Fifth Avenue is All on the East Side, City Says

via NYT/Marilynn K. Yee

Does everyone who has ever lived (or worked) in Manhattan have an East or West side bias? (We're East Side people, obviously.) As everyone knows, Fifth Avenue divides the two, but recently there was some debate about the specifics of the split area as you move north up Fifth to Central Park. Adjacent to the famed park are signs that conflict, with one side of the street belonging to the East and one to the West, and this did not please Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer. The Upper East Side was confused! But don't worry -- someone important made an executive decision.

The 50 blocks of Fifth Avenue bordering Central Park have been officially dubbed the East Side because "there are no intersections with the streets having the prefix 'West,'" according to Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC's transportation commissioner, as reported in the New York Times. The signs are incorrect, she said, and will be fixed by the end of the month.

"There was a real contradiction on the streets," said Stringer, in all seriousness. "It made sense to clarify what was west and what was east." A former transportation commissioner vehemently disagrees. But it's awesome that the people in charge of this city have fixed all of our other problems, so now they can focus on things like this.

For Fifth Avenue by the Park, 2 East Sides [NYT]