The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  Not one dime of public investment or developer subsidy made SoHo happen. In fact, the defeat of a big misplanned public investment made SoHo possible. Only in the defeat of the highway did urbanism have a chance. Only in the defeat of excessive, top-down plans did SoHo have a chance. After the defeat, spontaneous regeneration took hold. Individual creativity rescued the beleaguered district planners sought to raze. When not doomed by centrally planned, inappropriate projects, many urban and small-town districts can regenerate productively.

  JANE JACOBS VERSUS ROBERT MOSES

  This pattern of planned urban destruction parading as renewal, set by Moses and his disciples, led to the sprawling, dysfunctional landscape with which the country now wrestles. Jacobs was Moses’s most vigorous and visible opponent.

  Jacobs argued that the unplanned mix of uses is what constitutes a healthy urban district and sustains a viable urban economy. Her concept of mixed use is defined here with the complex combination of industrial, commercial, residential, and cultural uses. Additionally, and quite importantly, a mix of building ages and scale is present. Districts like this, she argued, were more valuable to a city’s economy than highways. Their value was underappreciated, she believed. Such a sensible and observable reality was heresy when Death and Life was published in 1961. She contradicted what the profession of planning was about and threatened power centers everywhere.6 The “sacking of cities” is how she labeled what was happening at the time. This adds significance to the expressway defeat, a significance that reaches well beyond even the rescue and regeneration of SoHo. Urban districts should not be sacrificed for expensive, wasteful, destructive clearance projects, she argued.

  SoHo was the biggest and most obvious battleground of the Moses-Jacobs urban philosophies that first unfolded in Washington Square Park. Grassroots battles against similar wrongheaded plans increased exponentially across the United States, especially highway urban renewal plans, inspired by Jacobs’s words and activism. Community-based planning, historic preservation, and the “recycling” of buildings triumphed. Other neighborhoods and cities followed the pattern, stalling the bulldozers of urban renewal and highways in many places.

  The lines were drawn dramatically in SoHo. This was a widely publicized and significant grassroots victory over top-down, autocratic planning. The reverberations had national impacts: Other groups were energized to fight harder if they were already embattled or to begin to do so if they weren’t.

  There were other community leaders around the country leading local fights against highways through cities, as Jane Jacobs did in SoHo. None gained the attention she did, being in the media capital of the country. Until then, only government officials and business leaders made decisions. They usually didn’t live in the community and knew nothing of its vitality. If it was old, they just declared it a slum.

  Before its designation for a highway, SoHo performed the age-old function of a healthy urban neighborhood that provides an outlet for innovation, gives birth to new businesses, permits established businesses to grow and adapt, adds new substance to the local economy, and exports its people and innovations to the rest of the city and country. “A lot more work than you imagine is occurring in SoHo,” Jacobs observed in a 1981 conversation, “especially in artists’ studios. Art is work, a very important work for cities, a very important export. Also, a lot of the services to this work, suppliers of various kinds, are there too. This is one of the few up-and-coming areas of New York. There ought to be forty to fifty neighborhoods like that.”

  SoHo’s revival demonstrated that the spontaneous generation that once characterized New York’s growth was still possible. In fact, this revival was happening during the 1970s when the economic condition of the city as a whole could not have been bleaker. The impact of SoHo on the larger city of New York is endless. SoHo changed the way we view all cities.

  SOHO BROADENED THE HISTORIC PRESERVATION MOVEMENT

  Preservationists have long been in the vanguard of opposition to inappropriate change, since historically or culturally important resources are often in the way of misguided plans. Incorrectly, preservationists are often accused of being against all change and for freezing the city. In fact, they oppose the erasure, mutilation, and overwhelming of places of value.

  The highway defeat gave heart to urbanists, community defenders, progressive planners, and all other opponents of invasive projects mislabeled as “progress.” Thus, SoHo helped slow the automobile-focused development nationwide that has destroyed so many viable neighborhoods, architectural treasures, and cultural resources.

  SoHo survived the worst kind of planned impediments and then flourished under strict government limitations imposed first by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and then the City Planning Commission. Basic rules and regulations have protected the area from excessive and overwhelming change, not from change itself. SoHo buildings are being constantly altered by what Jacobs called “adaptations, ameliorations, and densifications,” and new Modernist buildings are replacing nonhistoric structures and filling empty sites. In fact, because SoHo was so successful, it attracted a parade of upscale, innovative contemporary buildings, designed by big-name architects (Jean Nouvel, Gwathmy Siegel, Smith Hawkinson), all enthusiastically approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in recent years.

  These are the kind of rules that permit, even encourage, change within the context of what already exists. The integrity, scale, and individuality of scores of distinct neighborhoods are similarly protected by historic district designation. SoHo’s transformation after the expressway defeat defines productive change: New is added to old; some pieces are replaced, but new does not overwhelm the whole. Some old is renovated and updated for new uses. The layering process of history is continued, not interrupted. Most dramatically, the SoHo Syndrome has done more to retain the middle class in cities and stimulate new economic innovations than any planning or government-supported new development.7

  Discouragements to conventional development fundamentally helped SoHo’s spontaneous metamorphosis. The restrictions were precisely what prevented wholesale alteration of the district, prevented a different development agenda from overwhelming it, and gave it the value property owners enjoy today.

  Citizen activists stood ready to defend SoHo turf each step of the way. They lost few battles. No public funding, tax incentives, or zoning bonuses were necessary. The conventionalists who once decried the messy mixture of urban uses in gritty districts now celebrated the “mixed use” that SoHo epitomized.

  Conventional economists, Wall Streeters, planners, and city officials undervalue these microeconomies that feed, sustain, and expand the larger city economy, the way the city’s economy functioned in its most robust eras. These are the areas where new work is added to old, the kind of new work that authentically grows an urban economy. In recent boom years, misguided upzoning plans have been the constant threat to the continuation and expansion of these microeconomies. The frontiers within the city to which this dynamic energy can move are fewer and fewer due to a wave of upzoning, excessive development schemes, and escalating real estate values. Too many of these people and activities are simply being pushed out of the city limits.

  What has happened in recent years can’t be called modest anymore. In some ways, this has been a function of a national economy affecting every New York neighborhood and most American cities. What will happen now that this overheated cycle has cooled dramatically is anyone’s guess. But only one thing is sure. The variety and flexibility of SoHo’s building stock are in a good position to weather future dramatic shifts. The urban constant of change will continue to reshape SoHo and every other neighborhood.

  SOHO’S EXPORTS HELP REJUVENATE OTHER PLACES

  Change is a constant in SoHo. As it exported its innovations and innovators, new things have taken their place. The complaint today is that SoHo is losing its character as an arts district. As prices escalate, galleries and artists leave, chain stores and restaurants move
in, and tourists increase in numbers. This is especially dramatic in the era of a weak dollar, making New York City a foreign shopper’s dream. Fortunately, the City Planning Commission followed the lead of a few dissenting commissioners and resisted an attempt in the 1990s to permit larger retail stores that would have accelerated that change and more dramatically undermined SoHo’s artistic character and economic value. In this case, however, several fights ensued to prevent the Planning Commission from increasing parking. The protections in place for maintaining mixed use and manufacturing were constantly under attack. Over the years, however, manufacturing uses continued to diminish, but gradually, and conversions to residential continue today. Modest urban change, however, is both inevitable and most often healthy.

  Nothing born or created in SoHo has been lost in the last decade of change. Whatever and whoever have left exist elsewhere. Chances are their art or business has expanded. The only losers, actually, are the residential or business renters outpriced by the market. Some of the artists and entrepreneurs who left did so in better condition than when they came. An artist friend of mine, for example, lives in a SoHo loft co-op. He was there fifteen years ago when it went co-op and bought cheap, as did other artists in the building. Several of his neighbors have sold their apartments, gaining financially, moving elsewhere to live more cheaply, using their financial gain productively, leaving town for greener pastures, or making other life changes of their choice.

  Is this bad? It could be, if it weakens New York as a creative capital and if New York does not continue to regenerate and incubate new artists. But this incubation is, for the moment, still happening, very much so, in pockets all over the city. Some of the very people leaving SoHo and moving elsewhere are helping the process take hold in emerging SoHo-type districts in other cities. If anything, the recent economic freefall helps them stay. Landlords know better than to try to continue to raise rents excessively and, in fact, have lowered them in many places. Some areas are a convenient train ride or a short drive from the New York City marketplace. Isn’t this what healthy urbanism is all about, the nurturing and exporting of innovations and innovative people? Both the incubating and the exporting must be happening at once, however, for the process to be a healthy one.

  The piecing back together of the abused and undervalued manufacturing precincts like SoHo is happening across America. But the SoHo Syndrome doesn’t work if assets are not there. The places where this process works have context, urban fabric, history, and committed citizens to make it work. It can’t work where demolition is overwhelming. At that point, reproducing the urban fabric may be as alien as an enclosed shopping center. Replication is a trap. The result is form, not substance.

  ONE LAST STAND ON A NEW YORK CITY CONTROVERSY

  Jacobs actually summed it up quite well in 2005, a year before she died. On my periodic Toronto visits, we always discussed what was going on in New York, and I reported to her the proposed zoning changes for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. This was a classic gritty, mixed-use neighborhood in the real meaning of mixed use. Single-family homes, small apartment houses, tenements, and small local retailers were scattered among all manner of manufacturing and art and artisan uses, housed in former warehouses and manufacturing buildings. This neighborhood was a classic incubator of new businesses of all kinds.

  As gritty as it looked, Greenpoint-Williamsburg had been improving in recent years in a natural pattern of individualized upgraded uses (unslumming was the term Jacobs used in Death and Life). It had become one of the new frontiers for artists and small or start-up manufacturers, as SoHo, Tribeca, and other Lower Manhattan districts became unaffordable. An overscaled rezoning that encouraged new high-rise, high-rent housing would undoubtedly undermine this robust economic and social process. And that was exactly what the city was proposing, without even a required percentage of units at affordable prices or any significant protection to keep industrial properties from conversion to residential. Incentives for developers to provide affordable units were included, but it meant letting them build even more units than permitted under the new zoning. In prior years, developers were required to include a minimum percentage with zoning bonuses only for an increase above the minimum.

  4.3 Low-scale Greenpoint-Williamsburg was rezoned and overwhelming high-rises followed—stopped, temporarily only, by the economic collapse. Ron Shiffman.

  4.4 New upscale towers raised real estate values throughout Greenpoint-Williamsburg, threatening affordable housing and industrial uses. Ron Shiffman.

  Jacobs had seen this scenario unfold too many times, not just in New York. Hesitant to go public anymore on New York issues because of the flood of phone calls that usually followed, in April 2005 she agreed to write a letter in this case:

  Dear Mayor Bloomberg:

  My name is Jane Jacobs. I am a student of cities, interested in learning why some cities persist in prospering while others persistently decline; why some provide social environments that fulfill the dreams and hopes of ambitious and hardworking immigrants, but others cruelly disappoint the hopes of immigrant parents that they have found an improved life for their children. I am not now a resident of New York although most of what I know about cities I learned in New York during the almost half-century of my life here after I arrived as an immigrant from an impoverished Pennsylvania coal mining city in 1934.

  I am pleased and proud to say that dozens of cities, ranging in size from London to Riga in Latvia, have found the vibrant success and vitality of New York to demonstrate useful and helpful lessons for their cities and have realized that failures in New York are worth study as needed cautions.

  Let’s think first about revitalization successes; they are great and good teachers. They don’t result from gigantic plans and show-off projects, in New York or in other cities either. They build up gradually and authentically from diverse human communities; successful city revitalization builds itself on these authentic community foundations, as the community-devised 197-A plan does for Greenpoint.

  What the intelligently worked-out plan devised by the community itself does not do is worth noticing. It does not destroy hundreds of manufacturing jobs, desperately needed by New York citizens and by the city’s stagnating and stunted manufacturing economy. The community’s plan does not cheat the future by neglecting to provide for schools, daycare, recreational outdoor sports, and pleasant facilities for those things. The community’s plan does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing and imaginative and economical new shelter that residents can afford. The community’s plan does not violate the existing scale of the community, nor does it insult the visual and economic advantages of neighborhoods that are precisely of the kind that demonstrably attract artists and other live-work craftsmen, initiating spontaneous and self-organizing renewal. Indeed, so much renewal is happening so rapidly that the problem converts to how to make an undesirable neighborhood into an attractive one less rapidly.

  Of course the community’s plan does not promote any of the vicious and destructive results mentioned. Why would it? . . .

  But the proposal put before you by city staff is an ambush containing all those destructive consequences, packaged very sneakily with visually tiresome, unimaginative, and imitative luxury project towers. How weird, and how sad, that New York, which has demonstrated successes enlightening to so much of the world, seems unable to learn lessons it needs for itself. I will make two predictions with utter confidence. 1. If you follow the community’s plan, you will harvest a success; 2. If you follow the proposal before you today, you will maybe enrich a few heedless and ignorant developers, but at the cost of an ugly intractable mistake. Even the presumed beneficiaries of this misuse of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of luxury towers, may not benefit; mis-used environments are not good long-term economic bets.

  Come on, do the right thing. The community really does know best.

  Sincerely, Jane Jacobs

  This lett
er clearly articulated well-defined principles without any prescription for style, design, or use designations. But that was what she was about. This is pure Jacobs and the antithesis of generally accepted government policy.

  SoHo regenerated organically through the private actions of many individuals, mostly artists to start. But that was in the 1970s when few cared about this district. Few noticed what was happening because it was ad hoc and in small, almost unnoticeable, steps. Few recognized the significance of these small things slowly adding up to big change. As noted, this was happening unnoticed as well in neighborhoods around the city, from the Upper West Side to the South Bronx to Park Slope. The unfolding change was different in each neighborhood because the people and neighborhoods were different, shaped by many individual doers, including some developers. But those development plans for the most part were in scale with the neighborhood, too contained to spur cataclysmic change. But by the 1990s and surely by 2000, real estate investors discovered similarly gritty Greenpoint-Williamsburg and other Brooklyn neighborhoods. Planning officials were right there to initiate rezoning plans to expedite new frontiers for excessive neighborhood-altering new development. Jane’s letter to the mayor could have been sent on behalf of any of those neighborhoods targeted for rezoning.

  How ironic! The historic district, SoHo, that showed the nation the potential for regeneration of industrial neighborhoods had unleashed a redevelopment frenzy now undermining the virtues and authentic character of similar neighborhoods across the city.