The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  The number of cases around the world where a similar phenomenon is observable, that is, diminished space and disappearing traffic, is increasing. This is true whether in San Francisco after the earthquake brought down the Embarcadero or in Milwaukee after an elevated portion of the downtown expressway was removed or in Seattle in 2007 with the partial closure of Interstate 5—dubbed “the Big Clog”—when dire traffic predictions proved wrong.

  Clark Williams-Derry, reporting in the Seattle Times on August 30, 2007, noted that traffic remained “far better than average, despite slow-downs through the construction zone” and that people were finding alternative ways to get to work. “The main lesson from The Clog That Wasn’t,” he wrote, “is this: The conventional wisdom about traffic just isn’t right. We tend to think that Seattle commuters are tied to their cars and can’t—or won’t—use alternative modes of transportation in large numbers. But that notion was just turned on its head. As it turns out commuters are much more adaptable, flexible and wilier than we give them credit for.”

  NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

  The one big drawback to the park, the city’s smallest, is the same as it is for the surrounding district. NYU owns or rents so much of everything around it that this historical heart of Greenwich Village is, for all intents and purposes, the NYU campus. As long ago as 1958, an article in the New York Times noted, “The park is now in effect a campus shared with tourists and mothers who sun their infants and watch youngsters roller skate on the park pavement.”5

  “Overbearing” is how one park neighbor described NYU’s presence, while ambivalently acknowledging the positive contribution of the students’ youthful presence. “The crowd is not the blackstocking crowd of my youth,” she says, “but I like their esprit. NYU has made the neighborhood too campuslike, however. They even close the park for graduation.” In fact, notes another longtime resident, “NYU is the landlord of so much of the Village that you don’t see the same degree of groundswell of resistance to its continued encroachments. That is the hidden side of the neighborhood now. Too many people are beholden to NYU and thus stay silent.”

  Overbearing is surely the appropriate description for what NYU has become in recent years. Once a good solid commuter school with primarily New York City students, NYU with its fourteen separate schools has now grown to be the largest private university in the country, attracting students from around the world, as much for its top rank as for its New York City locale. After twenty years of expansion and about a dozen new high-rises, NYU owns or occupies one hundred buildings between Sixth and Second Avenues and has become the defining presence. And instead of seeking to develop a secondary campus elsewhere in the city where it might be a welcome, regenerative presence, it continues to expand in place. In 2007, NYU—with forty thousand students and thirty-one hundred faculty—claimed a need for another six million square feet of space over twenty-five years.

  Many residents of the Village are, of course, concerned that their historic neighborhood character will be subsumed into NYU’s overarching presence. It is not an unfounded concern. In fact, it parallels the concern of many neighborhoods around the city as educational, hospital, and other institutions take advantage of zoning privileges provided “community facilities” to physically expand in all-consuming ways. Cities across the country, from New Haven to Berkeley, wrestle with this dilemma, especially since urban colleges are a prime student choice nationally these days. Many also have wealthy donors who have been all too happy to have their name on a new building.

  While the university is somewhat dispersed around the East Village, its most dominating presence is felt around the park. The Greek Revival row houses on the park’s north side were once the home of John Dos Passos, Edward Hopper, and the social elite. Their elegant, restrained redbrick fronts with white marble entryways and classic fluted columns framing the front doors are beautifully maintained and guarantee the future for one of the park’s most distinctive architectural features. Now most of these designated landmarks house NYU departments. The gracious old apartment houses on the park’s west side, where so many of my childhood friends lived, are also owned by NYU and used for faculty and student housing. Eleanor Roosevelt had her apartment on the top floor of number 29 while her husband was president. I vividly remember walking my dog at the same time she walked her Scottie, Fala. She was very friendly and often stopped to talk as our dogs sniffed each other. I was much too young to be in awe of whom I was chatting with.

  ENHANCING THE STREET, OR NOT

  On the east side of the park, NYU has converted all the onetime factory buildings into classrooms and other uses. This includes the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirt Waist Fire building, a designated landmark. Some of the buildings have never looked better. Unfortunately, however, insufficient transparent street-level uses exist in NYU buildings. Ground-floor windows can add or diminish interest where it matters most, on the street. Too many of the university’s ground-floor functions are hidden by painted-over or filled-in windows. What could possibly be happening behind the darkened windows that the passerby should not see? Even mechanical equipment is more interesting to look at than a painted-over window.

  The scattered visible activity spaces—an attractive reception hall facing the park, a study area, a cafeteria—subtly add to the pedestrian experience. They are too few in number. In the suburbs, this would not be noticeable, nor would it matter, since everyone drives by in a car. But in a city, what happens on the ground floor of every building adds to or subtracts from street life. Relating better to the street is vital to NYU and the city.

  Street-level windows are probably the most underappreciated, smallest, and least-considered element of urban life. Yet they are the perfect vehicle to reflect local activity, character, and history.

  NYU is not alone in missing the opportunity of street-level spaces. New York street life is being nibbled to death all over town, one store window and one ground-floor space at a time. The federal office building near City Hall has solid green glass. The expanded Museum of Modern Art has turned most of Fifty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues into a solid wall of contemporary, metallic material, deadening the street. Even a few small windowlike openings—originally promised—could make a pedestrian connect to the museum space. This is a prime walking district. Banks, drugstore chains, and assorted uses have dulled the window-gazing experience on many streets.

  Ironically, in contrast, one of the best examples of a street-enhancing window use is an NYU one, a few blocks north of Washington Square Park at the corner of Broadway and Ninth Street. “Broadway Windows,” a program of the NYU School of Fine Arts, contains rotating exhibits of truly fine student work on the ground floor of a 1920s apartment house. It always grabs my attention. Imagine if windows around the district served as a showcase for student and neighborhood creativity.

  The most suburban feature NYU has added in recent years is a truly unfortunate one—the campus circulating bus. Understandably, many campus universities around the country today have a circulating bus system. On a spread-out, self-contained nonurban campus, this may make sense. But the NYU campus is the city itself. NYU is concentrated in one of the city’s most walkable—and bikable!—districts, well served by mass transit. Almost every subway line runs into it. This may not be what out-of-town or suburban students are used to. But the advantages of being here should be demonstrated, not circumvented. As an NYU student, I lived on the Upper West Side and commuted to class by subway and by foot, as did and do thousands of city students. Instinctively, some people say, “Students need a quick way to get from one class to the next when distance is a problem.” Well, it is doubtful that the bus is where every student needs it to be at the appointive time and going lickety-split, nonstop, to that student’s next class. In fact, most of the time that I observe this circulating bus, it has only a few passengers. Walking is probably more direct and faster, biking even better.

  THE POE HOUSE CONTROVERSY

  One of the big Vill
age controversies in recent years was NYU’s destruction in 2000 of the 1835 redbrick house in which Edgar Allan Poe lived when he published his poem “The Raven.” The unadorned Poe House was located on the West Third block between Sullivan and Thompson Streets. On the west end was Judson House, originally three separate Greek Revival houses that were merged and redesigned in the 1890s by McKim, Mead, and White. Judson House backed up to the landmark Judson Church facing the park, also designed by McKim, Mead, and White, one of the country’s most important historic architectural firms.

  This unassuming stretch of four- to six-story mustard and redbrick buildings was a quintessential urban block, representing varied building types, styles, and periods built over time. Such physical variety, when not totally occupied by one user, invites assorted economic uses on which a diverse city economy depends. The loss of this undesignated but landmark-worthy block was yet another clear diminishment of the Village’s historic character. The four-story law school replacement is at best an ordinary design with an unmistakable institutional look.

  A very public fight arose around NYU’s planned demolition of the Poe House. NYU rationalized that it had been heavily altered over time, something that can be said of many restorable landmarks. Yet it still reflected what Henry James described as the “established repose” of the once fashionable Federal and Greek Revival row houses built when the area was first developed in the 1830s. NYU argued that the loss was necessary for its survival. Many institutions make the same argument when, instead, they could be creatively weaving such landmarks into their institutional future, as well as the city’s.

  In a letter to the editor published in the New York Times on July 27, 2000, E. L. Doctorow, who teaches English literature at NYU, wrote, “NYU has consistently recognized and celebrated its connection to the historic literary culture of Greenwich Village. How uncharacteristic of this great university that it now wants to raze this . . . small house that is very suggestive of the writer’s perpetually straitened circumstances. I wonder why plans can’t be drawn to build the school around, above and behind it. This sort of thing has been done elsewhere when architects have been faced with a historic but inconvenient structure.” Also in a letter to the editor, Woody Allen noted that “surely it can be worked out in a way that does not destroy yet another piece of this fast-vanishing area.”

  The judge who ruled in the university’s favor in a lawsuit brought to stop the Poe House demolition nevertheless took the university to task, noting, “As a leading academic institution where Poe’s cadences are still heard . . . NYU would seem to be the natural guardian of the Poe House. . . . From a historical, cultural and literary point of view, Poe House should stand.”

  Subsequently, in negotiations with community and preservation groups, the university agreed to reconstruct the facade of the house as it appeared in the nineteenth century, using salvaged original bricks, lintels, cornices, and other materials. Even this concession was not fulfilled. “There were not enough usable bricks,” a spokesman claimed in all seriousness. Instead, a silly rendition in new brick of the historic building was incorporated into the ground floor of the new block-long building, a few doors away from the historic site. This fake is not even worthy of Colonial Williamsburg.

  Judson Memorial Church is all that remains of the south side of Washington Square Park. Philip Johnson’s hulking red-sandstone Bobst Library built by NYU in 1960 flanks the east end; the mock-colonial law school flanks the west end. In between is NYU’s thirteen-story Kimmel Center, built in 2003. Ironically, NYU promotional material still offers the opportunity to live in “Greenwich Village, one of NYC’s most creative and energetic communities and a historic mecca for generations of world renowned artists, writers and scholars.”

  In NYU’s favor, it must be said, is its overall respect for the urbanism and the street grid of its locale. NYU and Greenwich Village are woven into each other around the university buildings. This, of course, is ensured because of the Historic District designation regulated by the Landmarks Commission. And even though it has effectively transformed the community in which it resides, NYU never tried to change the street patterns to make it feel like a private enclave. A visitor does not know the extent of NYU’s dominance. One feels comfortable coming into it or passing through. The same cannot be said for Columbia University’s planned expanded campus, as will be further explored later in this book.

  THE WEST VILLAGE

  While NYU clearly dominates the east side of Greenwich Village, it has had no visible impact on the West Village. Cross Sixth Avenue and you feel transplanted back into the historical Village of small stores, one-of-a-kind boutiques, walk-up apartments, restaurants, cafés, and unpredictable happenings. The West Village, with its textbook array of historic architecture, misses the aesthetic unity of scores of the city’s historic residential and industrial districts. It does, however, have a different sort of unity. Here, the art of architecture is found in the treasured old, not the fashionable new. Housing costs have skyrocketed, but the resident population remains diverse in all ways. The content of the diversity is not the same—no longshoremen, more blacks—but varied nonetheless.

  “The West Village has done very well,” Jane observed on a visit in 2004. “If other city neighborhoods had done as well there would not be as much trouble in many cities. There are too few neighborhoods as successful right now so that the supply doesn’t nearly meet the demand. So they are just gentrifying in the most ridiculous way. They are crowding out everybody except people with exorbitant amounts of money, which is a symptom that demand for such a neighborhood outstrips the supply by far.”

  One of the most interesting sites is right on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Third Street. Until 1927 Sixth Avenue ran from Central Park West to a short distance north of here at Carmine Street. In that year, the city blasted away tenements to continue Sixth Avenue south. A few little wedge-shaped pieces of empty space remained, such as a small asphalt lot enclosed by a chain-link fence with several handball and basketball courts that daily host some of the most serious competitions in the city. Not just anyone gets to play there, and sport scouts reportedly come by looking for talent. This is one of those serendipitous urban activities that spring up where space just allows it to happen—never organized, never formalized, but eventually institutionalized in its own urban way. A busy subway entrance sits on this corner. I pass there frequently, but I never go by that a large crowd is not gathered to watch.

  Throughout the West Village, small change continues to unfold but sometimes with large impacts. The stretch of Bleecker Street west of Seventh Avenue, during the recent economic boom, was transformed into chic and upscale retail. It has long been fashionable, but somehow the presence of national retailers seems to many people to be more dramatic. But nothing has been torn down to make this happen, and the talked-about transformation may be more of a perception than a reality. The large retail chains can’t dominate. Landmarks and zoning limits deny demolition of walls between buildings for expansion of the ground floor to create the huge spaces that supersize national chains require. Most important, when each phase passes, as it inevitably does, the historic fabric will house the next wave of retail chic that is always looking for modest, affordable street-level space. Natural urban shifts unfold this way.

  For the most part, small businesses—particularly family-owned ones—do well there because the tiny store sizes work well for them and because Village residents are especially appreciative of the convenience of having them and can be very loyal customers.

  EIGHTH STREET

  Bleecker Street has long been the most interesting and probably best-known commercial street, but Eighth Street, from Sixth Avenue to Fifth Avenue, was the location for more of life’s essentials when I was growing up: the grocery store, pharmacy, delicatessen, butcher, and my father’s dry-cleaning store. Comfortably mixed in was a second-generation family-owned jeweler, a leather crafter of citywide renown, a jewelry designer, and an art store. Eight
h Street was a center as well of Village artistic and intellectual life. The Washington Square Book Shop was a literary beacon. The Eighth Street Playhouse staged cutting-edge plays and later became an art-film house. The Whitney Museum was founded on this street in 1931 and stayed until it moved uptown in 1948. The Studio School with Hans Hoffmann at the helm was also an important art center. Many artists lived above the stores along Eighth Street or nearby. The street was the epicenter for the New York School of artists in the 1950s.

  By the 1960s, drugs and fast-paced tourism took their toll. By the 1970s, most of the individually owned stores and cultural sites had closed, and the local character was completely gone. Eighth Street continued to get worse. Cheap shoe stores, head shops, and low-end clothing invaded like locusts and endured right up to the turn of the new century. The Eighth Street Playhouse, its facade gone, is now a cheap dollar store.

  A few good things have occurred, however, and indications point to a slow but sure turnaround, especially with new restaurants opening. Barnes & Noble replaced Nathan’s fast-food hot-dog chain. A few years ago, a merchant group organized a business improvement district. Store upgrades are concentrated on the east side of Fifth Avenue. But west of Fifth, the sidewalk is widened, traffic is calmed, new historic-style lampposts are installed, and various events promote the positive qualities of the street. The balance between pedestrian and car is better, and people feel less pushed aside. A Belgian sandwich shop with fresh baguettes, pastries, and coffee opened on the west corner of Fifth Avenue, the first new sign that upgrading is moving westward. An upscale restaurant opened next door to my father’s former store. Other new and better uses are sure to follow. Ironically, the current economic collapse has shuttered many more of the cheap shoe stores, leaving several vacancies. What will replace them when the economy turns around will be interesting to see.