Two of New York City’s most heavily trafficked streets were turned into public classrooms and stages for this day in 1970.

On the first Earth Day fifty-five years ago, an estimated 20 million people—nearly 10% of the U.S. population at the time—took to the streets for the sake of the planet.

The date we now recognize as Earth Day, April 22, was originally part of a week-long lineup of organized teach-ins, concerts, rallies, and remarks. Over 35,000 people spoke at Earth Day events—including artists, urban planning professionals, high school students, Congress members, and union workers. 1,500 colleges, 10,000 schools, and thousands of local groups participated, occupying parks, college campuses, sidewalks, and streets for environmental education and activism. 

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who first proposed the idea of Earth Day, knew the movement's success would rely on keeping it decentralized. One of the original organizers, Arturo Sandoval, later recalled being told by Senator Nelson, “Don’t look to the national organizations to tell you how to do it—just go do it.” Young people like Sandoval, a recent college graduate, powered the movement both in participation and organization. The oldest staffer on the first Earth Day team was just 28. 

In New York City, Earth Day organizers successfully closed down Fifth Avenue from 59th to 14th Street, turning one of the busiest stretches in Manhattan into a pedestrian zone for protests, performances, and teach-ins.

For two hours in the middle of the day, Fifth Avenue’s usual chaos of car horns and congestion was replaced by pedestrian activity. Girl Scouts handed out flowers, the Horticultural Society paraded a tree, Rockefeller Center hosted a children's art show, and the Voices of East Harlem performed outside the New York Public Library, where writers such as Kurt Vonnegut made remarks.

Union Square, closed-off to traffic for 12 hours, became an outdoor classroom on everything from the dangers of lead paint, to pest control, to population growth and pollution. About 100 booths drew a crowd of more than 100,000 throughout the day.

The impact of shutting down car traffic was immediately measurable–that day, the carbon monoxide levels in Union Square dropped from 13 parts per million to just 2. 

Policy changes also followed. New York signed an anti-pollution bill, and New Jersey established its own EPA. “The Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972—these big national victories created a sense of real achievement as the national environmental organizations evolved and became more sophisticated,” Sandoval later reflected. 

Decades later, the Design Trust continues to influence city policy on sustainability practices as one of our core areas of impact. In addition to influencing Local Law 86 and PlaNYC, we have developed multiple publications on sustainable design guidelines, produced a data collection toolkit for urban agriculture, and are working to activate community-designed green space at NYCHA public housing developments, as well as tackling the regulatory barriers that are severely limiting New York organizations’ ability to activate and use public spaces for community programming.

On the first Earth Day, two of New York City’s busiest streets were closed to cars and occupied by pedestrians, with the purpose of making environmental concerns impossible to ignore. Fifty-five years later, the tradition continues through citywide programs like Open Streets, temporarily turning space for car travel into places of gathering and community building. The return of Open Streets season kicks off this weekend, with the Department of Transportation’s 9th annual Car-Free Earth Day celebration. There’s also plenty of other ways to celebrate Earth Day throughout the week leading up to the weekend’s Car-Free events.

Happy Earth Day! However you choose to celebrate, anything you do in public space is taking part in a long tradition of civic expression and collective empowerment. Here’s to the next fifty-five years of activating public space in pursuit of an environmentally healthy and sustainable future.

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Sources:

Mann, Meredith. “Informed Archives: The Environmental Action Coalition and the Birth of Earth Day.” NYPL Blog, 20 Apr. 2017. New York Public Library,https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/04/20/informed-archives-environmental. 

Rome, Adam. “The Genius of Earth Day.” Environmental History, vol. 15, no. 2, 2010, pp. 194–205. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20749669. 

Smith, Ali. “Kurt Vonnegut Revisits Earth for Earth Day.” The Village Voice, 4 Apr. 2022. https://www.villagevoice.com/kurt-vonnegut-revisits-earth-for-earth-day/

Trust for Public Land. “For Earth Month, a Return to the Roots of the Environmental Movement.” Trust for Public Land blog, 19 Apr. 2019. https://www.tpl.org/blog/earth-day-arturo-sandoval