Streetsblog New York City

We continue our series on the next four years of New York City transportation and planning policy with today's essay by Ron Shiffman. Co-founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development and a professor at the Pratt Institute's Graduate Center for Planning, Shiffman served on the City Planning Commission from 1990 to 1996. Read previous installments in this series here, here, and here.

When Michael Bloomberg was first elected eight years ago, I and many others thought such a wealthy mayor might assert his independence from developers who choose to serve their own self-interest at the expense of the city's long term needs. Six years later, the release of PlaNYC 2030 finally gave hope to that desire. The mayor put forth a vision that, despite some shortcomings, promised a framework for sustainable, equitable growth. For all the city's progress toward advancing those goals, however, it has taken several steps backward by continuing to build real estate projects that erode the walkable city. Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election provides an opportunity to correct these oversights and refine his administration’s legacy on building an equitable and environmentally sustainable city.

When it comes to sustainable development, the mayor's record is mixed at best. Many of his agencies -- such as the Department of Design and Construction with David Burney at its helm, the Parks Department under the able direction of Adrian Benepe, and the Department of Transportation under the energetic and farsighted leadership of Janette Sadik-Khan -- have done a fabulous job promoting and implementing the goals of PlaNYC. With some fine-tuning of the process used to plan our public places, calm traffic, and reclaim our streets, the city can engage more communities in the introduction of these much needed innovations and prevent a harmful backlash.

Unfortunately, creativity, innovation and commitment to the principles of sustainability stop with these few agencies. Other public servants charged with planning for the future of the city have abdicated that responsibility. The Department of City Planning, despite some exemplary work on open space design and enhancing opportunities for world-class architecture, has ignored planning for the New York City of 2030. Instead, it has focused on rezoning the city as if we still lived in the 1960s, using the language and planning concepts of that discredited era rather than preparing to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

Together with private developers, the city's Economic Development Corporation and other quasi-government entities, the planning department has embraced outmoded redevelopment plans for Willets Point in Queens, Hudson Yards on the far West Side, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and Columbia University's expansion into Manhattanville without any substantive regard to the principles and goals of PlaNYC.

These large-scale development plans fundamentally ignore the issue of sustainability. And they cast the form of the city in concrete for a century or more.

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Forest City's Atlantic Yards project would create two massive superblocks in Prospect Hts., Brooklyn

Portland, Oregon, which has ascended the ranks of cities judged most walkable, bikable, and urbane, benefits mightily from its small 200-foot square blocks, which provide businesses more street frontage and people more streets on which to bike, cycle and walk. These short blocks did not create Oregon's and Portland's growth management and pro-transit policies, but they gave them terrain on which these policies could take root.

Contrast that to Salt Lake City. Its founder Brigham Young for some reason opted for one of the widest urban grids anywhere. (I've read he wanted teams of cattle to be able to turn around?) Its streets are laid out in a grid where each blocks is 660 feet square - which means that nine Portland blocks to fill up one Salt Lake superblock. This makes getting around Salt Lake City on foot very difficult, as I can personally attest.

New York City is somewhere in the middle, at least in Manhattan. Its numbered streets are set at a pedestrian friendly 200 feet apart while its avenues are set at a pedestrian unfriendly 800 feet apart, except where broken in two by Lexington, Madison or other mid-grid streets. This deficiency has long been noted, so if anything the city should have a set policy creating new streets when possible, and so to create shorter, more pedestrian friendly blocks.

But that is not the case. Instead the city and state often encourage one of the deadest institutions, the Superblock. Not content with blocks that are too large already, the city and state often team up to create even bigger blocks, and not even pedestrian friendly versions of those.

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The folks over at the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership have unveiled the results of a collaboration with the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) undertaken over the last couple of years. Two public workshops were held to get community input on the plans, which address four different areas of Myrtle Avenue, one of the main commercial streets for Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.

The days when Myrtle was known as "Murder Avenue" are long past. Thriving shops and restaurants line much of the street, in part thanks to the efforts of the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project and the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Business Improvement District (constituent members of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership). But many areas remain where the street's potential is going unrealized, and that's what the collaboration with PPS was meant to address. "We were looking at streetscape conditions," says Vaidila Kungys, the partnership's program manager for planning and economic development. "There's a lot of clutter, crowded sidewalks and problematic intersections."

There are also huge swaths of underused or poorly used space, including the area between Carlton and Ashland, which borders Fort Greene Park and the Walt Whitman Houses, and the portion from Hall Street to Emerson Place, which fronts on a superblock. Because of a four-block service road in this section, seven lanes devoted to vehicles separate one side of the street from the other. Pratt's freshly revealed plans for the site at 524 Myrtle could be a catalyst for improvements here.

The report shows how a service road next to a superblock marginalizes pedestrians

Michael Blaise Backer, executive director of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, is optimistic about the group's chances for implementing at least some of the recommendations that come out of the study before too much time passes. Some solutions, like the ones proposed for the intersection of Clinton Avenue and Myrtle (sketches above), are relatively simple, and Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership's solid track record with community leaders, business owners and politicians will certainly make a difference. "We've got all the stakeholders involved," says Backer. He notes as well that the current leadership at DOT is likely to be receptive to this sort of "livable streets" improvement.

We'll keep an eye on it.

Last weekend the New York Times published a nice piece about a resurgence in downtown Manhattan street life.

Optimism abounds now among developers and merchants, who are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into real estate along the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan. They are counting on the district, in its next incarnation, to be not just a collection of office towers and trading floors, but also a self-sustaining residential neighborhood that will appeal to families.

Office space, now in short supply, is renting for more than it did before 9/11. Over the next several years, around 14 million square feet of commercial space is scheduled to be built, replacing the offices and stores destroyed on 9/11, according to data compiled by Cushman & Wakefield, a large real estate brokerage.

With new retail, restaurants and even schools opening up, businesses are enjoying an influx of mostly well-to-do customers who are drawn to areas like Stone Street, which has been transformed from "a trash-filled alley" to "one of the liveliest social scenes in Manhattan, a slice of South Beach tucked into the financial district -- minus the palm trees and bikinis."

As pointed out by the Times and noted on Gristmill, the Lower Manhattan renaissance has been aided by $6 billion in tax exempt federal bonds (and though no parking garages are mentioned, the Times piece does refer to a new BMW dealership).

Car lots aside, encouraging as the downtown revival may be, some lament that housing costs are climbing out of reach, as the median downtown household income has risen to $165,000. While a typically gloves-off debate on the ethics of "FiDi" development unfolds over at Curbed, a Gristmill commenter wonders what impact a redeveloped World Trade Center site will have on downtown as a functional neighborhood:

I don't think it's time for urban advocates to be declaring victory and resting on their laurels. The rebuilt WTC won't be any better than the Avenue of the Americas in terms of walkability; the blank glassy facades, superblocks and windswept plazas of the original WTC will live on in the new plan. The base of the Freedom Tower in particular will be as deadening to street life as any suburban self-storage warehouse.

Photo: drocpsu/Flickr

In this week's New York Observer, Matthew Schuerman talks at length with Laurie Olin, the landscape architect who may or may not have been teamed up with starchitect Frank Gehry on Forest City Enterprise's Atlantic Yards project "to compensate for Mr. Gehry's reputed lack of urban-planning skills." Schuerman writes:

Mr. Olin's role in the project is far more than figuring out what trees to plant, and it cuts to the very heart of the controversy: the placement of the buildings that enclose eight acres of open space, the closure of city streets, and accommodating 16,000 residents on 22 acres of land.

One of the more controversial aspects of the Atlantic Yards project, the Observer reports, is the plan to de-map:

a one-block stretch of Pacific Street, melting the two adjoining blocks together into a "superblock" - the type of mid-20th-century urban planning widely used in housing projects, but since discredited by Jane Jacobs and a whole school of so-called urbanists. They have argued that superblocks discourage the type of street life that makes places like the West Village so successful.

Olin is clearly not impressed with "taboos against superblocks and the tower-in-park design."

"If I put a street through here, I have less space for people and I have more cars," he continued. "When people say 'superblock'- what's wrong with what this is? Because I don't see how adding one car in here is going to make it a better space. I think space on streets is actually useless space."

The folks over at BrooklynSpeaks see it otherwise:

Streets define the public realm in NYC. Nearly every park in the city is surrounded by public streets. And streets themselves are places of activity and recreation. Far from being "useless space," Brooklynites use their streets to hang out on stoops and eat and drink in restaurants that spill out on to the sidewalk. Aside from parks and plazas, New York's public realm is its streets. The bottom line is that demapping Pacific Street would turn land that is now totally public into semi-private open space, mainly benefiting the developer and the future residents of the project, who will enjoy the use of parkland that won't be for all of us.

Jonathan Cohn of BrooklynViews was writing about this issue a year ago. He found City Planning Chair Amanda Burden's position particularly puzzling:

Last week, City Planning Chair Amanda Burden made a strong case for an open Cortlandt Street at the World Trade Center site. "We need our streets," she said, "we need connectivity, we need an open Cortlandt Street for light and air and to create normal blocks". But that's Manhattan. Brooklyn is different.