For one weekend morning on 33rd Street, the Park Avenue Tunnel does something it is never legally supposed to do: it opens. Bikes and skateboards pour through its dim, echoing length while the rest of the city hums above them. Every summer for 18 years, New York has handed its biggest avenues back to the people, and what results is less an event and more a city-wide exhale.
What Summer Streets actually feels like from the pavement
Casey Neistat and his friend Jordan hit the closed avenues early, chasing what Jordan called ‘peak sun runs.’ The logistics of Summer Streets are simple in the best way: the city shuts down major arteries across all five boroughs for a handful of weekend days, and anyone on a bike, skateboard, or scooter gets to own the asphalt. No tape, no barriers between neighbors, just open road.
The Park Avenue Tunnel was the day’s most unexpected bonus. Technically, legally, you are never allowed to pass through it, Neistat noted while standing at the entrance on 33rd Street. But on this particular morning, the tunnel was open to everyone, a slow river of cyclists flowing through what is normally off-limits. The two pushed further, finding a staircase inside the tunnel with no signs forbidding the climb. At the top, they discovered a hatch, pulled at it briefly, then reconsidered when they spotted what looked like a ground wire or an alarm. They left it alone and descended back into the stream.
Out on the avenues, the surprises kept arriving. Near Grand Central, a route that Neistat described as equally elusive on foot, skateboard, or bike had been unlocked for the day. Then came a band: a group of middle-aged women set up along the closed street, shredding so confidently that the two stopped cold. ‘They’re so good,’ Jordan said. Neistat walked over just to say hello, telling them he was a fan. A man on a city bike rolled past with a laptop balanced on his lap running a full DJ set, music spilling into the open avenue while riders curved around him.
The guy on the bike with a DJ set running from his laptop
That cyclist was the moment that crystallized the whole day. Neistat was holding his large SLR trying to film the rolling DJ, but he wanted a shot from directly in front of the bike. He handed the SLR to Jordan, grabbed a compact 360 camera on a selfie stick, and rode alongside the cyclist with the camera stretched out ahead. The resulting footage cut cleanly into the rest of the day’s material, no visible seam between the two cameras.
Two women on electric scooters rolled by. Neistat stopped them: ‘You guys look great on those scooters.’ They laughed and kept moving. Another rider called out ‘Happy Summer Streets’ and the greeting bounced back the same way people yell it across a block party fence.
A hatch nobody opened
Back in the tunnel, that hatch at the top of the unmarked staircase sits exactly as they left it: pulled on once, then released. Whatever is behind it, the tunnel kept that part to itself.
By the time the avenues reopened to traffic, the city had done what it does once a year, briefly become the version of itself that does not need a car.
