The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  Old industrial buildings have been converted to residential lofts in the pattern established in SoHo after the demise of the Lower Manhattan Expressway plan.6 And although residents complain that the new high-rises are intrusive and out of character, the scale of some of the new buildings—notably the three best known, designed by architect Richard Meier—are only twelve stories. This is modest for the city, especially in contrast to the excessive scale—forty stories plus—permitted in a 2005 zoning change for the industrial neighborhood of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

  If Westway had been built and the new land created for development, can one imagine zoning for fewer than forty stories, and probably more with incentives? Would a wall of high-rises on a hundred acres at the river be better than what is emerging now? Most people complain about the scale of the apartment towers Donald Trump built along the river between Sixty-fifth and Seventy-second Streets, and they are lower than forty stories. Would the West Side have received zoning less than Greenpoint-Williamsburg’s forty stories plus?

  THE NEW PARK—BIG IS BIG

  The creation of the Hudson River Park along the waterfront puts the lie to the oft-repeated ridiculous belief that nothing big can get done in New York City. Even the New York Times, long an ardent advocate of Westway, noted that “this modest park is as big an urban planning success story as anything that has taken place in New York City in 100 years.”7 Modest it may be, but it is still the largest Manhattan park built in more than a century.

  Not only is this already a huge accomplishment on its own terms—about three-quarters completed—but it is the largest physical change in the city’s waterfront land use since the days when cruise ships and commerce filled a rich assortment of finger piers. The opening of the first segment in Greenwich Village in 2003 marked the beginning of serious city and state efforts to transform for recreational use waterfront areas in neighborhoods throughout the city. New segments seem to open annually.

  The first segment—a ten-acre swath in Greenwich Village—included three piers extending a thousand feet offshore with lawns, playing fields, playgrounds, a children’s ecology stream, and a display garden, not to mention the spectacular views of the city’s skyline from the end of the piers. Users disagree as to how difficult it is to cross the highway. Either way, millions are indeed crossing. Any weekend, people are coming from all parts of the city. Diehard Westway proponents argue that with the highway underground, access to the waterfront would have been better. But there still would be a road to cross, an access road, not much narrower than the present highway.

  Only six years since that 2003 opening, one marvels at how much more of the five-mile park already exists, with more constantly under construction. Within some common design elements, like railings, lighting, and comfortable benches, the diversity of uses and potential experiences is remarkable. Boating options range from sailing and kayaking to touring, with more boating opportunities planned. Lawns for picnicking, sun-bathing, or socializing are plentiful. Playgrounds, tennis courts, a fabulous historic barge, and more are found along the way. Even a small, protected wildlife sanctuary for migrating birds exists with a variety of plantings and flowers to attract whatever Mother Nature brings.

  Protecting the fish was at the heart of the Westway battle, and the new park seems to do this well with a generous assortment of habitat preserves. The areas between the piers are off-limits to filling and platforming and continue to function as they have for years. The piers and pilings slow the river flow and create calmer areas, providing shelter for the fish. Decking has been removed from what used to be piers, creating a series of protected pier ruins—pile fields that are both fish habitat and sculptural reminders of the waterfront’s history when piers lined the water’s edge, one after another. Their function as habitat is preserved; if more than 30 percent of the pilings in one field is lost, replacement is required. What is sadly missing, however, is any kind of interpretive signage to remind the visitor of some historic events and activity. This waterfront was the incubator of the city’s and, in effect, nation’s economy in the 1800s. Not a clue is offered.

  9.3 The Tribecca boardwalk section of Hudson River Park. Albert Butzel.

  Nevertheless, born out of the Westway defeat, this is the greatest park development since Central Park and not just because it is the largest park added to the city since then. It is a balanced blend of new park space, recreational uses, city service structures, and nearby new development. The design evolved out of a three-year planning process with definite input from the assorted adjacent neighborhoods. Because the end result reflects that input, Hudson River Park feels more like a string of contiguous but varying parks, some more passive or active than others.

  How do you value a five-hundred-acre park attracting people from all over the city? Kayakers, sailors, even swimmers can get into the water, and everyone gets close to the water. It turns out to be an incredibly well-used city park, not the neighborhood park that people expected. The waterfront-park momentum it precipitated spread to Brooklyn’s DUMBO, Red Hook, Williamsburg, and elsewhere in the city. The significance of the spread of this momentum is enormous.

  Unquestionably, this is a different park from what Westway would have produced. The intention was to create a passive park on the landfill, recalls one Westway defender, who worked on the never-completed design. That meant trees, walkways, and lawns, with ball fields down around Christopher Street. Some argue that it would never have worked out that way and instead would have been an extension of Battery Park City with a continuation of the same bulkhead and uses. There is nothing wrong with that, but that is not the same as what now exists, with the variety of designs and uses in between rebuilt piers. Being out on the pier, a thousand feet from shore, is a unique experience. “The piers,” one planning commissioner commented, “are the best thing to happen to New York in 50 years.”

  9.4 Hudson River Park grassy Pier 45 in Greenwich Village is a popular gathering place. Albert Butzel.

  Equally interesting in a diverse, urban way is the variety of residential and commercial development evolving across the West Side Highway on the inland side facing the river. An interesting mix of new and old of reasonable scale, including numerous innovative conversions of unusual commercial buildings, it is a variable stretch that changes from community to community, reflecting both the city’s earlier and its recent development history. And talk about serendipitous planning—the celebrated High Line neighborhood, with its own new park paralleling the highway two blocks inland, ties in nicely with the waterside park. In fact, what is evolving along the inland side should be called “Starchitect Row,” with buildings by Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Robert A. M. Stern. None of them exceeds twenty stories, and happily none overshadows such incomparable landmarks as the Art Moderne Starrett-Lehigh Building. In fact, as a group, the recent new waterfront buildings are among the highest quality of new structures because of high design standards imposed by the City Planning Commission.

  None of this would have happened if Westway were built with one hundred acres of solid, continuous park versus piers and one hundred acres of new development that would be towers like Trump’s Riverside South above Fifty-ninth Street. None of the inland-side development would have happened as well, or at all, knowing that a wall of towers would be built in front.

  THE TRANSPORTATION DEBATE

  Until the mid-1980s, the idea that more and bigger highways solved traffic problems still prevailed. Few observers recognized that highways through cities and increased vehicular traffic in cities were inimical to urban life. Few experts understood how crucial public transit was to the functioning of a vibrant city.

  Some of this is still true. After all, word usage reflects beliefs. Officials talk about “investing” in highways but “subsidizing” transit. Federal funding for roads and airports is infinitely more generous than for transit. News reporters fail to distinguish between infrastructure investment as code words in legislative propos
als for highway funding rather than sewers, utilities, streets, and other systems, which used to be—and should still be—what the words connote.

  The overwhelming predominance of highway provisions in transportation legislation is accepted as the norm. Some transportation legislation mentions only highways and makes little or no attempt to fund transit. The very central concept of mobility is lost. The transportation question should be: mobility for what? Highways are designed to move vehicles; transit is designed to move people. The difference is like night and day. For mobility of people and goods, public transit should be paramount. “Traffic engineers think of moving vehicles from point A to point B,” Jane noted in conversation. “But the kind of mobility systems cities need—and once had—link all kinds of places within the city in multiple ways.”

  VEHICULAR DOMINATION STILL PREVAILS

  The deadest downtowns in cities across America are car dominated. The vibrancy of New York’s bustling streets depends on pedestrian, not vehicular, traffic. Unquestionably, New York City has been much more accommodating of vehicular traffic than it was during the 1970s when the City Planning Commission was forced to clamp down on the number of parking spaces in midtown, among other strategies, to discourage driving. This move was a response to a Friends of the Earth air pollution lawsuit in 1977, but the parking-space restriction expired. Garages have not stopped proliferating since. Traffic gets worse. Every new building seems to have another enormous parking garage. The City Planning Commission maintains antiquated standards requiring too much new parking for each new building and residential unit. Curb cuts are granted for private residences on residential blocks where no garages ever existed, allowing one more suburban intrusion to erode vibrant urban streets.8 Resistance is fierce to tolls on the East River bridges, even by residents in neighborhoods accessible to transit. Tolls, of course, would impose some of the city’s costs on commuters and visitors and encourage more transit use. Mayor Bloomberg appropriately and vigorously fought for this to no avail. But he was 100 percent correct to do so.

  Delivery trucks get bigger and longer, causing traffic jams at every corner they can’t easily turn. Private tourist buses are larger and more numerous than ever and crowd out local buses from public bus stops. For the tourists’ convenience, taxpaying residents are inconvenienced. Nothing is done to encourage visitors to use the subway or buses, and hotel doormen only put visitors in taxis, rarely recommending transit. Transit maps should be given to every visitor. And why not a metro card with ten dollars’ worth of trips in every hotel room to introduce visitors to transit use? And why not give permit and financial advantages to smaller tour buses with operable windows and no luggage space?

  Police, fire, and many other city employees have free workplace parking, even though some of them also get free subway passes and live in transit-accessible neighborhoods. If they don’t live near transit, they could park at a transit locale and continue by subway. Imagine the added security if police and firemen took the subway to work like most city residents.

  The parking-garage lobby has achieved enormous strength, boldly evidenced after 9/11. To ease the postdisaster traffic congestion, Mayor Bloomberg wisely and firmly required all vehicles coming over the East River bridges to have two passengers. Garages reportedly suffered the loss of business. They were not alone, but they claimed erroneously that people wanting to shop were not coming in because of the limitation. The restriction did not last long. The garage-lobby investment in maximum vehicular traffic was never more clear until its opposition to congestion pricing.

  Permit parking for taxpaying residents in neighborhoods burdened by suburban drivers—as is done in Cambridge, New Haven, and other cities—is rejected whenever it is proposed. The city’s efficient trolley system and Second and Third Avenue elevated trains—called the El—were eliminated during the Robert Moses era to make more room for cars. As a result, the city has a smaller transit system than it did almost a century ago. But new replacement streetcar lines are dismissed out of hand because it is unthinkable to interfere with street space for cars. New York is way behind European cities, which have extraordinary streetcars, bike-ways, and congestion pricing.

  So some of the transportation ideas dating from before Westway was killed may still dominate. And some may even be worse. Nevertheless, one should not ignore the differences. The sea change is enormous. Public transit is valued more now than before the Westway fight. New York and the country could have become car-centric without Westway but not without Robert Moses. Yet in small, incremental ways, the public’s desire for the return of more mass transit is having an impact as light rail systems are built city by city, section by section, and downtown sections of elevated highways are being dismantled in a number of cities.

  Surely, on many levels, the death of Westway marked the end of an era. And, despite dire warnings of gridlock to come if the roadway’s capacity was not expanded, traffic flows no worse than twenty years ago, heavy but manageable. And while traffic has increased, adjustments have been made to avenue and crosstown streetlights by the Department of Transportation to assist a smoother traffic flow.

  BIG PROJECTS DO GET DONE

  Whenever a project like Westway is defeated, the cry is heard: “You can’t get anything big done in New York anymore.” Every time I hear this lament, I wonder what city they are talking about. Sometimes big proposals—usually for a new overscaled construction project—actually are defeated. But does that mean all big projects are defeated? Evidence indicates otherwise.

  Is not the rebuilding during the past twenty years of the city’s mass transit big, in fact huge and more complex than any singular building project? The mass transit system is not yet good enough, yet it is on its way. Extension of the Number 7 subway line west along Forty-second Street and downtown to Thirty-fourth Street is under way with an estimated price tag of $2.1 billion, even though the long-proposed Forty-second Street Streetcar would have made more sense. Although it would have been built faster and cheaper, it would have taken minimum surface space away from cars. Horrors!

  And what about the ongoing construction of the $6 billion Third Water Tunnel, not due for completion until 2020 and billed as the biggest public works project in America? Planned since 1954 and under construction since 1970, enough progress was made for the city to open a finished 13.5-mile segment, about a quarter of the whole tunnel. This allowed the city to close one of the other two tunnels for repairs. New York was facing a veritable crisis with its old, leaking water infrastructure.

  The Third Water Tunnel is as big and ambitious a project imaginable and proceeds with little interference. Funding has varied through six administrations, but under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, even with budget shortages, the city investment in the tunnel was twice the amount of the prior five administrations combined. When finished, New York’s water capacity will have been doubled.

  One of the largest water-filtration plants in the world is under construction in the Bronx in a ten-story-deep hole blasted out of bedrock. Scheduled for completion in 2012 but already behind schedule and over budget, the plant will be capable of purifying 300 million gallons of water a day. The plant, which will filter water from the Croton watershed, was estimated to cost $660 million when announced in 1998 but by 2008 had reached a projected $3 billion. Considerable opposition to this project occurred because it is under Van Cortlandt Park. The opposition legitimately questioned the selection of the underground Bronx park site when the city owned an alternative site in Westchester where the plant could have been built aboveground. Opponents argued the aboveground site would be cheaper and quicker, which logically makes sense. But the project moved forward, and it will be important to see if the city lives up to its commitment to restore the park better than ever, a commitment that does not seem to be true in the Yankee Stadium neighborhood of the Bronx.

  Both Yankee and Shea Stadiums were replaced at the same time. These are enormous undertakings. Stadia have been the favorite big project for cities ac
ross the country, even though every economic study has shown they are economic losers. But political and business leaders love their branding and boasting value, even though they exclude fans of modest means. Yankee Stadium is, perhaps, the most egregious in its unfairness to the public, especially the Bronx community. For additional parking garages, a much loved and well-used local park was taken. In return, a less appealing, somewhat distant park space was created. One park is actually located atop the garage and called a replacement. The community will experience the additional vehicular traffic while the Steinbrenners and the Yankees reap the financial profit of the garages. The one good thing that came out of the public debate is the opening of a Metro North train station within walking distance of the stadium. The Steinbrenners always opposed this since it could, it was hoped, get Westchester fans to come by rail instead of car.

  A rail link to JFK was built, no small accomplishment given the dissension and debate that preceded its approval. The first proposed route was ludicrous and defeated. A link to La Guardia Airport, however, just as important, doesn’t seem to be on anybody’s priority list. A connection of the Long Island Railroad to the east side and Grand Central, however, is under construction.

  And what about the $200 million restoration of Grand Central Terminal, one of the grandest public spaces and urban gateways almost lost during the era of transit devaluation and lack of interest in historic preservation? It is easy to build from scratch, harder to adjust and revive what exists. But the satisfaction comes with accomplishing what makes urbanistic sense. Grand Central is New York’s best face to the visiting and commuting world—a better brand, if you need one, than a stadium—but it does not only benefit the outsider; it is also a destination for New Yorkers. A terrific food market, assorted small local retailers, high-end restaurants, and a food court were added during the restoration, an appropriate diversity of uses bringing in activity of all kinds. This is the best measure of success.