Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (13 page)

THE UNHAPPY CHOICE to ring the edge of Manhattan with highways, thereby cutting off the public from the water, is usually laid at the feet of Robert Moses, New York's all-powerful planning czar. Moses has become the hissed villain in the municipality's Passion Play, just as Frederick Law Olmsted, who, with his partner Calvert Vaux, gave the city its greatest treasures, Central Park and Prospect Park, is our hero. In fact, it was Olmsted who initially proposed a wide thoroughfare, or “park-way,” along Manhattan's western edge, past his Riverside Park. Olmsted had a vision of adorning New York with a system of neighborhood parkways connecting up new parks, to serve the carriage trade (this was pre-automobile). As he and Vaux imagined it, the parkway was to be a pleasurably snaking, verdant route 260 feet wide, enough space to allow a wide path for vehicles down the middle, alternating rows of trees and walkways, then side-roads for vehicles to alight in front of buildings. They managed to build a few shining examples, such as Ocean Parkway and Eastern Parkway, which in turn inspired a nationwide parkway movement.

Olmsted's son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., also a prominent city planner, continued the work of his father in advocating a necklace of parkways around the perimeter of New York. But it was Julius Miller, as Manhattan borough president, who proposed the arterial roadway for the West Side in 1925 and oversaw the construction of its first section in 1930, and so it was Miller for whom the structure was named. (Few New Yorkers have ever called it the Miller Highway, taking almost immediately to the more impersonal nomenclature, the West Side Highway. A few years ago, ex-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, an unabashed Yankee fan, maybe forgetting that the road had already been named for an individual, chose to rename it the Joe DiMaggio Highway when the Yankee Clipper passed away, which designation New Yorkers have also largely ignored.)

Miller may have broken ground, but Robert Moses, expanding his domain from parks commissioner to highways and bridges, enthusiastically carried through perimeter-road construction around the whole island of Manhattan. If highways by the water's edge have proven to be a hideous idea, we must remember that many other cities in the United States and overseas were just as guilty of embracing that concept. It was in the air, not a demoniacal infliction by the Power Broker. Years later, in 1974, when perimeter highways were becoming openly reviled for robbing the public of waterfront access, a discarded Robert Moses wrote this defense, using passive tense and first person plural to suggest the more impersonal processes of collective reasoning:

“Not long after the turn of the century it became apparent that Manhattan's street system would not be able to cope with the inevitable growth of motor traffic. Congestion, particularly in the north-south avenues, was plain evidence of worse conditions yet to come. North-south arterials were needed, yet these could not be built in the interior of the borough…. The solution was obvious. Ring the borough with an arterial belt, remove the “Death Avenue” tracks
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to a separate right of way, and along Riverside Park, cover them. Bring the park to the river's side, and create new waterfront parks and promenades in the process. Thus were the east side and west side improvements initiated.” By these he means the
East River (later renamed FDR) Drive, the Harlem River Drive, and the northern extension of Miller Highway above 72nd Street, all the way into the Bronx, where it connected with Westchester's parkway system.

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“Death Avenue” referred to Twelfth Avenue and its freight railway spur, which took the lives of several citizens before being shut down.

“Such improvements were hailed as great achievements years ago. They rescued Manhattan from traffic strangulation that would have stunted the development of the business core. The Metropolitan region's worldwide eminence in commerce and industry is due in no small measure to them.”

Here, Moses dodges the issue of why the roads had to be built in such a way as to leave a brutal gash in the urban fabric, and make it nearly impossible for people to get to the water by foot. He had shown, in his sensitive handling of Carl Schurz Park, the Brooklyn Esplanade, and parts of the Battery and Riverside Park, that he knew how to fold a highway underneath a public space quite beautifully, when he wanted to. But, aside from the greater initial costs entailed by covering perimeter highways, it was never a priority for Moses to make the waterside accessible to pedestrians, perhaps because he regarded himself as serving another constituency.

Moses shared with Olmsted a preference for personal transportation over mass transit. Though he has been portrayed since as Enemy of the People, it was probably more that he saw the middle class as Everyman (a common bourgeois misperception), and, since car ownership was the linchpin of American peacetime industry and the hallmark of citizenship and upward mobility, he regarded perimeter highways as a means of giving middle-class drivers and passengers alike something inspiring to look at as they tooled along.

In any event, the West Side Highway became a workhorse, the second-most-utilized road in the Greater New York area, next to the Long Island Expressway, and by the mid-1950s, a mere twenty-five years after construction, it was already dilapidated. Some traced the highway's crumbling condition to corrosive rock salt used during the big snow of 1947;
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others, to pigeon excrement. “Nothing is to be gained,” wrote Moses, taking the lofty perspective, “by carping criticism and second guessing as to why the highways were allowed to deteriorate to their present state.” Suffice it to
say there has always been more money in the city budget to build than to maintain infrastructure.

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My first memory is of that 1947 snow, at four years old, when my mother tied my brother, sister, and me to a sled and pulled us down Havemeyer Street to do her marketing. What fun!

From 1956 on, plans were put forward to replace the West Side Highway, the most drastic being Moses' own egregious Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal, which would have barreled through parts of Greenwich Village and SoHo and shattered both communities. Jane Jacobs, whose paradigm-shifting 1961 book,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
awakened my generation to the value of multi-use neighborhoods and street life, and to the mistakes of urban planners seeking to impose excessive order, led the successful fight against this scheme. The Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal seemed the apotheosis of everything seignorial and urbicidal in Moses' method of planning; and the relative ease with which it was defeated signaled that a new day of community activism had arrived.

John F. Kennedy was in the White House, and on the local level, the same fresh-start, glamorous spirit was exemplified by John V. Lindsay, the tall, handsome Lochinvar of a congressman from the Silk Stocking district. In 1965 Lindsay got himself elected mayor of New York on the Republican ticket (a rare event in a then-Democratic town), on a platform of giving neighborhoods more control over their destinies, through local city halls and community boards.

Lindsay brought in Edward Logue from Boston, where he had done great things as planning head. Logue, unafraid to wield power, was something of a dark hero to that new crowd of
urbanistas
who had sprung up in New York in the mid-sixties. Improbable as it sounds today, there was an almost rock-star excitement that surrounded city planning and urban improvement in that era. Under Lindsay's mayoralty, there started to be vest-pocket parks, traveling theater groups who performed in the barrios, free outdoor movies in summer, and all sorts of small-scale, contextual housing on the boards. Not much actually got built, but a perfume of limitless promise hovered in the air, the mystique of urban solutions drawing idealistic graduates from good universities, the progeny of Jane Jacobs and Paul Goodman. (I was one inch away at the time from becoming a city planner myself.)

Nelson Rockefeller, who served as governor of New York from 1958 through 1973, pried Ed Logue away from Lindsay (the two men hated each
other; both liberal Republicans wanted to be president, with duplicate constituencies), and made him head of the newly formed Urban Development Corporation. At its outset, fully funded, the UDC had vast powers to construct housing, dormitories, hospitals, and schools across the state. Rockefeller had broken Moses' forty-year hold on the state, by accepting the Indispensable One's insincerely tendered resignation. Now Logue was given the authority, and he had more of a commitment to social justice and consultation with the community than Moses, his predecessor—which suited his new patron.

In spite of being born with the most silvered of silver spoons, Rockefeller, like all successful New York politicians, had the populist touch. “Hiya, fellow!” he would say, and wolf down pastrami at Katz's Delicatessen for the photographers. He wanted to be president, and got as far as vice-president, but was too liberal a Republican to make it all the way. The left could never say a good word about a Rockefeller, much less Nelson; but in retrospect he had a positive side, a passion for modern art and South America that helped establish the Museum of Modern Art and the United Nations headquarters; and he supported the UDC, which built a fair amount of decent mixed-income housing on Roosevelt Island and elsewhere. True, he made horrendous mistakes—the Albany Mall, the antidrug laws, his handling of the Attica prison riot—and that's what people tend to remember. In any case, he became one of the Westway proposal's earliest and most enthusiastic supporters.

THE WESTWAY PLAN was initially hatched around 1969-70, in the city's Housing and Development Administration (HDA), of all places. Sam Ratensky, a senior city planner at HDA, was, by all accounts, urbane and a mensch; he had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen in his youth, and wanted to give a chance to young architects and planners bent on improving the city. He set up a shop of under-thirty aides, jauntily characterized by architectural critic Peter Blake as “Ratensky's Raiders,” and they took on the problem of what to do with the West Side Highway. The team considered several options: restoring the elevated highway, building a new highway at street level, sinking a new highway along West Street with a deck over it, or the “outboard” solution—to build the highway
in the river, alongside the waterfront—which was the one finally chosen.

Craig Whitaker, then twenty-nine, fresh from Yale architecture school and the Peace Corps, played a large part in developing the “outboard” plan, first called Wateredge. Originally the team had toyed with the idea of building a highway on pilings, but the federal highway officials had wanted it placed in a box, so they came up with the inspiration, as Whitaker likes to say, to “drop it in the drink.”

Now a slight, professorial-looking man with thinning hair and pensive blue eyes, who teaches at NYU and wrote a book called
Architecture and the American Dream
, Whitaker seems a thoughtful survivor, less bitter than bemused. Westway is his Moby Dick, the whale that took thirteen years of his life. Having made more than 700 presentations to groups advocating the plan, and having spent years fighting to get it built, he is in no hurry to simplify the complexities of the battle story. He has devised a Westway slide show for his students, and his architectural office on lower Broadway contains what certainly must be the world's largest archive of Westwayiana.

“Look, no sane person would have erected an at-grade or elevated highway again at the edge. The beauty of dropping it in the drink was that this way you got a broad new area, and people could walk to the water without being cut off from the highway. There was lots of parkland acreage. Landfill, yes. So what?” It would not eviscerate neighborhoods or cause massive relocation, nor would it tie up traffic for years with construction, since the downtown part of the old West Side Highway could continue to function at street level until Westway was opened. But, most important, it would bring people back to the Hudson, without having to cross a major highway.

As Whitaker tells it, Sam Ratensky got Ed Logue interested in the redesign. “Ratensky and Logue were rivals, but Sam was ill—dying of brain cancer—and about to retire. So Logue, who liked the outboard idea, hired Sam's whole crew, including me, into UDC, and Sam retired.” The project now had a formidable protector in Logue.

“I was delegated to make the presentation to Governor Rockefeller. I was still pretty young, and no one knew me from Adam. But as soon as Rockefeller heard the word ‘tunnel,’ he went for it.” Whitaker pauses in
mid-thought, like a general recalling ancient errors of military strategy: “It was John Zuccotti [then Chairman of the City Planning Commission] who came up with the name ‘Westway.’ We should have just called it the Tunnel. People would have understood it better.”
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It was not as if New Yorkers were unfamiliar with underwater tubes: they had lived for decades with the Holland and Hudson Tunnels, joining Manhattan with New Jersey, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, running under the East River between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The only difference was that this particular tunnel would hug the western shore of the island, rather than connecting two landmasses.

Certainly such a submerged tunnel, which would take an estimated ten years to construct, would not come cheap: the budget was projected for over a billion dollars, which would make it, foot for foot, the most expensive highway ever built. But the beauty part was that it would cost the city nothing. The Federal Highway Fund would pay for 90 percent, and the state would kick in the remaining 10 percent.

Westway was to run 4.2 miles from the Battery to 42nd Street, in the form of two tubes of three lanes each, plus a shoulder lane on each side. It would be considered part of the interstate highway system. If you wanted the Highway Trust Fund to fork over the money, you had to propose a high-speed interstate expressway. The irony is that the New York City Department of Transportation didn't particularly want a high-speed expressway. The transportation field's philosophy was shifting, from moving cars rapidly through and out of the city, to discouraging high-speed corridors in urban settings. As it was, the rush-hour speed on Westway was projected at only twenty miles per hour. But it still had to be presented as an “interstate highway” (largely a semantic issue) because that way the Feds would pick up 90 percent of the costs, whereas if it were for any other kind of road, federal funds would only pay 65 percent. Being a federal highway also meant that it would take trucks (a plus, removing trucks from the streets). But the very word
interstate
aroused the public's mistrust, understandably, as interstate highways had had a bad record nationwide of bulldozing through neighborhoods and increasing pollution. In fact, in
1977 federal legislation was enacted to prevent interstates from passing through inner cities; however, Westway, being in a tunnel, would still qualify for federal highway monies.