A New Kind Of Tower, In The Center Of Manhattan

From Manhattan’s Chinatown to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, New Yorkers are taking notice as LinkNYC 5G towers spring up on sidewalks, where an earlier iteration of the free Wi-Fi kiosks still dominates today. The latest versions are hard to miss, clocking in at an imposing 32 feet tall.

Supporters say the tall towers will be a boon to mobile connections across the city. But local community boards up and down Manhattan seem to be qustioning the need for them and balking at placing them on in their neighborhoods.

“The district is getting very little new benefit in exchange for a colossal new obstruction,” said E.J. Kalafarski, a member of the board’s Executive Committee and chair of the committee on transportation and the environment, on Thursday night.

CB5’s Parks and Public Spaces Committee convened over Zoom with representatives of the project to discuss plans to erect one of the LinkNYC 5G towers at 1335 Sixth Avenue, between West 53rd Street and West 54th Street, in the center of Manhattan. After over an hour of questions, comments and concerns, committee members voted unanimously in favor of a proposed moratorium on any new construction, to be reviewed again in the following week’s full-board meeting.

“I don’t see the need to rush into this,” said David Achelis, a member of the committee. “The need for 5G doesn’t seem to be so desperate.”

Nuts And Bolts

Launched over the summer, the initiative to expand 5G connectivity will prioritize “underserved areas throughout the five boroughs,” according to the mayor’s office. A total of 4,000 LinkNYC outposts will fill the city once the construction of 2,000 new 5G towers is complete, with 90% of the behemoths slated to appear in the outer boroughs and in Manhattan north of 96th Street.

“These new LinkNYC 5G kiosks are going to finally help to close the digital divide and expand and improve mobile technology coverage all over this city,” Mayor Eric Adams said in July, when the first new kiosk was unveiled in the Bronx. LinkNYC, run by CityBridge, is operated as a franchise agreement with the city and generates funding via advertising and sponsorships.

In some cases, boxes containing 5G technology are affixed to street light poles, making use of the city’s existing infrastructure. But those setups can’t hold as much gear as the freestanding LinkNYC towers, according to Robert Sokota, the president of CityBridge’s wireless division.

He explained that the height of the new towers is integral to the way that 5G technology operates; placing them on rooftops would create too much distance from users on the city’s streets, but the radios can’t be placed too close to people, either, per safety guidelines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The original LinkNYC kiosk program launched in 2015 to provide free calls, Wi-Fi and charging in an effort to replace pay phones. Those kiosks were a more modest “roughly human height” beast, standing at around nine feet tall, Kalafarski said.

Hitting Close To Home

Midtown, according to some CB5 members’ estimations, has perhaps the most robust tech connectivity in Manhattan, if not the city as a whole. It was for that reason that Kalafarski objected to the plan for a new 5G tower on Thursday. “No location in CB5 is appropriate or necessary,” he said.

Stacy Gardener, the senior director of external affairs at the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation, countered that there would only be a “limited number of sites in Manhattan that are very purposeful.”

“We all use cell phones, we all like having really fast service,” she said. But Sokota acknowledged that the site at 1335 Sixth Avenue, on its own, wouldn’t have a “significant” impact on 5G connectivity in the area.

Still, the location is a sentimental one: 50 years ago, it’s where the world’s first call from a cell phone was made. Now, along with the new 5G tower, there are plans to unveil a plaque commemorating the anniversary of the site’s historical significance.

The Bigger Picture

Sokota said on Thursday that he didn’t have a “master plan” detailing where other 5G towers would be implemented in the Manhattan district — which committee members decided prohibited them from forming any final decision in favor of or against the proposed Sixth Avenue location.

Since the rollout of the new towers, there have been reports of residents fearing for their health, with the 5G devices placed near apartment windows. On Thursday night, some CB5 members expressed concerns about surveillance and the tracking of personal data. Sokota said the kiosks don’t reveal any “knowledge of who is using the system at any given time,” rendering those who oversee it unable to provide information to law enforcement when requests pertaining to sought after users are made.

Others took issue with the design aesthetics of the towers, calling for less obtrusive integration with the streetscape or, conversely, a more artistic vision to make each outpost unique, “rather than just plop them down like they’re from Mars,” CB5 member Tod Shapiro said.

Even with lingering hesitation and dissatisfaction, committee member Barbara Spandorf acknowledged what seems to be an unavoidable truth: “This is our future.”