An E-Bike Charging Hub Near City Hall Gets Thumbs Down from CB 1

An e-bike charging hub slated to replace an abandoned newsstand outside City Hall was rejected by Manhattan Community Board 1 on March 26, in an advisory vote that will not brake the federally funded project.

The charging hub pilot will allow e-bike users to safely drop off and charge their batteries for up to six hours for a full recharge. The planned facility will also include a rest stop for delivery workers for bike tune-ups and an information booth, staffed by the Brooklyn-based Workers Justice Project, ready to inform them about their rights on the job.

The defunct newsstand, located on Broadway outside the City Hall Park fence, is owned by the Department of Parks and Recreation.

The resolution approved by CB1 opposed the kiosk as too modern for the landmarked City Hall area, as well as potentially complicating crowd control outside the gates, where pedestrians and demonstrators often mass.

“This does not mean we don’t support them, or that we don’t want to find another location,” said board chair Tammy Meltzer before the vote. “This means that this site, and this location and this style is not what we’re approving.”

Several speakers, including delivery workers and representatives for elected officials and the parks department, had asked the board to support the project.

“We organized to make this job safer, and we need space to recharge our batteries and getting connected with essential information on the road,” said delivery worker Armando Grajales in prepared remarks to the board on Tuesday. “The Deliverista hub is necessary for many of us.”

While the city can build the hub as of right, the community board’s advisory vote is a strong indicator of local sentiment.

Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers Justice Project, said in a statement after the vote that the organization looks forward “to strategically and thoughtfully working together from start to finish to prioritize and meet the needs of the community.”

The public charging kiosk is intended to spare e-bike users from the fire risk in charging their devices at home. The project would be a game-changer for deliveristas in lower Manhattan, where the nearest bike repair shop is roughly a mile away in Chinatown, said Los Deliveristas Unidos founder and delivery worker Sergio Ajche.

“This hub would be a great help for those of us working in the area,” Ajche said in an interview last week. “It would be a great benefit to us, especially as the Financial District bounces back to life after it was desolate during the pandemic.”

“It would really be a dream come true,” added Ajche.

The kiosk is slated to include five charging cabinets, each with 10 charging cubbies, that would collectively charge up to 45 batteries at a time. Two of the five cabinets will be available 24-hours a day. E-bike riders can drop off their battery and track its progress via a mobile app, which will also unlock the cubby once the battery is ready for pickup.

Fantástica, the Brooklyn-based urban design firm tapped with designing the newsstand hub, presented its proposal to the board’s Landmarks & Preservation committee on March 14, to mixed reception from members, said committee chair Jason Friedman.

The site is in a landmarked area, though the newsstand itself — a replica installed in the 1980s — is not a landmark.

“If someone had designed something that blended in more I think, as a committee, we really wouldn’t have the right to turn it down for it’s not being contextual,” said Friedman, who added that he believed the charging kiosk would be better situated in a “less central location.”

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The Parks Department will present its proposal to the Landmarks Preservation Commission in April.

The pilot project, which is backed by nearly $1 million in federal infrastructure dollars secured by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, is a cornerstone project of Los Deliveristas Unidos, who first conceived the project nearly three years ago. A Schumer representative urged CB1 members at the meeting to approve the project in order to “make delivery workers’ lives better.”

Fires caused by lithium-ion batteries have surged in recent years, from 30 in 2019, to 268 in 2023, when 18 New Yorkers died in blazes caused by exploding batteries, according to the FDNY. There have been more than 30 fires attributed to lithium-ion batteries so far in 2024, including a Feb. 23 blaze in Harlem that killed journalist Fazil Khan and injured 22 others.

A network of public, open-air charging hubs, said Guallpa, could steer workers to a resource “that is safe, that has been tested, and has been vetted by every agency possible.”

The city Department of Parks and Recreation is meanwhile rolling ahead to open another federally funded charging hub at a disused newsstand at 72nd Street and Broadway on the Upper West Side, despite opposition from the local community board and block associations. An online petition calling for the city to consider a different location for the hub had gathered more than 1,800 signatures as of Tuesday night.

As the newsstand project nears almost two years in development, private entrepreneurs from Chick-fil-A to Grubhub and e-bike rental start-up JOCO stepped in with their own pop-up efforts. The city Department of Transportation in collaboration with Popwheels, a battery-swap company, also debuted an outdoor charging cabinet in Cooper Square earlier this month as part of a six-month pilot.