The Battle for Gotham (18 page)

Postwar buildings built before the 1965 landmarks law often do not relate well to the Village context. But since designation as a historic district, all alterations to existing structures and designs for new buildings must be reviewed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. This sustains the Village’s unique urban fabric and fundamentally protects its architectural heritage. Absorption of change is, for the most part, deliberative, incremental, and manageable, but change—including many new buildings—there definitely is.

Physical and economic change has not stopped, but cataclysmic change has. In fact, incrementalism is exhibited there in its most effective form with storefront upgrades, historic restorations, conversions of commercial buildings to residential, many modest rooftop and rear yard additions, and new buildings fitting into scattered available sites. Equally significant, the Village remains a hotbed of community activism, easily stirred into forceful action as threats arise from private developers, public officials, or large-scale institutions like St. Vincent’s Hospital or NYU. Civic protest movements have been recurrent in the Village for generations. They mounted as the garrets and saloons of bohemia fell under the wrecker’s ball, as apartment houses replaced some of the Greek Revival homes of the nineteenth-century wealthy, and as New York University increased its holdings to more than 80 percent of all the real estate on Washington Square.

It was in Greenwich Village that Jane Jacobs and others ignited nationwide resistance to authoritarian planning policies so forcefully shaped by Robert Moses. The legacy of that civic watchfulness endures. From the 1959 closing of Washington Square Park to vehicular traffic and the more recent unsuccessful fight to save the Edgar Allan Poe House on West Third Street from demolition by NYU to an unsuccessful fight to stop St. Vincent’s Hospital from a total disregard for the landmarks law and efforts to prevent the controversial transformation of Washington Square Park, the tradition of the engaged and vigilant community shows little sign of abating. Periodic public fights continue to provide the glue that keeps the spirit of community intact.

THE PARK

The commons of the Village, the 8.6-acre (eight square blocks) Washington Square Park, once again, has many young children in its one big playground, a reflection of the increase since the 1970s of young families in the neighborhood. Plenty of old people can be found sitting on park benches, too. Villagers don’t move away easily. My grandfather and his friends had a favorite bench. I would run to say hello to him after school each day. I see the elderly on that bench today. And just as was true during my childhood, NYU students use the park well. They guarantee a youthful feel to the park population.

Before even the newest redesign, the drug pushers were considerably diminished in number since the 1970s. One fools oneself to think they are not there at all. Their numbers had increased in the 1980s when Union Square Park at Fourteenth Street was “cleaned up” and relandscaped, following its newfound popularity with the success of the city’s first great Greenmarket.
¹
When the drug pushers were pushed out of Fourteenth Street, they just moved south to Washington Square. The law-abiding users of both parks are so plentiful that whatever criminal element exists does not feel threatening. Density and diversity of users, like on a street, are the best enforcement tools.

Probably my favorite park feature remains: the chess players. In the southwest corner of the park are eighteen concrete chess tables, a tradition dating back to 1932 under Mayor La Guardia. Clusters of onlookers can always be found watching their favorite game. This is a fascinating group to watch.

The park has been something of a lightning rod for Village protests—“eight acres of sociology,” Gay Talese once called it. The 1970s redesign stirred considerable debate but reflected genuine community involvement.
²
The controversy surrounding the current $16 million redesign, unveiled in 2004, reflects both the increased dominance of NYU and a “high-design” mind-set coming from the Parks Department.

The quintessential gathering place, Washington Square Park’s appeal was always its casual informality. A true neighborhood park, it was never meant to be a showpiece. Comfortable, safe, user-friendly, offering something for all, this park just happens to work. With its assortment of spaces, all manner of spontaneous activity took place here over the years, from roller skating in my youth to Rollerblading now, from pavement chalk games like hopscotch to impromptu guitar-playing songfests. The studying student, chatting neighbors, playing toddlers, dog-walking residents, and drug-pushing intruders all have claimed their space. I remember as a child being aware of the area where drunks hung out. It was to be avoided.

Showing wear and tear in recent years, this park needed some repair and renovation. But when the city unveiled its in-house design for a more formal, somewhat sanitized, and extremely groomed “greener” park, the community uproar was to be expected. Villagers understandably assumed the design was done with NYU’s needs in mind (the school is contributing $1 million to the work but claims to have had no input), especially the change in stage design and ground leveling that make the graduation ceremony more comfortable but is officially to make it handicap accessible. (Wheelchairs, however, have been all over this park for years.)

The loudly opposed initial provision for a fence and gates was withdrawn early on. But the equally controversial moving of the 1856 circular fountain remained. Here was a perfect case of an apparent legitimate need for repair of the pipes and underground infrastructure forming the ludicrous rationale for moving the fountain to make the plaza around it symmetrical and aligning the fountain with the Stanford White Arch to gain the view directly up Fifth Avenue! Symmetrical?! One could already see up Fifth Avenue. Ironically, few people even sit on the edge now during warm seasons because the vertical stream of water in the recalibrated fountain is so high, it blows over the edges that were favorite seating spaces.

Unbeknownst to anyone until a Village resident filed a Freedom of Information Act query, the Tisch family agreed to donate $2.5 million to the fountain work and, in exchange, secured the name, the Tisch Fountain. This occurred before the public review process but was not revealed until that process was over.

3.1 The circle fountain in Washington Square Park has been a favorite gathering place forever.

A nineteenth-century landscape orthodoxy is creeping into this and other park designs. The Parks Department’s plan included removal of five of the six much-loved and well-used alcove seating areas, added in the 1970 plan at community urging. Five were to be removed. Local city councilman Alan J. Gerson noted in his strong opposition to this design element: “Informal group seating, chit-chatting, debating, socializing has been an historic part of the Park. The alcoves and their predecessor corner seating areas in the park’s previous incarnation have long provided the settings for their activities.” The designer excuse for this alteration, besides the supposed advantage of creating more green space, was that seating capacity for the park was actually being increased. This is a sly numbers game. Benches elsewhere had been removed over the years, but now extra benches were to be added to the walkways. This is not about gathering places; this is just about sitting. Numbers don’t reflect use. In the end, four alcoves were retained. This park needed repair, not an overhaul.

The recent controversy over this park’s redesign reflects several issues common in many cities and other neighborhoods; it is more than just about parks. The conflict between design for design’s sake versus design to reflect use patterns, the difference between open communication and collaboration with the community and a manipulated form of community participation, the issue of unknown agendas and private interests, all these issues played out here. In fact, they will continue to play out as the phases of the park’s redesign proceed.

THE MOSES ROAD

This is the park—one of the city’s most storied—through which then parks commissioner and master road builder Robert Moses wanted to put a road. Fifth Avenue would extend through it, connecting Upper and Lower Manhattan. Until this proposal in 1956, only the Fifth Avenue buses entered the park to turn around and go back up Fifth Avenue. The avenue was two-way then, as were all streets and avenues until traffic engineers made the priority the acceleration of traffic through cities, instead of within them.

A coalition of Village groups formed in 1956 to kill this plan and, in addition, to ban all traffic from the park. Two housewives, Shirley Hayes and Edith Lyons, started this fight. Jane Jacobs joined the coalition and became its most celebrated leader in the battle against Moses. She would later lead the fight against Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway plan a few blocks south of the park. (See next chapter.) But the two battles were inextricably connected, although no one knew it at the time of the park conflict. “We found out why it was so important to put the road through Washington Square,” Jacobs recalled when we discussed the Moses era, “by seeing an artist’s rendering of it on the wall of the office of the borough president of Manhattan when we went down for something else. The road through the park was to be one of the ramps for the expressway.”
³

So when the coalition not only wanted to stop the road but ban traffic completely, Moses “had a fit,” Jacobs said, because he needed it for his larger expressway plan. “So he came up with all kinds of figures about the amount of additional traffic that was going to go around the square,” she said, “if this were done and how congested the streets would be.” Undoubtedly, the idea of limiting traffic capacity instead of increasing it was nothing short of heresy in the era of enlarging automobile capacity everywhere and in every way. Jacobs said: “Moses was trying to scare people—and he did scare some who lived on the perimeter of the square. He scared them to death about how much traffic would be there. We knew that was nonsense because there wasn’t any room for it. The only way you could get increased traffic was by increasing the road space.”

The coalition was very crafty in asking for the park’s closure to traffic. They proposed that it be done on a trial basis, to see what would happen. “We knew it was perfectly safe to just ask for a trial basis,” Jacobs said. “We knew that if the test were successful, it would become permanent. This was nothing radical really, just a chance to experiment a little.” Nevertheless, Moses was adamantly opposed. “Moses and all the city traffic engineers had always opposed doing anything like this anywhere,” Jacobs said. “They told us: ‘You will be back on your knees begging us to put that roadway back because of the inundation of traffic elsewhere.’ We didn’t believe that for a minute. We just said, ‘We’ll try it. This is an experiment.’”

Not only did chaos not happen, but no predicted tie-ups occurred around the park. In fact, Jacobs noted, “there was less traffic. Actual traffic numbers declined where they had been predicted to rise.”

TRAFFIC DISAPPEARS

That “experiment” offered a significant lesson that was never learned and only in recent years has been recognized in the sporadic places around the globe where traffic is being “tamed” and measured. In 1997 a U.S. study, “Road Supply and Traffic in California Urban Areas,” determined that every 10 percent increase in road capacity was followed by a 9 percent increase in traffic volume within a five-year period.

Cases like this happen all the time with anticipated traffic catastrophes not happening. But this broad insight into traffic behavior came long after the Washington Square road fight. Back then, Jacobs said, “for the first time, people began to understand that the more provision you make for cars in the city, the more cars and more traffic there will be. You don’t solve the traffic problem by making more provision for cars, with the potential supply of cars utterly inexhaustible.”

TIDE TURNING AGAINST CARS?

At the time of my conversation with Jacobs in 1978, the proponents of expansion of highways and roads seemed, on the surface at least, to have the cards stacked in their favor, or so it seemed in the press. The idea of saying no to expanded automotive accommodation was still alien to most people. If not alien, the concept just didn’t occur to many people in the 1970s, let alone the 1950s. After more than twenty years of indoctrination in favor of cars, malls, and the suburban lifestyle, people seemed very accepting of this as the norm of the time.

Jacobs disagreed. “Not really,” she said in a comment that turned out to be prescient.

It’s running the other way. Time is on our side. There’s more doubt about these things. The fights get harder and harder, more and more widespread. Really, Roberta, if you were my age, you would remember back to 1955 and ’56. It was unheard of to fight a thing like that, and it was unheard of to talk in the kind of terms that educated people now find it perfectly natural to talk in—whether they agree or disagree about what automobiles do to cities, that they can do harm, and that you would ever stop a road without planning for compensating road space nearby. Those were the terms it was put in: which alternative do you prefer, the road through the park or widening around it? Most people at the time just couldn’t imagine any other alternative.