Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (47 page)

All around us, the people we had served sprawled on benches, munching sandwiches, chatting with each other, and looking momentarily assuaged. Bill Dean took me by the arm and showed me—half a block from where the homeless had gathered—a bust of the author of “Bartleby” embedded into the façade of a new building on Pearl Street, and a plaque announcing that here Herman Melville was born.

SEVERAL BLOCKS NORTH OF THE HELIPORT, you will come to the Con Edison Waterside power station. This site stretches from East 38th to East 41st Streets, and from First Avenue to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Drive. The power station projects very different impressions depending on which side of it you encounter. The façades along First Avenue are for the most part handsome, early-twentieth-century buildings, with arched windows that go up four stories, lots of curved ornamental stonework, and the words the n.y. edison co. carved quaintly above the door. Looking at the backside of the Con Edison Waterside Station, overlooking the river, you get much more the sense of a powerful dynamo. Here, corrugated steel sheds, fat connecting pipes, catwalks, and ladders rule: it's an impressive, if daunting, display of old-fashioned industrial might, haunted, idled, and about to be torn down.

After federal legislation deregulated the power industry in the 1990s, Con Edison decided to phase itself out of the energy-production business, while continuing to deliver electricity. (It would also remain a producer of steam, which is still a moneymaker in Manhattan, where the closeness of skyscrapers makes it sensible to heat buildings that way.) The utility company, seeking to convert valuable Midtown property into cash, put its Waterside plant on the market. Originally Con Edison was only going to dispose of its non-generating buildings, but the real estate community advised the utility that the site would fetch much more money if the new properties did not have to sit cheek-by-jowl with generating plants. Con Edison may have also gotten a little greedy in soliciting bids for the property, driving the price up so much that only a very large, dense, luxury residential project could turn a sufficient profit. Several capable developers dropped out, sensing that such density would enmesh them in long, fruitless fights with the community planning board. The winning bidder was FSM East River Associates, a partnership of two New York developers, Fisher Brothers and Sheldon Solow, and Morgan Stanley, the financial firm. The final sale price for the property will depend on the size of the development rights approved by the city, which will consider input from the community planning board in making its decision. Some members of Community Board 6 are indeed worried that a development as large as this one is anticipated to be will entail very tall buildings, blocking the views of neighbors and casting extensive shadows over the surrounding blocks, while increasing the area's volume of traffic to unconscionable levels. Other members feel that the streets can handle the additional vehicles, and that there is nothing wrong with allowing a few more tall buildings in
Midtown, but worry that the urban design will be too prosaic. Beyond that, what will it do for the waterfront?

One of the first acts of the developer, FSM, was to hold an architectural competition soliciting world-renowned, cutting-edge architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, and Frank Gehry, along with a few more staid firms, such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Pei Cobb Fried and Partners, who had considerable local experience building in New York. This competition inspired much drooling and dreaming in the architectural community. It also whetted the market's and the public's appetite for the project: If something truly futuristic or original could arise where the generating station had been, it would almost justify the demolition of the power plant and the sale of Manhattan's waterfront to the wealthy. A jury, headed by knowledgeable, esteemed ex–university president Bill Lacey, was appointed, and the various architectural schemes published in the newspaper. It was assumed that the jury would pair one of the visionary architects with one of the more pragmatic local firms. Imagine the chagrin when the winning pair was announced as the two pragmatic local firms: Marilyn Jordan Taylor of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed! These results pleased nobody.

A part of me had to be amused at the way the New York real estate lobby felt it could stand up to the avant-garde mafia without blinking, and say, in effect, “Sorry, we're not interested in your cockamamie deconstructivist schemes, we think we can make more money with the usual boring, buttoned-down designs.” On the other hand, I was disappointed, discouraged, left, like everyone else, with a cynical, bitter feeling, as when a backroom deal has been struck. I no longer looked forward to whatever they might build at the Con Edison site, if it was only going to be more of the same.

Months after, I heard talk that at least one of the old Con Edison buildings might be salvaged. Granted, the idea of turning power stations into cultural institutions was already becoming something of a cliché; but if clever adaptive reuse had converted a London turbine plant into the Tate Modern, or a Paris railroad station into the Musée d'Orsay, why not turn a Con Edison generating building into a museum or school? While neither old building on First Avenue was an out-and-out historical
masterpiece, their façades had character. They possessed “wonderful soaring interiors,” I was told.

In Europe there is a growing movement, known as Industrial Archaeology, intended to preserve pieces of the industrial past, sometimes by keeping them as ruins, or as monuments to their past use, and sometimes by saving the shell and putting the interior to an entirely different function. In the United States, too, conferences are held in which hobbyist scholars of old factories and turbines and float-bridges deliver papers on the poetry of mechanical solutions. New York City has thus far done precious little to preserve its industrial heritage. Consider that the heroes and philosopher-kings of nineteenth-century America were for the most part its engineers and inventors—and that it is still possible that the greatest achievement of American civilization will turn out to be its engineering genius. True, at the moment this genius no longer excites the cultural imagination of many educated Americans, or, worse, inspires resentful ambivalence. Who knows, though, if someday our descendants will revere the technical innovations and study the works of Consolidated Edison?

I am not sure myself that it is worth going to the mat to preserve either of these old Con Edison buildings. But I think one reason the community board and civic groups such as the Municipal Art Society have remain fixated on adaptive reuse is that they think it might promote a better urban design, a better street-wall, than the suburban banalities of a tower-in-the-park enclave. At the moment, the chances of retaining any fragment of the Waterside power station are slim, while the odds of the resulting project looking similar to banal Trump Place, on the West Side, are very strong.

WHAT ABOUT THE PROJECT
'
S WATERFRONT ACCESS
?
Just south of the site, there already exists a two-block fragment of waterfront esplanade, from East 36th to East 38th Streets, called the East River Esplanade Park. Designed by the landscape architect Thomas Balsley (who also did the Queens West Gantry Park, the Chelsea Waterside Park, and Riverside Park South), this particular esplanade is pleasant and popular; it has a formal, Jardin Luxembourg quality; the best part of its design is the separation of levels between the benches overlooking the river and a raised portion underneath the trees. At the southern entrance, East 36th Street,
a “fitness cluster” offers instructions for stretching exercises and an inclined gymnastic bench. You can also enter the esplanade at 37th Street through an elegant granite underpass (though it often has a urine smell.) The East River Esplanade's ordered lines, geometric symmetries, and round stone planters are very different in feeling from Stuyvesant Cove's wilder rambles, but both have their virtues. This piecemeal, budget-starved way that the overall East River Esplanade is coming into existence may not be a bad thing: it makes for some variety reflecting differences in adjacent neighborhoods, more so than the monolithic strip that the Hudson River Park threatens to become.

In any case, you could extend the Balsley esplanade up to 42nd Street (and beyond, if only the United Nations would permit pedestrian access to its edge). The main obstacle to reaching the waterfront from the Con Edison site is the obtrusive northern ramp of the FDR Drive. Were it to be torn down, you would still have to traverse the highway at grade (with the aid of a traffic light), but visual access to the river would be much better. You might also decide to deck over the FDR Drive at this point: imagine a large deck from 38th Street to 42nd Street, which would extend from the ground floor of whatever new buildings arose on the Con Edison site, down to the river. The question is, who would pay for such a deck: the developer, the city, both?

On First Avenue, between East 41st and East 42nd Streets, wedged in as an afterthought between Con Edison's Waterside Station and the United Nations, is the Robert Moses Playground. An asphalt punch-ball field corralled by a chain-link fence, next to a ventilating building for the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, it is as bare and bleak a tribute to the man who created more elegant parks, swimming pools, and beaches than anyone else in New York history, as the harshest critic of Moses might wish for.

23 EXCURSUS ROBERT MOSES, A REVISIONIST TAKE

I
AM STRUCK BY THE FACT THAT WHENEVER PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE
—
STOCKBROKERS, ENGLISH PROFESSORS, ARTISTS, HOUSEWIVES, CARPENTERS
—
TALK TO ME ABOUT New York City, they knowingly trace its problems back to Robert Moses. There exists a startling consensus that Moses was a monster, the enemy of the good. This Manichaean tale—how Robert Moses ruined, or tried to ruin, New York—has indeed become the city's postwar master-narrative, its Romulus-and-Remus myth. It has proven extraordinarily useful, as master narratives often are, and has only two drawbacks: (1) it may not be
true—or true anywhere approaching the extent that people now believe; (2) it prevents our interpreting New York's history with greater accuracy and nuance, not to mention developing more sophisticated narratives that might better suit our planning for the city's future.

The genesis of the “satanic majesty” version of Robert Moses is of course Robert Caro's magnificently readable and researched biography,
The Power Broker,
which appeared in 1974. That it is a great work of investigative reporting and urban history, no one can deny. The summer I read it, I gobbled it down like a detective novel, to find out the answers to a lurid crime. I felt I had stumbled upon a Rosetta Stone that explained for the first time the city around me, its physical mysteries and flaws.

I placed it alongside Jane Jacobs's
Death and Life of Great American Cities,
both working together to support the informal, pedestrian culture I loved about old cities, as against the modern planners' sterile, street-killing interventions. Both books, in a sense, formed me; they became part of the molecular structure of my brain; I thought
through
their premises' scrims, as did many in my generation. The quarreling Moses and Jacobs became in my mind Uncle Rob, the prosperous blowhard who tells you at a family gathering that you don't understand the first thing about power and money, or the way the real world operates, and Aunt Jane, the retired English teacher who is always carping and trying to get you to sign a liberal petition. The fact that they were both Jewish (I know, he converted to Christianity, but still…) made it seem even more as though they were my arguing relatives.

Over the years I began to experience little voices of inner doubt, which made me entertain timidly pro-Moses thoughts. Some arose from overhearing architects and planners mutter, “What I'd give for a Robert Moses to cut through the bureaucratic crap.” As this seemed the equivalent of “Mussolini made the trains run on time,” I was inclined to dismiss it. But the more I witnessed New York City's paralysis in tackling any new public works or large civic improvements, the more I suspected that maybe Moses had a point. However delightful Jane Jacobs's vision of the choreography of Greenwich Village street life may have been, it seemed static, frozen in time, like a stage set of gingerbread houses where the same charming operetta takes place every day. Her preference for the ad hoc and community control left no room for planning regionally, much
less executing great urban schemes such as Central Park or the reservoir system.

Then I came across a book by Moses himself,
Public Works: A Dangerous Trade,
and discovered a mind far more playful and subtle than the caricatured villain we had made of him, and a literary style (founded on Samuel Johnson, his favorite writer in college) better than that of most of his critics.

Here he is on a subject dear to my heart, the treatment of New York in literature: