The Battle for Gotham (56 page)

We’ve seen the citywide impact of the defeat of Westway and its positive consequence along the Hudson waterfront, on the subway system, and in neighborhoods throughout the city, and Joan Byron’s technical assistance work with an energetic coalition of South Bronx organizations that will, hopefully, achieve the same broad healing with the proposed tearing down of the Sheridan Expressway. We’ve seen the resilience of the local industrial economy reinforcing a basic Jacobs economic principle that local economies drive the growth of cities and ultimately the regional and national economies.

If there is one overarching Jacobsian lesson, it is how complex cities are. Her observations of Greenwich Village only appear simple and are too often misinterpreted as advocating similarly scaled and designed neighborhoods everywhere.
³⁰
Instead, her observations are a fractal for understanding thousands of streets and districts. A fractal is simply something that may look and perform the same at all scales of magnitude. So when Jacobs wrote about Hudson Street and the Village, she wasn’t suggesting every community need mirror that singular place. Instead, that Village neighborhood must be understood as a fractal to help observe and understand the components of thousands of streets and neighborhoods everywhere that have the potential to
function
in similarly vibrant ways but have their own local character, context, and unique qualities. In fact, a fractal at a larger dimension can take on a different character and look and perform differently.

Through Jane’s local lessons, the greater public has come to understand the components of a particular neighborhood or whole city, and to understand how a city’s—or any size community’s—streets are the spine of any vital, vibrant city. That same public has come to understand their right and value in being a part of the process that leads to change. This is vintage Jane. Public process, on the other hand, was anathema to Moses.

Greenwich Village, Harlem, Boston, and Manchester and Birmingham, England, were for Jacobs lenses for understanding places and economies around the globe. The socially and economically productive spontaneous order that distinguishes vibrant places arises where Jacobsian principles prevail and Moses-style projects fail. Spontaneous, creative order can’t exist in a monoculture. Spontaneous order works; imposed efficiency leads to stagnation.

This book has shown how Jacobs’s principles are woven into many aspects of urban life. Often, however, they come only after the battle against yet another Moses-style proposal. Ultimately, cities will thrive where Jacobs’s lessons shape both the civic debate and the urban process of growth and change. Only through building on local assets, weaving in the new with the old, pursuing new growth through innovation, only with the success of these paths, will localized efforts, which may or may not be Jacobs inspired, prevail; they will not prevail easily. The good news is that New York City’s assets are many; much here exists to build on. Many cities are not so lucky and wastefully, sadly, keep demolishing the diminished number of assets they have.

The Moses impact will not disappear. Projects detailed in this book will emerge in varying forms in cities everywhere. Their defeat depends on a vigilant, successful citizenry; the compromises offered are never even close to adequate to mitigate the damage. Invariably, appropriate alternatives exist to achieve pronounced goals.

Citywide, one could debate which philosophy, Moses or Jacobs, was victorious. Evidence can be found for both, often simultaneously, as shown here, in the same city and, surely, in all American cities. Planners and developers would like us to think they follow most of Jacobs’s principles. Observation and scrutiny of their plans and designs reveal a different picture. When one looks at where many city governments’ primary attention and investment are directed, when one observes the plans and designs being promoted, when one looks at the cataclysmic scale and enormous cost of many proposals, nobody would be foolish enough to claim that her teachings are settled doctrine. Jacobs-style battles are still being fought, not always with success. But she certainly helped frame today’s debate about urban development and change. And that alone is an enormous change from when it was Moses’s way or no way.

The shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs still looms large over New York City and all cities. The battle for Gotham continues through the best of times and the worst of times.

EPILOGUE

Can stones speak? Go there and listen. You will hear, I swear, the endless murmur of ten thousand tongues expressing wonder at being alive, wonder at being here, and wonder at being free. History becomes a continuing conversation between past and present and the question is whether we listen.

BILL MOYERS,
on the occasion of the hundredth
anniversary of the Eldridge Street Synagogue

I
n December 1982 I walked into the profoundly historic but crumbling 1887 Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side and unwittingly changed my life. For the next twenty-five years, a good part of my time, energy, and passion was devoted to the rescue and restoration of this iconic landmark.

I never expected it. Once again, I had turned into what I write about, one of those people who work to change something in their community, totally ignorant that they have set their sights on an impossible task. That ignorance—and I do mean ignorance—combined with persistence (I was born stubborn) can make the unimaginable happen. And it did.

My friend Bill Josephson, a tall, thick-maned lawyer with a Wall Street firm, knew of my interest in preservation. We had met while both were involved in the battle to save the historic theaters in the Times Square and Broadway theater district in the early 1980s.
¹
None of the theaters was yet a designated landmark. Many were threatened with demolition. Several were on the verge of demolition and were lost. The remaining forty-four historic theaters were designated landmarks.

Bill had discovered the synagogue on a walking tour with New York University professor Gerard Wolf, who highlighted this house of worship in his book
Synagogues of the Lower East Side
. This extraordinary mélange of architectural styles—Gothic, Moorish, Romanesque—was the first synagogue built by the East European Orthodox Jews
as a synagogue
on the Lower East Side. Before then, synagogues on the Lower East Side were established in converted churches, storefronts, or ground floors of tenements. This was the first built from scratch as a synagogue. This is a significant fact.

For hundreds of years, East European Jews worshiped in unprepossessing spaces, vernacular in style, meant to blend in with local buildings so as not to attract undo attention. Most East European Jews had fled pogroms and other life threats to settle here. At first, they worshiped only in little local synagogues, called
shteibeles
. But when they realized they were finally in a place where they could worship openly and freely, they built the Eldridge Street Synagogue, K’Hal Adath Jeshurun with Anche Lubz.

It is grand, embellished, and elegant. The reds, greens, golds, and blues are of different hues in a combination of detailed patterns with the center dome dotted with gold stars on a sky-blue background. Boldly it proclaims its Jewishness. Stars of David are everywhere, a clear statement of “we are here, we are Jewish, we are free.”

I have no family roots on the Lower East Side. Both my parents’ parents settled in Brooklyn after immigrating from Poland and Lithuania. But when I walked into the synagogue, I felt my history emanating from the walls. What an icon of American Jewish history, New York City history, sacred architecture! I was hooked.

Pigeons roosted in the attic and flew in and out of missing windows. Dust was so thick on the pews that you could carve your initials in it. Water was pouring through one corner of the roof. Prayer books were left strewn about. Little objects that worshipers long ago had left behind, including crystal drinking glasses, were randomly scattered. Pieces of stained glass from broken windows were everywhere. No operable bathroom remained. One electric line, connected probably illegally to the street, was gerrymandered for plug-in heaters.

11.1 Balcony window and coffer before restoration. (To view all these photos in color, go to
www.eldridgestreet.org
.)
Kate Milford
.

Decades before, congregants had worshiped one day and left the next. The upstairs sanctuary was nailed shut. Sabbath services had shifted to the small
bes hamedrash
in the basement.
²
The synagogue remained nailed shut until Professor Wolf persuaded the
shamos
, Benjamin Markowitz, to reopen it. Markowitz, a short, stocky Polish immigrant who came through Ellis Island and always seemed to be wearing the same jacket he arrived with, greeted tourists on Sundays and collected small donations, enough money to pay for oil to turn the burner on for Friday night and Saturday Sabbath services.

A FLASHLIGHT INTO HISTORY

Through the dust, despite the pigeons, and beyond the many broken elements, a haunting beauty came through. Sun rays streamed through windows reflecting on the floating particles of dust like a flashlight into history. But it wasn’t just the aesthetic beauty that was so compelling. That beauty is found in many historic houses of worship. And it wasn’t just the intact condition of original, irreplaceable decorative elements, never subjected to unfortunate modernization. As one entered the building, one was touched by the ghosts of history.

While sitting in the balcony, for example, I thought of the hard lives so many of the worshipers had led, working in overcrowded sweatshops, living in crowded quarters, walking the teeming streets. What a refuge this must have been, the one place they could feel valued. After all, if one is worthy to pray in such a magnificent place, that means something.

A profound, untold story was screaming out from the ornately painted ceiling and walls, from the balcony where women sat, from the bimah where snuff boxes held the corners with four brass torchères, from the brass chandeliers and sconces that had never been taken by scavengers, from the red-velvet-lined Ark that once held numerous Torahs. It was as if a missing chapter of the rich Lower East Side Jewish immigrant story had been found. It had to be told.

For that story to be told, the building, the story’s vessel, had to be saved. “What do you think?” Bill asked. “Is it worth spending the rest of our lives saving?” Little did I realize that it would be my life he was talking about.

UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES

There were actually several things I didn’t anticipate. I didn’t realize that by shepherding this restoration I would be witness to and participant in the changing field of historic preservation. And while I long viewed preservation as the ultimate form of recycling, I didn’t expect we would be a model for green preservation and building a local economy, two critical urban issues of the twenty-first century. Localism, buying goods and services close to home, and recycling are fundamental to green design and building blocks for sustainable development of which green design is only one part. But more on this later. “Why do you want to save an old synagogue in Chinatown?” I was often challenged by people unaware of the touchstones of Jewish history remaining in the area. We created a tour, “From Ellis to Eldridge,” when tourist interest was just emerging.

It was clear from the start that if we didn’t save this building, we would have to reinvent it. Four-fifths of American Jews had passed through the Lower East Side on their way to elsewhere. For the Lower East Side, the Eldridge Synagogue had been a major center of Jewish life,
the
synagogue among many. No other synagogue remained intact from that era. For so many new arrivals, their story started here. For some, we learned from former congregants, it was an occasional visit. For others, membership was the pride of their family. Sendor Yarmolowsky, president of the first Jewish-owned bank on the Lower East Side two blocks away, was its first president. Isaac Gellis, before he famously went into the salami and other delicatessen specialty business, was the first rabbi.