How the Meatpacking District became NYC’s most walkable neighborhood

Jeffrey LeFrancois, executive director of the Meatpacking District Management Association, the neighborhood’s business improvement district, has a mantra about urban life. “If the city’s not changing, the city’s not healthy,” he says as he strolls down the 14th Street Promenade, the name for two pedestrianized blocks of the crosstown street that the BID inaugurated in June. Taking the place of parked cars are five curbside decks, each measuring around 18 feet wide and between 40 and...