Long-sought stop sign brings sigh of relief to parents and students at PS 7

For Richard Espinal, dropping off his two daughters at the Milton Fein School (P.S. 7) was like playing the video game Frogger, he said—having to jump across the lanes of a busy street and avoid being hit by a car.

“I felt like every time I would try to drop my child off, I was throwing them at risk,” Espinal, who is a vice president of the school’s parent teacher association, said. “You had cars commuting through… with all of this traffic [and] no stop sign here.”

Over a span of 40 years and the tenures of four previous principals, the school—which sits near the intersection of W. 232nd Street and Corlear Avenue—kept asking for stop signs, current principal Frank Patterson said. Signs were installed on W. 232nd Street, but not, until last week, on Corlear.

A gathering at the intersection on Jan. 11 to celebrate the new signs drew the school’s principal, parents and students, along with Councilman Andrew Cohen, Transportation Department official Nivardo Lopez and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz.

Debora Lopez, a fifth grader and the student council’s secretary, said drivers are often “impatient” and “don’t want to wait” for pedestrians to cross the street.

“Now that we have a stop sign, you can tell that cars are going to start stopping, and they’re going to wait for kids or adults to cross the street, and I feel very excited and happy,” Debora said.

Kamila Gonzalez, a fourth-grader and the student council president, concurred: “I think the stop signs are a great way to keep kids safe and that parents would be more free and more trusting for their kids to let them walk by themselves. I think that cars will finally stop.”

Obeed Zarate, a fourth-grader, said he was “almost” hit by a car while walking home from school last fall, but that now the stop signs make him feel safer.

Espinal’s daughters Viana and Noelia also said they now feel safe.

“You can look around, and if there are no cars, you can cross,” Noelia, a first grader, said.

Before the four-way stop signs were installed, the principal and an assistant principal stood on the Corlear Avenue side of the school to assist with morning arrivals and afternoon dismissals, Patterson said.

But while “the stop sign is crucial,” he said, problems remain: “My biggest thought is that we really need a crossing guard and we’re hoping that the NYPD helps us with that. They have put people here intermittently, but nothing has been full-time,” Patterson said.

“A crossing guard does more than cross children,” he said. “It’s also sort of a warning to drivers that there might be a child crossing and everyone slows down just a little bit and it makes a big difference to our kids. Ninety percent of our kids enter through that door.”

Dinowitz, whose office is near the school, said “given the number of kids in the area, the heavy traffic in the area—during certain times of the day—It was a no-brainer that we should have a four-way stop.”

“I drop by at this intersection very, very frequently and I could see first-hand and it was a dangerous intersection,” he said.

Cohen said he worked with the Transportation Department commissioner to show that the area needed some type of improvement and that previous traffic studies did not accurately reflect the level of potential danger in the area.

“It really did make sense to have four-way stop here, and I think that DOT was able to design the study in a way that we would warrant a stop sign,” he said.

Espinal no longer feels like he has to keep playing Frogger now that the four-way signs have been installed.

“It seems like such a minor thing and it shouldn’t be so hard to get,” he said, adding: “I would hope that this is just the beginning of more improvements that we can make in this intersection and [make] the whole school area safer for our students and parents and everyone else who commutes and travels through here.”

“I hope that things will slow down a little bit,” Espinal said. “It will be a little bit more controllable. That anxiety every morning of getting them out and dropping them off will be reduced.”