The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  This is the fundamental error—a tragic one, in fact—of Moses’s urban philosophy and why, as we will see later, this error keeps getting repeated. Moses mistook precursors—often messy at best and hidden in deteriorated and dormant areas, at least—as blight. Actually, precursors didn’t fit his vision of what the city should be. He was incapable of recognizing the precursors that stood in the way of his bulldozers, incapable of valuing their rebirth potential, and, worst, incapable of knowing how to deal with them other than through elimination. If even half of what he destroyed were nascent precursors or mature but growing contributors to the social, physical, and economic health of the city, one can begin to understand what the city lost and why it took so long to recover from the damage.

  Historic Preservation: A Visually Obvious Precursor

  If you look at any revived urban neighborhood today, you would be hard-pressed to find a more potent catalyst for its early regeneration than historic preservation. Historic preservation never starts in a big way. Sometimes the first upgraded building may be ahead of its time. Years may pass before other properties are similarly upgraded. Chances are, however, that things—often, small, creative, and productive things—are occurring in neighboring unrestored buildings of primary importance. Yet occasional and scattered upgrading, whether to official historic preservation standards or not, can be an important clue that precursors to more positive change exist. Wherever there is activity, close observation of its nature is called for to understand future possibilities.

  Most people don’t even know or remember that such celebrated neighborhoods around the country as the French Quarter and the Garden District in New Orleans, Georgetown in D.C., the Battery in Charleston, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the Victorian District in Savannah, the King William District in San Antonio, South Beach in Miami, Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the North End of Boston, Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and many more were at one time considered “slums.” And those are just the transformed residential districts. Likewise, many of today’s viable former industrial neighborhoods, now popular loft neighborhoods, all over the country were once declared slums. Slum, in these instances, meant deteriorated, seemingly empty, occupied by unimportant activity, abandoned, or absentee-owned, properties that owners were thrilled to sell.

  But many of the buildings in all of these districts also were occupied either by precursors that went unrecognized or offered an opportunity for new small enterprises and start-ups or by new residents. If such areas survived to grow and thrive while upgrading occurred around them, it was only because no larger replacement agenda existed to threaten them or a replacement plan was thwarted either by civic resistance or by failing economic conditions. Many of the empty buildings had a value often invisible to experts but not to potential buyers looking for affordable space. Many were scheduled for demolition that hadn’t happened yet (remember the Civil War-era piers Gregory O’Connell rescued from demolition plans in Red Hook). The historic nature of the architecture was probably not the first point of appeal, but the quality of the design, construction, and space added up to a good package. Now if the neighborhood was hopeless, if the problems so overwhelming a newcomer would stay away, then one could assume any hidden precursors wouldn’t last and no new ones would appear.

  Every neighborhood in New York that was once judged hopeless has turned the corner, from Brooklyn’s Bushwick (site of terrible riots) to Hunts Point in the South Bronx. The regeneration that started in the 1970s in the South Bronx, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, SoHo, Astoria in Queens, and Stapleton on Staten Island has steadily gained momentum, and as each neighborhood gained value, appreciation of the adjacent areas took hold. That is the way the regenerative urban process works when it is allowed to do so. The precursors survived and evolved into full-bloom regeneration. This process was visible across the city in gentle waves.

  In each of those neighborhoods, the renovation of historic, often architecturally unbeatable, residential and industrial buildings was early in the process. The uses within the upgraded buildings were often innovative and small, and the local businesses that follow the growing population, whether residential or commercial, are also varied and reflective of that new population.

  It is safe to say that any neighborhood in which people are willing to go through the expense and endless headaches to restore old, deteriorated buildings absolutely cannot be reasonably judged “blighted” or a “slum.” If a business invests private money in an area, no matter how shabby it appears on a windshield survey, how can such an area be considered dead? In those same neighborhoods, longtime residents and businesses that remain also reinforce the inappropriateness of the “blight” tag. We’ll see how that applies in three specific projects later.

  While historic preservation is greatly appreciated in contrast to twenty or thirty years ago, the understanding and appreciation of existing buildings are still too narrow. Preservation is not fully recognized as a precursor of broad regeneration. Nor is it valued as a serious contributor to a city’s local economy and to the national economy as well, nor as a fundamental building block of environmental conservation. (See the epilogue.)

  The Economic Contribution Is Huge

  The multiple but invisible economic contributions of historic preservation are buried in assorted statistics that cover more than preservation. The federal government, for example, has a category for all jobs; it is called the SIC code, which stands for Standard Industrial Classification. The individual categories covered do not include specialized preservation work. The masonry category, for example, does not identify as a masonry subset the specialized brick masons required for historic buildings. The plaster group doesn’t break out ornamental plaster work. And faux painting or wood graining is not identified as a painting specialty. No measurement exists within the SIC code or any other statistical category to even begin to calculate the enormous impact the historic preservation movement has had on the national economy.

  Restoration is not recognized as a big contributor to the national economy. It is not easy to measure collectively and is surely below the radar in conventional analysis. But like the big impact in small doses that preservation has had on the regeneration of cities, it has had a similar impact economically. That impact can be observed in logical ways.

  This clearly is not the standard way of measuring impacts, but consider this. In 1967, a tall, already balding man with a twinkle-eye smile named Clem Labine (not the ballplayer) bought a four-story brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope when the brownstone movement was just beginning to fuel the renaissance of that borough. “That movement,” Labine observes, “was totally grass roots with help from no one and nowhere but it helped build Brooklyn’s caché as a wonderful place to live.” He started on the restoration of this house, a job that never is totally finished because, he says, “there’s always something that needs to be upgraded.” Labine knew nothing about old houses or how to restore them. The restoration was “a painful self-learning process,” he recalls, but he realized that similar buyers of old houses were in the same boat.

  In 1973 Labine started the Old House Journal in the basement of that brownstone. A twelve-page offset newsletter, it was a how-to primer for new brownstone owners and quickly expanded to cover owners of old houses across the country. Paint-stripping techniques, wood-window repair, and fixing cracked plaster are all similar in an urban row house or freestanding wood-frame building. Labine printed 1,000 copies to give away at flea markets and preservation meetings. He had no mailing list, but each issue included a coupon to subscribe for twelve dollars. He also created a pamphlet, Field Guide to Old House Styles, which was a give-away with a subscription.

  By 1985 he had 60,000 subscribers across the country and converted the newsletter to a magazine format. With the new format, Labine started taking advertisements. By the time he sold the publication in 1987, there were 65,000-70,000 subscribers and growing, and it had gone from 25 to 100 advertisers but
did not go on newsstands until after he sold it. Now it has 150,000 subscribers plus newsstand sales and is thick with ads for businesses and products, most of which did not exist before the preservation movement emerged.

  Then in 1976 Labine published the first Old House Journal directory, getting listings from “every artisan and supplier we could find,” which totaled 256. The catalog inspired Claude and Donna Jeanloz to start Renovators Supply Company, individually soliciting those artisans and suppliers to carry their products in the catalog or by mail order. When Labine sold the Old House Journal directory in 1988, 1,800 preservation-related businesses were listed in the directory. From 256 to 1,800 listings is another reflection of the growth in preservation-related businesses in twelve years.

  In 1988, Labine started Traditional Building Magazine with about 30 ads and sold it in 2002. At its height, before the Internet and recession intervened, approximately 330 advertisers filled the pages. In 2000 Labine started Period Homes Magazine for professionals, starting with 25 advertisers, which went to 250 in no time and from 0 subscriptions to 12,000. “What amused me was the architectural profession,” Labine says. “They held their noses at preservation because it wasn’t ‘creative.’ Now the majority of firms all have preservationists on staff. They can’t afford not to.”5 The preservation market and the economy it represents are now huge.

  Another measure of preservation’s growth and impact is reflected in a seemingly minor change in the title of Sweet’s Catalogue. Sweet’s is the bible for construction contractors and architects looking for products, building materials, and manufacturers to use in their work. About twelve to fifteen years ago, its publisher, McGraw-Hill, discovered that about half of the work done by its users was renovation, not just new construction. The title was changed to Sweet’s Construction and Renovation Catalogue . “This was about the same time that architects added preservation to their work categories,” Labine observes.

  Preservation has also revived a variety of the traditional building arts that were almost lost and, in the process, created a host of new professions. “There is nothing that can’t be done today but that wasn’t the case only 30 years ago,” notes Labine. He cites wood graining, ornamental plaster work, stone carving, slate-roof installation and repair, and faux painting and scagliola (the painting of layers of plaster to imitate marble), to name just a few. Many of these were almost lost arts.

  The Transportation Link

  In Death and Life, Jacobs made clear that increasing accommodation of vehicular traffic in cities was a surefire way to guarantee deterioration, whether in a residential or a downtown district. It was a slow process, she said, made in many small moves that don’t always easily reveal themselves as destructive to the urban fabric. “Erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-signal systems are installed for faster movement. . . . More and more land goes into parking, to accommodate the ever increasing numbers of vehicles while they are idle. No one step in this process is in itself crucial. But cumulatively the effect is enormous.”6 That was 1961, and although New York did not suffer in this regard as much as many other American cities because of its size, Moses’s successes around the city clearly led to the erosion to which Jacobs refers. In the name of improving traffic flow, the streets of American cities were remade street by street to favor vehicular over pedestrian mobility.7 Couple this with the disinvestments in mass transit and the picture is clear on how New York’s decline advanced over time.

  Jacobs also outlined the counteraction strategy of “attrition,” defined as “action taken to diminish vehicular traffic.” Attrition happens, she noted, “by making conditions less convenient for cars. . . . If properly carried out, attrition would decrease the need for cars simultaneously with decreasing convenience for cars.”8 Attrition is now happening across the country and certainly reflects the increased popularity of Jacobs’s principles, even if the promulgators of attrition are unaware of her teachings and simply come by their understanding instinctively. Nevertheless, that attrition is occurring in a multitude of ways, some more advanced than others, but all working to reknit the nation’s urban fabric piece by piece.

  Jacobs’s Ideas Happening Big Time

  Jacobs’s critics like to perpetuate the myth that she was against anything big. She definitely was against big highways for all the reasons elaborated earlier in this book. But she was definitely for big networks of mass transit that move people and freight, instead of cars. Infrastructure that supports cities was certainly something big that Jacobs viewed as critical for government support. The key to the size here is network, a network of different modes of interconnected transportation systems that create the lifeline for moving people and goods.9

  Mass transit knits a region or a city together. And if dense enough, as it once was, a national rail system knits the country together and facilitates the economically and socially productive movement of people and goods without the excessive polluting and congestion-causing dependency on rubber-tire vehicles of any size. The proliferation of re-created transit routes within cities, from Fort Worth and Sacramento to Denver and New York, definitely reflects the increasing ascendancy of Jacobs’s urban values over the previously dominant values of Moses.

  Elevated highways are coming down, freeways are giving way to boulevards and avenues, traffic through downtowns and city streets is being calmed, parking capacity is being diminished or at least made less expansive, and even garage-front houses (called “snout houses” in some places), where the garage door is more prominent than the front door (if you can find it), are being zoned out. Zipcar facilities (short-term rentals) are proliferating, easing the need for multiple, if any, car ownership. Bike trails are multiplying exponentially, offering alternative commuting possibilities. And bike lanes in cities are increasing as well. Even the availability of “self-serve” rental bike programs has grown. Paris is the leader in this with more than twenty thousand “Velib” bikes available on the streets all over the city. Any balanced transportation system must include the bicycle. All kinds of isolating forms that separated, segregated, and isolated places and people are also coming down or being reconsidered, such as skywalks that drain life from streets. The car is being tamed, not eliminated. That’s an important distinction. Elimination of the car strikes terror in the heart of Americans. No balanced transportation advocate is suggesting such a thing.

  I have experienced people terrorized by this fear firsthand. In many forums where I have spoken, I am frequently challenged. “You just want to get rid of the car,” accusers have declared. “No, I don’t,” I respond. “In fact, you can happily keep all three cars. I just want you to be less dependent on them.” I also add something that appeals to their self-interest. “You don’t have to give up your car,” I say, “but wouldn’t it be good for you if the guy driving next to you does and leaves more room on the road for you?”

  Others ask in a similarly challenging way, “Do you have a car?” “Yes,” I say, “but I rarely use it to get around the city, mostly for out-of-town trips.” In fact, I’d prefer on many occasions to take the train, but, unlike in Europe, we are not allowed to take a dog on the train in most places in this country.

  Then comes the kicker: “That’s such a New York point of view.” I love this one. “The funny thing is,” I say, “people west of the Mississippi think everyone east offers nothing to learn from, and everyone east of the Mississippi thinks no lessons for them exist west, and you’re all wrong.” Taming the car is a national imperative.

  One of the bonuses of the improved New York subway system, in fact, is the increasing number of city dwellers giving up the car. Driving around New York City is to be avoided at all costs. People who do, for reasons other than sheer necessity, get what they deserve. It is too easy to get around this city by subway, bus, or taxi to require a car
. As other cities and regions improve their transit infrastructure, car dependency will similarly diminish.

  A balanced transportation system has a chance to emerge in the future. In many places, a highway’s construction started the decay in a neighborhood. Its removal can jump-start its rebirth.

  Remember What Was Lost

  It is useful to remember what was lost—and how it was lost—in order to understand what is imperative to re-create in a contemporary way. This is not about going backward and re-creating the past; it is about learning from the past what worked and adapting the lessons for today.

  Considerable focus today is on high-speed rail, and the Obama administration is appropriately pushing for the re-creation of a national rail system that more effectively connects both regional and more distant destinations. Among other things, this would relieve the excessive pressure on air travel and diminish the dominance of airlines. But the most important form of transit for the regeneration of urbanism is the modern streetcar or bus rapid transit. This transit mode makes frequent stops, like New York’s subway, and is easily accessible, comfortable, and reasonably priced. It must be all those things to compete with the car.

  We once had an extensive network of streetcar systems, one of the world’s finest. And we didn’t lose it naturally. It was destroyed to give automobiles more road room. Bradford Snell, a government researcher, first detailed this sorry tale in a 1974 Senate committee report.10 The story has been told many times, including in the 1998 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but it is always worth telling again to understand future possibilities.