In 2004 the New York Public Interest Research Group Straphangers Campaign mounted an exhibit at the Municipal Art Society titled “The Riders and the Rebirth of City Transit: 25 Years of Advocacy.” A companion booklet noted, “It may be hard for many of us to imagine now, but our city’s subways and buses were close to collapse in 1979, the year the New York Public Interest Groups founded the Straphangers Campaign. Subway . . . service was so horrendous that a daily commute was enough to make residents question why on earth they chose to live here. The same thoughts occurred to the city’s business leaders, who often cited poor transit as the leading reason for moving out of New York.”
In 1981 frequent track fires and derailments prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to launch an investigation into the safety of the subway system. Ridership fell to the lowest level since 1917. All of that has been substantially reversed. The station upgrades are particularly visible because the “Percent for Art” policy has meant inclusion of artwork in every renovated station. Nearly 200 stations have been upgraded and artwork installed since 1985 in the 722-mile system, the Works Progress Administration all over again. Sadly, some of the first rebuilt stations are beginning to show their age, primarily for lack of regular cleaning and maintenance. Money for capital projects, with contracts available for the well placed, is always more readily available than the operational funds necessary to maintain the facilities, which requires salaried, union labor.
REINVESTMENT PAYS
Since Westway’s demise in 1985, approximately $1.4 billion in Westway trade-in funds have flowed to fix the subways and buses. Additional funds have gone into the regional system. The trade-in for transit funding, what Westway opponents advocated from day one, was the leverage that rebuilt the system. The enormous borrowing the state initiated under MTA chairman Richard Ravitch would not have been possible without it. “It is scary to think what city transit would be like without that support,” says Gene Russianoff, staff attorney of the Straphangers Campaign. “Some people remember Westway as a symbol of what couldn’t get built, a symbol of how David held off Goliath and saved the subways. The $1.4 billion in trade-in funds was a pittance in terms of need,” notes Butzel, “but it came at a critical time at the beginning of the refocusing on transit that that controversy stimulated.” The system was in terrible disrepair, Butzel adds, so the trade-in funds were just the beginning. But the beginning of a real turnaround they were.
Today, trains are nearly twenty times more reliable. Graffiti on subway cars is negligible, and transit crime, fires, and derailments have all been dramatically reduced. Every subway car and bus has been either rehabilitated or replaced. The subway fleet has been expanded by four hundred cars and buses by eight hundred in order to meet growing demands. Miles and miles of tracks and antiquated signals have been replaced. Mayor Giuliani’s administration slowed that reinvestment when it resumed in 1995 the old pattern by cutting the subway rebuilding program by $625 million over the following five years.5 In 2004 annual ridership had reached 1.4 billion, the highest since the subway’s heyday in the 1950s. In September 2005, the number of daily bus and subway riders reached 7.5 million during weekdays, the highest average daily ridership since June 1971.
The transformation is enormous, but, as historian Mike Wallace points out, “the tangibility of the trade-off” remains elusive. People either forget or downplay the impact of the trade-in money on the subways. “If,” Wallace adds, “you could point to a new Second Avenue subway, people would feel differently.” Under Mayor Bloomberg, construction of that desperately needed subway line was resumed.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Mort Downey put it all in perspective probably better than anyone else could. He was with the Federal Department of Transportation from 1977 to 1981, chief financial officer for the MTA from 1981 to 1993, and then back to the federal Department of Transportation as deputy secretary for transportation from 1993 to 2001. Downey remembers this period well, having been in the eye of the storm for more than a decade. “The needs of transit were being debated independent of the Westway issue,” says Downy, but they weren’t making any headway in gaining new funding from either the governor or the legislature. Politically, however, it became clear to Governor Hugh Carey that in order to get Westway approved, he would have to create the illusion that he was also delivering funds for transit. “He announced publicly that he had applied to Washington for $600 million,” remembers Downey. But it was not at all true. When Washington denied that an application had been made, “Carey, then desperate to save face, persuaded [DOT secretary Neil] Goldschmidt to say that ‘it was not beyond the realm of possibility.’ But it was all done within the context of getting Westway through.”
Then Carey appointed Richard Ravitch as chairman of the MTA in 1980, and everything began to change. Ravitch started talking about the real conditions and needs of the MTA to rebuild the city’s transit and the suburban railroads. According to Downey:
He said a basic minimum capital investment of $1.5 billion a year was needed, when the whole capital budget was holding at $200 million a year and some of that money was being used not for capital but to save the fare. Ravitch was told not to talk about this because they had to get Westway approved, but he basically said, “I have to do the job you appointed me to do.”
Ravitch went around the governor, directly to the legislature, to get the first five-year [1982-1986] capital budget of $8 billion, so the time of the trade-in decision [1985] was such that it gave a nice boost to the MTA effort. It was a momentum builder. We would not have gotten the second five-year plan without it. It set the pattern. By 1987, we had the second plan, and by the third, the legislature just knew they had to do it. Ravitch got the debate going, but until he lit the fire under them, they were not supportive of doing both.
By 2007, Downey estimates, $74 billion has been spent rebuilding the system of the subway, buses, and suburban railways.
THE BIG DIG FACTOR
Another significant factor demands consideration. Let’s call it the “Big Dig” factor. One disastrous news story follows the next, it seems, about Boston’s Big Dig, the tunnel highway that connects the city and Logan International Airport. The tunnel is part of the larger central highway system through Boston. Concrete in the walls of the tunnel seems not to be of required quality and may be giving way. Ceiling panels in the tunnel were discovered to be faulty after one fell on a car and crushed a passenger to death. Other construction defects have been exposed over the years. Overruns have kept costs mounting from an original $2.7 billion estimate to what seems to be probably a $15 billion final cost. Started in 1991, the connector tunnel was opened in 2003 and replaced the elevated highway that had divided the city from the waterfront and the North End. Significantly, it does more than replace; it adds capacity.
Does anyone really believe that Westway’s construction would not have gotten the city and state into similar trouble, at least financially? Westway’s budget was expected to grow from $2 billion to $4 billion just because of inflation. Downey figures it might have hit $10 billion before completion, less than the Big Dig because the Big Dig may be more complicated, Downey says. It crosses a river and goes through the heart of downtown Boston. Yet Westway was also largely to be an underwater tunnel.
But the much heralded aspect that Westway would have been funded with 90 percent federal and 10 percent state funds would not have lasted the duration of construction. That commitment expired before Westway would have been finished. “Between 1978 and 1981, the picnic was over,” Downey says of unbuilt segments of the Interstate Highway System like Westway. “The mood in Congress was ‘get it done’ and let’s move on. The first deadline was set in 1978 and changed in 1981 to 1983, unless, as in the New York case, there was litigation.” Then it was 1985. The litigation was ongoing. That was the reason Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo finally agreed to the trade-in that year. There was no guarantee of Westway funds, but the trade-in was secure.
Every othe
r state except New York and Massachusetts had finished their interstate highway segments or were in construction. “There was a total of $6.5 billion to cover trade-ins around the country, not enough for both projects, so those two would have been hanging out there looking for money,” Downey explains. New York, like Massachusetts, would be scrambling for money, and mostly it would have to come from the state and city budgets because enough could never again be extracted from Congress that wouldn’t take up the transportation budget for the entire state. In fact, Downey adds, subsequent allocations to Massachusetts included a provision guaranteeing that a certain percentage of the money go to projects other than the Big Dig because “it was sucking up so much of the state allocation.”
STEEL-WHEEL JOBS VERSUS RUBBER-TIRE JOBS
Westway proponents vociferously argued that Westway was important for the creation of jobs at a time when the New York economy was seriously hurting. Union leader Peter Brennan said on CBS’s Eye On program in 1976, “Will we build a Westway, and open the doors to jobs, whether it be office buildings or warehouses? . . . Do we talk about getting New York turned around, or do we want to put a China Wall around New York and all die of starvation looking at each other? . . .”
The jobs issue pulls at the heartstrings, but what kind of jobs and for whom were never understood. Jacobs focused on this in our conversation:
The jobs argument breaks down into a few things. The Lower Manhattan Expressway debate was the first time the question was ever raised as to where are these jobs? Outside or in New York? And the ones that are in New York, how temporary are they? How long do they last? The other thing about jobs is that under this kind of scheme, permanent jobs are eliminated for the sake of temporary jobs in construction.
In fact, this is what New York has been doing for years: it’s been cannibalizing itself for the sake of temporary construction jobs. It has lost all kinds of low-cost industrial space. It has driven out—apart from those that want to leave the city for various reasons—businesses and all kinds of jobs, not only for highways but for urban renewal, for public housing, for anything.
It was the expressway that I first saw this issue confronted head-on [at a public hearing], and I had a conversation with Harry Van Arsdale, who was head of the Central Labor Council. In fact, I quoted this somewhere in Economy of Cities where a study of how many jobs there were in the SoHo area, before it was SoHo, and how many would be wiped out by the expressway. Van Arsdale was there with a lot of paid construction workers who were given a day’s pay, they told us, to come to City Hall and cheer or boo at the right points. They all left promptly before five o’clock.
Van Arsdale was speaking in favor of the expressway, and I said to him, “What about the jobs of all those people that are going to be wiped out by the expressway?” And a lot of those people are blacks and Puerto Ricans who have a very hard time getting work. And he said, “Oh, I can’t be concerned about those jobs.” And he wasn’t. He was concerned with construction only. High-paid construction workers, temporary jobs. To this day, that’s the basis on which jobs are talked about for Westway.
This is still true in debates on highways, stadiums, casinos, malls, and similar big projects.
In reality, highways and transit are both job creators, at least for jobs that last the duration of the construction project. The same energy and advocacy never seem to get behind the kind of entrepreneurial investment that creates long-term jobs not in construction.
An important distinction exists, however, in the jobs created by highways and transit. Most of the highway jobs are on-site, with cement, steel, and other supplies coming from distant places. With transit, more meaningful jobs and more of them can be created off-site but within the state.
In 2005 the MTA distributed an eight-page brochure highlighting dozens of subway, bus, and commuter rail parts that are made around New York State. A map of the state showed forty-four locations of parts subcontractors for subway, bus, and railcars. Diagrams of the hybrid buses, subway, and railcars identified the location at which each component is produced. The minimum number of scattered manufacturing sites was ten for hybrid buses produced in Oriskany in central New York; the maximum was twenty-eight for the Kawasaki railcars produced in Yonkers, a city north of New York City. “The economy of the southern tier of the state is very dependent on this work, especially the rebuilding of subway cars,” Downey points out. The shells of 660 new subway cars were delivered by ship from Brazil to the Port of Albany, for example, and trucked to an assembly plant with eleven hundred employees in Hornell, in the southwest corner of the state. The Hornell plant is producing the propulsion and gear units. All the parts work, Downey adds, is highly labor intensive. The lighting for new cars comes from Buffalo, the ventilation system from Auburn, and fabricated metal parts from Kingston and Farmingdale. The propulsion system for the new clean-fuel city buses comes from Johnson City and the sheet metal from Utica.
BEYOND TRANSIT: REGENERATION OR REPLACEMENT?
It would be a mistake, however, to evaluate the Westway defeat only on the basis of the enormous transit benefit from the trade-in funds. Multiple positive ripple effects are equally significant:
• The Westway corridor from the Battery to Forty-second Street along the Hudson River has been transformed on both sides of the roadway.
• Neighborhoods around the city experienced tremendous infusions of new residents, lured, in part, by vastly improved transit service.
• A stronger awareness of and interest in the full 575 miles of New York City waterfront evolved or were accelerated after the intense focus on this 5-mile section.
• The regional transit network shared in the new system investments, improving access to the city for local users, commuters, and visitors.
9.2 One of those lovely moments with Jane, a martini break in a conversation. Stephen A. Goldsmith.
The benefits are not obvious, until one appreciates the critical and beneficial role of transit to urban life and the destructive role of highways. Few New Yorkers living in neighborhoods revitalized in recent decades connect the improved transit benefits they enjoy today to the defeat of Westway. “The Westway trade-in and subway investment made all the difference in my life,” reports a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Park Slope. “Before that, you could never count on getting back and forth to Manhattan to make a business meeting on time. You never knew whether your kid’s lateness from school was something to worry about. And, you wound up spending a fortune on cabs at night (if you could get them to take you across the bridge), because you never wanted to trust the subway after dark. I’d say the subway improvements maybe doubled the value of my house.”
The transformation of the far West Side of Manhattan below Forty-second Street is probably the most visible testimony to the post-Westway change. What Jane said would happen if Westway was killed has, indeed, happened. “There is so much there,” she said of the so-called decrepit area. “Plenty of room exists for fill-in development between buildings and on empty lots. Much of that vacant space certainly ought to be developed before you add new landfill at enormous expense, if that’s ever necessary. And the new land wouldn’t be a success until these fill-ins were done in any case.”
During the Westway debate, proponents vigorously argued that the highway and landfill development were absolutely necessary to spur the revival of this stretch of the West Side. Without Westway, the area was doomed, the experts said. They were wrong. This area was certainly “ramshackle.” The condition was not debatable; the cause of the condition was. And Westway as the cure was a joke. As Jane said: “What a ridiculous idea that you put in a billion-dollar highway to manicure a place!”
ORGANIC REGENERATION GETS A CHANCE
Anyone who has observed the organic regeneration of urban districts understood how erroneous this notion was. Grand plans, for highways, urban renewal, stadia, and the like, work as impediments to authentic regeneration, and their defeat makes regeneration possible. Regeneration after defeat
is not guaranteed; other conditions are necessary.
In the 1970s many properties along the route were turned into sleazy bars and illicit sex spots, supporting the image of extreme deterioration. Owners waited for the big payoff that would come with condemnation. The bars served as a useful, very visual prop for Westway advocates. Mysteriously, all of these places disappeared after Westway’s demise.
Something was ready and waiting to happen there, and it did—after Westway’s defeat. Now, property along the West Village, Gansvoort Market, and the Chelsea waterfront is among the highest-valued real estate in Manhattan. “The neighborhood is now part of the richest ZIP code in New York City and the 12th richest ZIP code in the country, according to a study by Forbes,” the New York Sun reported on August 14, 2006.
Many buildings have been renovated, and numerous trendy restaurants and shops opened and new buildings have been built. Too many architecturally distinctive buildings, however, were torn down, viable businesses lost, and residents displaced while the death threat hung over the area and the Landmarks Preservation Commission delayed expansion of the Greenwich Village Historic District. An expansion was passed in May 2006. A small additional district was designated—the omitted remnants of the rich district that existed when the original Greenwich Village Historic District was designated in 1966. But even this time, certain landmark-quality buildings were omitted, enabling developers to replace them with high-rise condos.
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