Without interior streets, parents felt it was safe to let their children wander about; with children and teenagers wandering about there was a vibrant street-level neighborhood.

Note: The Co-op City thing failed primarily because with something so big, and nobody owning it, corruption is attracted. And in recent years as the garages were condemned, the interior green spaces were converted to the vast asphalt wastelands they were trying to avoid. (Robert Moses had his hand in it. Blame him for that state-funded quasi-government-authority structure. A big part of the Mitchell-Lama motivation was to stop the "White Flight" that his heavy-handed social engineering [and bull-dozing to make the Cross Bronx] had exacerbated.)

Reasons Co-op City worked: #1: Jessup was a brilliant architect. Open spaces under the buildings gave better vistas at the pedestrian scale. Varied architecture made it not the federal red monolith housing project. Not sure about the state-mandated townhouses. Some people like their scale mixed with the high-rises, but they occupy a lot of real estate. It didn't destroy an existing neighborhood or grid system, but was built on swamp (although today it would be called wetlands.) As a new neighborhood, the racial tensions of "old people" and "new people" were significantly lessened. As a middle-income nominal cooperative, there was more pride of ownership and less hopelessness than a low-income project.

E.g., Columbia is so huge that it's possible for one person in his day-to-day life to see primarily ONLY its beautiful and accessible open space, and another person in their day-to-day experience to see only the non-functional, multi-block wall. Same with Lincoln Center: attractive to many on the Broadway/Columbus Side; and a huge, dead wall on the Amsterdam Ave side (that incidentally cuts off from central Manhattan and Central Park an entire, large, less wealthy popluation (and also keeps that population out of sight of the wealthier citizens)).

A minority of these comments have made good defenses of both Olin and superblocks; but all the comments illustrate that a superblock can be good on three sides and bad on one (or vice versa, or any combination thereof), and that's still overall bad, because even just one side of a superblock is HUGE! Let's hope that the designers of any new superblocks take that into account.

Oh, and a final thought, and perhaps such designers already know this very well--I just haven't seen it in these comments: one thing that would make the "public spaces" inside superblocks "liveable" would be the presense of retail businesses. When I complain about walking far out of my way because of a superblock, I am sure that the trip would be less painful if there were numerous small businesses to keep me entertained on the long walk. And this is especially important for the more internal public spaces in such complexes. Yes, Danny, maybe these are outdated examples, but they're still very very common: some beautiful, manicured public space inside a superblock, with connections to surrounding streets, yet WHERE NO ONE GOES! If there were shops there, it wouldn't be so unused.

Exactly. This point is much more important than Mr. Ollin's record of accomplishments. Battery Park City Park- to the extent that it is successful- works because of its location on the waterfront. Atlantic Yards won't have the same amenities attracting the public throughout the day.

But College Walk (116th) is very vital, and used as a pass-through for the whole neighborhood, so overall I'd say success...

Honestly, I never liked that stretch of Pacific Street. I can't imagine it being any worse. It's just a question of how much improvement we can give it.

It has lots of life and people everywhere. Closing 116th Street to traffic and donating it to Columbia was a great move, but partially because it acts as the kind of pedestrianized street Danny suggested.

Whether something like that can succeed in a non-college environment is an open question.

OTOH, I also like streets which cars use. For one thing, they're good because you can take cabs and buses, which are forms of public transit that use vehicular streets. The problem is when you have too many cars - and for that the solution is not so much pedestrian streets as residential parking permits, congestion pricing and other demand management strategies.

The bottom line is that either a public pedestrian street or a public vehicular street would be both better than what they're planning to give us.

As a superblock all of the 'park space' between the buildings is privatized backyards that few outsiders would venture into- making a mockery of any claims that this is a benefit to the community.

When streets- pedestrian or not- subdivide the lot there will be much more greenspace fronting streets: creating conditions much more similar to what we consider to be public parks. Non-residents will feel more comfortable in enjoying this space.

Of course that's why Rattner wants it to be a superblock: paying customers only, please.

Danny, point definitely taken about irrational prejudice. Nevertheless, streets existed before cars. Even before horse-drawn carriages. I was indeed worrying about pedestrians, and streets NOT unnecessarily given to cars.

And, I, and I think Rob, were NOT complaining about "big open spaces." I think we were both talking about big CLOSED spaces, and I maintain, they suck. Note-Rob mentioned Lincoln Center on the AMSTERDAM AVE. side. Not a big open space. Rather, a big WALL. And the superblock I had in mind is very similar.

Yes, streets are the lifeblood of the city when children do not have parks to play in near their homes (see picture above). If you disagree, well then you are saying that the lifeblood of the city is dependent on the presence of cars.

Jane Jacobs spoke out against superblocks primarily as a poor means of public housing because the interior courtyards could not easily be policed. That is why parks have roads - so they can be kept safe.

The main reasons for streets, not superblocks are:
1) connect neighborhoods with car traffic
2) to keep an area safe with police presence
3) to provide more parking
4) to allow ddartley to drive to the convenience store on the corner

The reason livable streets advocates like streets is because of their intimate scale that forces pedestrian interaction.

I bet if they built pedestrianized streets, free of private automobiles, accessible by police and emergency vehicles, people wouldn't fight those. why can't superblocks be designed as such? Instead of big open spaces that seem "a horrible dead place" when not too many people are around.

I think the main argument here is not streets, per se. Rather, it is scale.

It worries me when smart people have an anti-superblock mentality because they have seen bad examples in the past. Can we learn from some of those mistakes and have successful superblocks free of cars in the public realm? I think so - I hope you can see it too, and fight not for automobile trafficked streets through Atlantic Yards, but rather pedestrianized neighborhood connectors and intimate scale givers.

Not that Ratner intends to build anything like that -- he just wants to appropriate public space for his private project. Whoopee.