The Battle for Gotham (51 page)

Considerable focus today is on high-speed rail, and the Obama administration is appropriately pushing for the re-creation of a national rail system that more effectively connects both regional and more distant destinations. Among other things, this would relieve the excessive pressure on air travel and diminish the dominance of airlines. But the most important form of transit for the regeneration of urbanism is the modern streetcar or bus rapid transit. This transit mode makes frequent stops, like New York’s subway, and is easily accessible, comfortable, and reasonably priced. It must be all those things to compete with the car.

We once had an extensive network of streetcar systems, one of the world’s finest. And we didn’t lose it naturally. It was destroyed to give automobiles more road room. Bradford Snell, a government researcher, first detailed this sorry tale in a 1974 Senate committee report.
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The story has been told many times, including in the 1998 film
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,
but it is always worth telling again to understand future possibilities.

In 1921 General Motors lost sixty-five million dollars. Then GM head Alfred P. Sloan decided to do something to turn that around. Stephen B. Goddard, in his revealing and extraordinarily detailed book,
Getting There
, puts it bluntly: “In the 1920s, General Motors, under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, and his fellow automakers decided to do nothing less than reorder society to alter the environment in which automobiles are sold by replacing light rail systems with cars and buses. So in the early 1930s, GM approached railroads and electric utility companies, which owned most urban trolleys, and offered to buy their electric streetcar lines, which GM would then replace with buses.”
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Resistance was strong. Buses were a hard sell. They jolted, smelled, and were not nearly as comfortable as trolleys. Trolleys were smooth, efficient, and frequent. But they were badly in need of repair after World War II. During the war, all the effort that might have gone into maintenance and upkeep of many things like public transit was directed, instead, to military needs. GM and its cohorts could not even pursue a plan of replacing trolleys with buses until after the war, when manufacturing could switch to a domestic focus.

Sloan was undaunted. If the streetcar systems would not willingly sell, they would be taken over and dismantled. With Greyhound and Yellow Coach bus companies, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Truck, and Firestone Tire Company as partners, GM secretly formed the National City Lines, which bought up streetcar lines in eighty-three cities. NCL cut services, left repairs undone, raised fares, and took money out of each system instead of rebuilding it. Disinvestment in transit was as devastating nationally as it had been when Moses practiced it in New York. The transit systems that had served dense, functional cities so well were sabotaged. Economic life still depended on proximity, and once that critical infrastructure deteriorated, urban economies faltered as well.

As Snell points out, a 1947 court case later confirmed that this secret partnership had “schemed to create a motor monopoly in nearly four dozen cities across the country, taking over more than 100 electric transit systems in the process.” Goddard notes: “Yet for their roles in concocting and perpetrating a criminal conspiracy—which helped change the dominant urban energy from electricity to less-efficient petroleum and to alter American urban life forever—the Court fined the corporations five thousand dollars each and the individuals one dollar.”
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The pattern was set. The momentum was in high gear. The direction was unstoppable. In a stark case of twentieth-century waste, the light rail systems either built today or on the drawing boards in many communities are re-creating the earlier transit systems that were so tragically destroyed.

With streetcars, pedestrian needs were still paramount. Building a fifteen-minute walk from a streetcar was a builder’s rule of thumb. This is still visible today in so many surviving and desirable former streetcar neighborhoods nationwide. With automobiles ascendant, building highways and moving vehicles became the priority. Furthermore, streetcar lines were built by private land developers and electric utilities. The Interstate Highway System, however, was and still is the largest public works project ever initiated in this country.

Until this dramatic reshaping of the national landscape for the car, Americans managed well with forty-four thousand miles of passenger rail routes run by twelve hundred companies employing three hundred thousand people who ran fifteen billion annual trips, generating an income of one billion dollars. As Snell reported, “Virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system.”

So the lessons exist to learn from, if the repair and rejuvenation of cities are serious goals. But it is not all about looking to the past; contemporary success stories also exist, providing confirmation and new lessons.

Highways to Boulevards and Avenues

Former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist is a tall, fair-haired man with the Nordic look reflective of the immigrant history of that region. It took him five years to demolish a segment on the north side of downtown of the never-completed elevated Park East Freeway that divided the city, as had been done by through-the-city highways across the country. It would have cost eighty million dollars to rebuild but thirty million to take down. The area, Brewers’ Hill and the Italian neighborhood known as the Lower East Side, was reconnected to downtown. Streets that had been disconnected for decades were reconnected. And with the demolition in 2003, developers scrambled to build mixed-use buildings on a major portion of the reclaimed sixteen acres of city land, filling it in the most productive way. “The traffic nightmare that was predicted never happened,” observes Norquist, “because the traffic now goes where it wants to go more efficiently.” With highways, he points out, drivers are forced either to overshoot or undershoot their destination since exits are spaced so far apart. The avenue that replaced the freeway segment connects directly into the city grid, giving drivers more routing options and allowing them to go directly where they want to go.
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Urban Husbandry at its best.

A highway ramp came down in the Coliseum Square neighborhood of New Orleans, and the neighborhood ruined by it in the 1950s has been vibrantly renewed.

In 1974, Portland, Oregon, closed Harbor Drive and created an appealing waterfront park that draws people year-round, way ahead of most of the country.

San Francisco’s creation of a tree-lined boulevard with bike trails, parks, and public exhibits where the Embarcadero Freeway—two levels of elevated concrete—once stood is perhaps best known, probably because, more than ever, the waterfront became a popular and economically productive district, one of the city’s greatest attractions for both locals and tourists. Nearby real estate values rose 300 percent.

The 1989 earthquake also damaged Central Freeway, a spur into the city. Designed by the renowned boulevard advocates and designers Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth MacDonald, it was rebuilt smaller, as Octavia Boulevard. A
San Francisco Urban Designer
writer wrote in January 2007 that it “feels like it belongs . . . keeps cars moving while making the neighborhood around it a better place to be.” New shops and housing developed on the periphery, and a once highway-destroyed neighborhood was revived.

In such cases, as with the rebuilding of Manhattan’s West Side Highway, necessary traffic is managed differently through adjustments to traffic lights and other measures. As first observed in the Washington Square Park Moses road defeat, drivers adjust accordingly, and some traffic simply disappears.

Many more cities are grappling with this issue as the deterioration of original highways, elevated or not, demands increasing attention. Chattanooga has also taken down an elevated highway segment. Toronto, Seattle, New Haven, Trenton, Baltimore, Buffalo, Syracuse, New Orleans, and Overton in Miami are just a few either already seriously considering such a move or just beginning to do so.

New York took down the elevated West Side Highway, defeated the Westway replacement plan, and is now getting a well-functioning quasi-boulevard replacement. But the state and city are taking years to recognize the similar wisdom of taking down the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, the 1.25-mile highway built in 1963 and never completed on the west shore of the Bronx River. The state wants to fix it at about three hundred million dollars (plus overruns, of course). A well-organized community plan developed with the help of planner Joan Byron of the Pratt Center would remove it and create a wealth of new parks and affordable housing opportunities. This citizen-led battle is a clear precursor of the continued revival of the South Bronx.

Streetcars Too

The urban healing process is even more visible in the proliferation of light rail systems in a variety of traditional and contemporary forms. San Diego was first, installing a light rail link to Tijuana, going through mostly commercial districts. It was a hard sell at the time, and none of the residential areas wanted it in their neighborhood, fearful of the intrusion of strangers that it would bring. Once up and running and a great hit, however, everyone wanted it, and the San Diego system has been expanding ever since.

Portland, Oregon, of course, is ahead of everywhere else, having first traded in highway funds decades ago to build the light rail system that goes through the city and beyond. In recent years it added a traditional streetcar imported from the Czech Republic that stops more frequently and is more like the streetcar system we lost but most European cities still have, most efficient for shorter downtown trips.

More than seventy cities have followed since, and more have plans on the books. Cities that have already put in the first leg immediately plan for expansion. The successes persuade even the strongest skeptics. Everywhere, ridership exceeds expectations. Developers and increased retail activity have followed. This should not have come as a surprise to anyone.

Now there is talk of reviving a leg of the once vast Brooklyn streetcar system with a leg from Red Hook to downtown Brooklyn, something citizen advocate Bill Diamond started years ago, stopping only when money was not available.

Converting Car Space to People Space

When Janette Sadik-Khan cut the ribbon with Mayor Bloomberg on the immediately successful Times Square pedestrian plaza created in the spring of 2009 by closing Broadway from Forty-second to Forty-seventh Streets to cars, she was hailed by
New York Magazine
and others as a combination of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Not one inch of what she made happen was out of Robert Moses’s file drawer; it was totally Jacobs and, to be sure, William H. Whyte as well, who also advocated more street space for people and transit and less for cars. But what Sadik-Khan was doing, and had been doing all over the city by eliminating lanes of traffic to make room for bike lanes and street plazas, was huge in its impact on the city.

Clearly, the enormity of the scale is what observers thought was out of the Moses file drawer, even though Jacobs clearly was an advocate of big, dense transit systems in cities. Many assume that if it is big, it must be Moses. Surely, this was thinking big but big in small bites and without erasing swaths of urban fabric. Not Moses’s style at all. And, as has been noted earlier, size is not the defining issue; substance is. And in substance, what Sadik-Khan had done and was continuing to do was pure Jacobs. “The good news about the Moses legacy,” she says, “was that he widened so many streets and created so much pavement, there is much that can be reclaimed for people, bikes, and bus-rapid transit. We’re showing that our streets can do more than move cars quickly from point A to point B. For too long, we’ve looked at the city’s six thousand miles of streets from behind the windshield and not at what happens on the street.” This is the ultimate undoing of one area of Moses’s excesses and of the overzealous transportation engineers who followed him with the automobile-is-everything approach to cities. This is the most dramatic example of the piecing back of the abused and undervalued precincts of our cities.

The pattern is now set for the twenty-first century. If the twentieth century was the Age of the Automobile, the twenty-first is the Age of Mass Transit. All of these trends—highways coming down, boulevards replacing in-city highways, re-created transit lines, and street reclamation for public spaces—are bound to continue expanding in the years to come.

This is stitching back the urban tears with strength renewed for the surrounding fabric. For sure, urban agriculture, transportation, and preservation are only three of many areas on which Jacobs’s principles prevail. An observant student of her writing can find many more. But Moses, too, remains with us today in a big way, as the following stories illustrate. Both legacies remain strong.

PART II: THE MOSES LEGACY

Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn: Moses Redux

From day one there was nothing urbanistically right about the proposal to build over and beyond the Atlantic Avenue railroad yards adjacent to downtown Brooklyn. The grandiosity alone would have made Moses blush. The combination of Moses-style elements would have prompted him to say, “I taught you well.”

Almost every aspect of this one-developer (Bruce Ratner),
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one-architect (Frank Gehry), 22-acre scheme (8 acres of rail yards, 14 acres of neighborhood), 16 skyscrapers and a 19,000-seat basketball arena, is a Moses descendant, a clone of the outdated 1960s urban renewal model: clearance only; erasure of precursors of regeneration; gigantic scale; a state authority overriding the city planning and zoning review process; absence of democratic process with public input; threat of eminent domain to take private property for a private development; incalculable public funding of more than an acknowledged $300 million public investment up front, and hundreds of millions more over the years to come; isolating design disconnected from existing urban grid; traffic-choking parking capacity for more than 3,600 cars; destruction of architecturally appealing and functional historic buildings; displacement of 33 businesses, 235 jobs, 169 homes, 334 residents (209 tenants, 125 owners); declaration of “blight” of an area with some vacant buildings and empty lots scattered in the larger regenerating district; constant escalation of private and public costs; and public benefits promised (questionable from the start) diminishing with time.