The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  Then there is Central Park, reclaimed and restored to its original Olmsted-Vaux glory over three decades. Its transformation is still ongoing, and Prospect, the Battery, and Riverside Parks are following similarly impressive paths. Central Park’s restoration was a big vision accomplished in manageable increments until the large-scale whole was revived by its small-scale components. The park is not big in a build-new way but big in a restorative way. The revival of Central Park parallels the restoration of the city itself.

  None of these projects is about real estate. Instead, they are about critical infrastructure, of the kind that either makes the city function or adds to the quality of life that makes it a desirable place to live. When one understands the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure, it is nothing short of amazing that New York is proceeding to address some of these crucial infrastructure needs.

  Sweeping new gestures in the form of big new real estate projects garner political appeal and grab headlines when proposed, regardless of the legitimacy of their claims; more satisfying and productive gestures are the ones made up of smaller components that are quite complex and stun you in their completion. They don’t emerge fresh out of the ground on a huge, cleared site.

  GOVERNMENT CAN DO IT BIG AND WELL

  One of the most staggering accomplishments achieved primarily by a city agency is the reclamation of the more than a hundred thousand vacant city-owned housing units contained mostly in old tenements and brownstones, the kind Robert Moses invariably demolished when he could.

  In the early 1980s conditions were so embarrassing that the Koch administration put trompe l’oeil decals depicting shutters, potted plants, and Venetian blinds to cover windows of city-owned abandoned buildings along the Cross Bronx Expressway. Instead of improving the image of the area and camouflaging the massive problem, it brought more attention to it.

  New York was losing thirty-six thousand residential units a year to abandonment. Pushed by community groups looking to occupy and renovate these buildings for affordable units, the city under Koch initiated a number of innovative programs. Grassroots efforts instigated these policies with little public notice. City officials, overwhelmed by the problem, wisely responded to community-based proposals. Mayor David Dinkins aggressively continued the new policies, and momentum was firmly established. Dramatic federal cutbacks under President Reagan pulled the rug out from under these efforts nationwide, and Mayor Giuliani showed no interest in trying to maintain the momentum or look for new creative ways to confront the problem. The momentum slowed. But Mayor Bloomberg recommitted to creating affordable housing. There is some question as to whether the city is losing as many as it is gaining because of gentrification and rent deregulation, according to the New York Times.9 Developer-built projects seem to dominate, but the renovation trend continues uncelebrated. Community-based efforts that contributed enormously in the past continue the regeneration momentum today.

  Local efforts reseeded with modest resources the neighborhoods by the late 1980s. Developers followed, built new projects with big tax or zoning incentives or on low-cost city-owned land, gained the attention of the media, and eventually took credit for scores of neighborhood turnarounds, especially in the South Bronx and Brooklyn.

  LOW-DENSITY MISTAKES STILL HAPPEN IN A BIG WAY

  Unfortunately, what was built on vacant lots was mostly low-density, suburban housing, instead of the traditional two-family or more row houses containing the density needed for well-functioning urban neighborhoods. Vacant land is now scarce for badly needed affordable housing. Many neighborhoods now lack the density appropriate for their infrastructure or to attract new local convenience stores and small businesses. In contrast, the New York City Housing Authority is now wisely offering parking lots at some public housing sites for development of new moderate- and low-income apartments. This is an important new infill initiative. In fact, other infill potential exists in public housing sites for more than just housing.

  Re-creating density where it’s been lost is critical. Every recently built single-family home should be allowed to expand or build its unit into a two-family dwelling immediately, even to have the ability to add another floor or two. Many already function as two-family, sometimes three-family, homes illegally. If legalized, health and safety regulations can be instituted and monitored.

  Owner-occupied two- and three-family units are a successful, low-scale housing resource in many urban neighborhoods, mixed in with high-density low-rise apartment buildings, creating the population necessary to support local retail, transit, schools, and social institutions—in other words, the components of real communities. The infrastructure already exists to support this. Allowing the expansion of the suburban-style homes is no guarantee it will occur, but permitting it offers new regenerative possibilities. This is the kind of big initiative in small increments that could have a big citywide impact.

  One of the bizarre twists in the changes to the city’s zoning and building codes is that it has long been illegal to build the city’s most successful housing form—the classic brownstone. The four- or five-story brownstone is the perfect structure to serve a single family or as multiple apartments. Easy to reconfigure over time, new brownstones would make infinitely more sense than the single- and two-family suburban housing that has been built in too many neighborhoods over the past twenty years. Between erroneous setback requirements and excessive handicap-access rules that require elevators for more than three floors, the return of the brownstone is stymied. Yet rebuilding brownstones in a big way around the city would go a long way toward adding affordable housing.

  MORE BIG THINGS GETTING DONE

  Historian Mike Wallace, whose brilliant slim book New Deal for New York was published one year after 9/11 and presents a clear and sensible agenda for public actions, goes further. He cites even more big things than I have enumerated, all accomplished by the city but either taken for granted or unrecognized. These are the kind of big projects that matter the most to the overall health and functioning of the city, its neighborhoods, and its economy but never count as “big projects.”

  Starting with water, Wallace of course cites the tunnel, “fabulously successful and profoundly under-celebrated. The Big Dig is nothing in comparison.” He continues: “Great strides have been made with water in general, in controlling pollution, both by private actors and by public agencies, in stopping chemical discharges into our rivers, in instituting critical controls, and in building the North River Pollution Control plant, an astonishing intervention into a massive problem.” For years, the Housing Authority has been replacing windows, appliances, and toilets in all public housing units to conserve water and energy.

  Wallace also cites the institution of a citywide recycling program, even though not as comprehensive as could be but at least a beginning effort to tackle the enormous garbage problem. And major inroads have been made in controlling air pollution, starting with outlawing the burning of coal in 1966. And in a different direction, he cites the area of policing. Giuliani takes more credit for this than is his due, Wallace says. The intelligent upgrading of technology started before him, under Dinkins. The drop in the crime rate shows the city is capable of responding to big problems. “You can’t look at this array of big accomplishments and say the public sector is not able to get big things done,” Wallace says.

  The big but uncelebrated successes share common threads. None were accomplished by one leader or one developer. None occurred quickly; nothing big ever does. Many responded to citizen pressures or were initiated by individuals. Others responded to new conditions, such as the need to conserve energy and water. Almost all gained public consensus or went ahead without it. None were stopped by the culture of confrontation and contention that interferes only sometimes successfully with the mammoth one-shot, top-down projects that inspire complaints about what can get done in the city. And each in its own way both fortified the connections of the larger city and inspired further efforts, feeding the critical momen
tum of renewal that produces constant but positive change throughout the city. Authentic regeneration, as already indicated, is a process, not a project. This concept cannot be articulated often enough. Beneficial change is ongoing, but it is beneficial because it does not erase or overwhelm a place.

  Not to be overlooked in any examination of big things getting done are the projects that have gotten done over time. Battery Park City is in its fifth decade and almost finished. Large waterfront parks are emerging on several sites in Brooklyn. Time-Warner went up overscaled but up nonetheless. After an intense battle with Trump in the initial phase, Riverside South, overlooking the Hudson on the Upper West Side, with its oversized buildings but commendable waterfront park, is two-thirds complete after twenty years and under new ownership.10 The theater district and Forty-second Street have been totally transformed into a glitzy office park and shopping mall for tourists with restored historic theaters as the only authentic anchors. The district is a classic replacement, not a regeneration. And, of course, huge buildings have gone up all over town.

  DEFEAT WITH GOOD REASON

  In my experience observing and writing about the New York development scene, big things are defeated because they are too big, inappropriate, and alien to the area for which they are proposed. Less grandiose schemes are accepted after intense and often meaningful public debate and genuine participation. Consensus is key. When achieved, projects go forward, as witness the convention center, Battery Park City, and the train to the plane, all of which were at various points quite controversial.

  The death of Westway, and before it the Lower Manhattan Expressway, led to some of the best big new development in the final decades of the twentieth century—big in the overall sense, not big in the sense of one new project or one place. SoHo, of course, and everything it inspired around New York and the country would never have occurred with the Lower Manhattan Expressway built. On the West Side, the Hudson River Park continues to unfold, bit by appealing bit. The Gansvoort Historic District, just north of Greenwich Village, is one of the hottest new real estate markets. Westway would have decimated it. The transformation of the Nabisco Building into the Chelsea Market is a model of small, diverse uses in a huge building with the city’s first Whole Foods Market in the ground floor. These are only a few of both the waterfront and the near-inland developments that occurred in the Westway corridor with the defeat of the highway.

  Cumulatively, all this adds up to big development, not big development all in one place, at one time. But it is big development nonetheless, in small doses all along the West Side and around the city. The process of authentic regeneration has unfolded in many places, sprouting a potpourri of innovative projects.

  Beneficial change is ongoing but never overwhelming. The positive spin-offs are endless and widespread. The geographically varied and diverse nature of the assorted developments cited above are components in the process, not singular projects. That is the kind of change Westway’s demise unleashed, adding up to enormous change in the larger city.

  Urbanism at its best.

  CONCLUSION

  Their Shadows Still Hover

  Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.

  JANE JACOBS,

  conclusion of The Death and Life of

  Great American Cities

  But how do you recognize the seeds?

  I have tried to identify in this book some of the seeds, the precursors, of the regeneration process. I have tried to show that these often modest efforts requiring little public investment but worthy of considerable public respect and encouragement are the real generators of urban resurgence. They should not be carelessly lost. Precursors contrast completely with the highly promoted, unseemly expensive, oversold big-bang projects like stadia, casinos, malls, mega mixed-use developments, entertainment complexes, and the like, all erroneously offered as urban anchors and revitalizers.

  What makes the seeds illustrated in this book as interesting as they are effective is the diversity of form they come in, all good examples of Urban Husbandry: community-based action in defense against erosive change; new infill construction of varying scales that weaves into the existing fabric rather than replacing it wholesale; conversion of vacant or underused old buildings whether architecturally distinctive or just solid, irreplaceable quality; historic preservation efforts of community landmarks; multiple small changes in transportation preferences leading to mass-transit improvements and vehicular traffic containment; new people and businesses moving into gritty old neighborhoods that officials label as slums to justify demolition plans; artists seeking cheap space adaptable as work space and residences; farmers’ markets, community gardens, infill agriculture, locally improved public spaces, self-organized activities transforming vacant neighborhood spaces; small innovative arts and entertainment activities emerging in quirky, off-beat places far from establishment circles; environmental justice efforts in low-income, racially diverse communities; new and expanding manufacturing companies, including green manufacturing, adding real substance to the city’s economy; community organizing to defeat a road widening, a highway exit ramp, or, even still today, a highway through a neighborhood; and coalitions opposing a megadevelopment threatening neighborhood scale, social cohesion, economic networks, and architectural character. All these occurrences reflect local citizens’ investment of time, energy, and money to make an area grow and contribute to the larger city. The number and variety are endless. But stakeholders don’t care about a place if they don’t have a role in the process.

  These seemingly small, spontaneous actions preview things to come; they are the precursors to positive, often large-scale, change. More numerous and varied precursors exist than indicated here. The challenge is to recognize them in any form, to permit the gradual process of their maturity to unfold, and to nourish them where possible.

  Most critical is not to interfere with the precursors, not to mislabel as a slum the emerging but still shabby neighborhood, not to misjudge as blight the weathered, run-down structures and vacant spaces being slowly upgraded and reoccupied with new uses, not to underestimate the self-organizing capacity of local people to respond appropriately to need. Solutions crafted in response to need are very different from formulaic solutions designed from above or afar and alien to local character. The former advances the urban process and promote resilience; the latter fulfills political and real estate agendas unrelated to the place and stifles authentic growth.

  This is where a real understanding of the teachings of Jane Jacobs comes in. “Too many people,” she said, “think the most important thing about anything is its size instead of what’s happening.” This requires the appreciation of the small, the new, the start-up, the oddity, the things that could lead eventually to “the next big thing,” she added. When it finally evolves into that “next big thing,” having grown organically, its significance will be about substance, not bigness.

  New York City—and cities across the country—lost a wealth of socially viable communities and renewable industrial neighborhoods in the Moses era of massive clearance. This was not because those districts lacked precursors with regeneration potential but because recognition of precursors and their regenerative value was lacking. The focus was on the new, the big, the efficient, and the planned.

  But in the 1970s, when the excessive gush of federal funds ceased and when Moses and his imitators lost power, everything changed. Money was not available for new megaprojects requiring demolition of precursor-filled existing places. Community resistance to excessive clearance was increasingly successful. New Moses wannabes also lost power and funding sources.

  In the face of these reversals, a new ferment took hold. While the powerful forces that interfered earlier were focused elsewhere, the seeds of innovation sprouted in the most derelict ne
ighborhoods, as identified earlier—from the Lower East Side to the South Bronx. Unrecognized and left alone, those seeds of regeneration took hold. And without the big money for sweeping change, fertile neighborhoods were left to emerge organically. As Harry DeRienzo, citizen leader of the revival of the truly blighted, burned-out section of the South Bronx, said: “We could do it because no one cared or was really paying attention and there was no big money to do anything else.” Such is no longer the case. Progress has been duly noted, celebrated, and expropriated. In fact, in the past decade especially, developers have been cashing in, building on the citizen efforts, in some ways appropriately and beneficially but in others out of character and out of scale.

  The lost lesson is this: what local doers did to repair, heal, and regrow their communities and the larger city was tackle the problems and challenges with what Jacobs called “adaptations, ameliorations, and densifications.” Local doers conceived of these “adaptations, ameliorations, and densifications” and made them happen.

  Opportunities for this kind of urban resilience are the most important things lost under the bulldozer of large-scale demolition. Nurturing self-organized local efforts is rare. These resilience opportunities are invariably found in the derelict old neighborhoods, not the spiffy new ones. Precursors are difficult, if not impossible, to find in an imposed order, too regimented and costly for the quirky, experimental new. The order that Jacobs argued naturally exists in a vital city comes in the form of a perpetually unfinished, intensely interactive, and informal web of relationships. “Everything interesting happens on the edge of chaos,” Jane said.