subwayfox's blog

What can one say about Grand Central Terminal that hasn't already been said?  A relatively late project of the City Beautiful era, it has been lauded as an architectural masterpiece since its current incarnation opened in 1913.  As a building, it was never intended solely to a be a place to embark from a train, although its architects, the firms of Reed and Stern and of Warren and Wetmore, skillfully never forgot this primary purpose and the building is a masterful example of railroad engineering and of handling the movement of very large numbers of people.  Grand Central was both a gift to the city, a monument to be cherished at the moment of arrival or departure from the New York in the true spirit of the City Beautiful, and was also a symbol of the wealth and power of its creator, the New York Central Railroad, conjuring up images of the scale and importance of this massive pillar of American industry as well as perhaps to evoke the Guided Era wealth of its late founder, Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Undoubtedly some of this symbolism is now lost: the decline of the passenger railroad industry at the hands of the airplane and automobile along with the subsequent financial implosions of the once omnipresent and powerful railroad industry have both changed our immediate view of the structure along with its use.  Though spared destruction at the hands of a near-bankrupt Penn Central railroad (a fate its larger, grander sister, Pennsylvania Station was not able to escape), for much of the late Twentieth Century the character of the under-maintained, now solely commuter focused station was anything but clear.  At times, the City of New York itself, along with all its monuments seemed to some destined to become relics of a past age, now supplanted by the high-tech office park, massive expressways, and the suburban diaspora.  Fortunately, this was not to be.  Starting in the late 1980's and accelerating in the early 1990's, urban life, and New York in particular, experience a renaissance on a scale that once seemed nigh unimaginable.  At the same moment, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the state-run agency which had inherited the terminal following the demise of Penn Central and the disinterest of Conrail, began a long needed refurbishment of the grand structure.  The intent was twofold: to restore the terminal to its former architectural glory while modernizing it into a facility more fit for its modern uses and for its future.  The result was a success not only of architecture, but of urban planning, far larger that its planners or even the building's present-day pundits may have ever imagined.

No discussion of Grand Central can proceed without touching on its architecture, both in its aesthetic and practical dimensions.  The building itself, by virtue of the year of its construction, the skill of its architects, and the cost the New York Central was able to play, represents in many ways a culmination of the practices of both the City Beautiful and Beaux Arts styles.  Externally and internally the building is assembled out of classical forms: it contains columns of every order (including more modernistic, rectangular columns in the Main Concourse), a true vaulted ceiling which frames tall, symmetrical, arch-topped windows, a polished stone veneer (the building itself is actually a steel structure made to look like a masonry constructed one*) which gives off an aura of permanence and prestige, the subtle use of the New York Central's Green and Gold color scheme (continued itself in the buildings gold-tinged granite), a bilateral symmetry that makes a massive space at once easily interpretable, and a hundred or more other things all come together in a proportion so ideal as to seem more than the sum of its parts.  For those who believe that classical architectural forms directly speak to the human psyche, the building is strong evidence.  For those who do not, it is simply an aesthetic masterwork, the culmination of decades of a particular artistic milieu into one tremendous example of the genre.

*From the date of its construction there have been those who have argued that this inherent mis-truth, a steel-building masquerading as a masonry one, makes the whole structure a fraud, an act of subterfuge and sleight of hand.  With now nearly a century of hindsight, it seem these appeals to the "authentic" were misplaced.  Buildings have always used art to convey feelings to their denizens; the Ancient Greeks, for example, built their temple columns so as to gently bulge in the middle, as if they were struggling under the building's weight, a deliberate, yet visually appealing, lie.  It only takes one step into the Main Concourse today for any feelings of mis authenticity to perish.

As stated above, however, such praise for Grand Central is nothing new.  What may be lost in such descriptions is how well the building ties itself into the urban fabric of the city.  While the point may be somewhat controversial, Grand Central truly has no main entrance, no singular passageway that is privileged above all others.  Rather, it has a multitude of entrances that come from every side and even from below, with connections both to the subway and, of course, it's own trains.  This makes the building extremely perforable: it is easy to enter from every direction and almost beckons you in, if even to simply cut across it.  By size, the building is a massive structure, yet from the ground it almost never feels as if it is in the way, a remarkable achievement.  It also means that the space within the terminal is easily reached from any direction (and vice versa), with a minimum of walking.  As an enclosed public space, that makes it tremendously unique.

In a lesser building, this transparency might have made the structure seem insubstantial, but Reed and Stern and Warren and Wetmore bypassed this by being, at least in this instance, masters of the architectural art of capture and release.  Almost every entrance way leads into a vestibule or passageway of only modest height which, a few moments of walking later, opens into the now-even-larger seeming Main Concourse.  Even when the passageways must be fairly large, one must walk through a small section of significantly lower ceiling before entering the Concourse, creating the same effect.  This capture and release is even more dramatic when departing a train; exiting the relatively low, dark tunnels for the bright, open space of the Concourse cannot help but be dramatic.  The power of this effect not only makes the structure of Grand Central itself seem more impressive, probably its original intent, but it psychologically delineates the interior space as something both particular and special.  From whatever direction one approaches or leaves the Terminal, whether they are catching a train or not, the building forms a distinct and special urban not along that trip.  The Yale Architecture Professor Vincent Scully, Jr. once famously described the destruction of Pennsylvania Station and it's underground replacement by stating, "One entered the city like a god.  One scuttle in now like a rat."  Almost any entrance to Grand Central might make one feel almost like a rat, only to be quickly released as a god.  These moments of transition also soften the shift between the canyon-wall, busy face of the street and the secluded but awe-inspiring place within without acting as a barrier to movement.  In some sense, Grand Central recreates the experience a city-dweller has all the time, of entering and leaving constricted and open spaces, and in doing so the Terminal seems even more urban, to be more a part of the city than separate from it.





Above: Examples of Capture and Release.  First is the enteranceway from 42nd Street to Vanderbilt Hall, the second is the lowered ceiling prior to the Main Concourse.

As noted above, Grand Central was not always in the pristine condition it now is.  Years of neglect, first by a railroad on the express track to bankruptcy and later by a poorly funded state agency, meant that needed maintenance simply was not performed.  The famous windows above the Main Concourse, for example, has been painted black during World War II to aid the City's black-out defense against a possible air attack; in the years following, no one got around to having that paint removed.  Huge billboards came to cover the interior of the Main Concourse hiding and cheapening its architectural features, and the sections they did not conceal were covered in grime that had never been cleaned.  The famous ceiling mural was hardly perceivable.  Parts of the station, particularly the Lower Concourse, were desolate outside of rush hours.  To get an idea of what the station looked like, one need only glance up at the Northwest corner of ceiling mural in the Main Concourse; there, a small patch was left uncleaned to demonstrate the state the station had been in.

From 1994 through 2000, the MTA took on a massive restoration and rebuilding of the Terminal.  Being, of course, a landmarked structure, the Authority had to ensure that every step they took preserved the character of the building.  At the same time, the project was not myopically historically focused.  The first goal was to restore the Terminal to pristine condition, it is true, but at the same time the plan made fundamental changes to the station that not only finished its transformation from the long-distance terminal it had been, but sought to create something entirely new in its place.

The Lower Concourse probably underwent the greatest change.  Maintaining the dimensions of the more famous hall above it, the lower level was originally known as the Commuter Concourse, as it was from here that the vast majority of commuter trains arrived and left.  It had its own seating area and ticket windows, all of which was made redundant with the death of intercity rail travel and the Terminal's transformation to a wholly commuter-oriented structure.  For years the Lower Concourse was desolate and could often feel dangerous: it was a only a space through which people would pass, and encouraged no one to stay.  The renovation transformed this area into a relatively high-end food court.  Formerly blank walls were lined with take-away food vendors, the former ticket windows were converted to sit-down restaurants, and the vast central space was filled with tables and chairs arrange to provide quiet oases within an immensely busy space.  In short, what was once a place only to walk through was now a place to stop and enjoy.





Above: views of the Lower Level Dining Concourse, post-renovation

A treatment in the same vein was given to the upper level.  Passages to the streets and subways, long only conveyances, were lined with small storefronts.  Each has a floor to ceiling windows, not only encouraging window shopping and adding visual interest, but making these passages feel far more like a street than a hallway.  The stores themselves are numerous and varied; they sell things from food to travelers needs to various crafts to high-end boutiques.  In addition, a new passageway to Lexington Avenue was constructed for what become known as the Grand Central Market.  Here, stalls are rented by individual New York companies to sell various gourmet foods and act as a special, and expensive, supermarket.  Vanderbilt Hall, on the South side of the Terminal, originally a waiting room for long distance passengers, was converted into a large exhibition space for all sorts of expositions, exhibits, and markets, adding further purpose to a visit to the Terminal.  While all this emphasis on expense is a duly worrying topic, it shouldn't take away from the fundamental urban success of the rebuilding.  It took what was once a solely single use building, a place to catch a train, and made it not only a station, but a place to shop, a place to eat, a place to see an exhibit, in short, a place to be.







Above: Examples of shopping, top is the Lexington Passage, Middle is the Subway Shuttle Passage.  Bottom: East Staircase

On one hand there is nothing new about his type of intensive multiple use.  Intercity train stations, Grand Central included, had in their heyday always been full service institutions containing shops, barbers, banks, and restaurants.  They were a fundamental node on a journey, be it a short commute or a much longer, multi-day trip.  When intercity train travel began to decline and passenger railroads faced bankruptcy, they sought to streamline and simplify their operations, and much of these 'additional' services were lost, weakening the train station's power as a central space in a city.



Above: a floorplan of the Michigan Central Railroad Station in Downtown Detroit, MI, demonstrating the many uses this now abandoned building had in its hey heyday.  Source is lost for the moment, unfortunately.

Yet at the same time, the rebuilding of Grand Central has potentially created something more than any previous train depot had been: an American version of the Ancient Greek agora*.  Though agora is often translated as marketplace, this severely underestimates the importance of the place in the Greek world.  Things were bought and sold there, it is true, but at the same time it was the central meeting point of any city.  Most days, around midday, almost all would descend on the agora, if not to conduct business then to partake in public life.  The agora was the setting for Socrates, where he famously questioned Athenians and built a philosophical following; it was where direct democracy flourished and policy debates occurred, and no less importantly, it was the place friends, family, and acquaintances met and interacted.  In many ways the classical Greek agora was the entire public sphere made physically manifest.

*It should always be noted that when talking about Ancient Greece, generally one is talking about the culture of Athens and, to a far lesser degree, that of Sparta, whom before Alexander so dominated the historical record as to blot out many of the other varied city-states.

An equivalent space to the agora is something that has been chronically absent in the history of America (and, it might be added, is exceedingly rare in many other cultures, as well).  From a very early date, the majority of American land has been set aside for private ownership and use, and therefore the majority of places open to the public are private property opened for a specific, usually commercial, use.  Some parks and plazas have throughout the country's history come close to replicating the environment of the agora, but many are built for structured uses, such as picturesque enjoyment or recreation, whilst excluding other elements like commerce, limiting their potential as free-form places.  Additionally, the climate of America tends to prevent any outdoor space from fulfilling an agora-like purpose year round, unlike in the mild Mediterranean.

A handful of times, the American experience has come close to having something akin to a true agora.  Perhaps the best example of such a place were the streets of the Downtown of every city of consequence from approximately 1880 through the early 1920's.  In this period, the mature years of the streetcar, not only was almost all business conducted Downtown, but rapid suburban expansion meant that almost all shopping and entertainment was conducted there as well.  Thus the crowded streets were filled with all walks of life and of all sorts of purposes during the majority of the day.  The marketplace aspect was covered by everything from mercantile exchanges to huge, multistory department stores to the humble peddler pushing a cart.  It was a space that was free to access and generally unstructured.  Unfortunately, its downfall can be traced to the decentralization of the American city, beginning first with entertainment and shopping, followed later by some of the organs of commerce themselves.  No longer was the vital mix of every walk of live present, and quickly Downtown stagnated, morphing from a vibrant crowd to blandness of the modern "Central Business District."*
* Much of the description of this period in time comes from Robert Fogelson's wonderful book Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950, published by Yale University Press in 2003.
In modern America, perhaps the the closest example we have to an agora may be the much maligned shopping mall.  Here, a variety of activities, shopping, eating, and entertainment, reside under on weather-proof, year round roof.  While encouraging its patrons to shop (and indeed offering little else), the public halls and food courts of a mall provide a relatively free-form public space that allows a multitude of uses, as any analysis of suburban teenager's activity will show.  By nature of its unity of desperate shops and its centrality, it pulls in people from a width swath of cultural groups.  Unfortunately, unlike the traditional agora, a mall is fundamentally private property, and commercial property at that.  Visitors are at the discretion of management, and while a certain amount of free-form activity is permitted, it is rare a mall's management will allow politics, unrelated business, or many other activities unrelated to shopping or planned, bourgeois entertainment to occur.

Grand Central Terminal, by contrast, is an overtly and de jure public space.  A visitor is under no obligation to ride a train or to spend money on goods.  Tables and chairs are available freely to anyone who wants to sit, for almost any purpose, from reading a book, to chatting with friends, to a high-powered business meeting.  Even the East staircase in the Main Concourse, a staircase added in the reconstruction as a symmetrical counterpoint to the West stairs, while lined with signs demanding people not sit there, are almost always full of people resting and watching the crowds pass by.  The Terminal attracts people now with many functions: trains, stores, eateries, and exhibitions, and now the very mass of people itself, as in all successful public spaces, acts as its own attraction.

Compare this situation with modern day Pennsylvania Station and the level of success could not be more clear.  On paper, the spaces seem similar: they are both train depots, the both contain a large number of stores, and Penn Station has the added advantage of being underneath a major arena, Madison Square Garden.  Yet few people linger in the current station, and fewer still would go out of their way to visit it.  Partly this is undoubtedly aesthetic: buried underground, Penn Station is a rat's maze of complex passageways and unpleasant spaces, the Long Island Railroad Concourse being a particularly egregious offender.  But aesthetics aside, the building hobbles itself.  It has far fewer entrances than it should, making entering more of a chore and a choice than it should be.  Each concourse, the Long Island Railroad's, Amtrak's, and New Jersey Transit's, are not only decorated in radically different styles, but are so disconnected as to make travel between them difficult even for the most veteran traveler.  The shops themselves almost all only serve commuters and travelers; there are few if any which would pull in a non-traveler like the Marketplace at Grand Central might.  Finally, and worst of all, there is almost no true public, free-form space: each and every concourse has it's own "waiting area" clearly marked only as such, with vigorous ticket checks to ensure they are only used by passengers.  Like Grand Central used to be, Pennsylvania Station is now solely a place one passes through, and almost never is a place where one would desire (or indeed, even be able to) stop and spend time.  Its deficiencies highlight the successes of Grand Central's renovation.

Of course, no space is perfect urban spaces in particular, and Grand Central is no exception.  Perhaps most tellingly, more than a decade after its reconstruction, its nature as an agora-space is still somewhat underutilized.  It is true that many non-suburban, non-Metro North riding individuals come to the station every day, perhaps buying supplies at the Market, viewing an exhibition, or simply to relax and watch the crowd.  But as a terminal, a transit destination, Grand Central has long been a victim of its own success: the surround area
 is almost 100% commercial, which severely limits the types and numbers of people who will pass through, particularly in off hours.  The Terminal and its businesses generally roll themselves up beginning around 10 in the evening, going as far as to cordon off the lower level's seats, killing its nature as a public space.  The sheer volume of passengers and of businesses in the area means isn't necessarily as bad as it might have been, the Terminal is still plenty busy on weekends, for example, but it is tremendously difficult for a space to become the central node and focal point of a community if that community itself does not exist.

There are plenty of other problematic aspects, to be sure.  The potential reliance on shopping, somewhat like a mall, is worrisome even if much of the goods exchanged are of a substantially mundane and everyday matter, as in the Market.  The success of the space depends upon its interaction of functions and spaces, and though it shows no sign of doing so, it would be disastrous if it were the Terminal were to devolve into a mall simply attached to a train station.  The stores, and indeed the very building itself, bring up unanswerable issues of economics and class.  For example, was the opulence of the place, a left over of the late-Gilded Age mindset, a misallocation of precious resources, or was, as City Beautiful proponents might have argued, the space a universal civic good?  In a more modern mindset, the Terminal is surrounded by some of the richest and most powerful corporate interests in the world, and its halls are traversed by some of the wealthiest individuals in the country.  The selection of stores, even in the supposedly practical Marketplace, bear this out in price.  Make no mistake, prices would always have been high for shops in Grand Central, for the storefronts are far too valuable due to traffic that passes by them to ever be cheap.  But even though one is under absolutely no obligation to buy or spend, unlike even in a mall, can one be comfortable surrounded by boutiques they cannot afford?  These issues come to a head in the form of the homeless: Grand Central, being a warm, inviting, public place often attracts many homeless individuals and their presence provides a stark contrast to the surrounding opulence and masses of middle-class and wealthy commuters.  To the credit of those who manage and police the Terminal, they have not succumb to bourgeois fears and taken draconian measures; by and large they have left it a public space open to all comers regardless of their "desirability."  Even so, the actions they have taken, such as closing the seating area in the evening to prevent sleeping, both have hurt the space's essentially public nature and highlight some of the starkest divides in present day American society.

And yet, perhaps precisely by how it deals with these problems, Grand Central in its modern incarnation can be considered nothing less than a booming success.  The building was always going to be busy, the sheer number of passengers determined that, but rather than simply mop the floor and slap on a fresh coat of paint, the renovation turned the station into a true landmark and a true public space.  It attracts people with no intent of catching a train.  It acts as an urban node, standing uniquely and strongly whilst connecting to other nodes.  It provides a free-form space for people to meet, interact, and exist.  It ties in deeply with the urban fabric of the area, becoming not only a major nexus in terms of transportation but a central space for a large section of one of the world's largest cities.  There are nasty undercurrents of class and economics which should not and can not be ignored, but neither should the fact that the station and its operators have created something seemingly impossible: a near-agora like space, a neighborhood center, in an area which has almost no residents to speak of.  One can only imagine what the Terminal might be like if only twenty or thirty percent of the surrounding square footage were converted to residences.  As it stands now, Grand Central Terminal is an exemplary urban space and, unfortunately, a relatively unique one.  As architects have for generations, so should urbanisits and planners  study the success of Grand Central.  Its current incarnation represents one of the highest achievements of the public urban form in America, and though it is not perfect, it sets a shining example to follow.

Note: All pictures save the blog opening or otherwise noted are my own.  I appologize for the poor quality, however at the time I only had my far-less than adequate camera phone.

Gentrification is the tragic removal of the poor and middle class from the city making it the preserve of the rich.  Or is it?  Later, it isn't that at all, rather it's that it is "inauthentic."  Part of a set, a pantomime of city life.  Which is all well and good for tourists, but do individuals really drop millions of dollars on relatively small apartments to be part of an act?  Or is there simply demand, and, fortunately or unfortunately, a class of individuals with enough to pay for it?

Part of me wants to apologize for the preceding paragraph.  It rambles, it is only semi-coherent, it makes little sense on its own.  But it is where Sorkin leaves me, particularly in the final third or so of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan.  Sorkin rambles and has a strong opinion about just about everything, but never stops to defend it, not here at least.  I assume he has justifications for his ideas, ones I find good, ones I find abysmal, somewhere; part of me really wishes he'd have shared them with us.  In any event, it leaves me with the same style, a bunch of semi-connected critiques that together, maybe, make a coherent whole.  Or maybe they don't.  I don't always demand intellectual rigor (and I'll be the first to admit that that in and of itself may be a lie), bu is it to much to ask that arguments be at least consistent and coherent in their realm?

There is a great irony here, that Sorkin desperately wants smaller cities while living in by far the largest in the country.  Perhaps it is simply to reduce demand and, therefore, threat to his small, rent-controlled apartment.  But it is hypocritical: Sorkin can choose to live in New York, and can keep his apartment for essentially forever at close to whatever the rate was when he leased.  Anyone else who desires to live there?  They are misguided; they should live in another, smaller city.  Never mind that the logic is flawed: New York is full of such vibrant people because they *want* to be there.  Not only in the city, but in the neighborhood of their choice.  Of course, if that means that there are more people than housing units, pushing prices up, well, I need stop there, as going any further would make me a "free market fundamentalist."

In continental Europe, where urbanity has been prized over suburban and country living, the center of the city is home to the single most expensive pieces of property.  It is the home of the rich; the poor are relegated to the suburbs instead.  As America and Britain end their love affair with the suburb, and individuals decide to move back into the city, why should the same not be true?

Unfortunately the ideal of the truly mixed city is often that, an ideal.  I am hard pressed to think of a time when there was true heterogeneity of class in urban spaces.  It seems a thought- a good one, I might add, that has had no practical success in the modern world.  If Mr. Sorkin has a good idea for ways to integrate the poor and middle class into the city, I'd love to hear them, and hear how they would operate in ways that do not interfere with the freedoms he so clearly treasures.  Do we want the government to say who lives where?  That is hardly a lack of centralized control and power.

Sorking at times seems to be simply a contrarian, and it's hard to know whether this is intentional or unconscious.  It reminds me of the stereotype of the "hipster"; a certain form of urbanity, like a formerly obscure band, was cool until it "sold out" and "went mainstream" (in practical terms: "became popular").  Sorkin goes out of his way to defend urban spaces that simply do not function, such as Washington Square Village and the Silver Towers.  Sure, they are different, they break up the city and are historically fascinating, but they are also unpleasant and were almost universally considered mistakes.  Why should we be forced to live with them?  Conversely, if we build spaces that are good, high quality housing that fits in with its location, must we deny it as "inauthentic"?  Isn't all physical structure as authentic as we make it out to be?

This is all somewhat darkly humorous when juxtaposed with Sorkin's idea of building many more cities.  These would of course be built rapidly, but somehow not out of central authority, or with a built-in "false" sense of reusability like the modern projects he derides?  And what if no one moves to these cities?  What if we build an urban paradise outside Hartford, CT, and people still want to live in New York and Boston?  Do we force them to leave?  Do we go the Donald Trump route and have people live in their "home" for only 1/3 the year allowing the city to triple its effective population?  It's bad to build a city all at one time in one fashion, except if done by Micheal Sorkin.

This stark sarcasm is hardly fair, on the one, but seems all I can do back.  The problems Sorkin describes are often real, but his haphazard approach gives yields no consistent answers or even consistent theory.  To a person living in poverty who had squatted in the East Village, Sorkin himself is a "gentrifier."  

The largest issue is the conflation of large scale economic and social issues with the small scale nature of possible urban solutions.  The shift to large, vertically integrate consumer stores (so-called national chains) is based around the cutting out of the warehouse middle-man.  This lowers prices for consumers, it also lower competition by raising barriers to entry and can hurt healthy local economies.  It is a nuanced problem, but its also one that is very difficult to attack on a local level.  The same is true of the income gap; to attempt to deal with it only on a local level is insanity as it is a pervasive American problem.  New York, or any other city alone, cannot fix it.  I very much doubt even an alliance of many major cities can fix it; the problem is of a federal and even international nature.

I shake my head.  I want to like this book, I really do.  For every thought I disagree with there is at least one which is fascinating and thought provoking.  At the same time it can't help but frustrate me with its lack of straight-forward thinking and internal consistency or logic.  Micheal Sorkin is no Jane Jacobs as writer, at least.  Maybe I need to approach him from a more level headed point of view, at a distance from the work.  Or maybe, conversely, I need to write a point by point rebuttal of some of the more onerous parts of the work.  But I am not going to accomplish any of that right now.

Somehow, this got really personally at the end.  If you've gotten this far, I think I owe you a cookie or something.  You've earned it.

Rent control is a very difficult subject to deal with.  Few subjects will get the ire of people as high, and it is no surprise why; we are dealing with peoples' homes, or at least peoples' potential homes.  Michael Sorkin spends a fair bit of time musing about rent control in the first section of Twenty Minutes in Manhattan without coming to any hard conclusions.  He certainly does a decent job defending the good parts of rent control; his idea of allowing the bards, in his terms, of the neighborhood to keep their residence and thus to preserve the neighborhood's continuity is compelling.  His almost 'liberal guilt,' the idea that we should keep prices low as reparations for modernist urban planning, is less so.  To his credit Sorkin does try to be balanced; he spends some time talking about the negative sides of rent control.  He bemoans the unfairness of the system, at least in as far as it doesn't discriminate between the person who is scraping by and those who are doing well but have simply lived there a long time.  But Sorkin never touches on the real problem of rent control, perhaps because he is in the privileged position of an existing, long-term resident: he never considers the perspective of someone who wishes to move into a neighborhood.

Rent control drives prices up.  This is true of limited price controls of any sort, and is one of the few simple, relatively universal laws of economics.  By limiting the available supply of an item, in this case, rental apartments, demand is spread over a lower number of units, and price must go up.  Real world studies comparing cities with rent control to those without, for instance New York and Philadelphia, almost universally find a massive increase in market housing cost; often up to or even greater than 100%.  It is of course difficult to compare the housing market across cities, but these studies try to compensate by looking at long term trends, acknowledging in advance that certain areas and certain cities cost more or less, adjusting for desirability to isolate the variable of rent control.  Rent control has another effect, as well: it creates a large black market of appeasement space.  If an individual has a deeply below market rate apartment and the means to rent another, higher quality one, they will often illegally sublet the older space and pocket the difference.  Not only do prices therefore continue to rise, but because this subletting is prima facie illegal, it is not subject to the usual legal scrutinies, such as making sure it is not driven by racial or other prejudicial ideas.



Source.  Note: I hate to link to the Cato institute as much as anyone; I find their work to be biased and unfortunate in many ways.  But the graph presented above is both clear and based on the hard data.  Even if I don't agree with most of their politics, in this case, there numerical analysis seems fair.

Michael Sorkin seems to have a deep misunderstanding of what a market fundamentally is.  It is essentially a way of distributing a limited good, in this case housing, amongst a large group of people; it does so by means of money, a substance transferable for other goods or services, and thus makes sure that there is a moral hazard, for the spending of money means there is less to spend on other goods.  It is not always a perfect way of distributing goods, but a lot of the time it seems the fairest we can come up with.  To distribute housing based on merit, for instance, would require giving some agency, more than likely a government one, the ability to decide quite literally who deserves what housing, a position that should rightly make anyone pause.  The art critic Dave Hickey, himself not at all on the right side of the political spectrum, has a quote he uses to defend his love for his home of Los Vegas*: "They think it is all about money, which, I always agree, is the worst way of discriminating among individuals, except for all the others."

*From A Home in the Neon in the book Air Guitar, p. 21.

This is not to say that rent control cannot be justified; it is rather to point out its vastly problematic nature.  To call those who do not support it free market fundamentalists, as Sorkin essentially does at one point, is to draw a line in the sand so far to one side of a political debate as to make it seem purposeless; all that can follow are ad hominem attacks.  To deal with the idea on his own terms, let us take up his idea of the perfect city, one where an individual has a huge degree of freedom to choose where they live but thence it is difficult if not impossible to remove them if they choose not to leave.  On paper, this seems a wonderful ideal.  And rent control, let it be said, deals with the second half of this equation beautifully; it allows an individual to essentially stay in their home in perpetuity at a price far less than perhaps many other would be willing and able to pay.  But in doing so, it breaks the first half of the equation: fewer and fewer people can in turn decide that the Village, for example, is a place they want to live; the rising price, due directly to the lack of available housing, prohibits it.  This is only made worse by those who decry the creation of new housing, such as Sorkin does, at least in part, about the new apartments on West Street.  New housing is one way of lowering the unit cost of apartment space and giving more people the option to live there, perhaps not in this latest building, but in the then vacated, older structures around it.  Again, there are reasons to be against such a development, one may truly feel it does not fit into the neighborhood, for instance (though in this particular case, I'm not sure I'd agree), but either way, if we overly limit production of new housing, prices will only continue to rise.

I've spent a long time ruminating about this, as does Sorkin, and like him, I don't have a great solution, either.  As he says, the system is in many ways broken, and in some ways, vital, and the correct response is hard to divine.  Perhaps, for example, rent control should be limited to some length of time, say ten or twenty years, enough to slow seismic-level shifts in the population of a neighborhood without allowing individuals to stay paying the same price they paid forty or fifty years prior.  Or, perhaps a long-term, but still more highly sloped graduated rise could start to bring rent controlled spaces towards the market rate.  This would too eventually lead to one no longer being able to afford their house, but would greatly slow the process.  The real solution, of course, is the most difficult, and the one that can least be handled on the local level: to reduce income inequality.  Neighborhood redevelopment is now often ridiculed as "gentrification" even when in the minds of most it makes a region more pleasant.  It's not hard to see why; this increase of pleasantness brings a concurrent increase of prices.  If we could all afford something similar, this would be less of a concern, but if we can't, well, they system is then not working well, and it should be repaired.  

On the one hand, rent control solves the problem of keeping people in their home.  On the other, it privileges those who rented their apartment at one time to a huge degree from those who would rent now.  This is not an easy trade off, and one which should not be taken lightly.

One last thought is that city's should not be beholden of a sort of historic conservatism: that because a neighborhood is made up of x group of people and y structures, it should always stay that way.  Cities are constantly changing, and thrive on change; a city which allows no neighborhood to ever change is a dead one, a theme park at best or a hollow shell at the worst (I'll leave it to the reader to decide how fine a distinction that may be).  This needs to be balanced; to destroy Penn Station for Madison Square Garden is a travesty.  To rip down five old-law tenements in a neighborhood of hundreds of them to erect something new may not be.  And, if that process happens again and again, the calculus may change, to preserve a certain amount of those left.  Cities change; it is a fact we need to appreciate.

Cities are complex organisms, and are subject to the laws of unintended consequences like almost no other entity.  Rent control is one such system with a host of unintended consequences.  I wonder how other ideas, such as Sorkin's greenways, would play out.  I must admit, I like the idea of, at least in certain, dense areas, extending sidewalks, bringing them into the public domain and giving them public ownership; it could greatly enhance a city.  On the other hand, especially if brought to areas that currently don't have the level of pedestrian traffic needed, it could be in essence reinventing the superblock- creating a vast amount of lonely, dangerous, almost empty and unpleasant land.  This is not to say we should not try to fix the city for the future, but to recognize that our actions will have far flung consequences, and to realize that not every solution can work for every neighborhood.  Such is the nature of urban complexity.

There is a famous H.L. Mencken quote that goes: "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."  It seems that we all fall prey, at least from time to time, to certain incorrect ideas which sound so Platonically perfect, so rational and simple, that we believe they must be true.  Occam's razor, the philosophical tool that, to simplify, states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, usually guides us well, but when it fails, it can fail spectacularly.  This is especially true of complex systems, systems which can not always be reduced to a number of simple rules.  Our biases, our inability to measure, our limited hypotheses; all can contribute to fundamentally incorrect ideas that seem eminently reasonable.  The early economists were a prime example of this; along with an almost untold number of brilliant insights were poor ideas such as David Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages.  It was beautifully simple: as population rose, wages would lower thanks to competition.  Lower wages would lead to starvation and thus lower childbirth, eventually decreasing job competition and raising wages.  The higher wage earners would thus have larger families, and this grim cycle would continue ad infinitum.  While seeming reasonable, in reality, the economy turns out not to be a zero sum game, nor were the fields of jobs or food productions: they had the ability to grow with demand, nullifying the "Iron Law" and introducing dynamics all their own.  This same type of pristine logic can b e found in certain strains of libertarianism or certain branches of anarchism (depending on ones political leanings); ideas which seem eminently reasonable yet can crumble under the weight of different, unforseen types of evidence.

The first century or so of true urban studies, the approximately 100 years before the work of Jane Jacobs, seemed to follow this pattern to a T.  Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, cities grew to sizes unseen since the fall of the Roman Empire, and continued to grow at a rate that alarmed many.  At the same time, there was a new generation of middle and upper class, often university trained individuals with bout the ability and desire to study new things in concrete manners.  It was in this was that modern urban studies, the study of the city as an entity unto itself, was born.  Unfortunately, this fledgling fields parents were almost universally reactionary and anti-urban, arguing that the city was morally debased and the cause of physical disease.  Instead, they preferred an idealized form of countryside life, a type of life that most certainly had never existed historically.  Make no mistake, there were valid complaints: housing stock for the poor was often despicable, and sanitation, not even invented until the second half of the 19th Century, took yet longer to implement in the dense cities of the time.  Still, for every valid complaint came multiple arguments based around an a priori dislike of the city, extreme classism, social Darwinism, and a whole host of other poorly conceived yet often socially accepted ideas.

The second and third generations of urban planners, far more than those who had come before, were able to effect their ideas.  As Ernest Burgess had predicted, the city's tenement districts which usually surrounded the Central Business District were only growing, and worse, the outer residential areas were developing their own retail and even commercial sectors, breaking the heretofore vice-like grip Downtown had had on commercial activity.  Soon would come the Great Depression and with it massive federal aid programs, followed soon after by the postwar housing crunch and an attendant moral pressure to "cleanse" the newly coined "inner city."  Urban theory, ideas based mainly on the prejudices and misconceptions of an earlier time, would get a chance to flex its muscle on a massive scale in the renewal and building projects that followed.  Its results, for the most part, were disastrous, only accelerating the very trends they were designed to stop.  It was this moment, the failure of an almost dogmatic system of urban thinking, upon which Jane Jacobs presented a far more nuanced and complete picture of urbanity, and of what the goals and tools of planners should or could be.

What does all this have to do with Robert Moses?  Surprisingly little.  For all his building prowess, Moses never had much interest urban studies or even urban planning in its more holistic sense.  Though Yale educated, curiosity about complex systems, at least those not related to engineering, were not in Moses's personality.  Rather, he tended to come to defensible, rational decisions about what was to be done, and then proceeded to fight dogmatically to achieve them (later in his career, the fighting was generally unnecessary).  Moses got his start trying to introduced a merit-based civil service in Tammany Hall's cronyism-run New York, and though his higher moral ideals would fade, his self-righteous battle sense would not.

To make no pretense otherwise, the desire to rehabilitate Robert Moses disturbs me.  It is not nesecarilly that what he accomplished was destructive; while undoubtedly much of it was, much of it was also necessary and beneficial.  Rather, it was Moses methods, his ruthless acquisition and abuse of power that made him a monster.  My initial inclination is to call him a petty tyrant, but the word petty is far too small; by the end of his life he had achieved tyrannical rule through and through.  Moses had plans, and had *only* his plans; outside views or suggestions, no matter their merit, were not welcome.  If you disagreed, as did those who desired to build a tunnel rather than his beloved Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, he was ruthlessly vindictive: he ordered New York's famous aquarium destroyed and almost succeeded in knocking down Castle Clinton, all out of sheer spite.  To celebrate Moses accomplishments without acknowledging his ethical and moral failings, or how much his methods were an affront to any sort of democratic governance, would be akin to a one sided praise of Stalin's Five Year Plans.  While they did build the Soviet Union up from a near feudal, peasant society in a major, Western, Industrial power in a few short years, the human and moral cost was enormous.  No direct deaths are attributable to Robert Moses, of course, but in terms of political machinations this comparison is not as hyperbolic as it may sound.

The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.  Such was clearly the case for early urbanists*, and while it was hardly always the case for Robert Moses, particularly in the second half of his career, it was sometimes true of him as well.  To a large degree this was due to a simple lack of experience and understanding (whether this lack was defensible or not is a question for another time).  Where knowledge was strong and the goals clear, such as was the case at Jones Beach, the results were superb.  Other plans were far less successful.

*And we hope, but alas, cannot prove, is not the case for us today.

Take parkways, for example.  On paper, they seemed a perfect civic improvement: not only could massive new transportation corridors be provided, but at the same time, in the same project, long ribbon parks would be built at the same time, not only beautifying the roadway but providing recreation space for the surrounding communities (while the earliest parkways were purely recreational in nature, they quickly migrated into transportation corridors).  It seemed a win-win.  What was missed, though, was that high-speed auto traffic and parkland do not readily mix.  Cars are loud, and the roadway produced a wall, not only separating communities on either side, but making the parks themselves often quite unpleasant.  Take, for example, the West Side Improvement, the massive extension of the Henry Hudson Parkway from the north end of Manhattan south to 59th street and its accompanying park.  While the park was a huge step up from what was there, and the roadway still is a vital transportation corridor, the parkway itself divides the park and separates the city from its waterfront.  

The same could be said for any number of Moses projects.  Lincoln Center is a single use facility, massively up to date and modern for the time, but concentrating any potential benefits to a tiny area rather than distributing them around the city.  Even Moses massive number of so called "vest-pocket" parks, though a welcome addition, are problematic: especially post-World War II, many tend to be concrete slabs with a handful of trees, with no grass or soft material; hardly the ideal park.

Much of this, even the emphasis on automotive transport first, could be defended as simply untested experimentation that seemed well, at least from an urban planning point of view.  Whether a Jane Jacobs figure could or should have come earlier is a matter for another time.  But Bob Moses cannot be defended entirely in the same vein.  His projects were about consolidating power and prestige.  He constantly reject adding provisions for mass transit on his highways, and he never made an attempt in his career to listen to differing opinions on how, for example, parks should be built.  After all, he was the "master builder."  While New York needed many of his projects, Robert Moses the man is rightfully reviled to this day.

And, unfortunately, the specter of Moses is with us to this day, albeit in reverse.  No project of size can go by without massive community protest, no matter the design or purpose.  In many ways, these are the psychological and political scars of Moses, to prevent any group or individual from steam rolling projects.  And while that is itself a rational and good idea, it can lead to a conservative inertia to build nothing, no matter how necessary, as someone somewhere has a complaint, justified or not.  Even construction of the Second Avenue Subway, a massively necessary project, was opposed for the temporary burden it would pose to businesses along the route.  While a real concern, such cannot be allowed to stand in the way of public good (although every remedial action reasonable and possible should be taken).  While there are disagreements on what the level of project building should be, the answer clearly cannot be to build nothing, ever, or else the city, and indeed any city, would cease to be, for it is the constant change and adapting to needs that make a city the vibrant, powerful institution it is.

Architecture is a funny thing.  It is considered with many to be a fine art, much like painting or sculpting, yet unlike those fields, the product of an architect must be usable.  This is not at all to disparage architecture or, conversely, any other art-form, but whereas most arts can be critiqued in any number of ways, most of them relatively equal in value, there are certain standards architecture must be held up to.  For instance, a building must not fall down.  Its success, or failure, as the space it was meant to be, both by those using it presently and by potential other users, have to be considered.  Most traditional forms of art are, at the end of the day, essentially an abstract concept, a product not necessarily designed to be used but to be appreciated in an entirely different manner.  It is for this reason that the traditional ways of critiquing fine art can be so problematic when applied to something as concrete as a building, leading not only to wildly differing conclusions, but, sometimes, buildings who designs are directly at odds with the people using them.  This is essentially Pollan's critique of Modern Architecture magazine, why he can criticize it for applying "literary" thinking to structures rooted in everyday use.

Architecture was not always considered as such.  Indeed, particularly in America, architecture as not only a fine art but as a profession separate from civil engineering, landscaping, and a whole host of other fields did not arise until the later half of the 19th Century.  A generation or so of professionals, people like Charles McKim, Stanford White, Louis Sullivan, and many others, sought recognition and appreciation beyond that of a sewer designer or a creator of landscapes.  This generally took two separate, yet related forms.  First was the creation of professional accreditation, pushed for by the American Architects Association (itself only founded in the early 1850s).  This was not only to ensure the quality of structures being built, it created a full-fleged profession that was separate and distinct from engineering.  And while most states did implement some such accreditation program by the turn of the 20th Century, some others, notably New York, did not follow until the 1920's.  Secondly, there was the appeal to the classical art institutions of the world to be taken seriously as a form of expression.  In some ways this was easier in coming; in some contexts architecture, at least that of a particular and monumental kind, was considered directly related to the classical arts.  At the same time, it was a leap of faith to lump the designer of the everyday structure, the everyday house builder, with a Palladio or an Inigo Jones, even if what they were doing was not entirely that different.

Much of the success of this movement came to a culmination as the City Beautiful and Beaux Arts movements where, for the first time, architecture as a profession was widely elevated as an art form.  And while the style died, for the most part, with the architects who brought it to the fore, the groundwork of education and institutions paved the way for the professional architect.  This is most noticeable in the history of housing: prior to the 1920's, it was rare for any house to be designed by an architect per se (with the exception of the occasional wealthy mansion or eclectic concern), it was usually the builder who acted as an all in one source of design and construction.  With the rise of the professional architect came the separation of builder and designer.  And, while most modern architects do continue the fine tradition of the civil engineer, some employ separate engineers to take care of work so trivial as meeting code or, more fundamentally, keeping the building standing.  Partly this can be attributed to advances in building construction, which has allowed almost any design, even those as structurally outlandish as a Frank Gehry, to be designed and built.  For these few, architecture has come fully around and separated from engineering, for in essence these individuals are sculptors of space, leaving the physics to another profession.

It is in the mindset that I find Pollan's decision to hire an architect at all to be slightly puzzling.  It is clear he has a good relationship with Charlie, and wants professional insight into what he is building.  On the other hand, he wants it to be his, down to the point of self construction, and thus to hire a professional, a thought that 100 years ago would've been odd for the house proper, to design a space such as this seems a tad odd.  None of which is to denigrate the work Charlie and his staff created; in many ways, especially his focus on the site and on materials, his office is closer to the builders of old.  Yet one has to wonder how comfortable Mr. Pollan can be calling the space his own when it has the mark of so many others on it.  In certain ways, this is always true; no piece of literature, for example, stands without context, and no scientific discovery exists without standing on the shoulders of others.  At the same time it is an odd turn for someone looking for something so intimate and personal.

1.  I have a map of the village from well before it could even be called a village, from the year 1875.  It denotes every standing structure and, taking up far more of the page, the owners of the vast tracts of property.  The main streets are clearly visible here, but that is to be expected: one is the famous Boston Post Road, the other a significant path that dates from at least the 1830's.  The bulk of the map is empty white space, broken not only by the man-made lines of property, but by the beautifully, handwritten name of that parcel's owner, sized proportionally to make it fit into the space.  It makes the land seem a far more crowded, far more of a human place than this nearly empty place must have been at the time.

Not including the hut of the train station, there are only three buildings on this map, spaced fairly neatly from one another.  Each is surrounded by a small lot, up to around a half acre, amongst the hundreds of acres of forest or farmlands, anticipating the town to come.  

The house is one of them.  It is eight years before the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, and eleven years after the close of the Civil War.

2.  If there was one thing that made this village, as well as all the villages surrounding it, possible, it was the train.  Between 1850 and 1920, no fewer than three mainline rail lines crisscrossed the town, all three of which were four tracks or wider by 1920.

In the middle 1880's, at the main train station for the village, a large, stone railway station was constructed far larger and with more grandeur than was necessary.  In it was a Post Office for what had to have been fewer than 600 residents.  There was another post office, in another village within the same town, only one mile away.

A major streetcar line ran between the cities to the East and West, running through the town.  The town itself had a small, rickety, single track and single car trolley line carrying people to and from the train station and between the various villages; villages not even a mile from each other.  The old fashioned trolley was run by a cantankerous, grizzled operator, a man seeming to be so old that he may have come from the very ground from which the town was wrought.  Supposedly, he was a spreader of gossip and rumor,  always ran well off his schedule, and his rudeness to his regulars was only outsized by his rudeness towards strangers.

The line and its operator were the inspiration for a major syndicated newspaper strip.  The humor came from the collision of the worlds of the city and the country.

3.  The Town is actually much older than many assume.  At one point, under a colonial charter, it controlled land all the way from the southern tip of today's Bronx to miles north of its present borders.  The town's namesake was an English physician and farmer.  One wonders how much this man, whose farmhouse is still standing (rebuilt out of stone during the Revolution, in the 1770's), actually knew of the terrain that belonged to the organization he had formed.  The farmhouse stayed in the family for well over 150 years.  A mansion constructed later, occupied by another wing of the growing family, still stands in a North Bronx Park.  It is now a museum.

4.  Settlements of people within its borders and the town itself had seemingly little relation; the town, in practical terms, did very little.  Over the course of more than a hundred years, there were various attempts to build civic structures.  There were large fights over where to place them, and the compromise usually reached, to build on a road midway between the various groups of people, and therefore close to no one, ensured their failure.  Slowly, most of the settlements broke away to form their own governments.  Still, to this day, one sees cemeteries, squares, roads, and buildings named after the town far outside it’s present confines.

5.  The man, for at the time the house was built it must have been a man, had to have had greatly contradictory emotions about his castle in the country.  On the one hand, the house and it's property were a picturesque masterpiece, suitable for a postcard, though independent companies would not be allowed to print their own post cards for almost another 25 years.  It must have seemed a place of heaven, a small recreation of eden to this almost certainly Christian, more than likely Protestant, man.  And, more than anything, it was far from the corrupting influences of the city, the dirt and the crowding, and in particular, the ethnic, blasphemous, mongrel poor.

On the other hand, the commute to his place of business must have been a great travail.  The walk to the train station, less than a quarter of a mile, was simply a continuation of eden along a handful of tree line streets.  The wait for the massive steam beast was spent pleasantly in the grandeur of the stone train station.  But steam power was not magic, it was dirty and slow, and the numerous stops along the southward trip must've taken time.  Worse, this line ended, abruptly, at the wall that was the Harlem River.  From here it was either a long ferry ride or crowding shoulder to shoulder with people of all classes and backgrounds on the Third Avenue Elevated to reach Downtown.  The level of construction of the house, the price of the land, and the price of the commute meant this man had to have been one of means, and had to have had a place of business in the heart of the city.  

The house was probably designed with an eye to being a summer cottage; an escape from the city in the hot months to be complemented by a townhouse the rest of the year.  It was meant to be a long-term escape, not a daily one.  But by the time construction was complete, there was seemingly no reason not to live there year round.  After all, what was good as a country villa would be only better if experienced year round.

It was a large price to pay.  Whatever he might have felt if he could have been free of the burden of expectations of his cultural milieu, he certainly must have outwardly appreciated the space.  And, on weekends in the Summer, surrounded by unnaturally natural, pastoral beauty that was far greater than that of any natural pasture, it must have all been worth it.  In many ways, it still is.  But it was a large price to pay.

6.  Growing up, the house was simply home.  I had no knowledge of its history, beyond the fact that it was old.  I have many memories of playing in the yards, and have such intimate knowledge of the building I could almost easily walk around it blindfolded.  Normally I only played in the yards alone.  I was a shy kid, I had no siblings, and there was no one else around.  My imagination was more than up for the task.

The shyness continued into school.  The town was small enough that we had no busses; my parents and/or a babysitter dropped and picked me up from school till I was deemed old enough to walk it on my own.  I have almost no memories from those early walks to school, though I have many from later.  The environment was so unchanging, why should I have a distinct memory of those particular walks?

I was shy in school and had few friends.  And, once I did have friends, getting together was generally hard.  I could walk to one friend's house, the others I needed rides to.  On the one hand, the magic of spending hours at someone else's house, or vice versa, born out of the necessity of minimizing the car trips and thus pressure on our parents, was lovely.  Of course, it would be hard to compare with actually being able to get together on our own at the same age.

We knew all our neighbors immediately surrounding our house, at least on our own street.  They were nice enough, but we were never close.  Except for my mother, no one in our family knew anyone in the town beyond, at least as neighbors.  It was a bit of a shock later in life to learn that others in the town had a wider circle of neighborly feelings;  it was an alien concept to us and our small circle.

Until I could drive, the village was less a community and more a series of disconnected spaces.  Learning to drive suddenly connected those spaces, and all of the sudden make the town seem much more real.  It also, with time, allowed me to discover a community of people, in various circles, around me.  As I child, I was essentially confined to my small islands.

It is hard to separate if that is a function of space or of my own nature as a kid.  But I still remember those hours in the yard.

7.  By the early 1930's, the village was complete.  Every piece of land had been filled, every yard landscaped, every church and school built.  Even a new shopping center had been built at the corner of the Boston Post Road and village's main street, one that was different than almost any other that had come before.  It did not come to the edge of the street, but was set back, allowing two narrow rows of cars to park at an angle.  Though it was small, it must've been a great convenience, for the stores it contained could not only serve those who lived within walking distance, but all those in the town and nearby who owned a car.  It would be an example for an almost uncountable number of other such centers all across America.

Further changes would come, new buildings built, old ones restored, but the architectural center of gravity of the town had been set.
    
8.  By the mid 1960's, the village looked much the same as it had done fifty years earlier.  Beautiful, well maintained houses still had well manicured, picturesque yards.  The shopping center still hummed, mainly powered by local businesses.  Some new buildings had been constructed, but the lack of land meant little dramatic could change.  

One example was a seemingly incongruous 1960's-era concrete Catholic church, built to serve the second and third generations of former immigrant families who could now afford a middle class existence.  The town was no longer an upper class enclave, but was now more mixed, blue and white collar workers living very close to one another.

Certain other things had changed.  The village's trolley was long gone, not even a memory for almost all the town's residents.  The same was true for the line between two cities, long since replaced by a county-operated bus line.  It was ridden by a few, but most owned a car, and it generally shuttled passengers between the two cities.

Of the three train lines, only one still carried passengers.  The one closest to the house had shut down first, leading as it did to seemingly nowhere.  It was followed soon after by the second, a bankruptcy that had hit the company hard.  A judge, believing there to be ample rail transit for the area, allowed the line to be scrapped to pay creditors.  Even though the state legislator voted to save it, the budget conscious governor vetoed the action.  And perhaps it seemed the right idea: the remaining railroad was still going strong, carrying hundreds of thousands of commuters into the city everyday.  In addition, parkways now meant new shopping centers were close at hand by automobile, alleviating the need for residents to take the train to shop.  The loss of a few noisy rail lines hardly seemed reason to panic.

9.  By the early 1980's, the village looked much the same as it had done fifty years earlier.  Beautiful, well maintained houses still had well manicured, picturesque yards.  The shopping center still hummed, mainly powered by local businesses.  In the resident's minds, however, there was anxiety.

The train line was in trouble.  Some former commuters had found jobs in new office parks outside of the traditional city.  But more, the railway was failing as the passenger rail companies of the United States collapsed amidst the pressures of the airplane and the car.  In order to ensure it's survival, the line would be taken over by the state, ensuring the line of travel would still exists for the hundreds of thousands who still used it.

The bus still ran.  It wasn't ridden by anyone in the village per se, rather is shuttled the far poorer residents between the two cities, stopping only occasionally to drop off or pick up a nanny or a worker for the corner stores.

The neighborhood was more mixed than ever.  It had the rich, the middle class, the working class, even a handful on the brink of poverty.  Everyone claimed they viewed this as a positive.  But many, in the back of their minds, harbored doubts.  For now, the town was safe.  But all those poor people in the neighboring cities... and all the sudden the Bronx seemed so close... Brand new homes sparkled miles and miles farther North, with the promise of jobs in office plazas close by.  Still, no one was sure that was answer; the town was still pretty, the people still pleasant.

Property values hit their lowest values since the village had been built.  There was fear in the air.

10.  By the year 2000, the village looked much the same as it had done seventy years earlier.  Beautiful, well maintained houses still had well manicured, picturesque yards.  The shopping center still hummed, and still contained local businesses, but now half the storefronts were national chains, chains which had forced many of the earlier stores, operated by owners close to retirement in any case, to close.
    
The train line carried more people than ever.  Whereas some people still drove to a job, the majority flocked to the convenience of a one seat ride into Manhattan.  Grumbles about the cost didn't seem to affect ridership; indeed, the main complaints were trains running a few minutes early or late, or that did not run frequently enough into the night and on the weekends.

The bus still ran.  It wasn't ridden by anyone in the village per se, rather is shuttled the far poorer residents between the two cities, stopping only occasionally to drop off or pick up a nanny or a worker for the corner stores.

Property values had increased by approximately ten fold since the 1980's  Poorer families were forced out.  In their place came young families.  Well off families.  And nothing but families.  The school district ballooned well beyond what it had contained in the years of the baby boom, in a town whose population had barely changed.  Property taxes shot up as the district rushed to build new buildings to hold the new students.  Even the voting power of the elderly, past enough to stop major expansion of the school district, could not overpower the new influx.

The train station itself had been meticulously restored, and a green sign with gold lettering, the kind one would expect from a country club, appeared out front.  The sign had a message beyond the name of the town- it spoke to the economic class of the people who lived there.  It would later be used as a set for a major motion picture about the relationship problems of the upper middle class, starring Will Smith.

The anxiety of the 1980's was gone.  As was the mix of residents.  Yet the village looked much the same.

[Image is my own]

Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule...[Residents] regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is, physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather, have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell." -Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

A truly functional city, the type of city one imagines when one says the very word, is a deeply complicated system. It is an intricate balance of people, places, and uses. Too much or too little of any one type of structure in one place, be it housing or commerce or industry or any other myriad of functions, and the system is damaged, sometimes even to the point of destruction. And even that is not enough to consider, for not all “uses” can be neatly categorized, nor do like uses necessarily have the same needs or create the same effects on their surroundings. A city is not necessarily fragile, though at times it certainly can seem so, but rather it is almost (or, if Ms. Jacobs is to be believed, almost truly) impossible to create full-fledged urbanity ex nihilo.

In one way of thinking, we are relatively lucky: rarely is it the case that one has the opportunity, or the need, to build a fully functional city from scratch. There is almost always some built environment from which to start, and much of what Jacobs is arguing against is a school of urban planning that advocates ripping cities down in order to rebuild them. But of course, there must be exceptions to this rule. Sometimes, for example, new forms of transportation or new land acquisitions mean that formerly non-urban spaces can be developed into cities. Sometimes, one may agree with the planners that Jacobs was arguing against, and much like James Kunstler, believe that an area functions so poorly that it must be demolished if one desires to create urbanity. And, although it is a bit of a truism, all cities must begin some place at some time, with certain people taking certain specific actions. It is in these scenarios that the difficulties of planning and building a functional urban neighborhood come to the fore.

A prime example of the pitfalls and successes of such an endeavour is Batter Park City. Located in lower Manhattan mere blocks from some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, Battery Park City literally did not exist prior to the 1970's. At that time, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, for reasons too complex to delve into here, decided to level a number of blocks west of Wall St. and south of City Hall in order to create a massive complex of buildings, the World Trade Center. This was no simple undertaking: even forgetting the existing structures on the site (including the Singer Building, the tallest building ever to be purposefully demolished), the land on which they desired to build was fill; a (somewhat) deliberate accretion of muddy soil which had widened to coast of Manhattan Island. This type of land was far too wet and unstable to build structures on the scale desired, so a waterproof foundation extending all the way down to solid bedrock had to be constructed, displacing millions of cubic feet of land.

This posed a problem: what is one to do with millions of tons of earth? The Port Authority's solution was not only ingenious, but in many ways was a bold and hubristic as the rest of their plan: they would build a sea wall out into the Hudson River and use the fill to literally create new land. Not only did this solve the landfill disposal problem, it gave the Authority new land it could lease and/or sell to help repay the massive construction costs of the project. In terms of city planning, this was a sort of perfect storm: not only was there to be literally new land in the heart of a major city, but the owners, being a government agency and thus not driven by profit motive alone, had not only complete control of the territory but the desire, if at times misguided, to improve the city upon which they were working. A grand experiment, one that would test the combined knowledge of its planners and of the nature of urban planning in general, was at hand.

Before proceeding further, it would probably be well to stop and identify some of the factors which contribute to a successful urban environment. Though there are many differing viewpoints on what that entails, any conception, this one included, should be heavily based on the work of Jane Jacobs. First, an urban environment must have multiple uses. An area solely composed of houses, of offices, of entertainment or cultural institutions, or any other imaginable single use will be, by its very nature, limited: people will only be on the street at certain times when that particular function is in use. The rest of the day, a single use area will be empty, much like the empty ghost town of a central business district after working hours. In the same vein, a city's streetscape is of immense importance. Not only does it provide the primary public space for urban denizens, but it helps create the multitude of interactions which give city life its special, vibrant qualities. The more stores, activities, and spaces a street offers, the number of these possible interactions is quickly multiplied, and the number of possible nexuses for community formation is increased. As well, the presence of shopkeepers, pedestrians, workers, and the like increases the number of eyes on the street, increasing safety and potentially aiding community. To this end, the architecture of these public spaces must exist in significant part on a human scale, and must be inviting, pleasant, and take into account human needs. Finally, but of no less importance, the best cityscape must ensure a variety of uses and of users, for these varied interactions further multiply the vibrancy of the city. In particular, this means having different types of spaces at different price points, for individuals and businesses alike have neither the same means nor the same requirements for existence.

At a first glance, Battery Park City, at least on paper, seems like it has gotten a great deal right. While always primarily designed as a residential district, it has commerce as well, not only from the massive former World Trade Center nearby but its own office complex, the World Financial Center. Streets were not arranged in superblocks or designed for the automobile, rather they are small and continue the grid of Manhattan. Taking advantage of its newly created waterfront, Battery Park City has a massive amount of parkland; not only beautiful in its own right, but creating pedestrian passages which theoretically should put the experience of the human visitor first. In theory, this combination of residences, offices, and parkland should create all day pedestrian traffic, enough to support shops and a streetlife comparable to anywhere in the city. Finally, each building was given to a different architect, both in order to avoid visual monotony and as another attempt to recreate the complexity and nuance of a functional city from scratch. On paper, the design seems ideal.

The reality of the development is far more murky. One of the first impressions of any visitor is that, though it is ostensibly an extension of the existing city, Battery Park City is cut off from its environs by the six-lane, divided highway that is West Street. A major link connecting the West Side to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, there is no time of day or night that this street is not laden with traffic. In the past ten or so years, engineering and design projects have tried to soften the impact of West Street by utilizing things like trees, plants, and bike paths, to separate the mass of traffic from potential pedestrians. Though a noble effort, one which may bear fruit in the near future, at the moment this is no Hausmann-style, Parisian boulevard full of people and shops, it is a highway fenced in by very tall buildings. While it is possible to cross West Street at ground level, traffic is such that it can take eternity to get a much needed walk signal, forcing pedestrians to wait next to traffic. This problem is so strong that much of the pedestrian traffic is encouraged to use bridges to get across, a kludge of a solution which, while somewhat effective, only increases the amount of effort it takes to travel to or from Battery Park City, further adding to the sense of disconnection the neighborhood has with the rest of the city.





Above: A view of West St., a pedestrian bridge over West St.  Click for larger views.

This is not to say that some level of separation is the worst thing possible for a neighborhood. On a certain level, it provides a level of exclusivity, boundary, and privacy that some people highly value. This was especially true when one considers the previous World Trade Center site which lay across the street, a development which in a multitude ways was the antithesis of all the planning ideas discussed above. However even today, with the World Trade Center site being redesigned, and through streets being restored wherever possible, a proposal to put West Street underground through Battery Park City was strongly opposed by a number of residents, effectively killing the proposal. The reason most usually given for the opposition was the amount of disruption that would be caused during the three or four years of road construction. If that reason is accurate, it seems to embody incredibly poor long-term thinking, as over decades the residential development of Battery Park City and the commercial development of the financial mecca to the West could join to create a deeply functional urban environment.

Once one has crossed West Street and is in Battery Park City proper, the parkland and waterfront seems to enact an almost intractable pull. T-shaped streets, argued so strongly for by James Kunstler, are anchored by pieces of public art, acting as a visual focal point and drawing a walker towards the water. Lovingly designed and sumptuously built, the park extends all the way from the Battery north, along the Hudson, to Chambers Street, at the end of the created land. Throughout it echoes some of the very best of park design: it widens and contracts, going through differently designed regions, not only always keeping the viewer interested but providing various types of parkland suited for different uses, all available within a short walk. A great example of this is the northern end of the park: a large, open green meadow extends almost all the way from the building line to the water, providing an undefined space for almost any vernacular activity from picnicking to frisbee. At the same time, along the inner side of this open space, a more structured environment exists, providing sequestered, quiet seating, playground areas, and spaces for other more specifically defined activities. The result of all this, combined with the spectacular setting with its views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, is a park which is well trafficked all year long, from the depths of winter to the height of summer, and has probably been the greatest design success of the entire project.





Above: A view of the north end of the park, A T-Shaped Street.  Click for larger views.

At the same time, all this life and activity cannot cover for the simple fact that Battery Park City has very little streetlife to speak of. This is fundamentally attributable to one thing: the paucity of street level retail locations. As such, the main thoroughfares, though well landscaped, shaded, and decorated with street furniture, are nearly barren of pedestrian life. Why would one care to walk down a street that provides little of interest for them to see, do, or experience? Indeed, for great expanses, the only street level businesses that one comes across are underground parking garages, hardly a type of business that fosters urban interaction. The only places one comes across groups of people, outside the parkland, are in front of the widely dispersed delis and other small retail establishments. This is problematic from more than an urban design viewpoint; the lack of shops means that there is often a relatively significant walk for residents looking for basic amenities, particularly if a stop at more than one store is in order. Indeed, there is only a one block section of traditional urban stores in the entire development. In addition, the relatively high rent and paucity of shop locations means there can be no street-level economy save for the absolute necessities: walking, one finds no bookstores, no coffee shops, few restaurants, and only a handful of deli/convenience stores, a single grocery store, and a handful of pharmacies and banks. It is almost as if, confronted with a fear of empty shopfronts, the designers decided it would be better to limit commercial space and rely on the park to generate pedestrian traffic and urbanity. Battery Park City is built to a density which could support all nature of businesses large and small, and yet one is almost always nearly alone walking along its primary streets.







Above: Two views of North End Avenue, the major street of Battery Park City showing a lack of street life.  Notice the building under construction, hopefully to include more street level retail.; Bottom: the only true block of urban shops in the development.  Click for larger views.

Theoretically, the retail trades and streetlife should be helped by the presence of the World Financial Center, which provides legions of employees at the very same time of day, the working hours, that a residential area is most quiet. Designed by famous architect César Pelli, the World Financial Center is a sculptural masterpiece. The primary design of its three towers, each with a different top, was to act as a set of foothills to the massive towers behind them. The changes of texture and material on the sides of the building not only made the buildings more visually interesting, but was a strong counterpoint to the steel and glass of the former World Trade Center. Unfortunately, all this sculptural beauty was steeped in previous era of urban design where appearance from a distance was considered to an almost unhealthy degree, with little or no thought of the interactions of the buildings with the street and pedestrians.

The World Financial Center is essentially an enclosed, internalized center that seems to actively encourage office workers to stay inside and pedestrians to stay out. Each tower is connected by an above ground walkway, and one of the numerous bridges leading over West Street deposits people directly in the lobby of the complex, obviating the need for an office worker to ever set foot on the streets of Battery Park City itself. The ground level entrances continue this theme: on West Street, the buildings are set back from the street by purely decorative, pedestrian-unfriendly green space, and the side facing the residential neighborhood presents nothing but the occasional gold-plated, seemingly impervious entryway. Worse still, the interior of the World Financial Center contains what is, for all intents and purposes, a mall, full of very expensive stores which are only open during the hours that workers would be in the buildings, and residents of the neighborhood would be elsewhere. Even the famous Wintergarden, itself a wonderful interior space, is essentially a recreation of the outside park inside, meaning no one need ever actually venture out of the complex. Though a handful of stores have tried to face the park, trying to recreate a streetscape on the outside, it is clear that these entrances are disused. The Wintergarden itself appears as a glass wall with no easily visible entryway, and if one was not already aware that the interior is meant to be public space, the thought to enter would never come to mind.









Above: A view of the Wintergarden and plaza, An overhead bridge connecting the World Financial Center buildings, A street level entrance to the World Financial Center, A street level view of the World Financial Center from South End Avenue.  Click for larger views.

Even the park land around the buildings is perhaps the worst of the entire development: cold and sterile, and built out of maintenance-free stone, it is full of uncomfortable, empty benches and wide expanses of paved territory, more resembling the 'brick graveyard' of Boston's Government Center than the rest of one of New York's most intriguing parks. Though the World Financial Center should be a boon to the urban plant of Battery Park City, adding more people at different times of the day, from the street it appears as little more than another set of blank, impenetrable buildings to be ignored.



Above: The empty plaza and attempted park-side storefronts of the World Financial Center. Click for a larger view.

On the topic of architecture, one of the more under-appreciated sections of Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities was the emphasis on the importance of the different ages and styles of buildings that make up a neighborhood. Without this variety, the types of business and residents that makes a city thrive cannot be accommodated, for not all businesses and residents have the same means or the same requirements. A used book store cannot pay the same rent as a luxury boutique; a light industrial firm cannot utilize the same type of space as an office; an artist might desire a high ceiling and low rent whereas a wealthy resident might want many rooms on a single floor with excellent views in a newly built building. Traditionally, cities have met this need via the accumulation of various ages of buildings. An older industrial building on a side street might suit the aforementioned artists or bookstore quite well, whereas a new high-rise apartment around the corner might suit the needs of a boutique and high-end resident. The fact that these structures exist near one another is one of the things that gives cities such a dynamic power, for by bringing many people, places, and industries into contact, new interactions and possibilities can form. In addition, not only can a variety of buildings be more visually pleasant than repetition, but it can aid in both the navigation of and improve the street experience of urban denizens.

An ex nihilo development like Battery Park City, however, doesn't have the luxury of a melange of existing buildings with which to work with. Port Authority planners, having seen the failures of similar mega-residential projects such as New York's own Roosevelt Island, decided to hand each building to a different architect in an attempt to ensure that there were differences in style and structure, to create a more diverse and visually interesting neighborhood. The main problem with this approach was simple: if all buildings were built at the same time, they would be valued significantly the same, meaning that in order to generate a return on investment, only businesses and residents who could afford like payments could be included. In practice, this meant that there would only be high-end housing, and that a small, low margin business such as a used bookstore would have to do an almost impossible volume of business to afford rent.

Visually, the effect of the selection of many architects has demonstrated its own form of unintended consequence. During the 1920's, many independent builders all over the United States created buildings with various "modern looking" touches, often seemingly inspired by a mixture of classical forms and of Art Nouveau. At the time, the style not only lacked a name, but was fundamentally not viewed as coherent style at all. Rather, it was simply the popular desires of buyers and builders, a form of vernacular architecture and construction somewhat along the lines of J.B. Jackson. It was only later that the term Art Deco arose to describe the style of buildings built in this era. To some degree, the architecture of Battery Park City (and much modern, urban housing) seems to follow this same trend. Although each building follows its own design and has its own distinctive touches (touches that, since we are contemporary with the style of the buildings, we are very much in tune with), they follow similar shapes and patterns: varying metal protrusions set against various faux-masonry sections with distinct windows, consciously playing with visual textures and putting gleaming, almost formless glass in contrast with older, more established styles. When one steps back from the buildings and takes them in as a whole, though they are clearly different, they begin to very closely resemble one another. In effect, it means the neighborhood is locked into a single architectural style, and though in the author's opinion, the buildings are currently quite attractive, future tastes might shift and leave not only a single building, but an entire neighborhood, seeming hopelessly out of date. Indeed, some of the older building in the southern part of Battery Park City itself, built in a more 1980's-style, almost brutalist fashion, already look very dated.







Above: The landscape of Battery Park City.  Notice how, though each building is different, they share much in common; A view of some of the oldest residential units, done in a style popular at the time, signs showing the single-class nature of Battery Park City.  Click for larger views.

At the same time, it is hard to say whether any of this stylistic or class-based uniformity could have been avoided. After all, this was literally newly land created; there was no history, no existing footprint with which to work. One might posit the idea of only building upon, for example, half of the building lots, leaving the balance to be developed at some point in the future, but a region of vacant lots is almost certainly worse for urbanity than almost any amount of homogeneity. One could attempt to build housing for different economic groups, but not only the cost of the land, needed to help recoup the massive construction costs, but its massive assessed value means it would be very difficult financially to build anything but for like economic classes. This does not even consider the fact that much of the base costs of construction are likely to be broadly similar at any particular time, regardless of level of ostentation or luxury. Jacobs's solution, to subsidize the rent of those who cannot afford to live in a neighborhood, is a good first effort, and has been tried with some degree of success in many an urban development, but it does nothing to alleviate other usage or business concerns. In regards to business as well, there is no reason to suspect that, had more retail space been included, it would have been leased at anything but premium rates, severely limiting the types of stores which could inhabit them.

At the end of the day, some thirty thirty years after the construction of Battery Park City began, we are left with the question: does this created space work as an urban environment? The answer is a frustrating yes and no. Battery Park City avoided the egregious sins of past developments, such as superblocks, dehumanizing buildings, automotive-minded development, and poor pedestrian spaces. Through careful planning, a neighborhood was created that is walkable and attractive, mixing private use with ample public space. Carefully sculpting a park, utilizing the beauty of the harbor, and mixing architects has created a place that is an aesthetically pleasant place to be, and, in terms of rents collected and the value of property sold, has been very successful indeed.

Conspicuously, however, Battery Park City is missing a crucial ingredient: street life. While the waterfront park pulls in many pedestrians and residents, the streets only blocks away are as barren as the street level windows of the buildings that line them. The World Financial Center's street level design plays a part in this, as does its internal mall, potentially siphoning off pedestrians from surrounding streets. Yet a large part of this deficiency is the direct result of a design deficiency: very few buildings have any place for street level activity. It is a puzzling decision, for the vast majority of urban planning literature published since Jane Jacobs's legendary treatise has spent an immense amount of time on the importance of street life. Perhaps, as previously mentioned, the developers were fearful of empty storefronts. Another strong possibility is simply the failure of planning in regards to urban complexity. Sitting down as an engineer, it is possible to imagine calculating the number of grocery stores, drug stores, libraries, and anything else that a city may need, then simply laying them out in the proper amounts. Urban planners going back to Ebeneezer Howard have worked with this mindset, the idea that a space can be neatly planned down to the smallest unit, that if one has this many people, that many jobs, this many stores, etc., a functional city must arise. The reality of urban life is that it is messy: new uses arise and old ones fall, businesses are founded and become defunct, land owners are slow to adjust their prices, and a whole host of other factors that can never be fully enumerated or fully planned for may and will occur. Cities need what planners once to referred to as “waste,” space for different activities to rise and fall with time, for it is impossible to predict the future of a complex system with anything approaching certainty. Much like a biological organism, cities need both time and space to evolve.

And that is exactly what Battery Park City is doing: evolving and changing to meet the needs of its current, and its potential future, residents. If there is any sign of successful urban planning, it is a neighborhood taking root over time. Slowly and steadily, Battery Park City seems to be fulfilling that role. The park draws many pedestrians, in effect providing a jump start of traffic and street life that otherwise may not exist. New buildings are still being built on the few remaining large parcels of land. Smaller, previously empty green plots are slowly being repurposed for more productive uses, such as business and restaurants. Some larger buildings are undergoing renovations to bring shops to street level, a development which could dramatically improve the area. There is no doubt that some larger structural changes to many buildings, in particular the World Financial Center, will be necessary to fully urbanize the area, but these are projects that can be ongoing. Though the plan to lower West Street has been nixed, if the landscaping of the street can be even remotely successful, it could help tie the development to the rest of Manhattan, and hopefully act as a conduit of vitality both to and from Battery Park City and the new World Trade Center development. There are no guarantees for the future of the neighborhood; its reliance on a single architectural idiom, the similar age of its buildings, and the financially circumscribed nature of its residents could come back to haunt it. But at the same time, if a vibrant community can continue to develop, the process of reuse and constant rebuilding could ensure a vibrant neighborhood in perpetuity.



Above: Repurposing of former empty space to a restaurant.  Click for a larger view.

Battery Park City demonstrates the successes and failures of planning and creating a city from scratch. Put simply, there is no way to build a fully functional city quickly on such a large scale and density. It simply takes time for the variety of urban functions to develop, for pathways to be formed, for community to arise, and for a city to be built. Perhaps, on a smaller scale, using the more plastic and less capital intensive materials of wood and brick, neighborhoods might develop more quickly, however that is only conjecture. The reality is that, in some times, at some places, the market demands density quickly, and planners and designers must be able to meet the demand while still attempting to create a functioning city. It is easy to point at certain design elements, such as the lack of enough retail space, and imagine a perfectly formed settlement dropping from the sky. While the mistakes themselves are real enough, no development can ever be perfect. The realities of making various builders, government agencies, and planners happy means compromises must be made. Even in a world of absolute control, one cannot plan for every possible occurrence; not only do businesses, institutions, and residents need time to rise and fall, but there is no telling what parts of the complexity of urban life any theoretical conception may be missing. Battery Park City is not perfect, but it is a good start, and with continual change, development, and the occasional guiding hand of planner and designers, it can continue it's path towards being a truly successful urban neighborhood.

All pictures (C) 2011 Blair Lorenzo and released under a Creative Commons license, see http://subwayfox.net/ for details.

Since Kunstler, even through the final chapter, only hints at what makes a real city or space work, hinting at the things like scale, walking distance, the information provided by buildings and the like, etc, he does not go into detail as to what that design might entail.  He implies that it is like a lost art, something that had been mastered in the past, and lost over time.  The reality is far more nuanced; much of the history of human space has been trial and error, encompassing quite a bit of error.  Even amongst successes, the reasons for urban vitality are hotly debated.  Still, reading Kuntsler, I couldn't help but be drawn to bring his ideas into contrast with a modern urban theorist, Nikolas A. Salingaros, in his work Principles of Urban Structure.  Salingaros attempts to outline a "scientific" system to create an "emotionally nurturing" environment.



Salingaros is a mathematician by trade and it shows.  His work is defined by his experience with graph theory and fractals.  First and foremost, he views urban space, or at least perceived urban space, as a network of nodes and paths.  Nodes can be almost anything, from a skyscraper to a trash can to the lines around a window, and, in his conception, we experience space as a point to point experience of these nodes.  For Salingaros, if there is less than a certain number of connections (he utilizes graph theory to articulate this as a number), the space is no longer urban, it is simply a disconnected series of objects and places.  The suburbs fit this description to a T, what with most places being connected by only one route, the car.

He continues by explaining that the city must be fractal.  A fractal is a mathematical function that is self-similar at any scale.  That is, no matter how far one zooms in or out of the image, similar structures are always visible.  For Salingaros, the city must start on the smallest scale (that is, the smallest level of human perception) and be self-similar all the way up.  Networks must first exist on one scale, and then a larger, and so on.  Importantly, he argues that lower scales must precede higher ones.  Much like Kuntsler he spends a great deal of time deriding Modernism, and this is one of his main complaints: as a systematic theory, it starts on the highest level networks, like expressways or large buildings, and expects that the urban networks below them will follow.  In his mind, this is backwards.  Indeed, he takes the fractal idea so far as to create a mathematical formula to suggest the numbers of various sizes of structures that should be constructed.

All this is important because it creates an "information field."  It is this field through which we perceive space, according to Salingaros, and it arises from our perception of the environment.  This is meant to be fractal as well.  The porches of Kuntsler, for example, are inviting because they are perforated, having a logarithmic connection between spaces and pillars, and providing a lot of visual information to the viewer.  Salingaros utilizes classical columns as a perfect example, including fluting as providing a deeper level of information on an even smaller scale.  

Salingaros too closes with Christopher Alexander and Pattern Languages, claiming that such a repertoire is a good start to creating functioning urban spaces.  To those who would critique such an idea as restricting, he replies that it is no more restricting than writing in any natural language.

This is a very, very quick gloss of a very complicated work, and it can be as difficult to parse as it sounds.  Salingaros's ideas are far from perfect; they are no more scientific, for example, than was the Modernism that preceeded it (he applies to rigorous testing to his hypotheses), nor does he provide near enough real-world examples to inform his claims.  Still, his work helps informs the relatively vague examples that Kuntsler gives as functioning or poor urban space.



For example, take a quintessential West Village street, a space Kunstler would surely see as highly functional.  In Salingaros's conception, it is ideal as well, for it creates a dense information field.  Trees, staircases, lampposts, and corners provide a low-level, node-to-node experience for the pedestrian.  This is continued fractally, first from building to building (each being different), and then block to block.  The buildings themselves have lots of detail providing intuitive insight to an observer.  



In contrast, take the standard big box parking lot.  This is not bad simply as it is cheap or poorly thought at, as Kunstler argues, it has many more specific defects.  A large parking lot with no landmarks provides at best absolutely no information field, absolutely no frame of reference for a human being (at worst it provides a highly negative information field, but this is a concept Salingaros does not touch on).  The building itself is not fractal, it exists only on one scale, as if it was dropped from the clouds.  On the human scale too, the building provides nothing; it has only vague colors and shapes to offer.  Finally, there can be no nodal network: the only connection is from the store to the car, and from the car to another location.  This is too feeble a network to provide any of the vibrancy that makes urban areas so succesful.

This is not to imply that Salingaros's theories are perfect; far from it, for they are often so theoretical as to be difficult to follow.  But it is an attempt, one of many, to systematize the kinds of successful places Kuntsler so passionately (and polemically, not to mention problematically) argues for.

Image sources:

http://freelargephotos.com/?fetch=000411_l.jpg&title=Bleecker%20Street,%20Greenwich%20Village.

http://www.maryvilledailyforum.com/features/x2048881949/Two-arrested-in-Walmart-thefts?photo=0

Rather polemically, Kunstler oft decries the state of the modern American landscape.  Suburbs, he implies, are monotonous slabs with only one use, housing.  They often lack civic institutions because of the speed at which they are built.  And, because of the mobility allowed by first the streetcar and later the automobile, these types of environments have rapidly eaten up land all across the country.  

[Above: A comparison in repetition of form, both in the Bronx and in a suburban development in Virgina, outside of Washington, DC]

Much of Kuntler's critique is reminiscent of the work of Jane Jacobs.  Jacobs also described the problems of monotony and single use as being deadly to any sort of urban vitality and create the poorest of neighborhoods, not necessarily economically, but certainly in human terms.  Yet these issues can apply to the city as well as to the suburb, much as was warned about in Jacobs's work.  

In my mind, the driving similarity between the suburbs of Kuntsler and the poor urban neighborhoods of Jacobs is the rapidity, focus, and scale of their construction.  The perfect example is not far afield: much of the Bronx, particularly those regions in late decades have descried as the South
Bronx.

Transportation often enables the transformation of formally rural or undeveloped countryside into land of other uses.  Kuntsler himself describes the frightening speed with which the streetcar allowed suburban development to devour land, only to be later accelerated by the widespread acceptance of the automobile.  If the streetcar allowed a flood of new construction in most places, in crowded New York the expansion of the subway and elevated railroads was a veritable tsunami.  Nowhere is this clearer than in the Bronx, for prior to about 1910 or 1920, much of the land was rural.  There were pockets of urbanity, as the elevated railroads expanded, but this was a long, slow ride to the primary centers of employment in Midtown and Lower Manhattan.  Yet the expansion of the original subway in the 1910's and the massive explosion of elevated subway lines with express service into Manhattan in the post-World War 1 era (known as the Dual Contracts period of subway construction) opened up vast amounts of land.  

At the same time, the population was exploding, and not solely from new immigrants.  Earlier generations had grown in social and economic stature, and the middle class was exploding.  The demand for quality housing was massive as former tenement and cold-water flat-dwellers sought better accommodation.

The result was a speculative explosion of growth, almost completely covering the landscape in a period of ten to twenty years.  Much as Kunstler and Jackson described, this was in the American tradition of individual land use and construction, with little thought to the public front.  Speculation meant land values were soaring, and builders sought to maximize their return by filling their lots with the largest building they believed they could reasonably fill.  At the same time, driven by earlier examples such as the Dakota, and for perhaps the first time in American life, the apartment building was beginning to be viewed as an acceptable place to call a home.  Thus, elevator apartment buildings, usually built to the minimum standards allowed under the so-called new Tenement Law of 1901.  These were fine buildings by the standards of the day, including electricity, heat, and plumbing in every apartment, and were certainly a step up for former tenement dwellers, and were often considered an improvement for those who lived in older townhouses, as well.  At the same time, they were constructed in the architectural vernacular of the time.  There was no grand plan, simply the styles of the day: first the continuation of various eclectic revival styles, and then the style we now know as Art Deco.

Like the type of suburban development Kunstler describes, this growth was rapid and nearly uniform.  It was one type of use, housing, and unlike previous multi-family dwellings, often ground-level retain space was left out in favor of more apartments.  It was monotonous, with massive blocks in familiar U-shaped buildings dominating.  It was for one income group, at the time the fast growing middle class (new immigrants were generally relegated by economics to the earlier slums).  Moreover, there were almost no parks or public spaces of any kind: land price prohibited such expenditures by the city (as did public opinion that generally discouraged government action in the decisions of land use), and developers were financially motivated to fill their lots as quickly and as fully as possible.  This price pressure also meant that builders skimped on amenities as much as was possible, and the "courtyards" and sidewalks of these buildings were (and often still are) concrete slabs devoid of trees, plant life, or anything else.  It is the monotony both Kunstler and Jacobs bemoan, only in urban form.  

History has shown us that this form has not aged well, in New York in particular.  As another generation passed and the American consciousness, guided not in small part by various government programs, turned towards the suburb and the car, the shortcomings of this type of development came more and more to the fore.  In almost the blink of an eye, a massive rush almost entirely enclosed between the years 1950 and 1970, the majority of the West Bronx (save Riverdale) jumped from uniformally middle class to uniformally poor and often destitute.  Even the working class, formerly quick to take over any occupiable land, were lured into new suburban bungalows by desire and by Federally guaranteed 30 year mortgages, bypassing the Bronx.  

Kunstler takes his argument one step further, arguing against the architectural ideals of modernism as a strong, contributing cause to the malaise (in his eyes) of the modern American landscape.  This is a difficult issue to digest in the face of this story.  In one sense, the buildings of the Bronx are certainly modern- they are generally twelve or more stories and share some of the skyscraper forms pioneered by Louis Sullivan, for example the column form of having a capital, central body, and base that are all well-defined.  At the same time, both in regards to what would come later and often in the eyes of those creating them, these were not modernist buildings, per se.  Earlier designs aped the classical much as the Beaux Arts, and Art Deco, while adopting a different idiom, simply exchanged one set of forms for another, much like the Arts Nouveux forms that preceeded it had.  

Kuntsler argues, in essence, that the modern impulse to ignore classical designs refined over generations have dehumanized the landscape.  This may or may not be true.  Arguments to conservatism should always be held to high scrutiny as the human mind is often driven to defend that with which it is familiar.  At the same time, the arguments of Jacobs in particular offer another reason for the the collapse of these areas: their complete devotion to a single type of use, housing, creating no urban interaction,  Kuntsler himself would expand this into the fact that these regions were created whole cloth for mainly economic reasons, creating no cultural or social institutions and having no public space.  
Architecture itself, save for the monotony of the same forms and the fact that it was all constructed essentially at the same time (a warning from Jacobs, for construction of the same age usually has the same price, precluding multiple types of use), seems to be of secondary import.

These same factors are the same reasons for the burgeoning vitality shown in many parts of the Bronx today.  Groups of inhabitants have, over the decades, set up cultural institutions.  The price of land, having almost zeroed in the later 1970's, has allowed a variety of uses to crop up.  Though they often look awkward, store fronts are being shoe-horned into former ground level apartments, and others are being repurposed into various services such as a health care, slowly creating a fully functional, multi-purpose neighborhood.  Make no mistake, this process of adaptive reuse can be painfully slow, but even Kuntsler's ideal landscape took many years to develop.  In this case, though, it involved a rush of the very high and the very low before it has begun to reach any sort of stasis, and even that stasis itself can, at times, be questionable.  Lack of public space still hurts the region, as does the monotony of the built form in many places.  



[Above: Adaptive reuse, showing storefronts built into a formerly residential-only building]

As well, it is well worth pausing to ask whether this type of adaptive reuse could ever be brought to the suburban landscape.  If J.B. Jackson is to be believed, this is a moot point, for much of it will simply disintegrate to earth when it is no longer needed.  A more pragmatic view is quite difficult: even assuming things like deed covenants, housing associations, and the like were removed, as they well might be in a period of collapse, the sheer amount of open space and the singular nature of most houses means short of complete rebuilding the vitality of Jacobs may be impossible to recreate.  At the same time, to predict the future is a fool's errand, for no one knows the course development trends will take next, nor the tools and technology that may or may not be available to potential redevelopers in the future.

J.B. Jackson's Discovering the Vernacular Landscape certainly seems to focus on the country of small-town environment rather than the urban  While he makes mention of the word city, referencing their citizen-making power, or such arguably urban phenomena as the Greek (which is to say, particularly the Athenian) agora.  This seems to some extent intentional; Jackson claims at the outset to try and avoid the "engineering" history of space, and indeed, he creates a particularly distasteful straw men his chapter A Puritan Looks at the Scenery, proceeding to unfairly and ruthlessly slander him.  His later platitudes about this creating a new approach to the landscape are not much of a palliative after such vitriol.  I personally am no expert in the ontological world of the medieval peasant or of the early American settler, so I cannot speak to the veracity of Jackson’s interpretations in these ares.  I can, however, attempt to critically apply his observations to the history of the American City.




[Above: Phtos of Yankee Stadium and the same house, taken in 1923 and in 1932, demonstrating the massive speed of urban change]

In America, cities have almost always been in a process of growth and change.  This is particularly notable as, unlike much growth in the history of humankind, much of it has been documented, albeit with varying degrees of completeness and detail.  Even before the Industrial Revolution, American cities experienced explosive growth, particularly starting as such tiny infants, the products of colonial creation.  The rise of American trade, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of America as a major economic power only exponentially multiplied this growth.  From day one, American cities have been forced to deal with the problems of growth and of transformation, in short, the problems of what and how a city should be.

The early American city was composed of a handful of major types of structures: the warehouse of the wholesalers and traders, the combined home and store or office of artisans and professionals, the row houses of the middle and upper classes, and the barracks-style housing or alley buildings of the working poor.  With the exception of warehouses, which were generally located near the wharves or other primacy source of trade, there were no explicit spatial outlines for the city.  Various types of structures would abut one another, and rich and poor lived in close proximity.  There were certain trends- trades tended to desire face-to-face communication and settled near one another; people of economic means generally desired to live together, albeit normally only on a block-by-block basis.  In general, the city was mixed, and additionally, echoing Jackson, it was constructed of wood (the problems of which were emphasized by the massive fires which occasionally engulfed the cities).  The ever increasing population of the city demanded the construction of even more housing.

A number of factors changed the relationships in the American city, and with them, its patterns of land use.  First and foremost, business was exploding, requiring ever larger parcels for warehouses, factories, and, with the rise of the separation of home and workplaces, offices.  Desiring to maximize the amount and speed of information available in the era before the telephone, these industries tended to centralize, creating the modern central business district.  Land values skyrocketed as a business of almost any sort could generate more revenue than a household could, rapidly forcing (or encouraging, if one prefers) residents to leave in favor of business structures.  Physically, this meant the destruction of the older houses and their replacement with more permanent, impressive structures of stone, of brick, and later of steel, echoing the predilection of those in power for permanence of structure as described by Jackson.  Of course, both stricter fire codes (a result of the detestation many cities experienced) and the far higher usage and strain commercial use puts on a building were at least of equal importance.

At the same time, two new inventions were radically changing residential patterns: the steam railroad and the streetcar.  Even before the mass introduction of these technologies, residents of mean, often using the horse-powered street railway, were moving further out, continuing the habit of traditional row houses, often now of brick or stone.  The steam railroad first accelerated this trend, allowing the rich (for they were the only ones who could afford the expense of steam commutation) to build outside the city proper, where land was both inexpensive and abundant.  Their suburban houses were as more often than not balloon-frame wood houses.  With the coming of the electric streetcar (and in a handful of cities, elevated trains and subways), the middle class too could afford a level of suburbanization.  Boston, to use a typical example (as described by Sam Bass Warner in Streetcar Suburbs and Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier), grew exponentially in area between 1870 and 1900.  This was vernacular architecture as Jackson describes it: the scarcity of capital meant that few developers could muster the cash to build more than a handful of properties (there were no early Levittowns); usually individual homeowners would contract local craftsmen to build their own abode, or those same craftsmen would construct a handful of houses.  Usually wood and balloon frame, they were built for all but the poorest of the working class: multiple dwelling, detached units such as triple deckers could be afforded by the rising lower-middle class.  It would be a mistake to call these houses disposable, though indeed they were commodities.  Families, immigrants in particular, were always looking to trade up station if they could make their incomes grow, in turn leaving their houses to the next generation of up and coming.

This process had started in the city.  The old townhouses, initially constructed for those of means, began to be filled by working class inhabitants, whose landlords subdivided the units into as small apartments as could be created.  This density of lower classes tended to further push the middle and upper classes out of areas bordering the growing central business district, creating something close to classic maps of the Chicago School of urban planning.  Meanwhile, in the new suburbs, much the same was going on: those of rising income would trade up, generally moving to newer housing further out.  At the same time, developers, looking to maximize income, would fill in unbuilt parcels in closer in suburbs with multiple dwelling units, creating a much more dense environment than originally had existed.  In essence, a huge region of most major metropolitan areas had exploded within thirty years, and new construction almost everywhere abounded.  At the same time, lacking the amortizing mortgage (a later invention), more than 75% of these new suburbanites were renters, furthering the possibility of mobility Jackson describes.  At the same time, Jackson warns of the dangers of the seemingly positive notion of the lower-middle class and upper-working class moving to new, better housing: unlike prior, when they were forced to inhabit structures left behind by the wealthy, and thus built to high standards, now they were building their own.  Yet, as capital was so tight, these new structures were built on the thinnest of margins, often omitting niceties that were soon to be necessities.  In effect, if and when the original tenants were able to "trade up," they would be creating the next generations slum, a region of poor quality housing in which only the destitute lived.




[Above: Schematic map of the city as imagined by Homer Hoyt (from his work 100 Years of Land Values in the City of Chicago)]

This suburbanization, though, contrary to the aforementioned Chicago school, was not inevitable.  In continental Europe, as described by Richard Fishman in Bourgeois Utopia, the pattern was reversed: middle and upper class residents built large, masonry apartment flats, often with stores on the ground floor, in the historical style of classical urban palaces.  Significantly, this was due to the diametrically opposed viewpoints of most continental Europeans and most Americans (and Britons) of the era: Europeans desired urban living, and forced business and the poor out of the center, while Americans, desiring detached living (and perhaps the freedom of movement Jackson describes) moved out to detached, suburban homes, leaving the city center to business and to the poor.  At the same time, it perhaps echoes Jackson's description of the average European growing accustomed to living in more permanent structures (though this would not explain the exception of Britain, nor the massive early unpopularity of flats in the Anglo-American world).

At the same time, size or quality of structure was no guaranteed preservative in America.  As Elizabeth Hawes describes in New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, New York's Fifth Avenue was once lined with mansions of the very wealthy.  Large, imposing, made of stones of the highest quality, these buildings, as Jackson describes, were meant to be a demonstration of power, and were meant to last.  However, very few have survived.  Not even the prestige of such buildings could prevent the explosive growth of urban living, and the coterminant explosive growth of land prices.

All this leads to a theory I have regarding structure quality and the history of land development.  Structures have a certain quality, usually based on their size, material, and cost of construction (all qualities which are not mutually exclusive.)  Cities, generally poor at the outset, begin by building wooden, relatively inexpensive structures.  As incomes grow, fires laws are introduced, and old buildings demolished, more and more significant buildings are erected.  These buildings, in turn, are more expensive to demolish than their predecessors, and market forces must be strong for new buildings to be built.  In the long run, this leads cities to having regions which either, a.) must wait for a market strong enough to rebuild it (much like Fifth Avenue described above), b.) turn to adaptive reuse, as many cities have done in the past thirty years (New York being a prime example), or c.) face slums or abandonment (much as Detroit).

Make no mistake, it is difficult to apply Jackson's observations to the city.  His historical sources are scattered and esoteric, to say the least, and his insights, while often interesting, often seem rambling, underdeveloped, and unfocused.  Jackson is committed to taking a view which prioritizes experience of location above all other factors; not a bad desire in and of itself, but one which can lead to erroneous conclusions.  In a certain way, he seems to put the horse before the cart, describing the effects of historical processes, the built environment, as their cause.  I readily admit my own bias as well, being steeped in the history of said built environment, but to essentially ignore the massive historical information accessible to us for and instead solely concentrate on what is observable seems a step sideways in regards to understanding and bettering our human habitats.  There is no doubt that experiential information is important; without it we are left with the husks of physical logic the era of urban renewal left us.  Yet without a firm historical basis and clear though, we are left wading through often disconnected, fascinating, but hard to defend ideals.
   

"Working-class and poor people do not live in homes and neighborhoods of their own design. They move either into residences that have been abandoned by the well-to-do, or into new subsidized housing" (171).

"West Enders never used the term 'neighborhood.' They showed little concern for the district as a physical and social entity; their interest was confined essentially to their own street and to the stores they frequented. ... When the West End as a whole was threatened with demolition, the people were shocked ino awareness. Even then some felt sure that while the entire district was coming down, their own street would be spared" (170).

In Chapter 5 of Space and Place, Tuan discusses at length how what is spacious and what is crowded are relativistic concepts, relying almost entirely, in his conception, on the perception of the viewer.  This is particularly important in a judgmental sense, as crowdedness has strong implications of being a negative experience, with spaciousness being the opposite.  He utilizes the example of a stadium as an objectively densely packed environment that is not only pleasant, but can seem spacious, comparing it to a highway where even a modicum of crowding can make a driver feel stuck and contained.

This line of thinking is very similar to that taken by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  At the time, the doctrine of most urban planners generally stated that any population density above a certain number, by necessity, was overcrowded at best, and a slum at worst.  Yet many of the neighborhoods Jacobs was studying, neighborhoods she cherished, were derided under this criterion even though they excelled in many of the other health and well being criteria the same planners had been using.  The example she used was Boston's North End, which though primarily working- and lower middle class, a neighborhood of mainly flats rather than individual home ownership, was succeeding in almost every objective and subjective measure she could apply.  She brings up the North End with a Boston planner who quickly derides it; claiming it will have to be torn down and rebuilt much like Boston's West End had been.  She famously responded that he should wish all Boston neighborhoods should come across so well.

Her point, one she defends valiantly, is that overcrowding and density are not one in the same thing.  Many people can live in a relatively small area without that area being overcrowded or unhealthy.  Planners, not only from a cultural drive towards suburban ideals but from a desire to be scientific, had attempted to quantify overcrowding in terms of persons per acre not accounting for, for example, the number of people per room, the square feet per person, or (perhaps most importantly) the desires of the individuals concerned.  Jacobs frames her argument in the terms that not only can density be a good thing, but he very idea of persons per acre is misguided; instead she prefers the terms of persons per room or individual dwelling.

Tuan goes even farther, claiming that perceptions of what is acceptable are highly culturally and individually determined.  He uses people like the Bushmen to indicate a group that lives in very small spaces by choice.  Tuan also uses the example of many working and lower class American (or immigrant) families who enjoy living in close proximity.

The arguments neatly come together: traditional planners, indebted as they were to suburban ideals, could only see density as overcrowding.  Jacobs, a lover of city living, points out that not only is that not true, it is objectively false, as most neighborhoods not in abject poverty had a certain amount of square feet per person.  Tuan demonstrates (if his anthropological references are correct) that even moreso than Jacobs, the question of what is enough space varies dramatically from culture to culture, individual to individual.  In this conception, no number can be assigned to what is too dense, or what is too empty.

This does bring up a difficult.  Without suggesting a specific number of persons per foot, persons per room, or persons per dwelling, Jacobs does suggest that there is a limit below which an area can be considered overcrowded.  She does not desire to recreate the famous slums (of course, a very loaded term) of East coast, American cities.  And this is understandable, seeing as how Jacobs was writing for a primarily American, and to a lesser extant Western European, audience, from an American cultural viewpoint.  However, even for the Bushmen of Tuan, I am sympathetic to the idea that there is a minimum space per person that can be considered healthy or well, even if that number is difficult to quantify.  For example, the Bushmen, though they live in close quarters, do generally have a large degree of open space accessible to each of them.  The minimum space argument, however, may arise out of cultural imperialism as well, a concern which must be handled with due care.

In the far West Village, there is a cafe I frequent.  It's name is not of particular importance; while I do withhold it in part out of sense of selfishness, a desire to keep the place to myself, it is also because it is immaterial: it is only written in small letters, and rarely is ever mentioned.  Rather, the place stands on its own merits, which is most likely how I happened upon it.  For various reasons I spend a lot of time in the neighborhood, and my eyes are often on the lookout for a sadly rare location: a low-key space that, unlike a coffee shop, serves real food, but at the same time still has that same sense of openness and the same implied invitation to sit and stay for a while that a proper restaurant simply does not possess.

This cafe fits that description to a T.  Functionally, it is much like any coffee shop: one walks in and orders at a counter, and after paying and if you are staying, they bring your order to wherever you choose to sit.  The environment is warm and friendly.  The space itself is fairly small, with large windows looking out over the street.  Two small, Parisian-cafe-style tables sit with a view out, astride the front entrance, each including a small alcove lined with various pillows and cushions, inviting one to sit in the window if they so desire.  The other tables are much the same style, although obviously lacking the windows and their alcoves, with the exception of a fairly large communal table, which gives opportunity for those dining alone or groups during crowded times to sit near one another, at the same table.  The environment is full of subtle art and unimposing chotchkies, creating a very pleasant visual space.  In addition they offer free wireless, always a major plus.  As I mentioned at the outset, the environment is reminiscent of a coffee shop, with the exception of having quite decent food as well.  It is that combination, the ability to eat, drink, work, and/or relax, all in one place, that begins to outline its specialness.

Those specifics, the services offered, the location, the aesthetics, are what drew me in initially.  But as I slowly became a regular, there were various smaller features that became apparent.  The staff is wonderful; congenial and quick, they truly get to know their regulars and are always eager to chat; they are friends to those who come often and are congenial.  Part of that is surely the regular crowd; it is as motley a crew as could be expected.  Of particular note are a group of elderly friends who come in near the same time everyday; they are boisterous and so hard of hearing that they practically need to yell at each other to communicate.  There are also writers, businessmen and women, a charming blind man with a sweet, seeing-eye dog, in short, a little community that over time can't help but draw one in.  The place and those who frequent it seem to encourage conversations between strangers, a rarity in New York.  And yet, at the same time, the cafe is neither cloying nor does it feel small town or cliquish; one can just as easily go there once, have a nice meal or coffee, and never return, as much as go there everyday.

One final point of note is a small historical aside.  It was one day while reading the book about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs that we shall read later this semester when I came across the address of Jacbos's longtime home on Hudson St.  Looking up, reading the numbers on the buildings, I quickly discovered that her home was the building immediately next door to that very cafe.  Such a moment of small-world connectedness and historicity, particularly of a figure I deeply respect, is magical.

In short, it isn't the type of place which you would necessarily recommend to friends coming in from out of town (unless your friends are like myself), for on one level it is quite plain.  But on the another level, it is a place that, were someone to try and force it to close, one would be drawn to start a picket line out front.

The attached picture is the Google Streetview image of the cafe; I will attempt to post an interior shot when I have the opportunity.