City Council Limits Size of Banks on Upper West Side A Bank of America branch wraps around the corner at 72nd Street and Broadway. A city planner says the Upper West Side is thicker with bank branches than other neighborhoods. The City Council approved a zoning change on Thursday that is meant to stop the proliferation of impersonal bank branches and other large storefronts along the major commercial avenues of the Upper West Side. The new rules, which were developed by the City Planning Department in response to requests from the local community board and the local councilwoman, Gale A. Brewer, limit street-level storefronts on Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue to a maximum width of 40 feet, with banks, on those avenues and on Broadway, held to 25 feet. The restrictions generally apply from 72nd to 110th Street on Broadway and Amsterdam, and from 72nd to 87th Street on Columbus. Existing stores and storefronts are exempt. The Council approved the change by a vote of 49 to 2. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who is sometimes critical of measures that interfere with property rights or the market, supports the new rules, which go into effect immediately. Ms. Brewer said in an interview that she was motivated by concern about the closings of mom-and-pop stores, which she said were being driven out by high rents and were often replaced with banks or other large stores. "We cannot be successful as a neighborhood if it's all banks, and that's what it's becoming," she said. We have to put a halt to it. She credited the planning commissioner, Amanda M. Burden, with persuading the mayor to support the change. "I don't think it was at the top of his agenda," Ms. Brewer said. I think, to his credit, he listens to his commissioners. Mr. Bloomberg said in a radio interview in February that he had initially been skeptical of the idea. "When I first heard Amanda propose it, I thought to myself, "You know, government shouldn't be in the business of telling people what they can do with their private property," " he said. But he said he was ultimately convinced that the rules were no more onerous than other zoning regulations, and that they had support from the local community. The planning department has said it does not plan to reproduce the new rules elsewhere in the city. "There is a unique problem on the Upper West Side," a planner in the department, Laura Smith, said, explaining that there was proportionally more street frontage devoted to banks on the Upper West Side than in other neighborhoods. The new rules have received support from people like the writer Thomas Beller, who, in an essay on the Web site of The New Yorker, lamented what he termed "bank creep," calling it the "new urban blight." Still, Mr. Beller's optimism about the likely impact of the change was tempered. "Whether this is a major victory for the neighborhood or just a flimsy levee built to contain a rising tide remains to be seen," he wrote. The zoning change is opposed by the banking industry, as well as by business groups like the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, the West Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District. Nancy Ploeger, president of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, said that even though individual stores can apply for exemptions, the zoning rules would probably discourage new businesses from moving to the Upper West Side. "You can apply for exemption, but you know how that is," Ms. Ploeger said. That's months and months and months of red tape. The New York Bankers Association, an industry lobbying group, has argued that the rules are illegal because they unfairly discriminate against banks and interfere with federal and state banking regulations. In an interview, the president of the association, Michael P. Smith, said that the association had not decided whether to sue over the rules, adding, "We'll have to wait and see." As expected, the Council approved the rules at a meeting in which it also voted to adopt the city's 2013 fiscal budget. In addition, it voted to override the mayor's vetoes of two recent pieces of legislation: the so-called living wage law, which will raise wages for some private workers, and another bill that requires banks to demonstrate their efforts at social responsibility before they can be approved to receive city deposits. That bill, the Responsible Banking Act, is partly intended to encourage banks to open branches in neighborhoods that currently have too few of them - the very opposite of the situation on the Upper West Side, as Ms. Brewer acknowledged. "I have colleagues in the City Council who have no banks - zero," she said. Please, take some of mine. An article in some editions on Friday about the City Council's approval of a zoning change that limits the widths of new storefronts at street level on the Upper West Side described incorrectly one of the restrictions. While banks will be limited to 25 feet on Broadway and Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, and storefronts will be limited to 40 feet on Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, it is not the case that storefronts besides banks will be limited on Broadway.