In New York magazine this week, architecture critic Justin Davidson contrasts the grand new buildings on the skyline with the dwindling results of the companies that built them, like Time-Warner, The New York Times, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. It’s not the first time the cityscape has lagged behind the economy. “Large, ravishing swaths of New York represent the legacy of misguided optimism or an irrational belief in permanence,” Davidson writes.
The same is true for the more public elements of the cityscape, whether parks, streets, transit or theaters. We can build them in boom times, but can we afford to keep them in busts?
In a video diary of the first spring Sunday in Central Park, Michael van Valkenburgh—who will be a guest on the Brian Lehrer show Wednesday—gets practically weepy about the teeming park as a kind of paradise on earth. But he also recalls that Central Park wasn’t always so:
"Nobody wants to go to a park that looks the way Central Park looked in 1975, when I came here having just graduated from Cornell and wanting to see one of the great masterpieces and there was literally broken glass and graffiti everywhere."Central Park’s renaissance came about thanks to the wild success of the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park using predominantly private funds. The High Line, the elevated park on the far west side opening in June, has already had a conservancy throwing star-studded benefits for years. But what about parks that are bigger, more expensive to maintain, or in less wealthy areas? To be self-sustaining, the builders of Brooklyn Bridge Park have allowed private development at the edge of the park, in exchange for ongoing payments for the park’s maintenance. The strategy has prompted outcry and lawsuits. A similar dynamic has played out in the renovation of the north end of Union Square, also designed by Michael van Valkenburgh (with ARO, Stephen Cassell’s firm). In Union Square the issue isn’t condos, but a privately run restaurant. Last month, a judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking to halt the project. In neither case do I have much sympathy for the substance of the arguments—these are reasonable and necessary bargains. But I do love them for trying. The fights over the use of parks and public space put all of us on notice that the sidewalks and parks are shared, and deciding how they should be used is a rightfully contentious process. It’s one of the pleasures of city life. (Unluckily for suburbanites, the same can’t be said for the fake urban streets of “lifestyle centers.”)
Photo by Davina Pardo
