Rich kids from ritzy UES school granted right to turn city street into personal playground

A ritzy Upper East Side private school has won its fight to turn a public street into its own private playground for the academic year — prompting businesses on the block to cry foul.Manhattan’s Community Board 8 unanimously approved an application from the $62,500-a-year Birch Wathen Lenox School to shut down East 77th Street between Second and Third avenues to foot and car traffic for two “peak” hours a day, three days a week, starting next month.“It’s a school filled with very rich kids.It’s like the 1% taking away from the 99%,” fumed Todd Layne, whose namesake laundromat lies just a few dozen feet from the posh school.“Why do they have the right to commandeer an entire street and disrupt the businesses on this block?”CB 8 granted permission last month for the private K-12 school — which boasts Barbara Walters as an alum — to shut down the busy thoroughfare from 11 a.m.

to 1 p.m.for three days every week as part of the city’s controversial Open Streets program, as long as it keeps its promise to a usher kids off the roadway as needed to let delivery trucks or emergency vehicles through.The 500-student school had been previously rejected when it proposed shutting down the road for five hours a day five days a week, after arguing that its rooftop playground was so small that only one grade could use it at a time.But the mom-and-pop shops that line the block say even the now-approved shorter shutdown could still be a death sentence for their tiny economy.“It’s a peak time for us, and it’s really going to be a major impediment to us doing business,” Layne said.“I let the community board know about that, and they just kind of feel that it’s not that much of a big deal because they’re still going to allow cars to come through.

But we don’t really understand how that’s possibly going to work.”Toby Chancey, owner of Toby Clairty Lighting, said he could stand to lose roughly 10% of his business because his majority elder...