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A Parade for Everyone? Depends on Where You’re Standing By CLYDE HABERMAN Wait till next year. Those were the closing words of a post-Thanksgiving NYC column a year ago. Now 12 months have passed. Somehow, next year looks an awful lot like last year. The issue is the annual Macy’s parade and the police barricading of one gilded stretch of the Upper West Side: West 61st Street between Broadway and Central Park West. Dominating the south side of that street is the Trump International Hotel and Tower, where the simplest room on Thursday went for $797.51, taxes included. On the north side sits 15 Central Park West, where penthouses have sold for as much as $45 million. As you know, thousands of parents and their children flood that part of town every Thanksgiving to watch the parade. Thursday’s early birds enjoyed prime views along Central Park West. Later arrivals had to settle for cramming into side streets in the West 60s and 70s to glimpse Buzz Lightyear, Spider-Man and their balloon buddies. No street was off-limits to them, except one. You got it: 61st Street. Police officers stood behind barriers at the Broadway end of that street. But they did not seem to be the true guardians. In a Thanksgiving equivalent of a hot club’s rope line, concierges from the Trump hotel and doormen from 15 Central Park West were at the barricades holding lists of approved people. If your name was on the lists, you could pass. If not, forget it, pal. TO hundreds of people turned away, it appeared that a public street had in effect been privatized for the extremely wealthy and their guests. As much as we smile at a proverb quoted in “The Philadelphia Story” — “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience” — a New York street is not “the private preserve” of anyone. So said a Police Department spokesman after the situation was brought to his attention. That was last year. On Thursday, we went back to 61st Street to see if procedures had changed. They hadn’t. There stood the same concierges and doormen with their lists and their rejections. If anything, frustration levels seemed higher than a year ago. Many people had tickets for grandstands set up on the east side of Central Park West. They had been led to believe that they could reach the stands by way of 61st Street. Instead, the police instructed them to go to 59th Street, or else trudge up Broadway to 72nd Street. But those who obediently walked to 59th were then ordered by officers stationed there to head back to 61st. As an added complication, even as many ticket holders were turned away at 61st Street, others with similar tickets were inexplicably allowed to enter. Eventually, that glitch was resolved, with all ticket holders getting through. But not before some people vented their ire at the police. That led to an exasperated outburst from one officer. “I understand you’re frustrated,” she said. “So are we. We don’t know what’s going on.” That last line sounded tiresomely familiar to someone who has watched the police in action at parades and large political demonstrations across many years. Orders from on high often do not filter down — not clearly, anyway — to officers at the barricades. That’s why you wind up with situations like that needless Ping-Pong of people between 59th and 61st Streets — and with an all-too-predictable rise in tensions. In fact, what went on may not have been all that complicated. Unexplained to paradegoers, both last year and this, was a police decision to declare that portion of 61st Street a “frozen zone.” “That street is a command post for us,” said Assistant Chief William T. Morris, the Manhattan North borough commander. A side street has to be kept open for emergencies, and 61st Street ably serves that purpose, he said. The concierges and doormen are there simply to give an O.K. to people who must get to the hotel or 15 Central Park West. “They’re not controlling the street,” Chief Morris said. “We, the police, are.” But he added, “I understand the perspective” of those who felt that a public street had been made the preserve of a privileged few. “I think it’s a perception issue,” he said. At the very least it is that. But let’s look on the bright side. Last year, a police sergeant said that the street was blocked off as a counterterrorism measure, and that the doorman was indeed a counterterror agent. Mercifully, no one repeated that dubious logic this time around. E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

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