The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  For me, the Village has mostly been defined by the geography of my own experience growing up there and then attending NYU. And while Washington Square Park is central to all of it and NYU is the overarching presence, the Village is really an assortment of very distinct enclaves with a history and character different from each other.

  As Jane Jacobs observed about Greenwich Village years ago in conversation, “It is not small. In fact, it is a pretty big district. Parts were always considered better than others and all different. The South Village was heavily Italian and before that I guess mainly Irish. That area was considered bad. Sullivan Street is considered very chic now, but I remember when it was just teeming with poor children and tenements, so I suppose it was considered bad.”

  Jacobs had moved to the Village with her sister in 1934, selecting it because “she found so many people walking in such a purposeful way and so many interesting stores and activities to observe.” This iconic neighborhood became the incubator for her ideas. It was a study area, a laboratory. She observed the different elements that added up to vibrancy in city life. She recognized the same characteristics in other vibrant neighborhoods, large and small, and assembled them into a web of related precepts. “Of course, the West Village where I lived was considered bad,” Jacobs said. “We didn’t know it when we moved here, fortunately, but it had been designated a slum to be cleared first way back in the 1930s when Rexford Tugwell, who would become one of Roosevelt’s ‘brain trusters,’ was chairman of the Planning Commission.” But one official’s slum can be someone’s definition of a good neighborhood to live in. And the Village has always drawn a place-proud population.

  WEST VILLAGE HOUSES: KNOWN AS THE JANE JACOBS HOUSES

  Parallel to the Hudson along the West Side Highway and a few blocks inland are the West Village Houses built in the mid-1970s. This complex could serve as a national model of everything that was wrong in postwar development policies and everything that is right when community sensibilities prevail. A community fight there defeated the Robert Moses Urban Renewal Plan—apparently, the first defeat nationwide of an urban renewal plan—that would have wiped out the entire fourteen square blocks of historic urban fabric filled with owner-occupied, well-maintained one-and two-family houses, tenements, and individual buildings. All had been restored with private money. But it was designated a “slum,” a necessary official step to qualify for urban renewal money. Residents and businesses in the area knew it wasn’t a slum. They thought well enough of the area, in fact, even with its service and physical limitations, to remain there, open businesses, and invest money. “The people in the Village had watched urban renewal around the city with its waste and profiteering vandalism,” Jacobs recalled.

  So much land was being taken, and so much was being lost. The West Village people understood the negative impact all these plans were having on the city.

  The sin of the Village was that it had all these mixed uses. All the manufacturing buildings were to be demolished and replaced with high-rises. There would be a little enclave left of all the most expensive and aesthetically appealing houses. The rest would go. Now all those former manufacturing buildings are turned into the most expensive lofts in the city. These people, even the real estate experts, they didn’t know from nothing. They were so ignorant, not just about what they were destroying but what people would like.

  The term slum is very subjective, differing according to who is using it. Poor conditions in an area may be due more to a lack of municipal services than anything else, as we will see throughout this book. A few buildings may be in need of repair or even in danger of imminent collapse. Some may be fire hazards, or abandoned and run-down. None of these individual conditions should qualify an entire area as a slum, especially when renovation and new infill options have not been explored. More than anything else, the terms slum or blight reflect the motivation of the people using them.6 All of this was clear in the fight against the West Village Urban Renewal Plan.

  A survey of the area, for example, revealed the presence of 1,765 residents, including 710 families, plus warehouses, truck depots, and mom-and-pop businesses. More than 80 businesses employed hundreds of people. In fact, this designation of “slum” was not too different from the designation applied to many other city neighborhoods declared “blighted” and cleared by Moses in the name of slum clearance. “We took Lester Eisner, regional administrator for the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, on a tour so he would learn what the community was really made of,” recalled Jacobs, who led the resistance.7 “It convinced him this was not a slum. He was floored, couldn’t believe the great range of incomes. He said it was wonderful. But this is the secret he told us: Never tell anyone what you would like. As soon as you do, you will be judged a participating citizen. You’re hooked, trapped. They can ignore you. Eisner alerted us to this. People in New York never knew why we were only so negative. Wagner eventually decided the urban slum designation had to be lifted.”

  One of the brilliant things about Jane but little acknowledged was that she believed in and followed smart tactics that she often learned from observing others. She came across as very confrontational and anticompromise, all of which had a purpose. But in this anecdote she reveals that the lesson learned from Eisner was to resist saying what you want until what you don’t want is defeated. Jacobs also believed that it was vital to cultivate your own constituency instead of trying to persuade opponents.

  3.2 The Little Red Schoolhouse on Bleecker Street with the expansion into the smaller brick building next door. My elementary school and still a great one.

  After the defeat of the Moses Urban Renewal Plan, the successful citizens group the West Village Committee, led by Jacobs, hired its own architect and promulgated its own plan and design for new housing. A basic, modest-scale apartment-house configuration was designed to flexibly fill in the district’s vacant lots, avoiding any demolition or displacement. “Not a single person—not a single sparrow—shall be displaced” was their slogan. The result is an assortment of plain redbrick five- and six-story walk-up apartment houses of different shapes and sizes and three different layouts with an occasional corner store on the ground floor.8

  The planning establishment hated this proposal because it was initiated by the community and left intact the organically evolved mixture of residential and commercial uses. “We hired Perkins and Will, not a New York City firm, so they wouldn’t be blackballed for working with us as all city architects feared,” Jacobs explained. “The West Village Committee was totally self-organized. Anything self-organized is inimical to planners who want control. The city was furious. We had an informant in the Planning Office who told us what was said: ‘If we let this neighborhood plan for itself, all will want to do it too.’ Planners always pick control over spontaneity. If one believes things can happen spontaneously and work well, it diminishes the importance of planners.”

  City officials, especially then housing and development administrator Roger Starr, did everything possible to strip the design of appealing amenities. He succeeded, nibbling away at the design in every little way possible. It was twelve years of delays. Costs escalated. The result is bare-bones architecture. Yet a waiting list of potential renters existed from the day it opened. Architecture critic Michael Sorkin has written, “West Village Houses fits unobtrusively within the intimate weave of its surroundings. It’s a model piece of urbanism because of this careful integration; because its architectural expression is not treated as a big, determining deal; and because it grew out of the self-organizing impetus to provide new and better housing for people of modest means for whom the market had little empathy.”

  The West Village Houses are probably the country’s first and most significant example of genuine infill housing design. Today, the “infill” description is inappropriately applied to whole blocks of new developments on cleared land inserted into existing neighborhoods, often like an alien species introduced among the natives. Genuine infill is inserted in s
paces within a block, not in substitution for a block. However, neither the West Village Houses’ infill value nor other innovations were ever spotlighted by critics, professionals, or professors for the lessons they illustrated. Thus, most people are unaware that it was probably the first successful community-designed challenge to the conventional planning and development policies of the day.9

  West Village Houses started as a moderate-income Mitchell-Lama rental under a program conceived in the 1950s as a solution to a shortage of low- and middle-income apartments. Named after State Senator Mac-Neil Mitchell and Assemblyman Alfred Lama, the 1955 law offered owners and landlords tax breaks and favorable loan terms in return for keeping rents within the range of low- and middle-income tenants. It also permitted owners to “buy out” of the program by paying off the mortgage and other debts after twenty to forty years, depending on the date and type of project. Once the developments exit the program, they can either go to market rate or go under rent stabilization, unless successfully challenged by owners.

  In 2007, the tenants of West Village Houses successfully organized to buy the buildings from the landlord who was planning to opt out of the program. After four years of negotiation with the landlord, the deal struck by the tenants to convert to a cooperative and rental mix guaranteed no evictions for tenants, a twelve-year period of rent restraints (rent stabilized), the right of tenants to buy their apartments at an insider price, the right of the new owner to sell the 10 vacant units out of the total 420 at market rate, and a guarantee new buyers would meet the federal middle-income standard. Other sensible terms were provided, but suffice it to say that this represents a reasonable compromise that affords the owner a fair profit without losing the larger city value as a middle-income enclave.

  In recent years, the city has been losing too many Mitchell-Lama middle-income apartments. From 1990 to 2005, the surviving number of rental units developed under this program dropped from 67,000 to 44,000, according to the Community Service Society. And according to the magazine City Limits, another 3,691 apartments were lost in 2006 alone.

  If its success had been recognized, West Village Houses could have become a model for other Mitchell-Lama projects that were privatized after the legislated thirty- to forty-year period, especially the large-scale ones like Stuyvesant Town, the thirty-five redbrick buildings in typical housing-project style with 8,757 units on East Fourteenth Street and First Avenue that were privatized a few years ago.10 The privatization of Mitchell-Lama units is one of the significant causes of the recent loss of middle-income housing units all over the city.

  FARTHER WEST

  Just west of the West Village Houses along the Hudson River waterfront is, perhaps, one of the most interesting districts in the Village and the city. Perhaps I should say “was,” since so much has been lost in recent years. Presumably, the far West Village was omitted from the first Greenwich Village historic district in 1969 because of continuing hope among some public officials of pushing through the urban renewal and West Side Highway widening schemes. In a 1963 letter to the Landmarks Commission promoting the inclusion of these westernmost streets, Jacobs noted, “From its beginnings, the old river-landing settlement combined work, residence and transportation, and these activities, while local were not provincial. They all had ties, in part, to the larger settlement of New York. With truly remarkable integrity and fidelity, this historic land use persists today: work, residence and transportation, with very similar links and the same quality of being local but unprovincial.”

  Nevertheless, this veritable heart of the city and country’s economic beginnings—the locus of activity that shaped the larger Village—was omitted. Not much change occurred, however, in the years in the 1970s and ’80s during the fight over Westway, the highway-expansion scheme. Everything was on hold, anticipating the government buyout for the highway. But once that scheme was killed, speculators took a new look and started buying, demolishing, or renovating and slowly rebuilding.

  Three highly publicized and aesthetically appealing sixteen-story glass towers designed by architect Richard Meier now sit amid the remaining intimately scaled nineteenth-century houses, stables, and maritime hotels. Yet the Greenwich Village Historic Society, aggressively pushing the Landmarks Commission to expand the historic district, noted that the area still contained fifty-five nineteenth-century buildings as well as dozens of period factories, warehouses, mills, and bakeries. Correctly, the GVHS argued that this area’s “gritty and more heterogeneous architecture was mistakenly consigned to the dustbin of preservation history when it was overlooked for inclusion” in the historic district. However, since one of the commission’s guidelines devalues areas that have been substantially altered over time, the commission was slow to respond.

  JACOBS MAKES THE CASE AGAIN

  In 2003, shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, I was asked by Deputy Mayor Patti Harris to serve as a commissioner on the Landmarks Preservation Commission. When I went on the commission, Jane was skeptical at first but then agreed it would be a worthwhile thing for me to do. Subsequently, she urged that I promote the designation of this “most interesting and historically illuminating and valuable part of Greenwich Village.” In a letter to me for transmittal to the Landmarks Commission, she wrote:

  For many people, like the New Urbanists for instance, the important ideas of mixed uses, functional diversity, and self-organization and organic adaptability are little more than trendy planning and design fashions, susceptible to being used inauthentically and meaninglessly . . . [but] the far west village . . . is the authentic seed bed and nursery of these qualities in Manhattan, beginning in colonial times and persisting thereafter. It may well be the most important historical area of New York, for that reason. It was the place of origin of many of the city’s important industries, such as machine manufacturing, food preserving, publishing and printing, to name a few, and . . . remnants of this history persist there, still appropriately very mixed, along with evidence of trains and adaptations. Even the roots of the meat market district itself were there.

  It has been overlooked and undervalued, I think, precisely because it has never been considered trendy, like the meat market district in recent times and the Henry James rowhouses and the bohemian village before the meat market. But it is something better than trendy. It is authentic. It was deeply influential. It will be a great pity if its remaining witness and evidence are wiped away in favor of towers with expensive views, empty of history . . . I beg of you, don’t let this happen . . . .

  The far West Village was designated a week after Jacobs died in April 2006.

  THE EAST VILLAGE—ANOTHER WORLD

  Greenwich Village is a microcosm of the city, an assortment of very different communities in close proximity to one another. The East Village is the most different from the rest of the Village, and it is here that some of the precursors of regeneration were first occurring in the 1970s, as noted earlier regarding the Cooper Square Committee and other citizen-based efforts.

  Like the South Bronx in the 1970s, officially no one cared. And no one paid attention to the small things happening in the East Village. No money was available anyway to do a Moses-style renewal on an area best known for high crime and deteriorating housing. Slumlords predominated. City services were almost nonexistent. With a history of Irish, German, East European, and Hispanic immigrants, the East Village defied easy categorizing. Pockets of social and economic energy, however, produced an almost sub-rosa vitality to which mainstream New Yorkers were oblivious, unless, of course, they dared venture forth to dine at vintage East European restaurants or delicatessens or attend a performance at the avant-garde La Mama or one of the offbeat music venues. St. Mark’s Place was as far east as most venturers would go, where Yoko Ono performed at the Bridge Theater or Andy Warhol presented the Velvet Underground at the Dom, formerly a Polish entertainment hall. Beats, hippies, punks, and postpunks all settled or passed through here. Artists found studios. Galleries followed. Musi
c venues appeared everywhere.

  It is here—in empty lots—that the Green Guerillas launched the community garden movement that is today international in scope. The city under Mayor Giuliani auctioned some off to private developers, but after an intense, contentious battle and the intervention of philanthropists, some of those locally created parks survived and are now overseen by the Parks Department. Squatters took over city-owned abandoned buildings that the city had no program or money to deal with. A variety of community-based efforts evolved and were replicated in derelict neighborhoods around the city, as mentioned in chapter 1.

  The tag East Village was meant to clearly distinguish the area from the rest of Greenwich Village. So far, except for incursions by NYU, the East Village has been spared much of the march of high-rise development so visible elsewhere in the city. This predominantly tenement district has also been spared an excessive proliferation of mass retailers, primarily due to the small scale of most of its retail spaces and a lower population density than found in areas of large-scale apartment houses. As such, it remains an incubator for fledgling designers of all kinds looking for small and cheap space to test their new offerings. Like the rest of Greenwich Village, this ever-changing enclave has its share of community activists willing to take on the large-scale forces that could bring corrosive, not productive, change.