The Gates of New York Will Soon Pass

Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about how roll up gates - the solid kind that shop keepers roll down over their business fronts to protect them at night - will soon be illegal.  In their place, the city will allow the kind of see-through "cage" gates that are used on store fronts in malls across America.

I have been thinking about these store gates all day.  For one thing, I cannot imagine that they are really, truly necessary.  The New York Times article even calls them a legacy from New York's past, the bad old days of the 1970s when crime in New York City was at an astonishing nationwide high.  The article also cites looting concerns, as in the looting which was widespread throughout the city during the infamous blackout of 1977.

If you are a small business owner, security is a big concern for you.  And yet, these roll up garage door style shutters are really only endemic to New York City.  If they really worked, don't you think you would see them everywhere?  And yet I can only remember having seen them in New York.  Maybe they are more common in the worse neighborhoods of cities that I have visited, and I was just lucky not to have seen them - or did not visit those neighborhoods at night, when the gates were deployed.

I can understand why you would want to roll down a solid steel door over your business, particularly if you are a one person operation, and it is your sole livelihood.  It must feel very secure, to tuck your shop away inside its own fortress defense before leaving it for the night!  And yet, the end result is to lend your neighborhood a forbidding air after dark.  A shuttered store front treats every passer by like a criminal.  No, you can't look in after dark, you don't deserve that privilege!

And as the New York Times article points out, these solid shutters are often magnets for graffiti.  Even a clean, graffiti free shutter is simply an eyesore, reducing the street appeal of a neighborhood after dark.  And in an era of increasing urbanization, the look and feel of a neighborhood at night is important.  According to the "broken window theory" (which is still hotly disputed), if you shutter your business, you make it look like your neighborhood is a war zone or prison, and it will be treated as such by the people who live there.

I can also understand why a business owner would choose a shuttered gate over a security system.  After all, you only have to pay for a shutter once.  And a gate doesn't accidentally go off in the middle of the night, costing you a fine for a false alarm call.  (I once read a statistic that something like 4 out of every 5 alarm calls were false alarms.)

Replacing the shutters will be costly, and fortunately New York has given its business owners a long time before they have to make the switch.  I hope funds will be made available to help struggling businesses pay for the cost of a new gate, for those who decide to buy one.