BIG CITY CHANGE IN INCREMENTAL STEPS
The city administration as well is making big changes with small strides even while it more aggressively promotes and overvalues controversial large projects. Individuals within the administration have a mandate to find new creative ways to make positive changes, especially in the area of reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. The Housing and Preservation Department under Shawn Donovan, now head of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., created 81,500 new low-income units scattered around the city, out of a goal of 165,000 over five years, less than they hoped for but considerable nonetheless.22 The Housing Authority is making possible needed infill development on long-underused and unnecessary open space left from the tower-in-the-park era of misguided development. For years the Housing Authority has been replacing windows, upgrading water-conserving plumbing, and installing low-energy-consuming appliances in public housing, increasing efficiency and lowering energy costs. None of these are individually big projects in one place but are large overall, with positive effects nonetheless.
The Transportation Department, under director Janette Sadik-Khan, is achieving enormous citywide change with small-scale initiatives that wrest traffic lanes from vehicles and expand the bicycle path network. Sadik-Khan created new plazas on street space where cars were once the sole occupants. Tables and chairs proliferate. More than two hundred miles of bike lanes have been added across the city in three years, with more planned. Bus stops are more welcoming. In the process, Sadik-Khan has reminded us of the multiple purposes of city streets. Nibble by nibble she is reclaiming city space eroded during the more-cars era—she calls it the “attrition of automobiles.”23 But she’s done something equally significant in demonstrating that a department of transportation has a greater responsibility than just moving traffic and that streets belong as much to pedestrians and bikers as to cars. This is part of the mayor’s ambitious vision to reduce pollution and traffic congestion.
PlaNYC is a shrewd planning document that includes many of the big development schemes that would have been included in a traditional master plan. However, this is not a traditional plan. What is unique are dozens of farsighted environmental initiatives that have never been seen in a city plan, including citywide storm-water drainage upgrades, making city buildings energy efficient, eliminating thousands of parking permits for city employees, the planting of 1 million trees (200,000 so far), and providing incentives to get 15 percent of the city’s taxi fleet converted to hybrids. This “long-term vision for a sustainable New York City” is based on a somewhat mysterious prediction that by 2030, the city population is expected to rise to 9.1 million, from its current 8.36 million. Such predictions are always tricky, like the one in the 1970s when the City Planning Commission predicted the population would go down to the 5 million range. The PlaNYC prediction, of course, did not anticipate an economic collapse or the exodus of some immigrants returning to their home countries as opportunities in the United States diminished. Futurist predictions are always risky and often wrong. Nevertheless, many of the modest accomplishments of city agencies already mentioned are enumerated worthwhile goals in this plan, regardless of population changes.
It is well known that the city’s communities of color and low-income residents carry the heaviest burden in pollution and traffic, from garbage handling, incinerators, and power plants. For years, environmental justice groups had been pushing for equity in the handling of the city’s solid waste, both commercial and residential. The goal was to shift waste export to rail and barge from thousands of trucks and to equitably redevelop the city’s dormant network of marine waste-transfer stations. Progress here has been made on several fronts. Instead of just building new big power plants, some existing plants have been retrofitted to increase megawatt production, while simultaneously decreasing pollution emissions. Two new marine transfer stations were approved for Manhattan, one on the Upper East Side and one on the Lower West Side, to reduce the truck traffic having a negative impact on the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Recycling efforts have increased to reduce the volume of garbage. Again, it’s big change in small increments.
Perhaps most significantly, a long-term solid-waste management plan proposed by Mayor Bloomberg and adopted by the New York City Council in 2006 is revolutionizing garbage removal for the city. This plan had been championed by environmental justice activists for a decade. All Bronx residential and municipal waste—about 2,100 tons per day—was shifted from truck to rail. The Staten Island Railroad was reactivated, and household waste in that borough now travels by rail. In 2009, residential waste generated in the North Brooklyn waste shed was shifted to rail from trucks. This Brooklyn operation represents up to 950 tons of waste per day. Eliminated are an estimated forty long-haul tractor trailer trips a day and about thirteen thousand trips a year. Permits to construct new marine transfer stations are also being sought so more containerized waste can be transported by barge to rail loading points or out-of-state receiving sites. Reducing large vehicular traffic on a big scale is no small feat. At present, more than one-third of the city’s residential and solid waste is now being transported out of the city by rail.
Mayor Bloomberg not only agreed to the environmental justice civic coalition’s longtime proposals but also brought into the administration one of the leaders of that fight. Eddie Bautista was the lead organizer for the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods before he was appointed director of the Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs to oversee the Bloomberg administration’s local legislative agenda. Bautista also continues to work with administration officials on the implementation of the landmark 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan.
The extraordinary success at the three-hundred-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard—between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges—under Andrew Kimball is the clearest evidence any city official should need to understand that New York City is still a perfectly viable site for light industry and that not enough space for it exists, as more than one hundred neighborhoods are upzoned, squeezing out existing manufacturing. In five years, the Navy Yard has gone from 3,500 to 5,000 jobs in forty or more buildings. The 230 companies vary remarkably in size, with many having grown exponentially in recent years. New buildings are in construction. The waiting list continues to grow. Only one company failed during the economic collapse, and as soon as one moves out, another moves in, all this while Wall Street, tourism, and retail hemorrhage jobs.
The Parks Department’s two-billion-dollar ten-year capital plan to build new and repair old facilities is the largest ever, and its impact is incremental citywide. In 2008 alone, four hundred million dollars was spent, clearly a stimulus package of the best kind. The restoration of the historic Highbridge, a substantial new park in Elmhurst; replacement of gas tanks, an indoor pool, and a skating rink in Flushing Meadow; restoration of McCarren Pool (a beneficial Moses legacy); creation of a huge new park on the former landfill of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills; and renovation and upgrades of small parks all over town are significant quality-of-life and neighborhood investments that have nothing to do with real estate or conventional economic development projects. In themselves, however, these investments function as magnets for economic and social improvement of an area, the kind that really works. Most significantly, many of the city’s best park investments (Hunts Point, Bronx River, High Line, community gardens) followed grassroots proposals. Responding to local ideas is the highest form of government leadership.
After years of debate and indecision, the mayor also began installing 3,300 bus-stop shelters made in New York City, 20 public toilets, and 330 replacement newsstands; converted more of the city’s car fleet to hybrids; and drastically reduced parking privileges for city employees who unnecessarily added to traffic congestion.24 These are not insignificant quality-of-life and environmental issues, either; they will have citywide social and economic impacts rather than the big-bang impact of one big development project in one place.
All these
governmental efforts dovetail nicely with local, private, and nonprofit initiatives. These are big efforts in modest doses spread all over town, adding up to big change. This is building on and adding to existing assets, appropriate in scale and context—Urban Husbandry at its best.
1
THE WAY THINGS WERE
I am a creature of the city I was born in. Although my parents contributed, it was the city—with its vibrancy, diversity, challenges, and choices, along with its sights, smells, and sounds—that raised me and shaped my urban sensibility. Our move to a Connecticut suburb shaped me also. It gave me a taste of another way of life, one that sharpened my urban sensibility. Mine is a New York tale, but more than that, my family story parallels that of millions of Americans and illustrates patterns of social change that altered the face of American cities, not just New York.
My parents were both the children of immigrants, both born and raised in Brooklyn, enthralled by the American dream as defined in the early decades of the last century. I was the first of my family to be born in Manhattan, a tremendous achievement for my parents’ generation, as moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan was a mark of accomplishment.
My father was in the dry-cleaning business, first learning the business by working for someone else, then opening his own store with money borrowed from the family circle, and expanding that business into a small chain of four stores in Greenwich Village.1 This pattern of entrepreneurial evolution was typical of new immigrants and their children. It still is. One can observe this happening, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods, in cities everywhere. Borrowing from the “family circle” or “community network” has always been the first step in new immigrant business formations. My family was no exception. Conventional banks are an intimidating, alien experience and not usually welcoming to immigrants.
The main store was on Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, then the primary shopping street of Greenwich Village. The plant, where garments from all four stores were cleaned, was on West Third Street, around the corner from where we lived. When I was very young, my mother worked there with my father while my older sister and I were in school. My mother enrolled in a decorating course at NYU (neither of my parents had been to college) and eventually became a professional interior decorator (today she would be called an “interior designer”). She developed an active career gaining clients through word of mouth.
We lived in a spacious apartment on the sixth floor of a twelve-story building on the south side of Washington Square Park with windows overlooking the park. My mother could keep an eye on me when I played in the park or beckon me if I overstayed my playtime. Roller skating, jumping rope, swinging a leg over a bouncing Spaldeen to the “A My Name Is Alice” game, and trading-card games against walls of buildings were favorite pastimes.2 Others played stoopball, stickball, curb ball, and many more. The variety of kids’ games on the sidewalks and streets of the city is infinite. The vitality that this street activity represented, under the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors, was often misinterpreted as slum conditions.
Television was not yet affordable for my family, but I had a friend on the twelfth floor who enjoyed that luxury. Every Tuesday night, I would visit her to watch Uncle Miltie (Milton Berle). Occasionally, I also got to watch Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows or, just as exciting, Ed Sullivan. I even saw the show on which he introduced the Beatles.
I walked seven or eight blocks to school; played freely and endlessly in the park; listened to folk singers who gathered regularly at the Circle (the local name for the big circular fountain); traveled uptown to museums, theaters, and modern dance lessons; and shopped Fourteenth Street for inexpensive everyday clothes and Fifth Avenue uptown for the occasional more expensive special purchases.
On Christmas Eve, my parents, my sister, and I would take the Fifth Avenue bus up to Fifty-ninth Street (Fifth Avenue was two-way then) and stroll down to Thirty-fourth Street to enjoy the exuberant Christmas windows of the department stores. While all the department stores competed to produce the most artful window displays, Lord & Taylor always won hands down; Saks Fifth Avenue and B. Altman alternated for second place. Even the few banks and airline offices then on Fifth Avenue put on a good display. Then we would take the bus the rest of the way downtown and join carolers singing at the huge Christmas tree under the Washington Square Arch. It was a great tradition. The city was a delightful place to be in the 1940s and 1950s.
1.1 My apartment house and block on Washington Square South before condemnation. NYU Archives.
1.1a NYU’s Bobst Library replaced my block. Jared Knowles.
THE PUSH-PULL EFFECT
Two things led my family to move to Westport, Connecticut, then a paradigm of suburbia. Opportunity beckoned my father. The first strip shopping center, with the area’s first branch of a New York City department store, had opened in Westport. Like in so many downtowns across America, this one was a short distance from downtown, enough to draw business away. Across from that, only minutes from Main Street, a second was about to open. The builder of the second center wanted to include a dry-cleaning store. He wanted my father to be the one to do it.
Strip centers across America of that time imitated city shopping streets and actually repackaged in a planned version the successful commercial mix that evolved spontaneously on urban streets. Developers went by a formula that included a mixture of service and specialty stores. Thus, the builder wanted a dry cleaner to locate between the supermarket and the baby-clothes store, with the hardware, carpeting, and other stores and the luncheonette to follow down the line. The offer was a hard-to-resist business opportunity for my father.
My father hungered for the appeal of suburban life, but my mother definitely did not and never settled into it happily. “You pay a stiff price for that blade of grass,” she used to say. Nevertheless, opportunity was having an irresistible pulling effect on my father. We made the switch.
My mother resisted the stay-at-home suburban-housewife lifestyle, but she definitely got caught up in the car culture. My father drove a secondhand Chevy station wagon, but my mother’s first car was a red Ford convertible with a V8 engine and stick shift. If she had to be in the suburbs, she wanted a fun car. A few years later, her second car was similar but in white. Both cars were guaranteed boy magnets in the parking lot on the very rare occasion that I was permitted to drive her car to school. For after-school activities, most of the time, I hitchhiked or biked to my destination. My mother refused to be a chauffeur.
While opportunity and suburban living were having a pulling effect on my parents, three negative forces intruded on our balanced urban existence and helped push us over the edge. The Third Street building in which my father’s main “plant” (I never knew why it was called a plant) was located was condemned as part of a large urban renewal project, devised by Robert Moses. “Urban Renewal” was the federal program that funded the major overhaul of most American cities starting in the 1950s. The plant’s Third Street block was part of the sizable chunk of the South Village’s multifunctional, economically viable urban fabric that was sacrificed for subsidized middle-income apartment houses set in green plazas, namely, Washington Square Village and south of that the Silver Towers designed by I. M. Pei. This area, just north of Houston and the future SoHo, had a similar mix of cast-iron commercial buildings, tenements, small apartment houses, and a few federal houses.
Through urban renewal, New York University, not yet the dominant force in the neighborhood that it has become, acquired our apartment building and let it be known that all tenants eventually would have to move to make way for university expansion. Urban renewal, then as now, helped educational institutions expand campuses through eminent domain, the taking of private property for a loosely defined public purpose. Bobst Library, a hulking sandstone library designed by Philip Johnson, was built on the site.
As if losing our apartment and my father’s plant were not enough, underworld forces were muscling in on small businesses, like my
father’s on Eighth Street, making it increasingly difficult for business owners like my father to remain independent. The primary site for Larry Brandes Dry Cleaners was centrally located on Eighth Street, at MacDougal. Eighth Street is the Village’s equivalent to a Main Street.
1.2 “L. Brandes Cleaners” was my father’s store on Eighth Street, circa 1930s or 1940s, with delivery truck parked in front. Eighth Street BID.
PUSHED TO LEAVE
The combination of Robert Moses Urban Renewal and the underworld shakedowns made our departure inevitable. So we moved to Weston, Connecticut, the neighboring town to Westport. My father, having sold what he could of the business in the city, opened in neighboring Westport one of the first cash-and-carry dry-cleaning stores in a Connecticut shopping center. My sister, Paula, was working for a New York advertising agency, and she created a newspaper campaign that started weeks before the opening, playing on the theme of “city to suburb.”
No pick-up and home delivery service was offered in the new store, as had been done in the city, but same-day service and on-site shirt laundering were possible that hadn’t been in his city stores. The store opened in 1953, and I eagerly worked there after school and Saturdays, starting by assembling hangers and eventually waiting on customers.
“Hand-finishing” (a fancy term for ironing) was a service not usually available in dry-cleaning stores. My father introduced that service in Westport. Katie, a woman who worked in the West Third Street plant, commuted from Harlem to Westport to continue working for my father. He picked her up every morning at the train station. Amazingly as well, two of the pressers, Al and Phil, who lived in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and also had worked on West Third Street, commuted from the city every day to continue working for my father. They were ardent Brooklyn Dodger fans; my father and I were equally ardent Yankee fans. During games—especially pennants and World Series—the store was wild with cheers and jeers. Customers came second.
The Battle for Gotham Page 4
