The Battle for Gotham (11 page)

REBIRTH’S BEGINNINGS

The seeds of recovery were being sown off the conventional radar screens, real even if unseen. Far from the public consciousness and not spotlighted in the press, local groups in the 1970s started forming in the worst of neighborhoods, too. The creativity and innovation that often evolve out of struggle were laying the foundation for the resurgence to come. The renaissance began in a multitude of small ways, all of which would eventually add up to big change. The 1970s allowed for positive measures emanating from the most local level because government was out of ideas and money and desperate for new solutions. When given the opportunity, local citizen-led groups were innovative and productive agents of urban change. Small steps collectively made a big impact.

Urban economist Dr. Saskia Sassen points out that an infusion of young women began making an impact. “In the 1970s, a lot of young people were coming to New York, including many professional women coming for things like publishing,” she says. “Women were leading the lives they wanted and not leaving the city after marriage.”

Significantly, in 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that provided a lifeline for moderate-income home buyers and local housing groups and forced financial institutions to find ways to reinvest in the same neighborhoods they had taken money out of years before. This critical access to capital had been missing from poor neighborhoods for decades. Financial institutions were now required to serve the qualified poor as well as the rich. The CRA was the result of a vigorous national campaign, led by Chicago activist Gale Cincotta, founder of the National People’s Action. Banks, following strict standards, were now required to make loans to
qualified
borrowers of all income levels in the neighborhoods from which deposits originate. The act allowed for community challenge of bank policies that negatively affected low-income neighborhoods, forcing many banks to reexamine their former redlining policies that gave them license to use investment dollars earned in cities to build suburbia. Eventually, some bank executives admitted that if the CRA had not forced them into it, they would never have discovered what turned out to be a profitable market of underserved low-to moderate-income home buyers. The CRA made possible a needed infusion of resident and business investment in deteriorated neighborhoods.

Former
City Limits
editor Alyssa Katz, looking back in 2006, wrote, “By the summer of 1977, more than 20,000 buildings in New York would be abandoned. At the end of that year, the city owned 6,000 buildings and was poised to foreclose on 25,000 more. Yet pockets of hope took hold in besieged neighborhoods across the city. With the support of community groups, tenants were taking charge of their buildings as the landlords abandoned them. The earliest of these efforts had won the backing of the administration of Mayor John Lindsay.”
⁹

Alphabet City on the Lower East Side, Kelly Street in the South Bronx, UHAB on the Upper West Side, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and many other low-income communities in between all had rejuvenating projects bubbling up. The Cooper Square Committee, Adopt-a-Building, organized in East Harlem to reclaim abandoned buildings and spear-headed other groups on the Lower East Side, then called Loisada, into joining Mobilization for Youth and Pueblo Nuevo Housing and Development Association, all of them working in small segments that eventually spread over a large area.

The first rooftop windmill, solar panels, composting, and recycling efforts were undertaken by some of these groups. On East Eleventh Street a small apartment house was reclaimed and a windmill and solar collectors installed on the roof. This effort was led by the Energy Task Force with the Pratt Center designing the building. The People’s Development Corporation, Mid-Bronx Desperados and Banana Kelly in the Bronx, the East Harlem Renegades in Harlem—all over the city grassroots efforts were the precursors to the city’s future rebirth.

Robert Schur, assistant housing commissioner, left his city position and formed the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, a coalition advocating on behalf of local groups. This was a unique coming together of grassroots groups and technical capacity provided by advocacy planners mostly associated with the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn.
¹⁰
These were the people whose homes, businesses, social networks, and family connections had been destroyed under the Moses bulldozer and who had been displaced and relocated one too many times. “Enough,” they declared. They dug in their heels where they were and set about rebuilding their lives, their communities, and, eventually, the city itself. Their ingenuity and determination emerged in spite of minimal resources.

This primarily community-based housing movement, with foundation funding, ignited a momentum for change that persuaded conventional developers—and their institutional lenders—to follow their lead with new investment in the very neighborhoods they had previously redlined and declared hopeless. Smart city officials, cajoled by community advocates, responded to proposals for new innovative housing policies that by the end of the century had restored or replaced almost all of the city’s once-endless supply of vacant and deteriorated buildings. Eventually, establishment developers and financial institutions followed, building on the foundation of local efforts and, of course, took credit for it all. Their only measure for success was developer investment. Nothing was real to them without developers. But, incontrovertibly, it was the grassroots, citizen-based movement that regenerated the city that developers and Wall Street took over. This organic, diverse, and incremental renewal process, not so-called economic development projects, revived New York and simultaneously took root in many communities across the country.

The precursors of regeneration took many forms and were allowed to evolve fully because there was no money or interest from either government or the private sector to interfere. Even the country’s community-garden movement had one of its earliest starts in the most down-and-out neighborhoods of this city. The Green Guerillas tore down barbed-wire fences, cleaned up garbage, and cultivated abandoned lots first on the Lower East Side but eventually all over the city and beyond. The term
guerilla gardening
was born here. This early effort matured into a revival of urban agriculture in low-income neighborhoods around the city.

The Union Square Greenmarket overcame official resistance and the cynicism of the experts to get off the ground in 1976, part of a then small national revival of farmers’ markets nationwide that is now a big-time national success. On the West Coast, Alice Waters had opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, buying from a network of local farmers and ranchers dedicated to sustainable agriculture and beginning a slowly contagious national trend championing locally grown food, small farms, and fresh ingredients. Similarly, new restaurants opened around Union Square, taking advantage of the immediate access to fresh products from regional farmers. The ripple effects were widespread. Now Greenmarkets blanket the city, giving many low-income communities access to fresh, healthy food direct from farmers.

1.4 The necklace I never take off.
Sandra Morris.

All of this was part of the renewal process, one that took root in communities across the country, not just New York. One charismatic leader did not make these things happen. Nothing happened quickly. This bottom-up change came out of the city’s culture of confrontation, contention, and caring. More important, none of this positive change was about stadia, convention centers, big clearance projects, tourist attractions, or other officially embraced baubles encased in rejuvenation rhetoric.

Preservation was the most visible of the bellwether issues indicating good things to come. For this reason, the next chapter recalls early landmark history to understand preservation as a framework for change. Reporting on landmark preservation revealed my eventual passionate commitment to the issue.

When New York seemed to hit bottom and outsiders derided everything about it, New Yorkers rose up in defense, forming block associations, planting trees and flower boxes, organizing house tours, finding many ways to demonstrate their loyalty. In response to external hostility—particularly the “City Drop Dead” headline—the “I Love New York” campaign took hold. I had always been one of those New York boosters and wrote a little feature story on the things one could buy to flaunt one’s New York chauvinism. Not much was available, but I still have and regularly wear the gold necklace I found at B. Altman’s with the words “I Love New York.” That was all I could find for the story. The “Big Apple” and “I Love New York” campaigns came later, an outgrowth of New Yorkers’ shared chauvinism.

Nationally, too, not everything was negative. In September 1975, a National Neighborhood Conservation Conference was held in New York City. Grassroots urban preservation and historic neighborhood repopulation efforts were under way in forty-five cities, including New York. Most historic preservation efforts started in response to the urban renewal clearance projects in each city. Representatives from those efforts came together in New York to compare “war stories” and learn from one another.

The Bicentennial celebration in 1976 unleashed a new interest and pride in ethnic roots and national history, so much of which is urban based. The historic preservation movement grew in popularity as the fight to save Grand Central Terminal scored a dynamic victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978. The appreciation of the authentic city, the fight to protect neighborhoods targeted for “renewal,” and the self-help inclination of local people were all visible and gaining momentum in the 1970s.

Jane Jacobs’s principles were in their ascendancy. The Moses-style strategies were in a free fall and fiercely resisted. Where they might have continued, the cessation of the federal money flow did the trick. Today, the New York City neighborhoods with the strongest appeal are the ones that reflect best Jacobs’s teaching; the ones in need of greatest help are the ones erased and replaced with Moses-style visions.

The world and this city have changed enormously in the intervening years. Change is the constant, unfolding in sometimes dramatic but often subtle ways. Yet as much as things change, the more they stay the same. Many of the kinds of things I wrote about in the 1960s and 1970s still go on today in different guises. In this book, I use some of the earlier New York stories to spotlight the larger issues they illustrate. Useful lessons and parallels can be drawn from many of those stories. Most assuredly, however, the contrast of the city now and then reflects today’s stark contrast to the topsy-turvy world of the 1960s and 1970s when a girl could be called a boy and nobody would blink an eye.

2

LANDMARKS PRESERVATION

Precursor of Positive Change

Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.

DONOVAN RYPKEMA,
economist

F
or this reporter, community and landmarks preservation battles were always a good story. The little guy versus the big one, a citizen taking on the heartless government and/or greedy developer, the local residents’ resistance to inappropriate change. It always added up to good journalistic fodder.

When I first started covering the occasional landmark struggle in the late 1960s, preserving old buildings was considered by many as simply a means of opposing progress or change. People were accused of not wanting change in their backyard or for other so-called illegitimate reasons. However, when I listened carefully to the local voices, this was clearly not the case, as this book argues in many ways. More than physical structures were at stake. The values of memory, human connection, vanishing quality, and public purpose were all wrapped up in architectural beauty.