The entire plan alone would lack the urban qualities that could evolve into an authentic and fluid urban place. But even worse, the neighborhoods around the development site reflect perfectly the potential for regeneration when multiple and varied precursors are undisturbed. Revitalization was occurring despite the blighted properties owned by either the city or Ratner.
10.1 The Atlantic Arts Building, formerly 31 high-end condos, empty since 2005 except for one holdout, Dan Goldstein, co-founder of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, fighting the project. Tracy Collins.
Regeneration Was Already Happening
In the decade from 1990 to 2000 the area within a half-mile radius, according to a thorough study by the Pratt Center for Community Development, experienced widespread new incremental investment with higher-income, better-educated, and younger residents moving in from other areas of the city.16 It was revitalization despite the proximity of the rail yards. The income for the area rose from 45 to 65 percent of the median income for Brooklyn. Home ownership increased from 12.8 percent to 24.7 percent. Row houses and small apartment buildings were renovated. Industrial buildings were converted to expensive condominiums. Modest-scale new luxury residences were built with million-dollar condos. Rooftop and backyard additions were added to brownstones. New small local businesses and some chains opened. All of this was happening with the retention of both public and subsidized housing, and both rent-regulated and unregulated low-income housing. More than 8,000 residents, or almost 15 percent of the area’s population, live below the poverty level. In other words, precursors to regeneration were maturing into the real thing. One neighborhood resident told Charles V. Bagli of the New York Times that he had watched his block “evolve from a strip packed with working man’s bars to a desolate eyesore and back to a thriving street.”17
A neighborhood door-to-door survey, conducted by local resident and trained researcher Patti Hagan, found 864 people living in the six blocks slated for demolition and 200 jobs. Ratner guessed there were 100 residents. A classic case of regeneration in motion, what Jacobs called “unslumming.” In the middle of this is the Atlantic Yards site designated BLIGHTED! I don’t think so!
Among the rationalizations for the blight designation, interestingly, was the existence of about 50 percent vacant lots or structures built to only 60 percent of allowable density. Many of the empty lots, as noted, were owned by the city or the developer and kept empty (or made empty through demolition) in anticipation of the new development. What better example of “planners’ blight”? As for the buildings built to 60 percent or less of allowable bulk, that refers to brownstones, small retail spaces, modest-scale apartment houses, industrial buildings, the very combination of structures that revived the surrounding districts. In 2007 a nearby four-story double-duplex private house was selling for $2 million.
By the definition of “blight” allowed on this site, most of Brooklyn and a good deal of the rest of the city could be declared blighted—exactly Moses’s point. This allows wrongheaded projects to be rationalized anywhere in the city, stopped only by successful civic resistance, financial implosion, or occasional court victories.
Historic Preservation Sacrificed
Preservation and restoration of historic buildings have been, as noted, one of the leading precursors of the area’s upgrade in recent decades. But that didn’t stop Ratner, with the complicity of the city and the state, from slating for demolition some noteworthy but undesignated landmarks, the kind that have been the star revitalization performers in New York and every city across the country.
The most egregious loss has been the six-story 1911 Ward’s Bakery with its white terra-cotta facade and colorful Greco-inspired ornamental arches. The owner was planning to convert it to a hotel until he took a nice profit and sold this and another building to Ratner for $44 million in 2005. Closed in 1995, “this factory helped create a market for mass-produced bread,” wrote Sam Goldsmith in the Brooklyn Paper. “Thanks to new machinery and techniques that mechanized the process, the factory turned out 250,000 loaves—a lot in those days—and employed hundreds of employees.”18
10.2 Ward’s Bakery, with its terra cotta façade and large arched windows, would have been a designated landmark on any other site. Now demolished. Tracy Collins.
Ward’s Bakery was on the footprint of a planned superblock on a corner of the whole twenty-two-acre site. Its preservation would have meant moving the location of the arena. Of course, if preserving the building were a goal to begin with, the site planning might have evolved differently.
Ironically, the bakery had a historic sports connection, too. George S. Ward, bakery president, was vice president of baseball’s short-lived Federal League, a failed attempt to create a third professional league from 1913 to 1915. His brother, Robert Ward, owned the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, one of the league’s eight teams, named after a Ward’s bread brand. They played in Washington Park, in nearby Park Slope, where the Dodgers played until moving to Ebbets Field in 1912.
To add insult to the injury of losing this building, Ratner will get credit under the LEED19 green building standards for eventually incorporating elements of this needlessly lost landmark into his new structure (if the stored elements even survive). The LEED standards are weighted almost entirely in favor of new construction, despite the fact that, as the now well-known saying goes, “the greenest building is the one already standing.”20
Public Relations and Politics Win Out
Ratner’s public relations effort has been amazingly effective from the start, especially succeeding in focusing the spotlight on the virtues of a new sports facility, the one thing even opponents agree is a legitimate goal, but distracting attention from the enormous public cost required. The arena, noted Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin on January 22, 2004, “would be a nice addition to Brooklyn, if you had it . . . someplace that disturbed no human beings who contribute a lot more to the world than a foul shot.” Ratner is also a generous philanthropist, strategically donating money to scores of organizations and institutions that just coincidentally results in minimum public debate.
The arena focus leaves in the shadow the debate over sixteen new glass and steel towers ranging in height from approximately 150 to 500 feet, 15,000 new people, gridlock traffic, overcrowded schools, overwhelming transit usage, and more. As Chris Smith wrote in New York Magazine in 2006:
In his push to make Atlantic Yards a reality, Bruce Ratner has crafted the most sophisticated political campaign the city has seen in a very long time, better than any professional politician has mounted to win elective office, complete with gag orders and aggressive polling. And even if Atlantic Yards was wildly disproportionate to the surrounding neighborhoods, its pillars seemed laudable (the subsidized housing) and potentially cool (Gehry; having the NBA’s Nets nearby). The developer, Ratner, seemed downright enlightened: a commissioner of consumer affairs under Ed Koch who’d gone out of his way to hire women and minorities to build his other projects.21
Smith might also have noted the deceptiveness of the affordable-housing promise. Not only has the promised number of units shrunk since first announced, as predicted, but the money to construct them would be coming from normal public funding sources, not from Ratner’s development coffers. In other words, those units could be built now, elsewhere, without Atlantic Yard’s construction. If Ratner really cared about creating affordable housing, he could do it now elsewhere in the city. And if such housing is constructed in the future and those public funds still exist, money used here will not be available for similar housing elsewhere in the city. That funding source is finite. And since any affordable units built here will be more expensive to construct than elsewhere, a disproportionate share of the citywide resource will get used here.
So, since its announcement in December 2003, where does the project stand? In light of the current economic crisis, this is hard to say. Ratner tried and failed to get a bailout from the stimulus package to build the
10.3 Dean Stree
t loft co-ops on the Atlantic Yards site, formerly fully occupied. The building has been empty since 2005 and is scheduled for demolition. Tracy Collins.
arena. Mayor Bloomberg has denied any increase in city funds. Court challenges continue. In September 2009, Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov agreed to buy 80 percent of the money-losing basketball team and to invest in the larger project. The details remain unclear. One cannot predict what will finally emerge from this overblown proposal. Cynics could easily observe that building the arena for his own team, the Nets, was Ratner’s goal to begin with, the rest being window dressing. If anyone really thought that the Gehry-designed development had a chance of evolving as presented for state and public approval, well, then, I have a bridge to sell them.
Ratner would have undoubtedly sold off parcels to other developers to design as they saw fit within the zoning. He still can. Wrote New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who had high praise for Gehry’s design: “New York has had a terrible track record with large-scale planning in recent years. Look at Battery Park City. The MetroTech Center.22 Donald Trump’s Riverside South. All are blots on the urban environment, as blandly homogeneous in their own way as the Modernist superblocks they were intended to improve on.”23 Ouroussoff points to Rockefeller Center as a prime and glorious example of what this city was once capable of producing. Yet Rockefeller Center evolved. It started as a planned site for an opera house, changed with the times, was designed by thirteen different architects, connected seamlessly to the existing grid (even adding a street), is totally geared to pedestrians and mass transit, not cars, and did not overwhelm the airspace of its site.
The alternative to Ratner’s proposal had smaller and more manageable components and relied on more than one developer. This could have produced some notable new buildings. The most critically acclaimed buildings designed and built around the city in recent years are on single infill sites, mostly in historic neighborhoods. The scale of the alternative would be more compatible with the existing urban fabric, even including reasonably tall buildings. The surrounding neighborhoods thus would not be overwhelmed. Viable buildings would not be lost nor current residents and businesses displaced. Development and new growth could have continued as they had in the prior decade, step by step, in modest doses. Transportation and pedestrian connections to its surroundings and to the downtown core would be more reasonable. All of this would add up to the kind of development in small or modest doses that leads to big but appropriate change. The alternative design would have had a better chance of genuine public approval and of getting off the ground. What a missed opportunity.
In fact, one of two Dean Street resident architects who offered alternative plans suggested razing the Atlantic Center mall, a much maligned suburban-style enclosed shopping complex built in the 1990s by Ratner just north of the arena site. (A few government agencies occupy space here. This is a typical way government helps economically challenged developer projects.) “If Mr. Ratner were willing to condemn his own property, he would be able to build his arena without displacing anyone from their homes,” architect Karla Rothstein, a Dean Street resident who worked on an alternative development, told Times reporter Bagli. “It would be an improvement on the existing mall,” she added.
Another important consequence of the alternative should be noted. The city would not lose the taxes, residences, businesses, and jobs of the site for the decades that most of this land will lie fallow, just like so many earlier Robert Moses clearance projects did. The losses on these sites is never calculated, just the promises of the new taxes and jobs to come eventually. Those jobs may not even materialize as promised. Seldom does the city or anyone go back after a project is finished to see if promises have been met. And in how many projects have we seen fewer jobs created than promised and then seen those jobs disappear within a short time after completion? The tax incentives that came with those promises are rarely removed.
Measuring the taxes and jobs is fundamentally the wrong way to evaluate a plan, in any case. One must consider how it affects a wide area, including the whole city, and not just the site. Otherwise, everything will continually be suitable for replacement, no matter how well the site still functions. “Just replacing a dime store with a larger five and ten doesn’t benefit the city in the long run,” notes Ron Shiffman. “Rather, the point is to enable those facilities, like the dime store, to improve themselves. One is a replacement strategy; the other is how an economy grows by nurturing from within.”
What Would Jane Jacobs Say?
Jacobs’s name was reportedly invoked in the early presentations of the Atlantic Yards proposal. Apparently, the Jacobs qualities included a web of streets and sidewalks, although winding suburban style and not connected to the city’s existing grid; ground-floor retail for some of the towers, something every developer now does because it is good business but is also used to claim a Jacobs imprimatur; and, of course, mixed use, which, as shown earlier in this book, is not the Jacobs definition of mixed use but contrasts with Moses’s separation of uses. Since her name was involved, it is appropriate to examine the project against her writing.
First, let’s dispose of the idea that Jacobs was against change or against big buildings or, indeed, a sentimentalist. First, go back to her letter to Mayor Bloomberg about Greenpoint-Williamsburg. That is a ringing endorsement for change, just a different kind of change than what the city was proposing. In addition, one can look at her enthusiastic championing of the planning and zoning changes in the old garment center of Toronto known as the King-Spadina area. Toronto city officials consulted with her and followed many of her suggestions there, today considered that city’s SoHo equivalent. New innovative uses occupy both old and new buildings. New buildings coexist comfortably with old. Once empty or underused old buildings are now full. This is change in a big way. That Toronto district was in no better shape than our city’s so-called derelict old neighborhoods.
And, of course, a true reading of Jacobs’s books versus a pseudounderstanding would indicate her disapproval of everything about Atlantic Yards but also her expectation for continued change and growth, just not Ratner’s idea of change and growth, any more than a Moses plan. A basic Jacobs precept is complexity: no complexity is possible in a monolithic development of this scale by one developer and designed by one architect.
Another basic Jacobs precept is opposition to “cataclysmic” money and development. Surely, this project qualifies as cataclysmic change. The proposal is so inimical to the character of the district and, in fact, the whole borough of Brooklyn that it is off any chart of Jacobs’s principles.
Trying to show how Atlantic Yards contradicts every Jacobs principle can be tiresome. And, in fact, she was too unpredictable for such an exercise. Furthermore, Jacobs was never about how to develop or design as much as how to think about development, how to observe and understand what works, how to respect what exists, how to scrutinize plans skeptically, how to nurture innovation, new growth, and resilience. That says it all.
As it happens, I had a brief conversation with Jane about Atlantic Yards in one of my last visits with her before her death. The development had only recently been proposed, and she agreed that it was right out of the pages of old, discarded development models derivative of Moses. There was not much to discuss. She shook her head and said, “What a shame.”
On to Columbia University
Atlantic Yards may be the poster child for current Moses-style development in New York, but it is not alone. Columbia University on the Upper West Side gained city approval for a second campus north of its historic 110th Street site that would provide 6.8 million square feet in eighteen new academic and research buildings on seventeen acres in West Harlem and an underground network six stories deep for tunnels, two power plants, parking, garbage collection, and loading docks. The site encompasses more than eight blocks north of 125th Street between the phenomenal architectural structures of two elevated trestles for Riverside Drive and the Broadway IRT
subway. Though lacking in gates or fences, this second campus will feel separated and segregated from the neighboring city. Under single ownership and patrolled by a private security force, this academic island will undoubtedly feel isolated, even if connected to the actual grid and planned skillfully by an accomplished city planning team under the leadership of Marilyn Taylor of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.
Like Atlantic Yards, Columbia targeted a semi-industrial, seemingly derelict neighborhood that to the contrary combined regenerative precursors interspersed with opportunities for infill development of varying scale. And like Atlantic Yards, both Columbia’s purchase and emptying of properties along with the threat of eminent domain blighted the area, although new businesses, especially restaurants, kept opening in the neighborhood, despite their location under and within sound impact of both viaducts. In fact, enough new restaurants have opened in reclaimed warehouses along Twelfth Avenue to be dubbed “restaurant row” and “a culinary hot spot” for West Harlem.
Unlike Atlantic Yards, however, Columbia could have achieved 85 percent, if not all, the expansion that it says it needs (predicting future needs is always a guessing game) in the next thirty years without erasing a Harlem neighborhood, once known as Manhattanville. That expansion, however, just would not have happened in the same form, with the same design, and according to the same plan as Columbia insisted on.
Forest City Ratner, a private-sector entity with the purpose of making money, is best known in Brooklyn for its two large suburban-style projects, the Metro Tech office park and the Atlantic Center Mall. That is Ratner’s style of development, not an urban vision reflecting a real understanding of how a city—its neighborhoods, economy, and public spaces—really works. But from Columbia University, one of the most prestigious in the country, something different was to be expected. Columbia should not behave like a private developer with a suburban view of the city. This 254-year old institution is home to a highly respected planning program, the first historic preservation program at any university in the country, and an impressive roster of urban experts, such as Mindy Fullilove, mentioned earlier, a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health who has written so extensively about the impacts of the ruptured social bonds in communities decimated by urban renewal.
The Battle for Gotham Page 38
