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The City by the Palisades

Once before, I blogged a passage from Mark Helprin, one of my favorite novelists. Here's another one, this time from his "Winter's Tale":

A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. As a book in which to read this plan, New York is unsurpassed. For the whole world has poured its heart into the city by the Palisades, and made it far better than it ever had any right to be.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Mon, 29 Sep 2008 at 12:57 PM  |  Permalink

How Government Has Spoiled My Local Dining

There's one thing I've been wanting to blog about since I began Culture of Congestion. It's why there's a paucity of very good restaurants in my neighborhood. I have a theory.

To some of you who have read between the lines and figured out that I live in Brooklyn Heights, New York City's First Suburb, with a median comparable to Greenwich Village, this may come as a surprise (unless of course you live here, too).

Part of the problem may be that the Heights is so darn convenient to Manhattan. The 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, F, and R trains all converge here, so that most points on the East Side, West Side, and all around the town are easily accessible from here. If you've got the income (and most here do) you can train (or taxi I suppose) to Nobu or wherever pretty quickly. Conversely, no one goes out of their way to dine here.

Now, explanations of the sub-prime lending fiasco and the near collapse of the financial market fall into one of two categories: those that blame the free-market (the prevailing sentiment among the intelligentsia) and those that blame government policy. Whatever the cause of those problems (if you couldn't guess, I subscribe to the latter explanation), the restaurant issue in my nabe is one that I can trace directly to government institutions.

Brooklyn Heights is bordered on the west by the Promenade, spectacularly overlooking the Inner Harbor. On the east, it's Borough Hall, the New York Supreme Court (perhaps the ugliest building in Brooklyn), and other municipal offices. It's the latter that are, I believe, at the root of the problem.

Restaurants in the Heights must cater to the huge lunch-time crowd pouring from those institutions from 1 to 2 p.m. on weekdays because that's where most of their business comes from. This market demands cheap food served and consumed quickly, not fine meals served expertly and savored slowly. For some reason few places can successfully combine the two. Consequently, few places to get an exceptional dinner.

Thus, on the first block of Montague Street west of the municipal buildings, other than a dozen or so banks, there's a Chipotle and Eamonn Doran. The former is strictly fast food but the latter is an Irish bar that serves only passable meals at dinnertime. On the next two blocks there's nothing special: a couple of diners, middling Italian restaurants, and other assorted ethnic places including Turkish, vegetarian Chinese, Thai, two mediocre Japanese restaurants, as well as a Starbucks and a Connecticut Muffin (my "office"). In fact, the only widely acknowledged "nice place" on Montague is Heights Café at the far end of Montague, about as far from Borough Hall as you can get.

South down Court Street there's McDonald's, KFC, Popeyes, a bar or two, and several yogurt places. One notable exception on that street is Queen, which is included in the 2008 Michelin Guide and one of the very best "old-style" Italian restaurants in the city. How to account for this? Well, it's one of the oldest surviving eateries in the neighborhood, having been founded in 1958 when the area may have had more diversity of uses than it does today and fewer city employees. People do come from other neighborhoods to dine there. This perhaps also explains why Gage and Tollner, one of the best steakhouses in the City survived for over 100 years (alas it went under a few years ago) on Fulton Street, a block or so east of Borough Hall. Today, Fulton is highly successful financially, but it's no more than a very average shopping mall. The architecture along the street, however, is stunning and reveals a much more elegant past.

One implication of my hypothesis is that the farther away from Borough Hall and the Courts you go, the better the restaurants should be, as long as you remain the same demographic. With the exceptions I've noted, casual observation seems to confirm this. Heights Café is at the far end of the Heights. And you have to go several blocks up Henry Street, practically to the northern end, before you get to the excellent Noodle Pudding.

Even farther north, but keeping within the same income demographic, better restaurants appear more frequently. On Fulton Ferry Landing there's the highly popular Grimaldi's Pizzeria (try getting a quick bite for lunch there) and the famous River Café. A bit farther into DUMBO are several very good places, including our favorites Rice, Bubby's, Almondine, and Jacques Torres. (The last two are a bakery and chocolatier, respectively, but they still make my point.)

Finally, if you go south from Brooklyn Heights to Smith Street, into Cobble Hill (sort of), you will find a variety of interesting, new places sprouting up seemingly every month, such as Grocery and my favorite, Saul, which my friends from Aix, Elisabeth and Carine, said made them feel like they were in France.

I predict you'll find this phenomenon in other neighborhoods dominated by civic institutions, such as City Hall. But to be fair, any dominant single use would have the same effect, such as in the Wall Street, where besides Delmonico's and Fraunces Tavern, two of the oldest restaurants in New York (if not the United States), you'll be hard pressed to find anything else comparable.

During this time of financial turmoil it may be trivial to be complaining about my local dining experience. But by the same token, it's in times like these that good food can give us some comfort — as long as we can afford it.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Mon, 29 Sep 2008 at 12:44 PM  |  Permalink

The New Versus Old WTC and Revisiting BPC

In response to my post "The Dark Side of Metropolis," my very loyal reader Benjamin Hemric writes in reference to the original versus the current plan for Ground Zero:

The old plan, with just a few minor corrections, was actually more conducive to public interaction and "the culture of congestion" than the current one, in my opinion. And I say this as someone who's lived nearby since before the WTC was finished and as someone who was thoroughly familiar with the site. (Plus it should be noted that Jane Jacobs herself thought it might be a good idea in this instance to keep the superblock.)

I've heard from others who were close to Jacobs that she did indeed view the WTC favorably. Benjamin is more familiar with the area, with its pathways and pedestrian patterns, than I am, but, based on my own experience there, it's still hard for me to fully fathom why (though Benjamin has done his best to explain). I remember clearly the vast, empty, above-ground spaces. True the below-ground mall was lively, but hardly exceptional.

One of the things I like about the new design is the restoration of one or two streets (such as Liberty Street?) through the former superblock, which I thought would partly restore the advantages of the "short blocks" about which Jacobs wrote in her "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" — that is, more corners and ways to get from point A to point B, which promotes visual variety and alternative patterns of movement. (Interested readers should consult Chapter 9, "The Need for Small Blocks" in DLGAC.) However, for the most part the superblock remains.

I also like the idea of more attractors in the public spaces than before, such as the memorial and museum, to increase public use at different times. The more the better as far as I'm concerned. Of course, as I argued in that earlier post, even if the new design might do a good job of encouraging such things, they can be offset by heavy-handed security measures.

***

Last Sunday my wife and I took a walking tour of Battery Park City, sponsored by the Municipal Art Society of New York and led by Francis Morrone, an architectural historian who writes excellent articles for the Sun. In my post back in July, "Battery Park City on a Weekday Evening," I said that despite my general aversion to district-size building projects, I found myself rather charmed by the place. Now I think I know better why.

Francis explained that the designers and architects who took over the project from Nelson Rockefeller, after it stalled during the New York fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s (remember that one?), had been schooled on the urbanism of Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and, to some extent, Andres Duany. The resulting design guidelines emphasized, somewhat traditionally, stone facades on the lower outer floors of buildings transitioning to brick with a distinct vertical termini, intimate walking paths and parks, and an overall feeling of old-fashioned, pedestrian-oriented livability. Elements of the Brooklyn Heights with its Promenade and other successful neighborhoods also found their way into the site plan.

Again, however, the construction has taken place over the better part of three decades — time enough for a more unplanned "fit" to emerge from within the guidelines with the passage of time. And it's still not quite complete, as its population is expected to grow from its present 10,000 eventually to 14,000. One further fact: The density of the 92 acres site is slightly higher than that of Manhattan.

I highly recommend this and other tours sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Check them out here.

***
For those with gaps in their knowledge about the current housing situation, which I dare say is most of us, over at Market Urbanism, Adam Hengels blogs Russell Roberts's posts on the "government intervention in housing." Excellent background reading on the public-policy roots of the present fiasco.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Fri, 26 Sep 2008 at 8:52 AM  |  Permalink

Naming Hell's Kitchen

Last evening at a dinner party someone asked about the origin of the name "Hell's Kitchen." That's the neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan just north of Chelsea and south of 57th street, which realtors for some time now have been trying to rename "Clinton" (after the former New York governor, not the current senator).

It was the perfect opportunity to consult a book I just bought at the Brooklyn Book Festival called "Naming New York: Manhattan Places & How They Got Their Names" by Sanna Feirstein. I was surprised to discover that it had no entry for "Hell's Kitchen" per se, but did have a very brief one for "Hell's Kitchen Park," according to which "the name was adopted from that of a gang of hoodlums who terrorized this area in the latter part of the 19th century."

These days, of course, inquiries of this nature usually start (and all too often end) with Wikipedia. The lengthy entry on that site, though, is not conclusive. It cites Davy Crockett's assessment of the Irish gangs in Five Points (the naming of which no one disputes) as being "too mean to swab hell's kitchen." But Five Points, in Chinatown, is quite a ways from Midtown. Then there's the infamous building on 39th Street allegedly called Hell's Kitchen, the name of which a local gang is said to have taken for itself. This corroborates Ms. Feirstein's entry. So perhaps the line of causation runs from building to gang to district. However, the entry goes on to say that the most common version claims "Dutch Fred The Cop" coined the name after witnessing a riot.

I finally consulted Kenneth Jackson's authoritative "The Encyclopedia of New York": "The name Hell's Kitchen was perhaps taken from that of a gang formed in the area in 1868, or adopted by local police in the 1870s." So now from gang to police to district? The common element of most these explanations, however, is a gang with that name.

Two things. First, while this is a very small sample size (of one), it's impressive that Ms. Feirstein's little book (about 1/10 the sheer weight of Jackson's) got it basically right, or gave in a short passage the answer that I distilled from the much longer Wikipedia and Encyclopedia entries. Second, while on the one hand most of us like definitive answers to these kinds of questions, I think a little mystery in matters such as this adds to the appeal to this town. Like a good tale, it remains obscure around the edges.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Fri, 19 Sep 2008 at 12:26 PM  |  Permalink

The Dark Side of Metropolis

In "Delirious New York," Rem Koolhaas defines

…the dark side of Metropolis as an astronomical increase in the potential for disaster only just exceeded by an equally astronomical increase in the ability to avert it. Manhattan is the outcome of that perpetual neck-and-neck race.

Bemoaning this snail's pace of reconstruction, Mayor Bloomberg has called for taking the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation out of the picture, arguing that "It's just another level of checks and balances and bureaucracy that you don't need." The number of stakeholders in Ground Zero has no doubt retarded recovery, but of course that's also an argument for excluding the Mayor's office and leaving it to the Port Authority.

No doubt if Robert Moses were in charge, something would have risen on the site long ago, whether the rest of us liked it or not. (Incidentally, here's an article about what appears to be the first fictionalized portrayal of Moses to be published.) Which is to say that it might not be such a bad thing that some time has passed since the tragic event, but only so long as some flexibility remains in the process.

In particular, I hope there's some flexibility in the way in which our well-intentioned security officials plan to police the area. According to a study by Justin Hollander of Tufts University and Jeremy Nemeth of the University of Colorado, as reported in Crain's New York Business:

Almost 30% of the public space in the financial district and the area around city hall is either limited or closed to the public because of security measures and barriers, threatening the city's vitality….

It's important for the long-term revitalization of this district that traffic (vehicular and especially foot) flows freely, because genuine urban development, which is inherently unpredictable, emerges from the contacts freely made in public space. Successful city spaces are those that promote such informal, spontaneous contacts. In this regard the design for the WTC site is a vast improvement over what was there before.

But cement barricades, police check points, and restricted access — responses to the last disaster — can undermine even the best urban design, and effectively render the areas around them immune to public attention and scrutiny. What has enabled great cities to push ahead of disaster is the free movement of those living in it, and the safety, the security, and, ultimately, the prosperity that result from their "eyes on the street."

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Mon, 15 Sep 2008 at 1:16 PM  |  Permalink

E.B. White on NYC

Astroland is closing. The world-famous Cyclone roller coaster will stay open thanks to landmarking (more effective for individual structures than for neighborhoods), but Coney Island's days as a working-class amusement park may finally be over. Sad. Rem Koolhaas characterized Coney Island as "a fetal Manhattan," both because of its smaller but similar dimensions but more importantly because he saw many of the various amusements created there as experiments in urban fantasy.

Now, Crain's New York Business reports that "New York City gained 256,000 jobs during the last decade, despite the dot-com bust and the terrorist attacks that crippled employment in some neighborhoods" (from a report released last Wednesday by the Center for an Urban Future). The media these days brim with stories of financial crises and economic downturn, but it's what happens in our local networks — our jobs and neighborhoods — that tends to matter the most to us personally. So the Center for an Urban Future study may surprise, but not so much really if you're one of the vast majority of the local workforce who have been gainfully employed since 1998.

Just two stories about the ups and downs of this City, about which we may or, more significantly, may not be aware.

Sixty years ago E.B. White wrote, "Here Is New York," a short essay many of you probably know. He writes:

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if the wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.

And as I write this, they're shooting a scene from an upcoming Muppets movie, "Letters to Santa," just down the street from my apartment. (Last year it was George Clooney and Brad Pitt, this time Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog.) Some noise of unloading this morning, a small crowd of crew and spectators this afternoon, traffic backed up a bit now and then throughout the day. By this evening, they'll pack up and be gone.

You'll never have known they were ever there.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Tue, 9 Sep 2008 at 7:38 PM  |  Permalink

Bogart on the Anachronistic City and Transitional Sprawl

In my post on Robert Bruegmann's book "Sprawl," I quoted him as saying that contemporary urbanists' (mostly negative) judgments on sprawl "were still based on assumptions codified in the late 1960s when American suburbs were booming and city centers seemed to be in grave danger of collapsing." William T. Bogart's "Don't Call It Sprawl," which I've been reading, makes a similar point:

What has been described as urban sprawl is perhaps best understood as a time of transition from the monocentric metropolitan areas of the early twentieth century to the interrelated trading place metropolitan areas of the twenty-first century. In other words, urban sprawl represents the chaotic time of transition from one equilibrium metropolitan structure to another.

Interventionist urban policy, like all interventions really, aim at a target that keeps moving unpredictably. I think it's encouraging to see that this point, which I thought was original with me at the time (but probably wasn't), expressed by two respected scholars. I hope this understanding of the dynamics and evolution of cities, and the realization that it's futile to try to shape them according to a particular image, will continue to deepen and spread.

***
Another insight from Bogart is the following:

A good rule of thumb is that office buildings have a physical life expectancy of about eighty years and an economic life expectancy of about sixty years. Houses are built with an expectation that they will have a life of about forty years. There are exceptions, of course, but these rules help explain what we see. The urban area that we live in reflects a weighted average of the new construction of the past. Thus much of the construction is technologically obsolete, from the office building that is insufficiently wired to accommodate computer networks to the house that reflects the demographics and preferences of the 1950s instead of the 2000s. A city is largely an anachronism, a relic left over from another time.

But the living city — the city of density, diversity, development, and discovery taking forms no one today can foresee — will not.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Mon, 8 Sep 2008 at 1:49 PM  |  Permalink

More Kindred Spirits: Mitchell Moss and "Market Urbanism" Blog

I had the pleasure last week of meeting Mitchell L. Moss, Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He's taught at NYU since the 1970s and has the air of an old-time New Yorker, but one who's very much engaged in current policies and politics. And he's a fan of Culture of Congestion. Here is his website.

We had lunch at a charming little Brazilian restaurant (sorry, can't remember the name) on East Houston Street around the corner from the Puck Building, historic home of the Wagner School. Noteworthy about this place, apart from the good food, was how its painted façade made it stand out cheerfully from the surrounding architecture. I'm lousy at describing colors, but suffice to say that it was a shade of blue very much "out of character" with the early-20th-century building that housed the restaurant.

Professor Moss pointed out that that eye-catching color wouldn't have passed muster with the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. Indeed, had the Commission landmarked what is today called "Nolita" (North of Little Italy), this entire neighborhood just east of Soho, with its interesting shops, wide array of eateries and bars, and other unusual places, probably wouldn't have sprung up when we weren't looking — at least not in the way that delights so many today.

True, a few of the new places — one bar in particular on Lafayette and Prince that has completely opened itself up on the two sides and has completely removed the original façade — are undoubtedly overly exuberant for some. However, he opposes landmarking here, as well as the Lower East Side, because of how it would stifle the creativity, liveliness, and entrepreneurship clearly on display. I completely agree. (You can read my thoughts on the landmarks preservation movement here.)

***

While internet surfing the other day I stumbled upon a great blog, very much in the spirit of CoC, called "Market Urbanism," subtitled "Urbanism for Capitalists/Capitalism for Urbanists." It's run by Adam Hengels:

In this blog I intend to introduce free-market thought to urbanists, and introduce urbanism to market advocates. I also hope to incorporate some ideas relating to environmentalism in the built environment. I like to refer to the connections between free-market economic thought, urbanism, and environmentalism as "Market Urbanism."

Through my personal inquiry, I have concluded that free market advocates and urbanists actually share many objectives. Growing up in suburban Chicago, I felt there was something inefficient about the land patterns and transportation of the suburbs. When I discovered urbanism in freshman architecture/planning coursework, it made sense. However, I became conflicted between my urbanist instinct and my free market instinct. Through study and practice of building and infrastructure design and construction, economics, planning, development, and urban economics I came to the realization that our problems with sprawl, congestion, and automobile dependency were the result of socialistic economic planning of our transportation system and land use, not due to market failures as many urbanists proclaim.

• Weekend Reading: Jane Jacobs, Agglomeration, Farms, NIMBY Songs
• Skyscrapers as Economic Indicators
• Block on Road Socialism
• Housing + Transportation Affordability Index
• Glaeser: State of the City

In a later entry (the first one listed, above), Mr. Hengels says that a piece that Eugene Callahan and I did a few years back called "Jane Jacobs, The Anti-Planner," and the aforementioned lectures has convinced him to read up on Jacobs. That, I'm sure, will only make his already refreshing and informative blog even better. It's one that I will check regularly and I encourage readers of CoC to do the same.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Mon, 1 Sep 2008 at 6:33 PM  |  Permalink

'Save Willets Point'

So read a large banner I noticed strung across a building when I drove past Shea Stadium last evening.

In a Crain's New York Business article, "City Quiets a Loud Willets Point Critic," Daniel Massey seems to suggest that that cause has just suffered a body blow. (Hat tip again to JW.)

One of the most vocal critics of the proposed Willets Point redevelopment says he has inked a deal to sell his land to the city. Jerry Antonacci, owner of Crown Container, says he reached an agreement earlier this week to sell his 23,000-square-foot parcel on 34th Avenue and move to Maspeth, Queens, should the city's proposal pass successfully through the land-use process.

"All I can say is it's a very good deal," said Mr. Antonacci, whose father started the waste transfer company in 1959. "The last couple of weeks we put a lot of time in, and we got it done."

If it's to keep things status quo or to enable the 250 or so business in Willets Point to develop or sell their land independently so that a wealthier, more organic community can emerge out of it — which is what I'd like to see (and blogged about here) — that's one thing.

Some might argue, however, that a second-best outcome would be for City Hall to at least give the current owners something approaching the true market value for their property, which seems to have been the case for Mr. Antonacci, rather than take it via eminent domain and paying out whatever it deems "fair." In my limited personal experience with this sort of thing (a few years ago and in another state), if an owner is able to negotiate a good price for his land in an area that's about to be condemned, his neighbors may be able to use it to leverage a higher price in their own negotiations later.

Of course, what still bothers someone like me is that this second-best is a very distant second indeed, when you consider where the Mayor is getting the money to make these deals. I'm not at all slamming Mr. Antonacci. What else could he do? But he's quoted as saying: "I don't want to see eminent domain used on anybody." Unfortunately, this solution still means taxing people elsewhere to compensate owners like him, so that the Mayor can take control of Willets Point. That's just eminent domain in a different guise.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Wed, 27 Aug 2008 at 6:09 PM  |  Permalink

Walking the 'Summer Streets'

Got back from Hawaii in time to participate in the third and last Saturday of "Summer Streets," in which Mayor Bloomberg closed Park Avenue and connecting streets from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park. Still jet-lagged (it's about 11 hours from Honolulu to New York), I got a bit of a late start, but did manage the mile-and-a-half or so from the Bridge to Union Square.

The first thing I noticed were the large number of cyclists (i.e., bicyclists, skateboarders, Razors, et al.) in proportion to walkers — perhaps 20 to 1, guessing conservatively. There were also quite a few joggers. The cyclists took up most of the street, however, leaving the fringes and, of course, the sidewalks (mostly) to the pure pedestrians. And when construction did force me to venture out into the street I felt quite uncomfortable, worried that a silent, speeding biker would come too close. Runners used the street, but I was too afraid for their safety to watch very closely.

On the section of the route that I walked, and I assume it was similar all the way up to 72nd Street, there were police regulating cross-town traffic, stage performances (a young woman singing an aria at Lafayette and Spring and organized dancing farther north), tents with volunteers handing out literature of various kinds, and the occasional but sensible first-aid tent. I did see one biker take a spill.

The emphasis was clearly on creating a festive and reasonably safe atmosphere. I'm not sure how this would work on a more regular basis, but I imagine that participants, residents, and businesses would find ways to congenially adapt to one another if it ever happened, and I would expect clearer rules to emerge about how space should be shared among vehicles, runners, and walkers. Indeed, as I observed, this was to some extent already starting to happen. The organized entertainment is nice, but it would be interesting to see what other kinds of patterns of use would arise spontaneously over time.

***

I was happy that the organizers chose Lafayette Street as the bottom of the route. Lafayette between Houston and Astor Place seems to be transitioning from older to newer uses at a less breathtaking pace than, say, the DUMBO district in Brooklyn. There are still garages and the like hanging around, which is the sort of thing I really like. But what makes it one my favorite parts of the city is how the street widens as it approaches Astor Place. That big-sky openness (apologies to Montanans) blends with Parasuco-jean hipness and tattoo-parlor grittiness to create a fresh, very urban energy. It's sort of like the meat-packing district in that respect, only better. Take a walk there and you'll see what I mean. (Incidentally, Francis Morrone offers an interesting critique of the architecture on Lafayette up near Astor Place that appeared in the Sun back in May.)

Anyway, at Union Square I met my young friends, Massimiliano and Rosamaria, and spent the rest of that sunny, cool August afternoon in pleasant company on the summer streets talking, eating, and shopping. A good day, even if I didn't sleep a wink the night before.

By Sandy Ikeda  |  Tue, 26 Aug 2008 at 4:48 PM  |  Permalink

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