New Upper West Side zoning aims to preserve, foster mom-and-pop shops

The City Council voted Thursday to approve the controversial re-zoning of the Upper West Side. The zoning revision will limit the size of Retail Stores On Broadway and Columbus and Amsterdam avenues, from 72nd to 110th Street on Broadway and Amsterdam, and from 72nd to 87th Street on Columbus, The New York Times reported.

Community boards in Tribeca, the East Village and Upper East Side are also weighing restricting storefronts in order to preserve mom-and-pop shops as well. But the planning department told the Times that “does not plan to reproduce the new rules elsewhere in the city.”

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The new zoning was approved 49 to 2.

“We cannot be successful as a neighborhood if it’s all banks, and that’s what it’s becoming,” Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who helped develop the new rules, told the Times. “We have to put a halt to it.” [NYT]