The Battle for Gotham (47 page)

And what about the $200 million restoration of Grand Central Terminal, one of the grandest public spaces and urban gateways almost lost during the era of transit devaluation and lack of interest in historic preservation? It is easy to build from scratch, harder to adjust and revive what exists. But the satisfaction comes with accomplishing what makes urbanistic sense. Grand Central is New York’s best face to the visiting and commuting world—a better brand, if you need one, than a stadium—but it does not only benefit the outsider; it is also a destination for New Yorkers. A terrific food market, assorted small local retailers, high-end restaurants, and a food court were added during the restoration, an appropriate diversity of uses bringing in activity of all kinds. This is the best measure of success.

Then there is Central Park, reclaimed and restored to its original Olmsted-Vaux glory over three decades. Its transformation is still ongoing, and Prospect, the Battery, and Riverside Parks are following similarly impressive paths. Central Park’s restoration was a big vision accomplished in manageable increments until the large-scale whole was revived by its small-scale components. The park is not big in a build-new way but big in a restorative way.
The revival of Central Park parallels the restoration of the city itself.

None of these projects is about real estate. Instead, they are about critical infrastructure, of the kind that either makes the city function or adds to the quality of life that makes it a desirable place to live. When one understands the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure, it is nothing short of amazing that New York is proceeding to address some of these crucial infrastructure needs.

Sweeping new gestures in the form of big new real estate projects garner political appeal and grab headlines when proposed, regardless of the legitimacy of their claims; more satisfying and productive gestures are the ones made up of smaller components that are quite complex and stun you in their completion. They don’t emerge fresh out of the ground on a huge, cleared site.

GOVERNMENT CAN DO IT BIG AND WELL

One of the most staggering accomplishments achieved primarily by a city agency is the reclamation of the more than a hundred thousand vacant city-owned housing units contained mostly in old tenements and brownstones, the kind Robert Moses invariably demolished when he could.

In the early 1980s conditions were so embarrassing that the Koch administration put trompe l’oeil decals depicting shutters, potted plants, and Venetian blinds to cover windows of city-owned abandoned buildings along the Cross Bronx Expressway. Instead of improving the image of the area and camouflaging the massive problem, it brought more attention to it.

New York was losing thirty-six thousand residential units a year to abandonment. Pushed by community groups looking to occupy and renovate these buildings for affordable units, the city under Koch initiated a number of innovative programs. Grassroots efforts instigated these policies with little public notice. City officials, overwhelmed by the problem, wisely responded to community-based proposals. Mayor David Dinkins aggressively continued the new policies, and momentum was firmly established. Dramatic federal cutbacks under President Reagan pulled the rug out from under these efforts nationwide, and Mayor Giuliani showed no interest in trying to maintain the momentum or look for new creative ways to confront the problem. The momentum slowed. But Mayor Bloomberg recommitted to creating affordable housing. There is some question as to whether the city is losing as many as it is gaining because of gentrification and rent deregulation, according to the
New York Times
.
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Developer-built projects seem to dominate, but the renovation trend continues uncelebrated. Community-based efforts that contributed enormously in the past continue the regeneration momentum today.

Local efforts reseeded with modest resources the neighborhoods by the late 1980s. Developers followed, built new projects with big tax or zoning incentives or on low-cost city-owned land, gained the attention of the media, and eventually took credit for scores of neighborhood turnarounds, especially in the South Bronx and Brooklyn.

LOW-DENSITY MISTAKES STILL HAPPEN IN A BIG WAY

Unfortunately, what was built on vacant lots was mostly low-density, suburban housing, instead of the traditional two-family or more row houses containing the density needed for well-functioning urban neighborhoods. Vacant land is now scarce for badly needed affordable housing. Many neighborhoods now lack the density appropriate for their infrastructure or to attract new local convenience stores and small businesses. In contrast, the New York City Housing Authority is now wisely offering parking lots at some public housing sites for development of new moderate- and low-income apartments. This is an important new infill initiative. In fact, other infill potential exists in public housing sites for more than just housing.

Re-creating density where it’s been lost is critical. Every recently built single-family home should be allowed to expand or build its unit into a two-family dwelling immediately, even to have the ability to add another floor or two. Many already function as two-family, sometimes three-family, homes illegally. If legalized, health and safety regulations can be instituted and monitored.

Owner-occupied two- and three-family units are a successful, low-scale housing resource in many urban neighborhoods, mixed in with high-density low-rise apartment buildings, creating the population necessary to support local retail, transit, schools, and social institutions—in other words, the components of real communities. The infrastructure already exists to support this. Allowing the expansion of the suburban-style homes is no guarantee it will occur, but permitting it offers new regenerative possibilities. This is the kind of big initiative in small increments that could have a big citywide impact.

One of the bizarre twists in the changes to the city’s zoning and building codes is that it has long been illegal to build the city’s most successful housing form—the classic brownstone. The four- or five-story brownstone is the perfect structure to serve a single family or as multiple apartments. Easy to reconfigure over time, new brownstones would make infinitely more sense than the single- and two-family suburban housing that has been built in too many neighborhoods over the past twenty years. Between erroneous setback requirements and excessive handicap-access rules that require elevators for more than three floors, the return of the brownstone is stymied. Yet rebuilding brownstones in a big way around the city would go a long way toward adding affordable housing.

MORE BIG THINGS GETTING DONE

Historian Mike Wallace, whose brilliant slim book
New Deal for New York
was published one year after 9/11 and presents a clear and sensible agenda for public actions, goes further. He cites even more big things than I have enumerated, all accomplished by the city but either taken for granted or unrecognized. These are the kind of big projects that matter the most to the overall health and functioning of the city, its neighborhoods, and its economy but never count as “big projects.”

Starting with water, Wallace of course cites the tunnel, “fabulously successful and profoundly under-celebrated. The Big Dig is nothing in comparison.” He continues: “Great strides have been made with water in general, in controlling pollution, both by private actors and by public agencies, in stopping chemical discharges into our rivers, in instituting critical controls, and in building the North River Pollution Control plant, an astonishing intervention into a massive problem.” For years, the Housing Authority has been replacing windows, appliances, and toilets in all public housing units to conserve water and energy.

Wallace also cites the institution of a citywide recycling program, even though not as comprehensive as could be but at least a beginning effort to tackle the enormous garbage problem. And major inroads have been made in controlling air pollution, starting with outlawing the burning of coal in 1966. And in a different direction, he cites the area of policing. Giuliani takes more credit for this than is his due, Wallace says. The intelligent upgrading of technology started before him, under Dinkins. The drop in the crime rate shows the city is capable of responding to big problems. “You can’t look at this array of big accomplishments and say the public sector is not able to get big things done,” Wallace says.

The big but uncelebrated successes share common threads. None were accomplished by one leader or one developer. None occurred quickly; nothing big ever does. Many responded to citizen pressures or were initiated by individuals. Others responded to new conditions, such as the need to conserve energy and water. Almost all gained public consensus or went ahead without it. None were stopped by the culture of confrontation and contention that interferes only sometimes successfully with the mammoth one-shot, top-down projects that inspire complaints about what can get done in the city. And each in its own way both fortified the connections of the larger city and inspired further efforts, feeding the critical momentum of renewal that produces constant but positive change throughout the city. Authentic regeneration, as already indicated, is a process, not a project. This concept cannot be articulated often enough. Beneficial change is ongoing, but it is beneficial because it does not erase or overwhelm a place.

Not to be overlooked in any examination of big things getting done are the projects that have gotten done over time. Battery Park City is in its fifth decade and almost finished. Large waterfront parks are emerging on several sites in Brooklyn. Time-Warner went up overscaled but up nonetheless. After an intense battle with Trump in the initial phase, Riverside South, overlooking the Hudson on the Upper West Side, with its oversized buildings but commendable waterfront park, is two-thirds complete after twenty years and under new ownership.
¹⁰
The theater district and Forty-second Street have been totally transformed into a glitzy office park and shopping mall for tourists with restored historic theaters as the only authentic anchors. The district is a classic replacement, not a regeneration. And, of course, huge buildings have gone up all over town.

DEFEAT WITH GOOD REASON

In my experience observing and writing about the New York development scene, big things are defeated because they are too big, inappropriate, and alien to the area for which they are proposed. Less grandiose schemes are accepted after intense and often meaningful public debate and genuine participation. Consensus is key. When achieved, projects go forward, as witness the convention center, Battery Park City, and the train to the plane, all of which were at various points quite controversial.

The death of Westway, and before it the Lower Manhattan Expressway, led to some of the best big new development in the final decades of the twentieth century—big in the overall sense, not big in the sense of one new project or one place. SoHo, of course, and everything it inspired around New York and the country would never have occurred with the Lower Manhattan Expressway built. On the West Side, the Hudson River Park continues to unfold, bit by appealing bit. The Gansvoort Historic District, just north of Greenwich Village, is one of the hottest new real estate markets. Westway would have decimated it. The transformation of the Nabisco Building into the Chelsea Market is a model of small, diverse uses in a huge building with the city’s first Whole Foods Market in the ground floor. These are only a few of both the waterfront and the near-inland developments that occurred in the Westway corridor with the defeat of the highway.

Cumulatively, all this adds up to big development, not big development all in one place, at one time. But it is big development nonetheless, in small doses all along the West Side and around the city. The process of authentic regeneration has unfolded in many places, sprouting a potpourri of innovative projects.

Beneficial change is ongoing but never overwhelming. The positive spin-offs are endless and widespread. The geographically varied and diverse nature of the assorted developments cited above are components in the process, not singular projects. That is the kind of change Westway’s demise unleashed, adding up to enormous change in the larger city.

Urbanism at its best.

CONCLUSION

Their Shadows Still Hover

Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.

JANE JACOBS,
conclusion of The Death and Life of
Great American Cities

B
ut how do you recognize the seeds?