After Woman is Fatally Struck on W. 96th St., Brewer Suggests Adding Traffic Agents

Sixty nine-year-old Miriam Reinharth was struck and killed by an ambulance while crossing W. 96th St. & Amsterdam Ave. on Nov. 12. She left behind a grieving family and community.

An events organizer for New York Jewish Week from 2007 to 2012, Reinharth was married to NYT labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, and had two children and four grandchildren. Her daughter, Emily Greenhouse, has been the editor of The New York Review of Books since 2021. Her son, Jeremy, is a data scientist.

Greenhouse described what had happened to Reinharth in a heartbreaking Facebook post: “I have very sad news. My wonderful wife, Miriam Reinharth, was hit by a car–actually by an ambulance–around 1 p.m. [Nov. 12] and she died several hours later. This is so sudden and shocking and upsetting that it’s hard to discuss and process. And it feels insane and unfair.”

”Miriam was so full of life and so looking forward to many more happy years together. We were to celebrate our 40th anniversary in February, and Miriam’s 70th birthday is this March,” he added.

Greenhouse said that doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital believed Miriam only had a broken leg, and that she was conscious when being wheeled into the ER. However, they soon realized that she had numerous fractures in her pelvis, which caused serious bleeding that led to her heart stopping.

Crucially, W. 96th St. is considered a notoriously dangerous route by both locals and city officials, and has seen a disturbing amount of accidents occur. Indeed, Curbed has deemed the confluence of W. 96th St. and Broadway to be the Upper West Side’s “Zone of Pedestrian Death.”

In a September letter, NYC’s Department of Transportation pointed out that 96th St.–both on the east and west sides of Central Park–is in “the top 10 percent of most dangerous streets within New York City.” They added that within the last five years alone, “there were 391 injuries on the corridor, which includes 44 individuals who were killed or severely injured.”

Upper West Side City Councilmember Gale Brewer is well aware of how deadly the road can be. In an interview with The Spirit, she said that the amount of high-profile pedestrian fatalities that have occurred on W. 96th St. has been “unbelievable” and “awful.”

She’s observed that cars are often in a rush to get to the West Side Highway, creating back-ups from Amsterdam to Broadway–and endangering people trying to cross the street. She’s also heard from people on the Upper East Side–who fall outside of her district–but who regularly complain to the DOT about dangerous E. 96th St. bottlenecks of cars trying to get to the FDR Drive.

As for what Brewer thinks could be done to mitigate horrible W. 96th St. incidents, such as what happened to Reinharth, she suggests expanding the use of traffic agents at key W. 96th St. intersections. “There is a school on West End Ave. and W. 96th St., P.S. 75, and there is a traffic agent there when kids are coming and going,” she noted. “There’s not one at the Amsterdam Ave. or Broadway intersections. That would help.”