014 but the counterfeit corridor on Canal has evolved into something unusually concentrated, visible and spatially dominant: not merely commerce occurring on sidewalks, but commerce overwhelming them.<\/p>\n

What could be one of the great pedestrian corridors of New York is instead a daily obstacle course.<\/p>\n

This is public space<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Or is it? Photo: Joseph Tedeschi<\/p>\n

It would be one thing if the current situation at least worked for one group of people, but it currently works for no one: Residents, workers, customers of local businesses, commuters, the elderly, parents with strollers, people with disabilities all must navigate an unwalkable sidewalk.<\/p>\n

The vendors themselves are forced to operate in a constant cycle of confiscation, dispersal, and return. Cops certainly can\u2019t love the fact that they perform the same futile folie-de-deux day after day. And let\u2019s not forget the customers seeking these counterfeit baubles. We may not like them, but their desire to buy cheap luxury knock-offs is the foundation of this entire crazy system.<\/p>\n

The failure of three consecutive mayors to balance these competing interests practically invites in an interventionist federal government; indeed, federal immigration authorities raided Canal Street late last year, adding a layer of fear and volatility \u2014 which was probably the point, but didn\u2019t solve the problem either (which may have also been the point).<\/p>\n

So what is to be done?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To figure out a path forward, we first must understand: Why is this happening on Canal? There are busy, tourist-rich commercial streets all over the city \u2014\u00a0West Broadway in Soho, Broadway between Times and Union squares, Main Street in DUMBO and in Flushing, the Hub in the Bronx \u2014\u00a0that have not similarly been commandeered by unlicensed vendors.<\/p>\n

Unlike those other areas, this is not only a political or enforcement issue, but a human and civic one, as well. So it\u2019s worth asking: Why not create a safe, regulated, temporary space for vendors to sell while a broader plan for Canal Street is developed and implemented?<\/p>\n

Advocacy groups and scholars have long pointed out that many of the people selling counterfeit goods on Canal are migrants operating in an economy that offers them few viable alternatives. As one recent essay in the Fordham Political Review<\/a> observed, the debate around Canal is often burdened with racial and class assumptions that flatten the human dimension of the situation. It is easy to speak abstractly about \u201cillegal vendors\u201d or \u201ccounterfeit markets.\u201d It\u2019s harder to confront the reality that many of the people caught in this cycle are simply trying to survive in one of the most-expensive cities in the world.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, there are discussions happening inside the Mamdani City Hall, the Department of Transportation, the MTA and the NYPD \u2014 as they have been happening for years. And DOT has shared a vision for a dramatic \u201cre-imagining\u201d of Canal Street that includes widened sidewalks, reduced pedestrian crowding, expanded public space and other pedestrian-first improvements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some locals fear that vision: unless the city simultaneously addresses the underlying vending ecosystem, wider sidewalks may simply become a larger stage for the same dysfunction. More space alone can act as a kind of induced demand \u2014 a siren song drawing even more vendors, more congestion and more pressure onto public space that is already failing to function as a sidewalk at all.<\/p>\n

So, clearly, this is not an easy problem. It involves enforcement, economic reality, coordination across agencies, and some the ability to consider the human toll of an exploited, mostly immigrant workforce just trying to make a buck.<\/p>\n

But \u201ccomplicated\u201d cannot be an excuse for inaction.<\/p>\n

What exists now is a failure of basic public space.<\/p>\n

Is a simple sidewalk too much to ask?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is every day on Broadway just south of Canal Street: police sirens cut through the normal chaos…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":798116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,31668,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-798115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-promoted","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116578479720954437","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/798116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}