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WNYC Cityscapes: The Publicness of Streets

In advance of next week’s Cityscapes meet-up on the Grand Concourse, I put in a call to Deborah Marton at the Design Trust for Public Space for a preview of what she’ll be talking about Tuesday evening on the boulevard. Here’s what she said: the role of design in the service of a healthier society. That’s a big departure from your usual walking tour, with its entertaining tidbits and “on this spot” history. But it’s a shift that mirrors a broader change in thinking about the cityscape. Architects, designers, urban critics and sociologists have been talking about it for years. More recently, politicians and bureaucrats, in New York especially, have caught on as well. The big idea is that streets, parks and plazas—public spaces—should not only be evaluated for their decorative qualities, nor how much traffic they manage to move. Instead, they should be measured for their very publicness: for their ability to be true living rooms of the city.

“Good public spaces can make people feel like they have room to experience who they are, but also feel connected to a larger culture,” Marton said.

Being in one, you don’t have to be a shopper (like at a mall), an athlete (like at a ball field), or belong to any race or class. In a good public space you can be most fully yourself—and so can everyone else. But here’s the catch, to be addressed Tuesday evening: we’re talking about streets. Plain old streets. What’s exciting about the Design Trust’s competition, and the broader movement behind it, is that it sees enormous possibility the overlooked and taken-for-granted spaces of the city. And it sees a role for designers and architects in cultivating that possibility. What does this mean for the Grand Concourse? That’s for the competition entrants to say, and it’s early yet. The finalists won’t be on display until this fall, at the Bronx Museum. Marton didn’t want to give too much away, but she did say this: the best schemes put people before cars. The medians got bigger and the access roads got smaller. (A few entries even took the idea to extremes, re-imagining the Concourse as a farm or a watery canal.) All of them recognized that there’s a lot to work with on the Grand Concourse. It is a street of history—and even more so of possibility.

WNYC Cityscapes: Meet-up No. 2 - The Grand Concourse

Photo by Flickr user ipythias

On a brisk evening last month, nearly a hundred Cityscapes enthusiasts showed up at the edge of Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek for WNYC/Urban Omnibus’ first meet-up: a walk with environmental sculptor George Trakas. On June 9th we’re doing it again—in the Bronx—joined this time by our friends at the Design Trust for Public Space. Leading the walk will be lifelong Bronx resident Sam Goodman, an urban planner at the Bronx Borough President’s Office, and Deborah Marton, executive director at the Design Trust. The Grand Concourse is the borough’s “Park Avenue of the middle class,” its Champs-Élysées, a four-mile long 182-foot wide grand thoroughfare set atop the crest of a hill, originally designed to connect Manhattan to the parks of the north Bronx. Opened in 1909 and mostly developed in the 1920s and 30s, the Grand Concourse is home to the largest collection of Art Deco and Art Moderne buildings in America. No doubt it's had some down times, but this year it celebrates its 100 birthday, with the Bronx Museum presenting a trio of exhibitions examining the street’s past, present and future, and co-sponsoring an international design competition with the Design Trust to generate bold ideas for the Concourse “beyond 100.” But it's not just all that. The Grand Concourse is having a moment. The old boulevard is at the crux of a broader conversation about the cityscape. While talk used to focus on individual buildings and the preservation of historic monuments, today there is a growing emphasis on the spaces between: on the streets themselves and their role in defining civic life. The trend is epitomized by this week’s dramatic change to Times Square, under the leadership of DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn, and is apparent in the city’s new street design manual. As the Design Trust's competition will demonstrate, the Grand Concourse is one of New York's greatest places of possibility. Goodman and Marton will tell us how. Check out this video for a preview: Sam Goodman on the Grand Concourse from Design Trust on Vimeo. Then show up—after RSVPing!—at the corner of 171st Street and the Grand Concourse at 6:30pm on Tuesday evening June 9th. (You can take the B train to 170th and exit the station at 171st street, west side.) Following the walk, we’ll gather at 7:30pm at the statue in Joyce Kilmer Park, on 161st Street and the Grand Concourse, for one of the Design Trust’s famous Public Space Potlucks. (4, B, D train to 161st St - Yankee Stadium). Bring along some food and drink to share. RSVP for both events to rsvp@designtrust.org, or on Facebook. (The walking tour will be limited to 50 guests, while the Potluck is open to all.) See you there!

WNYC Cityscapes: Nothing Boutique-y About It

On a lush carpet of lawn on the roof of Rockefeller Center yesterday morning, Mayor Bloomberg announced a big plan for making the city’s existing buildings more energy efficient. I was sitting in the scrum of City Hall reporters—an innately skeptical, jocular bunch—trying really hard to keep my cool, because what was going on up on the stage was truly as exciting a moment as I’ve ever had covering green buildings. Here's how I described it to Amy Eddings on All Things Considered yesterday: mp3

What’s so thrilling about ventilation systems and lighting controls, two of the things mentioned? Scale. There is nothing boutique-y about this. The “Greener, Greater, Buildings Plan” isn’t a flagship park restroom with waterless urinals, or a solar-powered garage for the city’s fleet of hybrid cars. It's not even a new green skyscraper. This is a big-bore, all-city move which—if you come face to face with the significance of global warming—is as important a change in the built city as is going to happen in the next 15 years. It breaks down like this: 80 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings, and about 20 percent from transportation. (In most cities those numbers are reversed). And 85 percent of NYC’s buildings will be in use for the next 20 years—so no matter how many beautiful new green towers we build, for a long time coming they’ll still just be responsible for a drop in the bucket of the city’s total emissions. Yet PlaNYC, the city’s visionary, relatively unsung, long-term environmental strategy, calls for a 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. (The consensus is we need a 50 percent reduction globally by 2050 to squeak out our survival.) The “Greener, Greater, Buildings Plan” is designed to provide a five percent reduction by 2022—which makes it the single biggest line item in all of PlaNYC. It’s as if we’ve been sweeping the house with a toothbrush and yesterday they decided to buy a vacuum cleaner. (Or rather, that building owners should.) Driving home the point that an initiative of this scale in a city of this size was big news, both the executive director of the Sierra Club and the president of the Environmental Defense Fund—the two most prominent national environmental organizations—were up there at the podium with Mayor Bloomberg. On Earth Day morning, they could have been wearing waders and cleaning out streams in some suburb. But yesterday they were in the spectacular forest of midtown skyscrapers, talking about the ho-hum subject of retrofitting existing buildings. That’s the change that will define the city in the next decades.

WNYC Cityscapes: Art & Poetry

Untitled, New York, 2002

All this talk about the politics of the cityscape has me missing its poetry and art. So put aside for a moment the contested parks, rising seawaters, and protests over public space that have been occupying this blog and the WNYC airwaves. And listen to this invocation from poet James Merrill, writing in 1962 about the changes in his neighborhood:

Out for a walk, after a week in bed, I find them tearing up part of my block And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years. Her jaws dribble rubble. An old man Laughs and curses in her brain, Bringing to mind the close of The White Goddess.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down Before you have had time to care for it. Head bowed, at the shrine of noise, let me try to recall What building stood here. Was there a building at all? I have lived on this same street for a decade.

Those are the first two stanzas of “An Urban Convalescence,” a relatively unknown piece of NYC literature (unknown compared to, say, O. Henry’s line about New York being a great place, “if they ever finish it.”) You can read the poem in its entirety at the Poetry Foundation, or listen to Merrill himself read it here. I love how Merrill comes face-to-face with his mixed feelings about the changing city, with its simultaneous destruction and creation. He seems as upset about what’s been torn down as he is at not being able to remember what was there in the first place. It’s a quintessential response to the evolving cityscape—and a helpful thing to recall when your favorite little store turns into another bank branch. Now for the art. If Merrill freezes the frame in the destruction phase of construction, Brooklyn-based photographer Stanley Greenberg—whose photographs are shown here—arrives at the scene a few months later, after a building has become recognizable, but long before its completion. Mies van der Rohe called this the most revealing moment of a building’s “constructive character.” For Greenberg the process of construction is as heroic and as beautiful as the completed building. And I love how Greenberg captures that, not in colorful bursts of Flickry photography, but in the slow frame of his large format black & white camera. The images evaporate the usual thumbs-up/thumbs-down aesthetic evaluation of architecture, and leave you alone to just appreciate each building’s buildingness.

Untitled, New York, 2004

Untitled, New York, 2007

Untitled, New York, 2007

I was going tell you what each of these four half-built structures have become, but I’ll let you guess instead. (Greenberg leaves them all untitled.) Hint: two are museums and two are office towers, and the photos were taken between 2002 and 2007. Greenberg’s project was supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and will be published in a book, out next February from the University of Chicago Press. The images are Copyright Stanley Greenberg, and courtesy the artist and Gitterman Gallery, New York. And check out Stanley’s earlier book, Invisible New York: The Hidden infrastructure of the City.

WNYC Cityscapes: Of Booms and Devil's Bargains

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

The far bigger threat to the city’s public spaces is allowing their use by advertisers, as the Times reported in 2006. No doubt the revenue is a boon (permits for Times Square start at $25,000), but there’s a collateral effect: renting the city’s spaces to the highest bidder debases them as places for free speech. That’s not an abstract concept in New York, where protests happen every week. We don’t want to be in a position of juggling the schedules of anti-war rallies with toilet paper promotions. But what if that’s the devil’s bargain we now have to strike to keep from turning back the clock to the New York of the 1970s?

WNYC Cityscapes: The Lifecycle of Streetscapes

Photo by Flickr user Stephen Harlow

Cityscapes has explored shifts in the skyline, new glass condos, and a major park. But the most meaningful pieces of the cityscape are often the spaces between buildings—the tiny details, from fire plugs to streetlights, that give New York its character.

I’m in Toronto right now for the holidays, and while this city often stands in for New York in the movies, the differences in their streetscapes are dramatic, if still subtle. In Toronto, the street signs are white (not green). The taxis aren’t yellow. The buses are red. The streetlights are a lot clunkier than our elegant and iconic NYC “cobra heads.” (I’m serious—this stuff matters.) And most glaring of all (but still easy to miss), in many parts of Toronto the power and telephone lines run above ground, which you almost never see in New York. These details add up to as distinct an experience of a cityscape as any number of new condos or museums.

They last longer than a single building and are more difficult to change—which struck me during Brian Lehrer’s show yesterday, when Paul Goldberger and Stephen Cassell were talking about the “life cycle” of buildings. The “greenness” of a building is determined not only by its energy usage on a day-to-day basis, but also by the energy required to construct it—by how the materials were made and how far they had to travel. As Paul pointed out, “The National Trust for Historic Preservation likes to say that the greenest building of all is the old one that you preserve.” We’re good at this in New York, turning industrial buildings into lofts and offices, office buildings into condos, or mansions into schools.

The life cycle of the streetscape is nearly as long. (Look at old movies for proof.) Which makes it even more surprising how dramatically the streetscape changed during the last boom—as part of a concerted effort by the Bloomberg administration. There are the big moves, like Broadway Boulevard, the Department of Transportation's plan to turn parts of Broadway into pedestrian plazas. But there are also thousands of smaller changes, like new bike lanes marked by green paint, planted traffic medians, and sidewalks widened to take back a full lane of traffic. These were design projects, as intentional as any new museum—and in many ways more enlightened. Their bible is the fascinating “High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines,” published in 2005 by the city’s Department of Design and Construction, in partnership with the non-profit Design Trust for Public Spaces. It provides a pattern book for everything from the permeability of pavement to the position of fire hydrants. It’s an anatomy lesson of the city’s streets.

Next Wednesday on the Brian Lehrer show, Michael van Valkenburgh will talk about his grand design for the 76 acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park, and also those little things that make up the feel of a street—like his firm’s work on the renovation of the Union Square farmer’s market, where they just finished laying the new paving last week.

In the meantime, architect Hugh Hardy trains his video camera on some favorite overlooked details of the cityscape.

WNYC Cityscapes: How Green is NYC? More Verdant Than You Might Think

Photo by Flickr user Aaron Freedman

The efficiency of New York’s infrastructure might feel--or smell--a little too obvious when you’re nose-to-neighbor’s-armpit on a packed subway car. But the unavoidable facts of city life such as tiny apartments, travel by transit and buildings huddled together are its greatest green asset. Architect Stephen Cassell, who will appear on the Brian Lehrer show Wednesday, has dedicated a great deal of time to understanding the city’s built environment. He has produced two videos online. The first, viewable here, addresses perhaps the biggest question: “How Green Is NYC?” He looks out his office window (Stephen's firm, ARO, is downstairs from WNYC, actually) at Hudson Square, where many of the former industrial buildings have been repurposed for media, advertising and arts companies. Stephen also made a video about the Queens Botanical Garden’s new visitor center, which is one of the only buildings in the city to earn a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Stephen also shows us what a waterless urinal looks like. Whatever the city’s shortcomings now, the next steps for the city are relatively clear, and crisply described in PlaNYC, the mayor’s green blueprint, a document that deserves far more attention than it has received so far. Old buildings should continue to be retrofitted to become more efficient; new buildings should be green; add parks to make dense urban life more pleasant; push for fewer (and cleaner) automobiles; increase public transit offerings, and pay careful attention to how the city handles wastewater. (Oh, and fly less!) All good things. The piece of New York’s green puzzle I’ve become most interested in is the “image of the city”—how New Yorkers see it, and what it means to them. As a kid, my family used to drive to Jones Beach on hot summer days, but what I remember as clearly was the drive back: Manhattan appearing out of the haze, emitting wavy lines of heat like a cartoon pie. Then, it seemed like the opposite of nature. Now I realize that’s not really true. That view of the city—even at its densest and grittiest, like seen from the 7 train or the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—today can be understood as a compelling vision of a sustainable future. So forget Yosemite. The symbol of today’s environmentalism should be the skyline.

Cityscapes: What's Not to Like About Brooklyn Bridge Park?

Photo by Flickr user Barry Yanowitz

It’s great to see Michael van Valkenburgh’s quick video tour of the under-construction (finally!) Brooklyn Bridge Park. I fell in love with the park plan when I wrote about it for Metropolis Magazine in 2006, calling it the city’s third great park, after Prospect and Central:

Frederick Law Olmsted would be pleased. Van Valkenburgh and his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), share the old master’s emphasis on the park’s role as a democratic equalizer for the city; they share his technical sophistication and imperative for a sensitive layering of the constructed landscape upon the natural one; and they recognize the need for range, for varied and multitudinous landscapes rather than singular compositions.

Brooklyn Bridge Park is much bigger than many people realize: 76-acres of parkland, stretched along over a mile of the Brooklyn waterfront. But seen from the Brooklyn Heights promenade, the piers that make up much of its area look small and squished. In fact, they’re five acres each—about the size of Bryant Park. Each. Standing at the end of one, as I had the chance to on a cold day a couple winters back, feels like being out in the middle of the harbor—a sensation the park design emphasizes. Seventeen acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park will open by the end of the year, with another section coming online in summer 2010. $100 million of construction contracts have been awarded. $231 million out of the park’s $350 million construction budget is allocated. Even at this moment of pause, Brooklyn Bridge Park is happening. But you wouldn’t know it from following Brooklyn neighborhood politics. Among a small but vocal group in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, the park remains highly controversial (“bad park!”). Despite hundreds of community meetings over two decades soliciting input on the design of the park, despite one of the most respected landscape architects in the country at the helm, despite construction having begun, there are ongoing efforts by a few to change the design. And they remain steadfastly opposed to the plan to finance the ongoing maintenance of the park with fees from condos and a hotel built at its edge. (The park must be economically self-sustaining.) At this point in the long and public gestation of Brooklyn Bridge Park I have trouble seeing this ongoing sideshow as anything but political grandstanding and NIMBYistic concern over the crowds the park will bring. No doubt some quiet streets in Cobble Hill, DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights are going to get loud—loud with the sounds of people on their way to enjoy the park. On a crowded city with a beautiful waterfront that strikes me as cause for celebration, not opposition.

WNYC Cityscapes: Welcome, Creative Destruction, and Climate Change

Hello all, I’m thrilled to be your guest Cityscapes blogger, one part of WNYC's multi-platform month-long examination of how the city has changed, and where it's heading next. Brian Lehrer will be speaking every Wednesday with the New Yorker's architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, and a rotating cast of the city leading architects, who will also be contributing video diaries. I'll be here providing context, drawing connections, soliciting comments, and making statements you might disagree with. For example: I love the changing city. No doubt I have the occasional nostalgic streak, but more often than not I am invigorated by New York’s creative destruction—by the holes in the ground, the churn of restaurants and stores, the occasional glittering gem of a fresh building, and even (but too frequently) the heartbreaking eyesore of a new condo, made of cardboard and glass. Yet as Hugh Hardy and Paul Goldberger both bluntly put it on the radio yesterday: “You can’t freeze the city.” Whatever pause we’re in the midst of now, it’s likely temporary. That’s not boosterism—more like metabolism. But that still makes this the right moment for reflecting on the changes in the cityscape. Reading your comments, watching Hugh’s videos, and listening to Brian’s segment, it’s clear a lot of you feel the same way: filled with profoundly mixed feelings about the city’s most recent reinventions. Angry at what’s lost. Tickled by what’s new. I—and a bunch of us who write about architecture for a living—have recently been feeling especially disillusioned, not merely by the financial houses of cards built by Wall Street, but also by the literal houses of glass and steel we heralded, which in retrospect can seem as empty as a subprime mortgage-backed security. Is the New Museum on the Bowery, for example, a cosmopolitan addition to the cityscape, a witty comment on zoning and background buildings, a triumph of the city’s ongoing devotion to art and culture? Or a dirty blank façade that mocks us—along with the soup kitchen next door—for paying more attention to luxury than humanity? (Commenter RLewis on Wednesday’s segment seems torn about this as well.) As Brian put it on the air, it’s time to take stock of where we are as a physical city, “and what it means to our lives.”

Photo by Amy Pearl

I’ve been challenging myself to move away from thinking about the cityscape only in these classic terms of aesthetics and economics. I’ve also begun to believe that the unwritten story of the city’s future is wholly intertwined with the story of climate change. By virtue of their size and density, cities are the biggest users of energy. But they can also be the most efficient. So looking at the cityscape, I ask myself not only if it’s ugly or pretty, just or unjust, but also how it responds to the rising swells—of carbon, seawater, whatever. Does a new building, park or streetscape make the city more livable for more people? Can it be "less bad" by being non-toxic and low-power, and also be good by making dense and efficient city living the best kind of living? (If you live here, you're probably ready with an answer.) More on that over the next weeks from me and, no doubt, from architects Michael van Valkenburgh, Steven Cassell and Liz Diller. Glad to be here.