The Battle for Gotham (40 page)

It is worth pausing for a moment to look further at why Lincoln Center is a signature Moses creation. This is difficult to do now without offending many good people who have worked hard to make this world-renowned seat of culture a great success. But that success is due to the content and programs, not the vessel they come in. As soon as a critical word is said about the physical design of the complex, such people take offense, even though they had nothing to do with designing it, only in making it succeed as an artistic center despite itself.

First, it must be said loud and clear that the institutions of Lincoln Center have become star performers on the city’s cultural stage. But that is about cultural programming, not bricks and mortar and urban design values. Paul Goldberger wrote a very perceptive Sky Line column in the
New Yorker
, “West Side Fixer-Upper: New Ideas for Lincoln Center That Don’t Involve Dynamite,” giving high marks to the first steps in a planned redesign. He credited architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro with “figuring out ways to weave the atoll back into the fabric of the city.” He noted, “There were complaints about the facilities at Lincoln Center from the beginning.” But more significantly, he hit at the heart of the matter:

But the raison d’etre for Lincoln Center was dubious from the beginning. . . . Moses didn’t care much for opera, or theater, or symphony orchestras. He just figured that they could serve as a magnet for development. Using culture in this way was a new idea in the fifties, although almost everything else about Lincoln Center was stuck in the past. As a piece of design, it was as retrograde as the halls that it replaced—and much less successful. . . .

The idea of a cultural campus set apart from the city never made much sense, even though Lincoln Center did, to be fair, promote the urban renewal effect that Robert Moses intended. The neighborhood would probably have been gentrified without Lincoln Center, of course, but hardly in the same way, or on the same timetable. . . .

Lincoln Center has sometimes seemed less the vibrant source of the neighborhood’s energy than the empty hole in the middle of the doughnut. . . . Lincoln Center reflected [Moses’s] social philosophy, which was on the side of public subsidies for middle-class amenities and against the visible presence of the poor.
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Centers, like other big stand-alone separatist projects, breed more new development mislabeled revitalization. But more than anything, they continue nibbling away at traditional streets and diverse uses, the ingredients of real places. Here, too, Moses (in partnership with John Rockefeller) led the way, as Martin Filler notes: “This cultural one-stop shopping center launched a nationwide boom in performing- and visual-arts complexes.”
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Moses was a separator, segregator, and isolator, designing the world for the car. He was a “centerist”—meaning cultural (starting with Lincoln Center), retail, industrial, sports, entertainment centers—isolating uses within the city, suburb, or town in a way that disconnects them from the rest of daily life, creating islands of singular activity in the urban fabric. Again, he created the model, and the nation followed.

The Moses pattern undermines the potential of vibrant, vital, economically and socially robust, integrated, and connected “places” in a city, suburb, or town. And it is a form of growth that annihilates and replaces versus replenishes and adds. Communities throughout the country today are trying to reconnect what that separating era of planning destroyed. Now, Lincoln Center, cited as one of Moses’s great achievements, has embarked on a billion-dollar effort to remodel itself in a more urbanistically connected way, undoing Moses’s isolationist vision.

Lincoln Center is a good place to understand the Moses philosophy, even though its widespread popularity as a cultural destination blinds people to the underlying fallacies of its creation. Understanding what was wrong with the barracks-style high-rise housing projects is easy today, especially since so many of them have been and continue to be blown up and rebuilt around the country. And widespread understanding exists more than ever that massive highway building and disinvestment in mass transit were the fatal domestic flaws of the second half of the twentieth century. But there are few signs of public or official understanding of the antiurban nature of cultural centers or, for that matter, entertainment centers, sports complexes, or similar concentrations of singular uses. Superblocks, whether for residential towers or entertainment, are disruptive and destructive in a city. Robert Moses launched his approach to city building in a big way on the West Side.

WEST SIDE STORY

Elizabeth Yampierre’s family displacement saga was recounted earlier. Yampierre actually lived on the site, known as San Juan Hill, where the musical
West Side Story
purportedly takes place. A number of scenes in the movie were actually filmed on those streets. The movie’s producers had persuaded Moses to hold off demolition a short time while they used it as a stage set.

Looking at the stills of those scene shots now is startling to anyone who thinks what Moses was clearing was really a slum by any honest standard. Not that deterioration wasn’t clear, and not that living conditions weren’t seriously deficient. But if one studies the photos of empty tenements and small apartment houses with windows already missing and evidence of the accelerated decay that sets in once urban renewal is declared, it is hard not to question how so much reusable, renovatable fabric could be consigned to the garbage dump. Many comparable buildings today have been converted to upscale apartment houses and condominiums. As Filler also wrote, “Today, that 19th-century housing would be gentrified before you could say Jane Jacobs, but in the 1950s, tabula-rasa development was standard operating procedure.”
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THE REAL DRAW OF THE WEST SIDE

The traditional mix of dense and architecturally masterful West Side buildings experienced a real image problem during the era of massive slum clearance and new project building. The incomparable prewar apartment houses of Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive north of Lincoln Center had never lost their appeal, although they had lost their status as chic. For a long time the “chic” label applied only to the Upper East Side. But the architectural appeal, solid construction, and size of apartment rooms could not be matched by anything built after World War II.

In time, the West Side became overchic, and for many longtime West Siders, it lost its charm. Real estate values are off the charts. The area is so overrun by tourists at the southern end around Lincoln Center, where I live, that little local flavor remains. Mall stores dominate. This is one of the city’s worst traffic-congestion hot spots. More and more superwealthy people have moved in and brought their sense of entitlement. Three lanes of traffic on Central Park West, for example, are sacrificed for angled parking for private cars of the policemen and double-parking (sometimes triple-parking) for private cars and limousines at the Trump International Hotel and the new superluxury condominium 15 Central Park West. This new addition to the West Side opened in 2007 at such through-the-roof sales prices that the area was dubbed “the new Gold Coast.”

Essential qualities hold strong. Some things are almost immutable because a large swath of the area was declared a historic district in 1990. Actually, several historic districts cover a lot of the Upper West Side. The largest is the Central Park West district from Sixty-second to Ninety-sixth Streets, with parts of Columbus Avenue included. A scattering of smaller districts is found along Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. Effectively, nothing within those designated areas can get torn down or altered without approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. That is not to say things don’t get torn down that shouldn’t and that new large-scale buildings of mediocre design don’t get built. But the basic effectiveness of the area’s landmark protection is clear. Enormous change has transpired on the Upper West Side, but its essential physical character has been sustained. The glaring compromises remain isolated and contained. That is the fundamental virtue of designated historic districts in the first place. Change evolves within the context of authenticity, a good definition of regeneration.

POSITIVE CHANGE, NEGATIVE CHANGE

The West Side exhibits the result of two kinds of change—change that is regeneration and change that is replacement. This kind of duality can be found in cities around the country. Here it is dramatically pronounced because of the large scale of both kinds of change.

The substantial areas of the West Side most dynamically regenerated are those with the large stock of renewed brownstone and limestone row houses, small-scale and large-scale prewar apartment buildings, and the varied assortment of combined residential and commercial structures that line the three primary commercial corridors. Then there are the replacement areas: Lincoln Center; the eight-building, 3,837-unit apartment complex of Lincoln Towers (Sixty-sixth to Seventieth along West End Avenue); the six-building Park West Village (Ninety-seventh to One Hundredth from Central Park to Columbus); and a number of public housing projects north of Ninety-sixth Street that totally replaced a diversified fabric. Robert Moses had declared each of these areas a “slum.” One has to question how much of a slum these areas could have been when comparable assortments of diversified buildings that stood on the cleared and rebuilt sites are today significantly upgraded and regenerated.

The replacement projects have remained static—physically no different from when constructed under Urban Renewal. Granted that Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall has had to be rebuilt inside twice because of poor acoustics. The central plaza, too, was rebuilt, and recent years of creative outdoor programming have dramatically enlivened that space. The open-air band shell of Damrosch Park at the southwest corner was added after completion. But Lincoln Center remains the isolated and isolating island of culture it was meant to be. And while sections of Lincoln Center are being redesigned to connect to the vibrant area across Broadway, no attempt appears to be in the planning to open up the west side of Lincoln Center that is walled off in the most hostile way possible from the public housing projects on the other side of West End Avenue. North and south along West End Avenue across from the public housing, street-level retail can be found. A solid brick wall in the rear serves as both an impenetrable boundary and a break in that retail strip. Clearly, it was designed to be fortresslike.

DEFINING PROGRESS

The impact of Urban Renewal is probably more benign on the Upper West Side than in most other New York City neighborhoods. Several things explain this. To start, the area was a dense, rich fabric with a variegated texture that could sustain considerable loss without losing its essence. And considerable losses it did indeed sustain. Ironically, the large swaths of alleged slums that were demolished and rebuilt would be gentrified middle-class neighborhoods today. Additionally, the replacements, besides Lincoln Center, are an assortment of well-maintained and well-managed middle-and low-income developments. Over time, they have woven themselves into the surrounding community. Nevertheless, they represent big tears in what was and could be today an untorn urban fabric that could have had a diversified assortment of economically and socially mixed housing of every scale, national and local businesses, and varied institutions, simply more of what it already is in the regenerated areas.

Many neighborhoods and downtowns in New York and around the country are not so lucky. They have sustained too enormous a scale of clearance. From Bushwick in Brooklyn and the South Bronx to St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Detroit, Buffalo, Charlotte, and others, only remnants are left. To regenerate by building on a modest remnant is possible but much more difficult. The cities regenerating the best today have the most traditional fabric left; the ones having the most clearance damage are experiencing the more difficult time. It is staggering to think of the damage done across the board to American cities after World War II in the name of progress.

With Lincoln Center, as had been true with the highways and housing towers, Moses created a template that would deceive the world into accepting the notion that this was a good way to redevelop cities—Moses style.

8

WESTWAY

A Conversation with Jane Jacobs

You take some things as given: you don’t want a city that’s built for automobiles and not people first.

JANE JACOBS