John Lumea

At Grand Central, Time for Flags to Leave the Station

The Grand Central sky, as it always was — and should be again

On 10 July 2007, The New York Observer published an abbreviated version of the following essay arguing that it's time for the flags in Grand Central's main hall to come down. You can read the Observer essay here.

Of the more than 1,100 New Yorkers who responded to
a Gothamist poll based on the Observer essay, fully two-thirds agreed that the Grand Central flags have overstayed their welcome.

 

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Unbidden, they came. Not in response
to any appeal, official or otherwise,
but as visceral, desperate, speechless inarticulations of solidarity and resolve.
In a matter of hours after 9/11 morning, there were thousands of them, and they were everywhere in New York — on storefronts; in building lobbies; on bumpers, subway cars and lapels; lining the avenues.

Among all those impromptu American flags were two
placed in the iconic main hall of Grand Central Terminal: The first, a flagpole standard, soon was joined by an enormous 40-foot-by-20-foot banner, vertically suspended over the center of the room. Smaller flags have been hung in Grand Central's main hall before, especially during times of war, according to Metro-North spokeswoman Margie Anders, but a flag of this size — nearly four stories tall — is "basically unprecedented".

Both flags hang there still. But they can no longer mean
what they meant in the days and weeks after 9/11. Now, four-plus years into a war that, according to a recent CBS poll, more than three-quarters of Americans think is going "badly" and more than 60 percent think we should never have started in the first place, the flags at Grand Central don't unite us; they divide us. This is only the most obvious reason they must come down.

 

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HERE'S another flag story. It took place in my
hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky.

Having left Owensboro for college in 1983 — and never expecting to get back there much, apart from whatever visits the life of a good son entailed (this was, after all, Owensboro, Kentucky) — I found myself "lodged" there again, between the summers of 1990 and 1991.

I'd just graduated from the University of St. Andrews
in Scotland and, having spent the previous four years abroad, I decided to take a year off before jumping back in to graduate studies in religion and theory. Since
a job in Nashville or Louisville (the cities closest to Owensboro) was not forthcoming, Owensboro became the unlikely site of my repatriation — a repatriation that was about, among other things, religion.

I was raised Southern Baptist. But while the relatively
small church I attended in my childhood was extremely conservative, it wasn't what "fundamentalist" has
come to signify over the last 25 years. It was more about the "old time religion." And, especially given what a Democratic stronghold Kentucky was until 1994, "victory in Jesus" had nothing to do the Republican Party. Anyone, including my parents, still warming the pews of the Hall Street Baptist Church in 1990 would have told you the same thing.

The man who occupied the pulpit thought differently.
C. Richard Dendler had been installed as the pastor of Hall Street in 1982 — about four years into the meticulously scripted political takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by fundamentalists aligned with the cultural right wing of the Republican Party. The intervening years had seen the consolidation of fundamentalist control of the Convention. And while Dendler had not, in 1982, disclosed his connections to this movement, it was clear by 1990 that he had always seen Hall Street as his ticket to glory within the new Southern Baptist ecology of power. This meant, for starters, that he would have to turn Hall Street into a megachurch. For it surely was no accident that every fundamentalist pastor with influence had one.

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery,
and one of the easiest ways to at least look like a megachurch was to hang a large American flag in the sanctuary. The flag was, in so many ways, the perfect symbol of a Christian fundamentalism that had worked hard to blur the line between Christianity and militaristic nationalism in the guise of patriotism. No longer was the "God and Country" service limited to the Fourth of July; it was every Sunday morning of the year. Never was this more true than during the military escalation leading up the Gulf War of January 1991.

So it was that, sometime in the fall of 1990, Richard Dendler, flaunting even the pretense of church protocol — his philosophy: do first, ask later (or not) — prevailed upon a few able-bodied men of the church to hang a large American flag directly over the pulpit. Not a Christian cross over where the Christian gospel was to be preached, but an American flag. It was physically impossible to cast one's eyes toward the pulpit, without first seeing the stars and stripes.

This was no longer the church that my parents knew. By
this time, in fact, nearly everyone there had lined up for or against the pastor, and many of my parents' closest friends — people I had known all my life — had long since left. And yet, my parents, having been active at Hall Street for nearly 40 years — my mother as church pianist, my father as a deacon — were loath to be edged out by someone they regarded as a pretender. The least I could do was to join them on Sunday mornings, if for no other reason than to make them feel less alone in their own house.

Like virtually everyone else who walked into the church that first Flag Sunday, I was dumbfounded. I took one look at it, clenched my teeth, and didn't stop clenching until I walked out sometime during the first hymn. The next day, I sent a letter to every deacon in the church, imploring them to take the flag down, and explaining why. If they hadn't figured out a way to resist this pastor after eight years — and the large majority of them were squarely against him — they clearly needed a push.

The following Sunday, I returned, hoping to see that my letter had done some good. Alas, the flag was still there. I made it through the first two hymns this time; next, the offering plates would be passed.

Traditionally, the offering concluded with the ushers walking the plates up the center aisle, the congregation standing, and the choir leading everyone in singing the Doxology — "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" — as the ushers placed the plates on the altar table. But on this day, right at the big "Render unto God" moment, the choir belted out "God Bless the U.S.A.," and we were all expected to join in while the flag looked on.

When I returned a couple of months later, it was Richard Dendler who — having seen the writing on the wall — had left the building, left the church, and left town.

 

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LIKE any very large painting or sculpture in a public space, the flag at Hall Street — and the ones in Grand Central's main hall — are examples of large-scale iconography.

How do large-scale icons influence public spaces?

Icons visually define their spaces. Planners often describe any public space in terms of the amount of floor (or ground) area it provides for sitting, walking, playing, having a picnic, holding a greenmarket, or staging a rally. But a public space, like any other space, is never just a floor; it's always an entire room, defined by its walls and ceiling — literally so, if it's an indoor space like Grand Central; figuratively, with buildings around and the sky above, if it's outdoors.

In both cases, we see and experience the room three-
dimensionally — side to side and bottom to top. We experience the space whole.

This is why one doesn't — and can't — visually separate a large, prominent icon within a public space from the space itself.

Think of the free speech argument for more liberal television broadcast standards: If you don't like it or think you might be offended, change the channel. Today, at Grand Central, this isn't an option. The flags aren't one more channel, they're part of the screen — and because they're part of the screen, they fundamentally alter the picture itself.

For decades, Tony Rosenthal's 1967 sculpture, "The
Alamo" — better known among New Yorkers as "the cube" — has presided over Astor Place, the pedestrian crossroads of New York's East Village. Such is the anchoring and defining presence of the sculpture that when the Parks Department unceremoniously removed it in March 2005 — the City did not explain until later that it was only borrowing the sculpture for a long-overdue restoration — residents and other neighborhood travelers were, quite literally, thrown off balance. They did not regain their footing or recover their sense of place until the cube was returned eight months later
and Astor Place was, once again, Astor Place.

The reverse is equally true. When a prominent new object is introduced into a familiar old space, the effect on those who use the space can be jarring, even alienating, as when the flag went up at Hall Street.

Sometimes, of course, a large-scale sculpture or painting is exactly what a public space needs to energize it; calm it; or provide the spatial "center of gravity" that an otherwise diffuse, even confusing, public space needs to make it "legible." Positive examples abound.

But in both cases, the effect of such a new object is
never merely decorative. It recreates the space itself.
Grand Central's main hall is now, in virtue of the two flags that hang there, a different room than it was before 9/11.

Icons emotionally define their spaces. One doesn't ordinarily think of a church sanctuary as a public
space. But architecturally and, for want of a better word, phenomenologically, that's what it is. A sanctuary may be a private public space — a space for a "private public" — but, for those who use it, it's still a public space.

Hall Street is a community of believers rooted in a
tradition that already has an icon, the Christian cross. The Hall Street-ers also happen to be Baptists, a group whose hallmark contribution to American religious and civic practice has been its dogged insistence on the separation of church and state. So to make an American flag the central icon in a Baptist sanctuary, of all places, was just absurd.

But are the two flags now hanging at Grand Central any more fitting? The received wisdom, surely, is that the American flag is always appropriate for such a truly public space. Let's think about that.

Grand Central's main hall is the closest we come in New York to a town square. It's a piazza with a roof on top. And teeming in, out, across, and through this piazza, at any given moment, are hundreds of people of every nationality and creed.

Soaring high above this perpetual scene, the barrel-vaulted ceiling, in luminous teal — etched with constellations and embedded with tiny lights for stars — offers one of the best sky views in the City. Looking up at these plaster heavens, you can do what one does with a few spare minutes and a patch of blue: Tell the sky your thoughts and hopes, then listen for what bounces back down to the ears of your soul. A rare serendipity in Midtown Manhattan.

What makes Grand Central exceptional is that it's the one place anywhere in New York where you can stand right in the middle of the most careening rush of human ambition and diversity, and yet be completely alone in your reverie, This is the urban embodiment of the American idea of welcome and possibility, and it's what has always made Grand Central's main hall a great American room.

Icons must be seen to be felt. It was an American flag that kept the Baptists at Hall Street from seeing the pulpit, their central icon, on its own terms.

For Grand Central's entire history, two icons have defined the essential character of its main hall: the great gilded, four-faced clock below and the sky ceiling — one of the glories of New York — above. And yet, today, our view of the Grand Central sky is forcibly distracted, mediated and, ultimately, blocked by a competing icon: a four-story-tall American flag.

 

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HOW, you ask, could the American flag be a problem in an "American room"?

The flag always is a contested symbol, since it stands both for general national ideals — freedom, diversity, the rule of law, self-determination — and specific national policies being carried out in the name of those ideals.

For those who see President Bush's war policy as an expression of national ideals, Grand Central's flags "hold together" — they are true.

But for the solid and increasing majority who oppose the
war — and whose opposition signifies a more generalized shame over U.S. state policy in Iraq and elsewhere — national ideals are especially hard to decipher in the Grand Central flags, which lord over the main hall as corporatized, Orwellian symbols of state power and pride.

For many — and for me — those two flags are billboards
for the war.

 

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A PUBLIC space is a blank canvas for the "art" of public life, a canvas on which the "painting" changes every second. But just as the fabric, texture, and thickness of a canvas determines the quality of the painting, public spaces also create their publics: We are influenced by the spaces we use.

Scale and beauty aside, the added influence of Grand Central's main hall lies in the fact that thousands of people every day cannot choose not to walk through this room. Understanding this, New York State's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) — Metro-North's parent — obviously believed that the flags would transform Grand Central's main hall into a public incubator for the local and national esprit de corps that coalesced shortly after 9/11.

But what about now, when the failures of Iraq and of the "war on terror" have eviscerated every trace of that solidarity? Or, looking at the military impulse that has always been in the post-9/11 mix, is the better question: Solidarity for what?

Addressing the country on 9/11 evening, Bush called
the terrorist attacks "acts of terror" and "acts of mass murder." The next day, he branded the attacks as "acts of war," which the New York Times reported as "a distinction intended to lay the military, political and psychological groundwork for military action" — specifically, "bombing attacks by manned aircraft" and "special forces troops on the ground" that would "broaden potential retaliation beyond the low-risk unmanned cruise missile strikes of the past."

On September 14, after the U.S. Senate authorized Bush to order military strikes, Bush told rescue workers at ground zero that "the people who knocked down these buildings will hear from all of us soon." Over the next week, national public opinion polls showed support for military retaliation ramping up to more than 90 percent. American bombs began falling on Afghanistan on October 7.

So by the time the MTA hung the large flag over Grand Central's main hall — the agency didn't have a four-story-tall American flag just lying around; it had to order one, according to Margie Anders — the United States had been on a war footing for days, if not weeks.

Grand Central's flags always were at least partly about rallying national unity for vengeance and war.*

 

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ONCE the flags were up, it presumably didn't take the
MTA long to recognize that leaving them up also was good for business. The flags feed a certain mythology
of New York as the land of 9/11 retributionists — a mythology that always has had less to do with many New Yorkers than with the hordes of heartland tourists who saw 9/11 on TV and who believe that the pro-war Rudy Giuliani actually is "America's Mayor."

The New York Times observed, barely more than a week after 9/11, that "[t]he drumbeat for war, so loud in the rest of the country, is barely audible on the streets of New York," with many "worried that the rest of the country, encouraged by the White House and the news media, was driving the nation toward a large-scale conflict."

Within hours of 9/11, the southern end of New York's
Union Square Park — initially, the northern border of a downtown "frozen zone" quarantined to everyone but residents; business owners and employees; government officials; military security; and rescue workers — had been transformed into a round-the-clock memorial shrine, peace vigil, and anti-war rally that lasted for weeks.

On October 8, the day after the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan started, 10,000 New Yorkers protested the
move by marching from the park to the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Station in Times Square. Hundreds of thousands marched here in January 2003 and again in February 2003, in the wake of Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. And in August 2004, half a million endured sultry mid-summer heat to protest the Republicans who had come to town to rubber-stamp another four years of George Bush.

The week before the August 2004 march, a New York Times poll had only 25 percent of New Yorkers saying that the U.S. ever should have gone to Iraq in the first place. How many thought that the war in Iraq was "worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq"? 17 percent.

That was nearly three years ago.

And yet, tourists still flock to New York's twin shrines of patriotic spectacle: Grand Central to the north, ground zero to the south.

That gets them to lunch. What's next? An afternoon
of (more) shopping? Dinner at the Times Square Applebee's? Whichever, New York's latest initiates to the Church of 9/11, flush with all this "New York"-ness, retire to their hotel beds in the hope and belief that, god, it's great to be an American, as Randy Newman, wherever he is, smiles and shakes his head.

But how do they sleep on that? What connection can
they make between the flag and ground zero, at a time
of ever-waning support for a war that George Bush insists on connecting to ground zero and the flag?

 

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THE fact is, if putting the flags at Grand Central was an act of raw, complicated humanity, leaving them there now is mostly an act of politics — or, at the very least, political correctness — that reduces the large flag, in particular, to a fetish of knee-jerk triumphalism.

Of course, triumphalism always is delusory. It was the United States, after all, who, in the late-cold-war ambitions of the Carter and Reagan administrations, financed, armed and trained the Afghani mujahideen — which was itself organized and financed by Osama bin-Laden — to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s. And it was the United States who, once the Soviets had pulled out, left Afghanistan to devolve into chaos and warlordism.

The ignorance of most Americans about this history made it easy for American politicians and journalists of all descriptions to push the idea, in the days, weeks, months, and years after 9/11, that 9/11 was terrorism's original sin and that America was blameless in the fall. This enabling fiction continues to underwrite and sustain in America a low-level siege mentality of fear and aggression — a mentality which, by now, is rooted in a virtual theology of permanent American victimhood, a theology that these same politicians and journalists can use to justify every American response to the very existence of terror, be it real or perceived.

Indeed, to the extent that Grand Central's current flags ask to be read in this way, they are the flags of a false religion.

But don't hear me saying that there shouldn't be American flags in public spaces, including at Grand Central. In fact, try this: Take the current flags down and plant a single flagpole in the floor of Grand Central's main hall. Make it tall. Raise a simple flag to half-mast, and leave it there until every last combat veteran in Iraq either is redeployed or comes home.

That will bear a more profound and truthful witness to American patriotism than the flags that now hang there
ever have.

And it will clear the view, for too long obstructed,
of the very "sky" that always has helped to make Grand Central such a profoundly American space. It is an American-ness that those who pass under this sky have, for generations, felt on a deeply spiritual level.

It is an American-ness that has never required literal flags to validate it.

 

* There is one (and perhaps only one) other clearly documented case
of an extremely large American flag being hung at Grand Central. It too
was used to translate fear, angst and aggression into a spectacle of good old-fashioned American boosterism. In late 1957, shortly after the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the U.S. Army's Redstone nuclear missile was briefly displayed in Grand Central's main hall as part of a promotional campaign to calm America's cold-war nerves. A flag comparable to the largest flag now at Grand Central was used as a backdrop.

Box Is a Box Is a Box

"The Treachery of Images" (1928-29), Rene Magritte

Is Philip Nobel, the "resident curmudgeon" of Metropolis magazine, going soft already? Probably too soon to tell, but historians of such things — do such people even exist
yet? — may well look back on this moment and say that this was when Philip Nobel started to lose it. Asked why, they will say that it was one part Nobel, one part never-ending crisis of Modernism, one part New York Times Building and, oh, 10 parts New York.

I'll get back to this momentarily, but we needn't wait
for the verdict on Philip Nobel to know that, despite "getting one in" occasionally, large-scale Modernist architecture has spent most of the last 40 years on the ropes. Among the first to put it there were architect-scholars Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, with their pithy and generously illustrated 1972 study Learning from Las Vegas. Whether or not you've already read Las Vegas, you should read it now to see how right — and how much more wrong — the authors turned out to be.

What Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour mostly saw when they surveyed the Modernist built landscape of the late 1960s was "heroic and original" architecture that was irrelevant, they said, because it did not speak with explicit symbols that most people could understand.

As Experts with Ideals...[Modern architects] build for Man rather than for people — this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular middle-class values, which they assign to everyone...Developers build for markets rather than for Man and probably do less harm than authoritarian architects would do if they had the developers' power.

One does not have to agree with hard-hat politics to support the rights of the middle-
middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-type aesthetics are shared by most members of the middle-middle class, black as well as white, liberal as well as conservative.

The authors nicknamed "heroic and original" buildings
ducks — after a duck-shaped poultry stand on Long Island that appears in Peter Blake's 1964 book God's Own Junkyard. These were buildings "[w]here the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form": a "kind of building-becoming-
sculpture."


The "Long Island Duckling" (1931), in Flanders, N.Y.

The B-side of the authors' class critique was that ducks
were not only aesthetically elitist but unnecessarily — and inappropriately — expensive:

We architects who hope for a reallocation
of national resources toward social
purposes must take care to lay emphasis
on the purposes and their promotion rather than on the architecture that shelters them.  This reorientation will call for ordinary architecture, not ducks. But when there is little money to spend on architecture, then surely greatest architectural imagination
is required. Sources for modest buildings and images with social purpose will come, not from the industrial past, but from
the everyday city around us, of modest buildings and modest spaces with
symbolic appendages.

So it was that, opposed to "heroic and original" ducks, the authors — inspired by the schlock commercial architecture of the Las Vegas strip — prescribed an "ordinary and ugly" alternative: decorated sheds. Exactly as mundane as they sound, decorated sheds were buildings "[w]here systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them."

Sketch from Learning from Las Vegas

Summarizing the distinction between duck and shed, the authors wrote: "The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional building
that applies symbols."

For them, ducks were symptoms of a sickness within
the basic culture of architectural design:

To replace ornament and explicit symbolism, Modern architects indulge in distortion and overarticulation. Strident distortion at large scale and "sensitive" articulation at small scale result in an expressionism that is, to us, meaningless and irrelevant, an architectural soap opera in which to be progressive is to be outlandish.

Writing later that "[i]f articulation has taken over from ornament in the architecture of abstract expressionism,
space is what displaced symbolism," the authors conclude:

...this is not the time and ours is not the environment for heroic communication via
pure architecture.

When Modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornament. In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament, they distorted the whole building into a duck. They substituted for the innocent and inexpensive practice of applied decoration on a conventional shed the rather cynical and expensive distortion of program and structure to promote a duck...It is now time to re-evaluate the once-horrifying statement of Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.

 

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THERE are still ducks, and there are still decorated sheds. But the line between the two is no longer so bright and clear as when Learning from Las Vegas was published in 1972. Modernist explorations of program- and site-driven form — from Eli Attia's 1972 design of Pennzoil Place for Philip Johnson to Foster & Partners' 30 St. Mary Axe — along with continued experiments in the deep texturing of building surfaces, have often made it difficult to tell which is a shed and which a duck.

On Foster & Partners' Hearst Tower, for example, the stainless cladding on the external structural members is obviously ornamental. But so are those big notched corners. Both the chamfering and the structural detailing are executed on such an "heroic" scale, to use the authors' word, as to mask the fact that the tower is, for all intents and purposes, a box. This is a high-end decorated shed, to be sure, but a decorated shed nonetheless. "Duck" and "decorated shed" becomes a distinction without a difference.

I digress, but not much. For while it's not that difficult to see why many people read the Hearst Tower as something other than a decorated shed (that's the idea, dear), some are just as seduced by — and confused about — buildings that are more open about their essential decorated shed-ness.

Look at the word that Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour chose to  reinforce what they really meant by decoration: applique. That's a word that those of us who came of age in the 1970s would have associated with the felt cut-outs, brocade and sequins on our grandmother's purse. Applique. Tacked on.

There could not be a clearer illustration of that in our own time than the ceramic-tube screens bolted on to every 52-story facade of the soon-to-be-completed New York Times Building, near Times Square.

New York Times Building: Model by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFowle

Ceramic tubes aside,
the building, designed
by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFowle, bears a striking resemblance to the new Bloomberg Tower (right), which no one would describe as anything other than a very nice box.

Indeed, isn't that what the new Times tower is too, a very nice box — a shed — with more elaborate decorations?

 

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NIMBYopolis

 

What would happen if city planning departments everywhere decided, willy-nilly, that the building practices of two, three, four generations ago would now become law? No new building would be allowed to punch through the 6-story ceiling of the old neighborhood. And, well, if the city needed to grow, it would just have
to find other ways to do it.

This was never an issue in the Ohio Valley river town where I grew up. Not that Owensboro, Kentucky, was an architectural backwater. I've always had a soft spot for this little ode to Mies, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1962.

But as Louisville gets ready for its Rem-tacular close-up, Owensboro, the economically flatlined "capitol of western Kentucky," has never been under imminent threat from a rogue invasion of tall buildings. And yet, in the 1960s and 70s, Owensboro, Kentucky, did put a couple of intrepid toes — literally, two — in the shallow end of the Pool of High-Rise.

Given the results, the low-rise people
of Owensboro probably wish planners had just capped their "skyline" early and called
it a day.

It all started when Gabe's Shopping Center opened
at the southwest corner of 18th and Triplett Streets
in 1959. Built a generation before the strip mall, with parasitic ubiquity, began to chew up ever-larger
swaths of the urban fabric in places like Owensboro, making such developments the paradigmatic trope of a suburbanized America — Owensboro's population within the city limits is the same 55,000 today that it was in 1959 — Gabe's Shopping Center was nonetheless and, for all intents and purposes remains, a strip mall.

Originally anchored by a W.T. Grant's dime store on
one end and the Bi-Lo drugstore on the other, Gabe's Shopping Center today looks out across its parking lot
to the antiseptic glare of the new-ish BP station and convenience store on the corner.

The BP, a model of spotless corporate efficiency, seems to look back with a mix of pity, shame, and reproach. For unlike so many other older shopping centers that have long since been retooled into slick little cash registers with cupolas on top (often with shiny gas stations out front), Gabe's somehow never caught up with the times. Always a little shambly and forlorn, it stands like Moses looking over into the Promised Land, a ghostly reminder of a vision that did get fulfilled, just not here.

Indeed, the BP station serves as a "dis-intimation" — a "putting the dogs off the scent" — of the largeness of vision that once held forth on this site. For a shopping center wasn't the only thing Gabe Fiorella opened at 18th and Triplett in 1959. Where the BP now stands
was the second generation of a restaurant — Gabe's — that for more than 60 years, starting in 1922, was
fine dining in Owensboro, Kentucky.

On the point of the corner was a bigger-than-life-size statue of Gabe himself. With his trademark red jacket, black trousers, white shirt, and black colonel string tie, Gabe — tonsured, smiley-toothed, black-horn-rimmed Gabe — stood atop a 6-foot pedestal on a revolving platform, his right arm raised, forearm right-angled
from the elbow, hand straight, and palm forward in a perpetual hello. Really more of a stereotypical "Indian" "How!" Round and round and round, 24 hours a day. "Welcome to Gabe's!"

And in late 1963, Gabe Fiorella completed construction of Owensboro's first tall building. There, on the southern edge of the little world Gabe was building at 18th and Triplett Streets, Gabe's Motor Inn — a 13-story cylinder of a hotel, clad in a rainbow of pastel-painted panels — was a slice of Miami in western Kentucky. By the time I was a kid in the early 1970s, Gabe's Tower — swimming pool at the top; restaurant-in-the-round just below; and still rising alone from a field of one- and two-story houses — was the undisputed marvel of Owensboro, Kentucky.

Gabe's Tower, dressed in original pastels

 

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IT WAS at about this time that Owensboro built its second — and last — tall building. "Designed" to "house" the elderly, Roosevelt House — now Roosevelt I, to distinguish it from the much smaller Roosevelt II, which went up next door in the early 1980s — put 18 stories of federally subsidized concrete right on the small city's main thoroughfare. It's a real HUD* special.

Roosevelt I, in Owensboro, Ky. | Detail of photograph by Dave Spencer

Like Gabe's Tower, Roosevelt I was, and remains, a "tower in the field." Except for a handful of 6-story bank buildings downtown and a few buildings of similar height scattered elsewhere, Owensboro is at heart the same 1- and 2-story town it was in 1963.

The difference is that the charmless Roosevelt I hasn't a trace of the earlier tower's whimsy or optimism. At the very least, the town's tallest building could have offered the town's eldest residents — who live here, after all, only because they have to — the town's best views, opening north to Owensboro's beautiful old residential neighborhoods and parks and to all of its old-growth trees, with the Ohio River and Indiana farmland in the distance.

Instead, every apartment window looks east and west, to the placeless borderlands of strip malls and storage sheds, where wall-to-wall privilege comes with a brass chandelier and a double-height atrium on a quarter-acre lot. One after the other.

Presumably there will continue to be a waiting list for Roosevelt I, so long as enough people need the kind of social welfare that the building provides. But in every other way that matters, Roosevelt I is a building with no character and no future. Ask anyone in low-rise Owensboro to name the worst building in town, and you will hear the same quick and fatal judgment as when Roosevelt 1 was completed in the mid 1970s.

Owensboro's business and municipal leaders had welcomed the previous decade's construction of Gabe's Tower as a sign that Kentucky's stepchild city — then and now, the state's third largest — was finally ready to join Louisville and Lexington at the ball. (It never did.)

But in a town small enough to make everyone's "backyard" the same, the decision to build Gabe's was a Not-In-My-Back-Yard initiation rite — and, as it turned out, Roosevelt I practice run — for Owensboro's rank and file, who sought vigorously, albeit without power
or money or voice, to keep a tower that tall (!) from being built.

Four decades later, Gabe's is an endearing folly, a bit
like New York's long-embattled 2 Columbus Circle (which, coincidentally, was completed the year after Gabe's, in 1964). The tower has been an economic disaster for most of its peripatetic life; has long since traded in its period pastels for a tellingly conservative pale gray with black stripes; and, by right, should have been demolished years ago.

And yet, Owensboro can't quite seem to let go of its quirky landmark. Last month, Gabe's Tower was sold for $280,000 to a developer who promises to make it, once again, a hotel.

 

::   ::   ::

 

NONE of this would be worth mentioning if the New
York City Department of City Planning wasn't pushing a reactionary rezoning of the East Village and Lower East Side that, if successful, will set these Manhattan neighborhoods back a hundred years.

New Yorbanism

Oh, alright, so maybe not every New Urbanist is a parsimonious, fearmongering, paternalistic prig.

But it's fair to say that what's gone wrong with New York's architecture and urban development over the last 30 years has a lot to do with the ascendancy of New Urbanist thinking in the City's planning, political, and media establishments — a traditionalist mindset that began to take hold in New York in the 1980s, well before anyone formulated these ideas into an ideology; came into its own in the 1990s, under Rudolph Giuliani; and now is coming home to roost in large-scale projects from ground zero to Atlantic Yards.

It's true that any number of the planners, critics, and urban advocacy groups who shape political and public opinion about New York's built environment haven't signed the New Urbanist charter and would never introduce themselves that way at a cocktail party.

They are nonetheless functionally New Urbanist, to the extent that they tend to place ultimate faith in the street grid; profess to favor small buildings over large ones; given the choice, would prefer a classical or "vernacular" building to a contemporary one; and are prepared to sacrifice urban vitality to get these things.

But solving New York's Architecture Problem is not simply a matter of "outing" New Urbanists in High Places (although that’s probably not a bad place to start). There are other players, too.

Joining New York's "professional urbanist" class are (1) inveterate Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ists working to make sure that nothing modern or large or even remotely tall gets built in "back yards" across the City; (2) the most Big Developer-coddling City Hall and City Council in recent memory; and, of course, (3) the Big Developers themselves — three constituencies that couldn't care less about anyone's charter or theory but their own.

Together, all of these forces — sometimes working independently, sometimes forging small alliances — have created in New York a mutant strain of Modernist-inflected New Urbanism that is less an agenda than a condition, a word that perfectly registers the sense of a sickness.

I call it New Yorbanism.

Many will tell you that what I call New Yorbanism is really the long-expected Second Coming of Jane Jacobs — the 21st-century reclamation of the Prodigal Daughter of New York Urbanism. New Urbanist, NIMBYist, and Big Developer-ist actors, each starring in the title role of guess who, strut the stage of New York planning and architecture wearing a thick pancake maquillage of Jane, performing endless variations on the same well-rehearsed soliloquy: "Jane Jacobs is New York. I am Jane Jacobs. I am New York."

But neither of the impulses that feed the New Yorbanist condition has anything to do with Jane Jacobs. Line up a New Urbanist, a NIMBYist, and a Big Developer-ist alongside the irrespressible Jane, and it's very clear which of these things is not like the other.

Which begs the question: Where, now, does Jane Jacobs
end and New York begin?

 

::   ::   ::

 

NEW YORK TIMES Metro columnist David Dunlap,
in his appreciation of Jane Jacobs following her death
last April, cited former Lower Manhattan Development Corporation planning chief Alexander Garvin, who said that Jacobs's classic Death and Life of Great American Cities "changed my life."

"It is no coincidence,” Dunlap concluded, that it was Garvin who, while he was at the LMDC, brokered the proposed plan to "break down the superblock...into four smaller blocks" by "re-establish[ing] Greenwich and Fulton Streets." Garvin had done what Jane would do.

But at ground zero, it may not have been Jane Jacobs that Garvin had in mind.

In 1994, when husband-and-wife architectural team Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg were preparing a Lower Manhattan master plan for the Battery Park City Authority, Garvin was their consultant.

It raised eyebrows when Garvin, shortly after arriving at
the LMDC in February 2002, brought in his old friends as the agency's in-house planning consultants; when the LMDC that May awarded them a $375,000 no-bid contract to produce some of the (ill-fated) plans that were released that July; when the agency extended their contract that August for another three months (and $165,000); and when the LMDC just a few weeks later added Peterson Littenberg as a de facto seventh finalist in its new "competition," even though the couple's designs had been among those that failed that summer.

Then-New York Times architecture critic Herbert
Muschamp was worried for a different reason, writing in December 2002 that "Peterson Littenberg are followers
of the reactionary architect Leon Krier, Prince Charles's architectural adviser. With this firm on retainer, we risk seeing all of Manhattan below Canal Street morphing into a cenotaph, a cityscape frozen like Pompeii at the hour the Twin Towers collapsed." 

Formally, Krier is, among other things, a Senior Fellow
at The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment.
The Foundation is the headquarters of Prince Charles's 20-year crusade against contemporary architecture.
A couple of other names on the Senior Fellows list:
husband-and-wife architectural team Andre Duany
and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.*

No small coincidence. Duany attended one of Krier's lectures in the 1970s, and it was this that set Duany on the path that led him and Plater-Zyberk to start their own firm in 1980 and to help found the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are now the best-known teacher-practitioners of the movement — and many regard Krier as its intellectual godfather. Indeed, the reading list of "books essential to the New Urbanism" on the Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) Web site — and for true believers, it always is the New Urbanism — has Krier's Architecture: Choice or Fate as "a graphic presentation of principles by the master." emphasis added

 

::   ::   ::

 

DID Peterson Littenberg tap Alexander Garvin for their Battery Park City project, because Garvin knew of and approved these associations and the agenda behind them? Of course, they did.

Did Garvin tap Peterson Littenberg for ground zero, because he hoped and expected that they would advance the same agenda — what Muschamp called "New York circa 1928"? Of course, he did.

Indeed, Herbert Muschamp in October 2002 rightly pinned the previous July's failures on the LMDC, for "tr[ying] to imprint ground zero with the hokey New Urbanist real estate formulas favored by Alexander Garvin…."

What does all of this have to do with Jane Jacobs? The New Urbanists are much more confident about the answer to that question than Jane Jacobs is.

In fact, DPZ, with its have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too approach, might well place Jacobs in the most telling New Urbanist frame of all. Jacobs makes DPZ's New Urbanist book list, but, unlike Krier — whose name is preceded by "!" for being an actual New Urbanist — Jane is listed without honor.

James Howard Kunstler is more brazen. Indeed, if Andre Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are New Urbanism's leading pedagog-practitioners, Jim Kunstler is the movement's preacher-pundit. He's the one who takes
it to the people — and he takes it there unvarnished.

Introducing his September 2000 interview of Jacobs, Kunstler made it clear that — in his mind, at least — the
New Urbanists had taken up Jacobs's mantle. Jane Jacobs, he wrote,

seized the imagination of an otherwise extremely complacent era when she declared...that the experiment of Modernist urbanism was a thumping failure, and urged Americans to look instead to the traditional wisdom of the vernacular city and its fundamental unit, the street, instead of the establishment gurus...Decades later, her book become one of the seminal texts of the
New Urbanism.

By "traditional," Kunstler of course meant traditionalist.

Later in the interview, Kunstler sought to make common cause with Jacobs, introducing one question by saying: "Many of the dogmas of modernist city design which we both deplore in our books...."

And: "Well, you know the people at the elite universities today, at Harvard and Columbia and Yale, are extremely hostile to the kind of ideas that you were retailing forty
years ago and which some of my colleagues are still
trying to persuade the American people would be good."

But for Jacobs, there was a baser reason for New Urbanism's charm:

James Howard Kunstler I have a theory that we don’t have to run out of gasoline in order to throw places like Houston, Phoenix, San Jose, Miami, Atlanta into terrible trouble. All that's necessary is a mild to moderate chronic instability in the world oil markets. It seems to me that we are sleepwalking into an economic and political trainwreck.

Jane Jacobs [ ] I'm not saying how it is going to go. But it's not going to go the same. This is a continuation of what I was saying about the revolt against Victorianism. Here comes a generation or two that just can't stand what the previous generations did. And for whatever reasons, they want to expunge it. And they are absolutely ruthless with the remnants of it.

But I don’t think of it as an economic or political trainwreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming. And I think that part of the growing popularity of the New Urbanism is not simply because it is so rational, and not simply because people care so much about community or even understand it, or the relation of sprawl to the ruination of the natural world...[T]hey just don't like what is around. And they will be ruthless with it.

JHK I wonder if it will take an economic shock to prompt the majority of American to really reconsider their living arrangements.

JJ I don't think it's that rational, that this is unsustainable. I don't think that's the reason. Suddenly they can't stand what the generations before did. There was no reason for Victorianism to be so reacted against in these terms.

JHK Well, you were a little harsh on the City Beautiful movement in Death and Life, although when I look back on it I see the sheer artifacts that they produced as being just awesome. Some of the best apartment buildings in New York City. The best single family houses in America were produced during the American Renaissance. Just the sheer excellence of what they left behind is kind of stunning.

JJ Yes, but it also had that weight of authority that people were reacting against. So I think that things are going to change just because people get too damned bored with what they have.

In Death and Life, Jane Jacobs wrote:

Most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop — insofar as public policy and action can do so — cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish….

So her observation to Kunstler that New Urbanism is becoming popular, in part, because it is "so rational" was
not intended as a compliment.

 

::   ::   ::

 

INDEED, Herbert Muschamp was tapping into this critique when he wrote that the source of ground zero's problem is the determination to "imprint [the site] with hokey New Urbanist real estate formulas" — in this case, reinscibing the street grid to create stock development parcels for stock commercial buildings. emphasis added

Jacobs, in a June 2001 interview with Reason magazine, explained why she thought these formulas are wrongheaded, and why they are unlikely to produce the urban vitality they promise:

Jane Jacobs [T]he New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop, where people run into each other doing errands and that sort of thing. And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers.

They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect. In a real city or a real town, the lively heart always has two or more well-used pedestrian thoroughfares that meet. In traditional towns, often it's a triangular piece of land. Sometimes it's made into a park.

Reason What kind of traditional towns?

JJ You can see it in old Irish towns. You can
also see it in towns in Illinois. The reason for
it is that the action so often was where three well-traveled routes came together and made a Y. There are also T-intersections and also X-intersections. But they're always intersections that are well-traveled on foot. People speak about the local hangout, the corner bar. The important word there is corner.

R Corner store, corner bar. They're illegal in most places today — certainly in the suburbs.

JJ Yes. The corner is important. It's of all different scales. For instance, big cities have a lot of main squares where the action is, and which will be the most valuable for stores and that kind of thing. They're often good places for a public building — a landmark.

But they're always where there's a crossing
or a convergence. You can't stop a hub from developing in such a place. You can't make it develop if you don't have such a place. And I don't think the New Urbanists understand this kind of thing. They think you just put it where you want.

R And that people will go there, as opposed to what's really happening — that people are already going there? You're just giving them
a place to stop and congregate?

JJ That's right. It occurs naturally. Now it also has the advantage that it can expand or contract without destroying the rest of the place. Because the natural place for such a heart to expand is along those well-used thoroughfares.

This, surely, is what Jane Jacobs had in mind in May 2004, when she told Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker "that it might be a good idea not to ‘restore’ the street grid at the Ground Zero site but to break it decisively. ‘I was at a school in Connecticut where the architects watched paths that the children made in the snow all winter, and then when spring came they made those the gravel paths across the green. Why not dothe same thing here?’”

Jacobs recognized that...

the site itself is a giant X-intersection; that

the whole thing is a corner; and that

this corner will not be a "lively heart," a “where the action is” kind of “hub,” if it is choked with streets and real estate — including the memorial — that max out the site too quickly, (1) robbing this heart of the room it needs to expand and (2) making of the next World Trade Center a less, not more, hospitable place within which a "great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities" can enable it "to flourish."

 

::   ::   ::

 

NEW YORKER architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in Metropolis magazine last June that

Jane Jacobs…had little patience with much
of what was presented as an extension of
her views; she…understood instinctively the difference between the real street life of an old New York neighborhood and the packaged synthetic urbanism of the new make-believe streetscapes.

He wrote that

[a] troubling part of her legacy [is] the frequency and ease with which her words
are taken as pure and absolute gospel by well-meaning, earnest followers who don’t
have half her imagination or boldness.

He wrote that

Jacobs is not always well served by urbanists who insist that there is no model but Greenwich Village, and that there is simply no other way for a neighborhood to look and no other way for a city to work, period. Jacobs subtly encouraged this by engaging in what I have often called the fallacy of physical determinism, suggesting that the physical form of a neighborhood determines everything about how it will function.

But as anatomy is not always destiny, neither is architecture. High-rises in open space are usually not right, but Stuyvesant Town works just fine, thank you, despite Jacobs's misgivings. And there are plenty of other examples of places that do not fit within the Jacobs mold and succeed anyway. Yet Jacobs could often see beyond the formulaic, but the same cannot be said for too many of her followers."

Mostly true, although Goldberger undermines his
argument — and betrays his (willful?) misreading of
Jane Jacobs — when he argues that there is even such
a thing as a "Jacobs mold."

Obviously, he believes there is. Not two years before — and flying in the face of what Jacobs told his own magazine at the same time — Goldberger in Up from Zero, his book on the rebuilding of ground zero, wrote:

If anything could stand for the triumph of Jane Jacob's view of the city over Robert Moses's, it was putting back the streets that had arbitrarily been taken away more than thirty years before.

Jane Jacobs seems to have understood better than Paul Goldberger that even a grid of streets — and surely there is no more basic "physical form of a neighborhood" — can become "formulaic."

Then again, Goldberger also said that Suburban Nation, the New Urbanist manifesto published in 2000 by Andre Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and then DPZ colleague Jeff Speck, "set forth more clearly than anyone has done in our time the elements of good town planning."

Paul Goldberger, New Urbanist? You decide.

 

::   ::   ::

 

BUT what's it all about, really, this New Urbanism in Jane Jacobs drag — this New Yorbanism? Two things: (1) Making life easier for conventional developers. (2) Colonizing the City with ever larger and more private domains for shopping.

One could hardly ask for better proof of this than the description of Battery Park City — New Yorbanism's opening shot — offered on the Web site of the architectural firm of Cooper, Robertson & Partners. A previous "incarnation" of this firm, Cooper Eckstut, had completed the plan in 1979:

The Master Plan proposed [a] then-radical concept...extension of the adjacent street grid and geometry across the property to create a normalized development pattern while discouraging through traffic. emphasis added

James Howard Kunstler reinforces the developer case for
New Urbanism himself — and does so rather crisply — in
this remarkable exchange from his interview of Jane Jacobs:

James Howard Kunstler What are your thoughts on what happened to American cities?

Jane Jacobs It's a tragedy and a totally unnecessary tragedy.

JHK The destruction continues.

JJ Yes, because really nothing has changed. Talk has changed, but regulations haven't changed, lending systems for these things haven't changed. The notion — and it worries me that this extends even into New Urbanism — the notion of the shopping center a valid kind of downtown, that's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

JHK We're starting to return to that, particularly in the work of Victor Dover
and Joe Kohl.

JJ I don’t know them.
The most priceless line of the interview — JL

JHK They were trained at the University of Miami by Duany and Plater-Zyberk and started their own firm about ten years ago. In two projects, they've taken dead malls and imposed a street-and-block plan over them and created codes so that the individual lots could be developed as buildings, not just as a megaproject. So I think that's definitely the direction the New Urbanists are going in. I think that we're leaving the age of the megaproject.

"Imposed a street-and-block plan...so that the individual lots could be developed as buildings." Could there possibly be a more concise summary of the proposed plan for the World Trade Center site? Would this plan be any worse with one developer instead of the current two? Would it be any better — or any less a "megaproject" with three developers? Four?

It has become the politically correct fashion in New York for those with an interest in such developer-coddling New Urbanist schemes to sell each one to the public by labeling it with a large Jane Jacobs Seal of Approval — as if to prove its essential "New York"-ness by providing a preemptive "yes" to the WWJD question that now seems to haunt every new architectural project in this architecture-mad City.

Paul Goldberger did it by invoking the blessing of Jane Jacobs for the street grid.

And City Planning director and Planning Commission chair Amanda Burden sought to create a virtual Jane Jacobs Carte Blanche in a recent essay, adapted from remarks she delivered at a City University of New York forum on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses:

Big cities need big projects. Big projects are a necessary part of the diversity, competition and growth that both Jacobs and Moses fought for. But today's big projects must have a human scale; must be designed, from idea to construction, to fit into the city. Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs's standards, but they are still judged by her rules.

Look at Battery Park City, across from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

Look at Riverside South, on the Upper West Side, between 59th and 72nd Streets.

Look at the proposed plan for the World Trade Center.

Look at the proposed Atlantic Yards plan for the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Plan: Olin Partnership

Illustration: Jason Lee / Aerial photograph: Vincent Laforet

It can hardly be an accident that the proposed plans for ground zero and Atlantic Yards are being fast-tracked on Amanda Burden's watch, given that it was Amanda Burden who led the planning and design of Battery Park City — initially at the New York State Urban Development Corporation, then at the Battery Park City Authority — throughout the decade of the 1980s, the most crucial, formative phase of its development.

(It's also worth remembering who New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — Burden's boss — picked to help him conceptualize his own December 2002 "vision" for Lower Manhattan: Peterson Littenberg.)

At the end of Burden's Battery Park City tenure, in 1990, Paul Goldberger, writing in The New York Times, called Battery Park City "the best large urban project of our time."

At around the same time, Paul Willen, together with perennial Jacobs testifiers the Municipal Art Society and
the Regional Plan Association, brokered his 1990 concept
plan for Riverside South; then developed it, with the help of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, into the 1992 plan that guides the development today.

To be sure, Willen's plan is far better than the proposed
15 million square feet of Trumpian bloat and bluster it replaced.

But are any of these projects "human scale"? Do they "fit into the city"? Are they Jane Jacobs? Are they New York?

No, no, no, and no. They are exactly what Jane Jacobs said they are: shopping centers.

What does this mean for the City? Herbert Muschamp's unflinching, sobering and timely October 2001 analysis
of shopping mall design tactics in New York development projects takes Battery Park City as its point of departure.
It's worth quoting at length here: 

As a demonstration of what government might accomplish in the era of privatization, Battery Park City was an experiment well worth undertaking. Still, by the mid 1980s, the project's shortcomings had become clear. Despite attempts to imitate traditional urban architecture, despite all the lavishness and talent focused on parks, public art, an attractive riverside esplanade and other amenities, Battery Park City was burdened with the oppressive atmosphere of a gated suburban enclave. More accurately, the place is a mall. It is an in-town shopping mall whose major line of merchandise is space. It markets discrete parcels of cubic feet, built with a combination of public and private investment for consumers of residential, office and commercial units.

[...]

The design of the American shopping mall has been the subject of many serious studies. One of the most penetrating is ''Recapturing the Center,'' by Mark Gottdiener, co-editor of a book, The City and the Sign (Columbia University Press). On the relationship between design and psychology, Gottdiener has this to say.

''The purpose of a mall is to sell consumer goods. The function of mall design, therefore, is to disguise the exchange relation between producer and consumer, which is always more to the former's benefit in capitalist society, and to present cognitively an integrated facade which facilitates this instrumental purpose by the stimulation of consumer fantasies. Thus the mall, taken as a whole, is a sign in itself, because it connotes something other than its principal function through the use of a motif that is its disguise. The motif of the mall serves as a code, which integrates the particular consumer fantasy which designers have as the overarching associational image they hope will hide its true instrumental nature.''

Gottdiener conducts his exposure through a neo-Marxian lens. His approach is justified
by the extreme deception practiced by mall designers in contriving to make private spaces look like public ones. The interior of a mall may resemble a small town Main Street, sometimes, or, in the case of the Mall of America, the ceremonial axis of a grand capital city planned on neo-classical lines. But the interior is enclosed within walls that discourage public access. Those without cars, for example, will find their right of entry curtailed.

Alas, the deceptive practices of mall designers have been increasingly adopted by planners and architects in the older urban centers. Battery Park City is one of many incubators where mall techniques are used to market space, one of the city's most precious commodities. Working with mall-like motifs — Ye Olde Building is the most common — they have converted pieces of the city into mazes for consumers of real estate. In the case of Ye Olde Building, the fantasy is that consumers are acquiring a piece of New York tradition: colonial, 19th century, Art Deco or prewar New York. The reality is that they're buying into fear: fear of crime, fear of the present, fear of the city itself. emphasis added

The isolation would be partly mitigated if West Street were depressed below ground. But the psychological manipulation performed by the unifying architectural motif would remain. The motif creates a sense of exclusion and sends out a deceptive message. Apartments behind the facades are by no means of prewar dimensions, comfort or charm. In the parks, the esplanade and other public spaces, it is hard to shake the feeling that you are being watched.

The feeling is not uncanny in this setting: you are being watched. Security guards, surveillance cameras and other devices are deployed to maintain a hierarchical relationship between those who belong and those who don't. The result is not quite public, not quite private. It is not, in any case, what Jane Jacobs meant when she wrote in 1961 of neighborhoods self-policed by ''the eyes on the street.'' There are eyes here, in a Big Brother-ish sort of way, but no streets, if by streets we mean freedom to circulate. The Ye Olde motif of this fortified network of cul-de-sacs only heightens the
sense of restriction absent from the city
streets outside.

Cities appreciate failures. How else can they learn? Unfortunately, little has been learned thus far from the shortcomings of Battery Park City. Instead, it has become a formula for application elsewhere: retrogressive architecture plus ''public'' art and ''public'' spaces patrolled by private security guards plus corridors that look like streets. It has been applied, thus far, in Riverside South and Queens West. When last heard from, the developers of the Con Edison site, south of the United Nations headquarters, appeared headed in the same direction — straight into the rear-view mirror.

 

::   ::   ::

 

WHAT this really comes down to is control — the collaborative determination of politicians, planners, and developers to control; the fearful desire that they and so many others have to be controlled.

For decades, this sadomasochistic ritual has had all sides hedging themselves into fewer and fewer corners, until the City threatens to become simply a stage set for the most predictable architectural simulations of city life and “the new,” already rare, can no longer break out at all.

This is why Norman Foster's novel-seeming Hearst Tower has been met with unabashed delight in many quarters, although it is actually quite conventional in many respects. It's also why the mundane performance at ground zero gets an eye-rolling sigh at this point, although it is more destructive than anyone dares to imagine.

But where, in any of this, is the Jane Jacobs who wrote that cities should be "congenial places" for the "creation” of “diversity” by “incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purpose”?

Certainly, there is no diversity in seeking to thwart, as the NIMBYs do, every building project that seems to them too modern, too large, or too tall. Do they suppose they are speaking for Jane and helping the City? They are not even helping themselves.

Jane Jacobs believed that a healthy city is not an overly planned city but a city more or less left to its own devices. She believed that such a city would generate variety, and that included variety of architectural forms and styles —  buildings old and new; buildings small, medium, and large; buildings short, tall, and in between.

The NIMBYs have adopted their reactionary architectural posture because they have no faith in the ability of architectural design itself to reckon creatively with the New York market's demand for larger and larger buildings. Given the general run of buildings that have been added to the New York streetscape over the last 30 years, it's hard to blame them entirely.

But if the market wants a million square feet on site X, it will — and, in many cases, should — get a million square feet, or very close to it. The question is: How will that million square feet be configured?

One has only to compare the Macy's Building with the Empire State Building to know that there are a lot of different things an architect can do with 2.1 million square feet.

But only four words really pertain here: More height, less width. For a given amount of floor area on a given site, a taller building with a thinner profile shows more sun to the streets; creates smaller shadows of shorter duration; preserves better views for the surrounding area; and can provide more space on the ground than can a shorter, wider building.

Since the basic design of a building — its form as an expression of its site orientation — is what determines whether, and how well, it succeeds in relation to the street, the sidewalk, and the sky, NIMBYs must stop trusting their unschooled instincts on height and make a serious effort to learn from architects about how a building's design actually affects its urban environment. In the course of talking to architects, rather than fighting them, NIMBYs may discover that taller buildings are in their better interest, after all.

The city changes. It must change. We will adjust — and
they will adjust — to seeing taller, thinner, more elegant
new towers woven in and amongst the old New York
streetscapes that we all cherish.

But the City cannot afford another who-knows-how-many generations of streetscapes lined with the kinds of buildings that NIMBY pressures have been helping to produce for the last 30 years: bulky, flat-topped monoliths that offer no grace to the sky above, no light or space to the people below.

 

::   ::   ::

 

NIMBYists and traditionalists and Michael Bloomberg
and Paul Goldberger and the Municipal Art Society and Leon Krier and Larry Silverstein and Prince Charles and Alex Garvin and Andre Duany and Amanda Burden and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Bruce Ratner and the Regional Plan Association and James Howard Kunstler and (even) Donald Trump — these and a thousand conspiring, competing others are the New Yorbanism.

Jane Jacobs is New York. There is a difference.

Amanda Burden, in her recent essay, wrote that "opposing visions of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses towards city building resonate with many New Yorkers today" but that "Jane Jacobs is now the prevailing force."

But this is just one more example of how those caught up in the New Yorbanist situation have romanticized, bastardized and mainstreamed the radical Jane Jacobs beyond virtually all recognition, turning Jacobs, her book, and her legacy into a grotesque cartoon.

For where Jane Jacobs rang the New York-ish bells of individuality, creativity, spontaneity, serendipity, and diversity, Burden leads a self-perpetuating and  self-cannibalizing system of architectural exchange whose chief currencies are fear and control: city making at its conceptually prefabricated — and, for all intents and purposes, mechanized — worst.

Fritz Lang ain’t got nothin’ on this Metropolis.

* The Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America provides another example of how determined architectural traditionalists are to close ranks. On the Board of Directors: Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. On the Council of Advisors: Andres Duany, Michael Graves, Leon Krier, Myron "Compassionate Conservative" Magnet, Witold Rybczynski, Robert A.M. Stern and — yes — Tom Wolfe.    

comments [email protected]

Farce in 1'52"

This fall, Larry Silverstein hired Giroud Pichot, a small architectural animation firm, to create what amounts to a high-end commercial for his latest efforts. This seductive little movie has been out there for several weeks now. If you've already seen it, have another look after this review. If not, consider this the set-up. Movie to follow.

In September 2001, just nine days after 9/11, Larry Silverstein declared his intention to build 4 or 5 buildings of 50-60 stories on the World Trade Center site. Ever since practically the whole world rejected Silverstein's plan in July 2002, he and the rebuilding authorities have been desperate.

Desperate for enough of the right people to believe that
they — Silverstein and the authorities — were taking the next World Trade Center in a new and better direction. And desperate for these same people to believe this Fiction of the New fervently enough to make them forget the original.

Using a calculated rhetoric of images and words, Silverstein and the authorities have continued to adorn their Emperor with more and more and more elaborate new clothes, to the point that many people — far too many — are not able to recognize that the Emperor is every bit as naked as before.

Indeed, most of New York's politicians and virtually all of the national news media — starting with The New York Times — have long since climbed up on the Emperor’s float and, even now, are waving to the crowd from on high. Whether out of genuine enthusiasm or self-deludedly hopeful exhaustion, much of the crowd is waving right back.

It's been quite a parade.

The organizing idea for this campaign has been a
little something called "the Libeskind vision." Now,
Larry Silverstein has coopted three more architects — Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki —
to help sell this vision.

But this, unveiled in September 2006...

...is the same as this, unveiled in July 2002, more than two months before Daniel Libeskind was even on the scene.

Karl Marx famously said something to the effect that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." The problem with farce is that the less obvious it is — the more it seems to resemble straight-up Shakespearean comedy — the longer it takes the masses to realize that there's something insidious going on.

And who wants to think hard thoughts, anyway, when
they could be clapping along to a good song and dance at the Emperor's parade?

If you've ever read Aldous Huxley, you know that this was the crux of his warning: For once society starts believing the burlesque, it risks laughing itself all the way over the precipice and down, down, down into the Brave New World below. And once that happens, it's all over.

Think I'm kidding? Watch this movie. It's a cautionary reminder of the lengths to which desperation will go — especially when it's armed with a big checkbook.

Enjoy it if you must. Replay it a few times. Just don't
be seduced by the spectacle: The prim, slim, elongated, slightly chilly, high-heels femininity of the towers in this animation is an utter fantasy.

Absent the George Gershwin and Kander & Ebb soundtrack — deployed here to render the proposed plan as a kind of sunny, Jazz Age confection — the hyper-congested, light-starved, streets-and-sidewalks reality produced by the bulky corporate monoliths that would actually get built under this plan would not be the charm this movie promises. It would be a curse.

There have been plenty of machinations at ground zero
these five years.

This movie is the the most dangerous piece of
propaganda yet.

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Of Streets and Superblocks (Postscript to The Kinks)

Photo by Peter Page, 1985.

Is an argument against streets at the next World
Trade Center an argument against streets in general?

No. It is a critique of the New Urbanist planning dogma
that streets — and, in New York, the street grid — is in every case the right answer and superblocks in every case the wrong one.

And it is an indictment of those pro-street New York City planning groups who, in the wake of 9/11, sold the public a bill of goods; who misled their captive audiences into believing there was but one kind of superblock — the long-demonized "World Trade Center superblock"; and who used that reductio ad absurdum both to mobilize the public and the news media in favor of streets and to (thus) narrow the possible futures for the next World Trade Center.

Some background: By the time the public was asked what it thought about ground zero's future — the first public meeting took place in January 2002 — Larry Silverstein had repeatedly stated his intention to build four or five buildings of 50 to 60 stories each. Silverstein rolled out the idea just nine days after 9/11, and, for anyone who was paying attention, it was a desperate gambit to finesse the fact that he had underinsured the World Trade Center. Given that Silverstein would not have enough money to rebuild, building one box at a time and using each one to leverage the financing of the next was the only way for Silverstein to get enough, even if it meant delaying the project for years.

But for all the eleventh-hour finger pointing over certain financial implications of Silverstein's involvement at ground zero, no one has ever looked at the design implications.

In fact, all of ground zero's money problems — including at least a cumulative billion dollars in waste between the memorial and the acquisition / demolition costs associated with plans to build unnecessarily on land that is not even on the site — can be traced to Silverstein's design. Although we have not been conditioned to think of Silverstein's "contribution" in this way, his determination from the earliest days to build a handful of standard-issue Manhattan boxes is the architectural lynchpin of the entire project.

This architecture, in ways New York's decision makers have not even begun to imagine, is where the real damage is being done.

The New York City planning advocacy groups who in the first six months of 2002 took the lead in soliciting public input — "civic groups" was the media-friendly catch-all applied to convey a sense of neutrality to organizations that were anything but — weren't happy about Silverstein and his 10-million-square-feet-of-office-space lease with the Port Authority, the owner of the World Trade Center site.

What's ironic is that, in fighting for one of their most fiercely held shared agenda items — streets — these groups, the aptly named Civic Alliance (an umbrella group convened after 9/11 by New York's 84-year-old Regional Plan Association) and the 113-year-old Municipal Arts Society of New York (whose own Ground Zero project was called Imagine New York), did perhaps more than anyone else to ensure that Silverstein's architectural vision would come to pass. For where else were those buildings to go, if not on streets?

 

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BOTH the Civic Alliance and the Municipal Art Society are staffed by planners and activists who cut their urbanistic teeth on Jane Jacobs and for decades have resented the World Trade Center superblock — bitterly — for taking out part of the Manhattan street grid (which they view as sacred); for cutting off the site from its surroundings; and for providing the occasion for the towers themselves (which many of them hated as much as they did the superblock).

Determined to get at least some of the old streets back, both of these New Urbanist-inflected groups used their bully pulpits at various public forums to preach the gospel of "restoring the street grid," presenting this to eager participants as the only way to "weave the site back into the urban fabric" and to provide for buildings that would introduce a "human scale" to the area. The clear message was that more streets with shorter buildings was the obvious choice of real New Yorkers.

These ideas were being peddled in other circles by Freedom Tower architect and Municipal Art Society director David Childs and by Paul Goldberger, the influential architecture critic of The New Yorker magazine. Goldberger delivered a keynote to the Regional Plan Association in April 2002 — two weeks after the LMDC issued its "blueprint for rebuilding" and seven months after 9/11 — in which he wisely cautioned that getting it right at ground zero required continued deliberation and restraint:

"The events of September 11th have a magnitude that we cannot grasp in six weeks or six months or nine months, and long-term decisions made when we still feel the shock are not likely to be the right decisions." [emphasis added]

Yet Goldberger reversed himself almost immediately, saying that "restoring streets will go a long way toward making the city whole...To go from the anti-street private space of the World Trade Center to a renewed embrace of the street is something that returns this site...to the public realm, and for that alone, it is worth it...a way of using this catastrophe as an opportunity to fix something that had been broken for a long time, and it is reassuring that a consensus has developed around [this idea]."

He even went so far as to say that if, among other things, "we restore the streets...we will have been worthy of the challenge that has been laid before us."

Goldberger concluded his talk with another call for patience — "Let us reflect, and let us think." — but, obviously, certain "long-term decisions made when we still feel the shock" required neither reflection nor thought. Goldberger knew his audience. (He also knew where the political winds were blowing. In an early sign of just how determined politicians were to arrogate the major design decisions to themselves, one of the first things Lower Manhattan Development Corporation planning chief Alexander Garvin had said to Goldberger after arriving at the LMDC in February 2002 was: "I am telling you right now that no one is building in the bed of Greenwich Street, period.")

Childs, whom Silverstein had hired in the summer of
2001 to upgrade the World Trade Center  complex, almost immediately after 9/11 began drawing up an all-new plan for Silverstein. The following May, Childs would tell Time magazine that the trade center superblock was "an act of vandalism just as complete as September 11th."

But whatever Childs's contempt for the superblock and whatever else he may have thought about the street grid as an urban gesture, Childs's plan for Silverstein — one of the six the public rejected in July 2002 ("Memorial Garden") — made it clear that he was sufficiently grounded in the age-old logic of Manhattan real estate to understand what streets really meant to someone like Silverstein. Streets helped to organize ground zero's very large site into smaller stock development parcels for exactly the kind of speculative office boxes Silverstein had in mind, while cordoning off a discrete memorial precinct.

 

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GOLDBERGER is right, of course, that the former World Trade Center was an "anti-street private space," just as Childs is right that it constituted an "act of vandalism" at the street level (although I would prefer to leave 9/11 out of the metaphor).

But the trade center was not "anti-street" solely because it lacked streets. No one calls Rome's Piazza Navona or New York's Union Square or Washington Square Park or Central Park — superblocks, all — "anti-street." No one says that these great civic spaces need "human scale" that they would gain if only they had more streets.

This is the Piazza Navona, in Rome. It is a superblock.

This is Union Square, in New York. It is a superblock.

This is Central Park. It is a series of superblocks.

To be sure, not every superblock is a piazza. But every
piazza that occupies an area of two blocks or more is,
by definition, a superblock. And the best piazzas are the centripetal crossroads of their cities. Anyone who has been in Rome has experienced how each clearing becomes a stage set, an urban "theater in the round" for the kind of drama and variety and energy and vitality, planned and spontaneous, that attracts people and thus accelerates the pedestrian, retail, commercial, and residential velocity of the streets that are drawn into its vortex — both the "hub" itself and the "spokes" that spill into and radiate out from it. This centuries-old urban practice holds many lessons for the rebuilding of ground zero.

The trade center was anti-street not just because it was
a superblock but because it was a very particular kind of superblock — one that sat atop a three-story platform, so that every street and sidewalk approaching it terminated with a barricade in three dimensions. The planning advocates convening the major public forums on rebuilding in 2002 invariably left this detail out of their programs.

By using the specific design of the trade center to define "superblock" while rarely, if ever, mentioning that the trade center's chief transgression was its platform — in effect, denying that there are other ways to design superblocks, including on the World Trade Center site — the Civic Alliance, the Municipal Art Society, and their fellow travelers presented to the public a self-serving straw man which they just as self-servingly knocked down. According to their brand of urban fundamentalism, every superblock was bad, any break with the grid wrong — perhaps even immoral. Streets, they said, would be ground zero's salvation.

Never mind that virtually all of Manhattan's great urban dramas coincide with breaks in the grid: Columbus Circle, Times Square, Herald Square, the Flatiron Building, and Union Square (where Broadway's diagonal cuts in at 59th, 42nd, 34th, 23rd, and 14th Streets); and, of course, Central Park.

This is Columbus Circle, in New York. It happens where
Broadway cuts against the street grid.

This is the Flatiron Building, in New York. It happens where
Broadway cuts against the street grid.

This was irrelevant to forum leaders for the same reason the rebuilding authorities replaced the six austere white models the public rejected in July 2002 with the "money shots" of December 2002 and beyond. The public rejected those simple models because they told the architectural truth. The authorities learned from the experience the political lesson the planning groups already understood: If you wish to guarantee the outcome, do not trust the public with the concrete complexities of architectural reality. Deal in the oversimplified abstract.

For forum leaders, this meant trucking only in the idea of the superblock and the idea of streets. Given these choices, "restoring the street grid" — a catch phrase clearly calculated to invoke the greatest sympathy — was an easy sell to participants who, for all their good intentions, were also, for the most part, as unschooled in urban design as they were anxious to do the right thing.

The quickly manufactured consenus on streets helped the LMDC to justify to the public the agency's stated "preference" for streets, both in its April 2002 blueprint and in the instructions the agency issued to architects the month after. Indeed, as far as the unsuspecting public was concerned, "restoring the street grid" was its own idea. In the words of the Civic Alliance's brand name for its forums, the rebuilding authorities truly had been "listening to the City."

The result? The rebuilding authorities never produced for decision makers and the public any design that did not use streets to draw physical lines between life and memory on the site.

Both life and memory would be better served otherwise.

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The Kinks, the Cotswolds and the Next World Trade Center

 

This is Bourton-on-the-Water, a tiny idyll in the English Cotswolds. It's my friend Michael's favorite spot in the
whole world.

To understand why, it helps to know that Michael is a latter-day, non-Tory — i.e., altogether more complex and interesting — incarnation of the Englishman most of us non-Brits have in mind when we hear that Gilbert and Sullivan song: a tweeds-and-cravat-wearing gentleman scholar who — although he wasn’t born until 1960 — still can't completely forgive the Germans; still can work himself into a righteous tether over the decline and fall of old English carmakers like Rover, Morris, MG and Triumph; and is never happier than when he's ambling around a place very much like the Leicestershire market town he grew up in.

Which is to say, a place very much like Bourton-on-the-Water.

Michael introduced Bourton to me sometime in the late 1980s, when we were students together at St. Andrews University in Scotland. That was around the time he also introduced me to The Kinks by playing me their classic 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

It turns out that the early prophets of the British Invasion and the quintessential hamlet of the English Midlands hold some of the most important lessons for ground zero, which I'll come to shortly. The convergence couldn't have been more fitting, even then.