The Battle For Gotham Part 8

Friedman also wisely suggested creating a new "balanced mixed-use" district that would deny conversions to residential use if 50 percent of a block was already converted. Lots of less than six thousand square feet, he added, could be converted to residential. Those ideas as well were ignored. It seems that it's okay for government to intervene to encourage office and residential development and give tax breaks to big box retailers, but it is beyond the role of government to preserve the conditions that foster manufacturing.

I, too, testified at that Planning Commission hearing on behalf of Gratz Industries. Picking up on some of Friedman's ideas and adding some of my own, I said: Create manufacturing sanctuaries. a.s.sess new office or residential developments with a manufacturing retention fee. a.s.sess, as well, current property owners whose property values will jump considerably. Use the money to help manufacturers either buy their building or underwrite the predictable rent increase that will follow your upzoning. Where possible encourage development of new manufacturing s.p.a.ce but require its rent to be affordable in a manner similar to requirements of a percentage of new residential apartments be kept affordable.Give incentives to manufacturers, like my husband, to retain their manufacturing business. This city knows how to offer gargantuan financial incentives to big new developments. Only modest ones are required here. And you know inevitably incentives will be offered to new development in this area. Why not offer it to those who don't sell their industrial property for another use?And why not think along the lines of farm trusts and land conservancies who buy the development rights from land to retain agriculture and open s.p.a.ce? Gratz Industries would be the first in line to entertain such a proposal, one that would guarantee beyond our ownership that our s.p.a.ce would remain industrial.

INDUSTRY NURTURED AND SUSTAINED NEW YORK.

For its eighty years of existence, Gratz Industries has represented the kind of small, individualized manufacturing resource that once sustained New York. The city's once-booming economy was almost entirely based on just this kind of small and medium-size manufacturer. Collectively, the city's manufacturers produced a dizzying and endless array of goods shipped around the globe. Until the 1980s, even while the city was losing jobs, tax collections from industrial New York underwrote the bulk of the city's budget for public services.

New York was never the cla.s.sic smokestack city dominated by a single large industry like steel in Pittsburgh and Youngstown, automobiles in Detroit, Boeing in Seattle, rubber in Akron, or Kodak in Rochester. What heavy industry New York had was gone by the 1940s, notes sociologist and professor Robert Fitch, such as "chemical plants, slaughterhouses, animal-fat rendering plants." Instead, small production and processing industries formed the bulwark of New York's economy. As Fitch observes further: "The whole form of industrial life was practically invented in New York City. As early as the 1940s the city's chief manufacturers were not producing standard, a.s.sembly-line products. . . . They were a bunch of little guys practicing 'agglomeration' economies-the cost savings that result from businesses locating next to each other . . . small inventories, design driven, relying on 'external' rather than 'internal' economies of scale. Instead of savings from long production runs, capital savings arise from not having to sink capital in expensive equipment available nearby."13 The breadth and diversity of its economy and greatest concentration in the world of manufacturing jobs insulated New York well from the ups and downs suffered by the singular-industry cities. In large measure, it is the reason New York fared better during the Depression than many other cities. New York's bewildering array of businesses provided entry-level jobs for the steady flow of immigrants, many who eventually opened their own businesses elsewhere in or out of the city, adding to the national economy. The same immigrant absorption and new business creation process is visible today. New immigrant-generated, innovative businesses exist all over the city and since the 1980s have been probably the most unacknowledged source of the city's regeneration.

The staggering variety of products once made in New York City is long forgotten, and what is made here today is hardly known. Whereas Manhattan was a manufacturing center dominated by the garment, jewelry, and printing industries, Brooklyn probably had the greatest variety of products. Brooklyn was the fourth-largest manufacturing center in the country by the early twentieth century, home to makers of Brillo soap pads, Heinz ketchup, Spalding sporting goods, Eberhardt-Faber pencils, Domino sugar, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Pechter Fields Rye Bread, Topp's chewing gum with its popular baseball cards, Rockwell chocolate bars, Gretsch musical instruments, Corning Gla.s.s Works, Esquire Shoe Polish, and Meri-lei's that were exported to Hawaii to be sold to tourists, many from New York. Coffee, tea, machinery, paint, paper boxes, shoes, soap, and beer added to the variety of goods manufactured there. Queens had Swingline staplers and still has Steinway pianos and knitwear. The Bronx had American Bank Note and Farberware. Harlem had Madame Alexander Dolls, furniture repair, high-end woodworking, and window manufacturing. And the Brooklyn Navy Yard produced an a.s.sortment of vessels.

The diversity and number of manufacturers are comparable today. The variety is huge, the individual scale of each often modest. Many big companies that started small and grew large and then left the city did so because at a certain scale, experts note, large companies don't need the advantages cities offer smaller companies. As Jacobs emphasized, the important point is not how many mature companies leave the city; the important measure is how many new ones grow in their place. That is the measure of a dynamic economy.

From the 1890s to 1950s, the New York City region was the dominant manufacturing center of the country, and the city's economy was its most robust. 14 14 Industrial production dominated. Then the agenda changed to office and residential priorities, public investment in supportive infrastructure plummeted, and decline set in. All the areas designated for demolition and rebuilding were doomed, no matter how many successful businesses remained and wished to stay. For its two decades of subsequent steady decline, New York still had the nation's largest concentration of manufacturing jobs. They were not disappearing for natural causes. It is not a coincidence that the decline of industry here, although started before World War II, paralleled the increasing momentum of Urban Renewal clearance projects planned and implemented by Robert Moses. For the century of its economic preeminence, New York's economy had grown organically with a spontaneity that produced its unpredictable hodgepodge of businesses. This unique economic system remained a national stronghold longer than conventionally believed. Industrial production dominated. Then the agenda changed to office and residential priorities, public investment in supportive infrastructure plummeted, and decline set in. All the areas designated for demolition and rebuilding were doomed, no matter how many successful businesses remained and wished to stay. For its two decades of subsequent steady decline, New York still had the nation's largest concentration of manufacturing jobs. They were not disappearing for natural causes. It is not a coincidence that the decline of industry here, although started before World War II, paralleled the increasing momentum of Urban Renewal clearance projects planned and implemented by Robert Moses. For the century of its economic preeminence, New York's economy had grown organically with a spontaneity that produced its unpredictable hodgepodge of businesses. This unique economic system remained a national stronghold longer than conventionally believed.

By the 1950s the combination of a technological revolution and low-wage compet.i.tion from the South or abroad threatened New York's and the national industrial economy. Many factors were cited, including containerization and cheap suburban land available for the preferred one-story plants instead of the multistory lofts. This was the favored rationale for a.s.suming the inevitability of deindustrialization and planning to make it so. Yet if global compet.i.tion made it all so inevitable, how is it that in the 1980s, Los Angeles gained precisely the manufacturing jobs New York was losing, especially in the garment industry that doubled there? Some manufacturers moved elsewhere, but there were plenty left behind.

Clearly, attention and investment went elsewhere during the war. A neglected infrastructure made doing business in New York more challenging, while new, cheap suburban alternatives multiplied. Rail freight diminished, while highways multiplied and cheaper truck freight increased. But as has been pointed out in many ways in this book, the answer to neglect and deterioration is not replacement. The a.s.sumption that manufacturing was dead, of the past, or anachronistic was as ill-considered as the idea that a financial- and information-based monoculture could fully sustain a "new" economy or that it did not have production needs.

POSTWAR OPPORTUNITIES MISSED.

Three directions were possible after the war. One focused on nurturing the strengths of an innovative entrepreneurial cla.s.s and the workforce behind it. The second focused on replacing it with a real estate- and service-based economy. The first valued the tradition of individual innovation and entrepreneurial instincts; the second valued the city's real estate almost like a natural resource to be mined into a shining replacement. A third possible direction would have been to balance the first two, providing for the survival and strengthening of the old economy and recognizing its contemporary value and emergence and growth of the new economy. Under this direction, neighborhoods would not have been replaced wholesale. New housing would have been fitted in where opportunities allowed. Small numbers of businesses would have been forced to relocate, but appropriate neighborhoods would still be available to locate in. But that third option is not what happened.

"Information-" or "knowledge-based" jobs, in the FIRE sectors, so the conventional rationale went, were the wave of the future. Thus, a carefully planned, neat, newly created city to house a financial-based, information-age, and service-based economy would purposefully replace a messy, organically grown, unpredictable, and fundamentally flexible economy that had evolved according to no imposed plan. For this scenario, growth of the city economy was overly dependent on leveraging the value of real estate instead of the entrepreneurial spirit and energy of people whose innovative ideas create the new businesses, jobs, and meaningful expansion and growth. This scenario is also heavily dependent on public funds or incentives of all kinds, what many call "corporate welfare." This distorted economic policy at best leaves the city vulnerable to economic shifts that would be mitigated with a more balanced and diverse economy in place. Instead, the current overdependence on Wall Street evolved.

In the 1980s, for example, white-collar jobs on Wall Street and in other FIRE sectors proliferated with head-spinning growth. Proponents of this "new economy" strategy patted themselves on the back. Then in the late 1980s, the stock market took a nosedive. Jobs were lost with the same head-spinning velocity they had grown. According to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Manhattan, where most FIRE-economy jobs take place, lost 149,000 jobs between March 1989 and April 1992. This equaled the entire gain since 1980. In other words, by the early 1990s, all the job gains of the 1980s were lost. Considerable revenue was lost, too, due to all the corporate tax breaks given to businesses to remain in the city and create jobs.15 Even more jobs were lost during a period of heavy mergers and consolidations. Of course, jobs in this sector multiplied again in the boom of the late 1990s. A bigger loss occurred in 2008. If, however, New York had nurtured its multiple economic a.s.sets, tumultuous ups and downs in one dominant sector might have been balanced by sectors experiencing less dramatic shifts. Even more jobs were lost during a period of heavy mergers and consolidations. Of course, jobs in this sector multiplied again in the boom of the late 1990s. A bigger loss occurred in 2008. If, however, New York had nurtured its multiple economic a.s.sets, tumultuous ups and downs in one dominant sector might have been balanced by sectors experiencing less dramatic shifts.

Also during the 1980s, as city policy and investments were focused on nurturing this white-collar economy, industry experienced insult upon injury. Developers were getting tax breaks, subsidies, and cheerleading from all city agencies. But industrial districts were suffering service cutbacks and infrastructure neglect. Gratz Industries experienced periodic break-ins in the 1980s. When Donald sought some police a.s.sistance, he was told there was one patrol car for the entire district. When it rained, the street in front of the shop flooded due to a clogged drain that caused long-lasting backup. All pickups and deliveries occurred at this frequently flooded entrance and were made exceedingly difficult. I remember Donald's innumerable frustrating attempts to call one city agency after another, over and over again, pleading for relief. It took years.

FALSE G.o.d OF EFFICIENCY.

The 1929 plan of the Regional Plan a.s.sociation (RPA) first reflected in a formal way the emerging disdain for the messy, difficult to define, individualized a.s.sortment of industries and the similarly varied residential neighborhoods. While this view of urban life already had been growing, it was codified in the 1929 Regional Plan and embraced and implemented enthusiastically by Robert Moses.

Here was the first potent articulation of the view still in force today that the city's major a.s.set was not its pulsating, complex industrial economy, its diverse entrepreneurs, its patterns of innovation and new start-ups, its energetic immigrants, and its skilled and semiskilled workers but its residential and corporate real estate. Rearranging the city's built form to be more orderly, less congested, and cleaner was the goal. Real estate became the resource of choice to effect the change.

This transfer of economic priority was not a natural market shift but one of official policy. The RPA, the establishment's favorite nongovernmental voice, led the chorus for this refrain, supported by "The Plan." City officials, financial leaders, corporate heads, newspaper editorial boards, unions, architects, and the emerging profession of city planners embraced it wholeheartedly from 1929 forward. The appeal of this strategy was strengthened by the federal funding that would fuel it.

The broad acceptance of this urban strategy in effect gave Robert Moses carte blanche to pursue his vision of the efficient city of demolished, replaced neighborhoods connected by an efficient spaghetti network of highways. Under the skillful direction of Moses, the master builder who could get things done, all things would be put where they belonged. Productive efficiency would be the result, so the thinking went.

Cities, however, cannot be reduced to an efficient order like a machine, as Jacobs has taught. Efficiency stifles innovation and a diverse economy, as one learns well from her book The Economy of Cities The Economy of Cities (1969). In this, Jacobs's second and probably most important book, she shows in several ways how "efficiency fails to make a city prosper." In her chapter "The Valuable Inefficiencies and Impracticalities of Cities," Jacobs describes how Manchester, England, stagnated due to its "efficient specialization," becoming an "obsolescent city" and "the very symbol of a city in long and unremitting decline." The economy of Birmingham, on the other hand, "did not become obsolete, like Manchester's. Its fragmented and inefficient little industries kept adding new work, and splitting off new organizations, some of which became very large but were still out-weighed in total employment and production by the many small ones." The key measurement of the economic rate of a city, Jacobs points out, is "the addition of new work to . . . older work" in which Birmingham excelled. (1969). In this, Jacobs's second and probably most important book, she shows in several ways how "efficiency fails to make a city prosper." In her chapter "The Valuable Inefficiencies and Impracticalities of Cities," Jacobs describes how Manchester, England, stagnated due to its "efficient specialization," becoming an "obsolescent city" and "the very symbol of a city in long and unremitting decline." The economy of Birmingham, on the other hand, "did not become obsolete, like Manchester's. Its fragmented and inefficient little industries kept adding new work, and splitting off new organizations, some of which became very large but were still out-weighed in total employment and production by the many small ones." The key measurement of the economic rate of a city, Jacobs points out, is "the addition of new work to . . . older work" in which Birmingham excelled.16 Her a.n.a.lysis of efficient and stagnant Manchester contrasted to fragmented and diverse Birmingham remains instructive. Her a.n.a.lysis of efficient and stagnant Manchester contrasted to fragmented and diverse Birmingham remains instructive.

The efficiency that has great value, Jacobs also shows, is the efficiency of density, what she calls the "concentrated market." That concentrated market "is, in itself, an efficient thing. And its chief characteristic, that it is concentrated, makes it possible for small, fragmentary, exceedingly special, weak or much-duplicated enterprises to operate with considerable inefficiency and yet often get away with it. But apart from this, as far as I can see, the conditions in a city that promote efficiency of operation are in conflict with the conditions that promote development work."17 Economist Sandy Ikeda provides a similar take on this idea: The modern demand to rationalize the city and to make it 'more efficient' is misplaced. A living city cannot be efficient. Efficiency, in the economic sense, presupposes an overarching plan against which measured outcomes can be evaluated. A living city, however, follows no such plan. It is itself the unplanned, collective result of the countless individual plans executed continuously in it day after day.Neither can it be inefficient, because that too presupposes a system-wide plan. Both efficiency and inefficiency presume that we know how things ought to be, what success and failure look like, and that's impossible in the urban dynamic. Instead, . . . a living city is a 'dynamically stable' process . . . [that] generate[s] order through time. It embodies trial and error, surpluses and shortages, apparently useless duplication, conflict and disappointment, trust and opportunism, and discovery and radical change. These are in the nature of the living city.18 The valuable economic density that Jacobs refers to, fostering new business formations and breakaways from existing businesses, is what is being eroded as the city's industrial neighborhoods are purposefully transformed into high-end residential communities, erroneously labeled "mixed use" because some retail and commercial s.p.a.ce is included. This continues the never-ending search for order. Overdesigned order represented by large-scale redevelopment projects inhibits new patterns of activity. It stifles the fundamental DNA of the New York economy, which is more complex, unpredictable, fluid, and diversified. The result is a monoculture revolving around financial and related services-in other words, Moses's sterile vision of efficiency.

Thus, in the name of rational planning for the efficient service and financial economy, many of New York's industrial jobs were deliberately and needlessly lost, an occurrence still happening in twenty-first-century New York. City officials boast of a much diminished rate of displacement from renewal-type projects since the days of Robert Moses. Maybe the loss is less, but, of course, what's left is already diminished considerably. And maybe it is more scattered around the city. But it is like being a little bit pregnant: first month or ninth, you are still pregnant. Displacement is displacement at any rate. The loss continues to be unnecessary and avoidable, given available alternatives. The pursuit of oversized replacement projects continues to cause needless disruption and economic and social loss.

City officials, for example, are enthralled with new mall development where possible, missing the opportunity to preserve small, growing businesses or create new, much-in-demand industrial s.p.a.ce to incubate new ones. In 2007, a large city-owned vacant industrial building provided a redevelopment opportunity for which the city sought a developer. The location was in Sunset Park, a traditionally mixed industrial and residential area in Brooklyn. One development team proposed to recycle the existing building, making it totally energy independent and giving it a modern new design. Most of the s.p.a.ce would be retained for industry, but retail and residential would be added modestly. The developer's primary goal was to preserve industrial s.p.a.ce and advance a sustainable development opportunity. The proposal offered an interesting mix of uses asked for by the city. But, instead, the city chose a politically well-placed developer planning a conventional shopping mall and upscale housing mix. The idea of preserving some s.p.a.ce for industry was dropped entirely. Fortunately, the economic collapse caused the winning developer to withdraw, and a chance exists that the first developer interested in industrial s.p.a.ce may be the winner after all.

Moses's power diminished and then disappeared in the late 1960s and '70s, but the industrial erosion continues under new policy formations.

LONG ISLAND CITY ESCAPES FOR A WHILE.

For reasons not apparent, most of Long Island City escaped the worst of this urban strategy for a long time, probably because the focus and interest of planners and real estate speculators were elsewhere in the city. Our factory is just south, in the shadow of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. North of the bridge had been totally bulldozed and replaced in the 1930s with a thirty-six-hundred-unit tower-in-the park public housing complex-twenty-six six-story buildings on six superblocks and a lot of fenced-in green gra.s.s. But south of the bridge-down to the entrance of the Queens-Manhattan Tunnel and the beginning of the Long Island Expressway-escaped major surgery. It was the strongest and densest area of the whole city's industrial economy until recent years.

Long Island City's escape from the worst was not through any positive action on the city's part. In fact, commercial and residential development was heavily encouraged by the city but went nowhere fast because the market wasn't there yet. But even at slow speed, redevelopment began a nibbling trend that has accelerated over time. In 1989 CitiCorp built a huge tower with a facade of green gla.s.s and ninety-seven million dollars in tax abatements. Several suppliers of materials like aluminum and small job shops disappeared. All sorts of ancillary service businesses-pattern makers, cabinet shops, upholsters, machine shops-were priced out and moved away. The farther they moved, the higher became our cost of doing business. The serious erosion of this industrial heartland was perhaps later than other areas but gaining momentum.

Queens West, at a onetime waterfront port and terminal site with varied industrial buildings, was begun-a ma.s.sive, highly subsidized complex of high-end residential and commercial towers meant to be a whole new neighborhood, not unlike Battery Park City but surely out of place in a functioning industrial district. Five apartment buildings went up in ten years. The plan for sixteen apartment buildings with forty-four thousand apartment units and four office towers on this seventy-four-acre site gained momentum in recent years as new development raced forward all over the city.

Long Island City's Hunters Point community was hardly a blighted outpost. A longtime industrial and manufacturing district was mixed in with a historic Italian working-cla.s.s community that included small locally owned businesses. Thirty-two companies were located there, employing two thousand people doing everything from baking to servicing elevators. Some land had been vacant for years, left from the 1940s when land-banked property was held for large-scale schemes, such as a possible UN residential village, directly across the East River. The Planning Department staff member who surveyed the area in 1980 found that this was a robust mixed neighborhood with a fair amount of thriving industrial businesses. Her bosses did not want to hear it. They demanded instead that she sign a doc.u.ment reporting it was blighted. She resigned instead.

THE PAST IS PAST.

Absolutely no one is suggesting that New York City will or could once again become an "industrial" city, but this is a simplistic way of dismissing economic realities that question current thinking. The challenge the city fails to face is allowing existing industry to survive instead of being excessively sacrificed on the altar of real estate development. The loss of industry is no more now a natural process than it was over the past fifty years.

The twenty-first century needs a new set of definitions for such things as "manufacturing," "industry," and "crafts." New York has become a so-called service, not production, economy. But what is service and what is production? Is Kinko's a service provider with its copying services or a manufacturer with its production of bound books or both? Is the stained-gla.s.s craftsman who restores deteriorating old church windows but also designs and produces new lighting fixtures a craftsman, service provider, or object producer, or all three? And what is the designer who designs for others and also produces a small inventory to sell retail on-site? Then there is Sarabeth's Kitchen, which started twenty-nine years ago as a jam-and-jelly shop and became one of the city's top gourmet-food brands. Two Sarabeth's Kitchen restaurants are quite popular. The brands are sold in grocery stores, with baked goods and soups added to the mix. So is it a restaurant, wholesaler, or retailer, or all three? And what about the hairdresser who provides the usual services but also produces his own line of products, manufacturing and selling them? In what categories are these businesses cla.s.sified and measured in the economy?

Likewise, one need not advocate bringing back lost industry to promote the idea that manufacturing is not only alive but actually an undervalued economic sector with new things bubbling up that could be nurtured instead of strangled. Industry can't be brought back to what it was, but neighborhoods where new innovations might emerge could be protected and nurtured. New elements of a green economy-products to serve the new interest in green construction-are starting here in hidden ways, but may not be able to find the s.p.a.ce in which to grow, expand, and add new work to old.

The important thing is to recognize the multiple values that existing industry has for the city and its workforce and not lose what exists because a real estate speculator has designs on a site or a district. A manufacturer today may lose a market or find a more economical way to produce overseas, but that does not mean another form of production won't fill the unused s.p.a.ce or employ the same skilled labor, just as Gratz Industries has over the decades. And who could antic.i.p.ate production work returning to our sh.o.r.es because of the weak dollar, increased production costs abroad, and high shipping costs?

CREATIVE CONVERSIONS.

As larger businesses leave today, the s.p.a.ces once occupied by single-use tenants are sometimes being divided up for multiple smaller businesses. One of several buildings once occupied by the Eberhardt-Faber Pencil factory in Greenpoint was divided into dozens of smaller s.p.a.ces for woodworkers, designers, jewelry manufacturers, printers, and artists. The forty-thousand-square-foot former Na.s.sau Brewery in Crown Heights has been carved up into two dozen smaller s.p.a.ces ranging from four hundred to four thousand square feet, and includes a mix of metalworkers, designers, video producers, and others. The former Monti Moving & Storage building, also in Crown Heights, is now home to twenty-five works.p.a.ces that include artists, woodworkers, film editors, set designers, and architects.

Also significant is the proliferation of food-preparation businesses occupying old factories. This is especially true of ethnic specialty foods, the fastest-expanding segment of the growing New York food industry that includes everything from a variety of breads to chocolate and beer (again). The problem comes as these small companies succeed and grow and need larger s.p.a.ces, the kind the city is losing rapidly. Many will be forced out of the city. At the same time, Friedman notes, not enough big s.p.a.ces are being divided into small s.p.a.ces, as O'Connell and Sweeney have done, as we will see. Start-ups need rental s.p.a.ces under ten thousand square feet. A s.p.a.ce mismatch exists. The supply is the bigger older buildings for single-use tenants, and the demand is for small and medium-sized properties. This seeming contradiction becomes understandable when one observes that the big ones frequently are converted to high-end condos, not new industrial s.p.a.ce.

TRUE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IS A RENEWABLE PROCESS.

Many familiar corporate giants-Kodak, General Motors, Apple Computers, Macy's-were started by a single innovative entrepreneur. Starting in a small, limited way, each one expanded, shifted its product mix, and evolved into a corporate giant. That process is not anachronistic. It repeats itself regularly when not stifled by city policies. This is the DNA of economics. Some famous companies didn't start out making what they became known for, as Catherine Rampell pointed out in her article mentioned earlier about companies reinventing themselves. Nokia made paper before cell phones. Toyota made looms before cars. Some auto-parts manufacturers today have reinvented themselves into windmill turbine producers. For city planners to continue to plan and rezone as if industry can't survive, grow, and be a significant contributor to the city economy is dramatically shortsighted. The rezoning of almost every industrial district in the city reflects that shortsightedness.

Ironically, one city agency is actually proving the wrongheadedness of the official no-confidence vote in industry. The Brooklyn Navy Yard with more than forty buildings, four million square feet of industrial s.p.a.ce, 230 tenants, and five thousand employees has a never-ending waiting list for production businesses wishing to get in. It can't build new buildings fast enough to fill demand. Only one business, so far, has folded during the economic collapse, and another was right there to fill the s.p.a.ce. Current tenants keep growing and want more s.p.a.ce. Demand grows while available s.p.a.ce citywide keeps shrinking.

The entrepreneurial processes from which new businesses emerge and grow have a timeless legitimacy and repeat themselves if conditions exist to allow the process to continue. The repet.i.tion of the process often looks somewhat different over time, but the repet.i.tion of a natural process remains nonetheless. Real estate development doesn't create economic growth; it follows it. Real estate development doesn't create economic growth; it follows it.

Again we return to Jacobs's point that economic growth comes when new work is added to old and imports are replaced with local production. One of the most important and oft-cited examples she presented to demonstrate new work created by import replacement was the j.a.panese bicycle industry, which, when her book was published, was a world leader. She wrote: "Innovations are the most important kind of goods and services added to older work. But for every true innovator, there are many, many imitators. Innovations make up only a fraction of the many individual instances in which new goods and services are added logically to older work. Imitation is a shortcut. It seldom requires as much trial and error as innovations do. The repairing of things is often the older work to which the newer work of making the same things is added."19 In late-nineteenth-century j.a.pan, Jacobs observed, the j.a.panese economy was in the doldrums. The import of Western goods was preeminent, including bicycles, a popular means of transportation. A conventional response by government to this evolving business would be to invite a Western manufacturer to set up shop, as has been done in many places with car companies. Alternatively, the government arranges for the establishment of a manufacturing business, copying Western models and importing Western machinery and professionals to operate the new facility.

Instead, Jacobs observed, the j.a.panese production of new bicycles grew out of the extensive network of one- and two-man repair shops that sprang up to service the growing demand. Instead of importing expensive parts or cannibalizing valuable existing bikes, the "repairmen" learned to manufacture replacement parts, thus becoming light manufacturers. New entrepreneurs became the "a.s.semblers," in effect producing their own line of bicycles. "The j.a.panese had acquired a pattern for many of their other achievements in industrialization: a system of breaking complex manufacturing work into relatively simple fragments, in autonomous shops," Jacobs wrote. "Parts making has become a standard foothold for adding new work." In fact, Sony too, she noted, began at the end of World War II "as a small-parts shop in Tokyo, making tubes on contract for radio a.s.semblers, and was built up by adding to this the manufacturing of whole radios . . . and other types of communication and electronic goods."

Ford Motor Company had a similar beginning, Jacobs pointed out. Henry Ford failed twice to set up complete car-manufacturing operations but succeeded the third time by buying "from various suppliers in Detroit every single item he needed for his cars-wheels, bodies, cushions, everything." Ford evolved into a manufacturer from there. Philco, Motorola, Lockheed, Grumman, and others followed similar patterns. Today, parallel success stories are all over the place, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft, all garage start-ups.

Ironically, a variation of this very process can be observed today in, of all industries, bicycle manufacturing. Portland, Oregon, often hailed for its early farsighted public transit policies, built an ever-expanding light rail network, increased densities, and rolled back its greenhouse emissions. It was also early in planning and developing bike lanes. This was in the 1970s when the focus of that city's transportation planning shifted from accommodating the automobile to promoting the revival of ma.s.s transit. Today 3-5 percent of Portlanders commute by bike, the highest percentage in the country, according to the Census Bureau.20 The increasing popularity of biking caused an increase in sales of national brand bicycles produced elsewhere by large corporations. The increasing popularity of biking caused an increase in sales of national brand bicycles produced elsewhere by large corporations.

Now, Portland has an expanding twenty-mile network of bike boulevards, and a growing number of custom-made bike builders. These are the import replacements Jacobs cited as crucial to expanding a local economy. An estimated 10 small shops produce high-end handmade bikes, and approximately 125 bike-related businesses produce racks, components for manufacturers, and clothes. Bike sales and bike tourism keep growing as the city increases bike lanes and bike-friendly amenities. A cycling industry and its offshoots now account for an annual one hundred million dollars and a thousand jobs in the local economy. Ten years ago, a small number of those employees were working for retailers selling ma.s.s-produced bikes-the imports in the process Jacobs described.

The public health- and environment-minded city government recognized an emerging new industrial sector. Now it is working with the small number of bike builders to improve business and accounting skills as well as hosting handmade bicycle trade shows. This is government at its best, nurturing spontaneous and genuine economic development. Often, a.s.sisting small businesses in marketing, accounting, and joint advertising is more beneficial than tax breaks or incentives. For genuine economic growth, nurturing the homegrown business beats luring the mature one from elsewhere with tax breaks and other expensive incentives.

Unplanned economic growth has occurred in New York City over the years, but in most cases that growth has been nurtured by not-for-profit developers or under-the-radar small entrepreneurs, especially in the furniture-making industry.21 The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center started by David Sweeney, for example, rehabilitated five vacant North Brooklyn buildings containing five hundred thousand square feet, creating s.p.a.ce for more than a hundred firms. Officially, this spontaneous new growth has been handicapped at best and stifled at worst. The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center started by David Sweeney, for example, rehabilitated five vacant North Brooklyn buildings containing five hundred thousand square feet, creating s.p.a.ce for more than a hundred firms. Officially, this spontaneous new growth has been handicapped at best and stifled at worst.

OFFICIAL LOGIC IS ELUSIVE.

The current official approach to industrial districts in New York is schizophrenic. Officials go through the motions of protecting them, and then undermine them with erroneous planning and zoning policies. On the one hand, for example, the mayor created the Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses and charged it with creating sixteen special Industrial Business Zones offering industries additional services but no legal zoning protection. Zoning in manufacturing districts still allows hotels and big boxes that erode needed s.p.a.ce. Land values escalate because of proximity to new residential and commercial development that the upzoning encourages. Industry continues to be priced out. Incentives are available to relocate into an industrial zone but not to survive if you are already there.

A 2008 study revealed that big boxes are like big vacuums, sucking up local retail dollars and sending them to home offices out of the city.22 In addition, they are huge automobile and truck traffic generators, low-wage job creators, and magnets for more vehicular-dependent businesses. In manufacturing districts, they squeeze out industry. Take, for example, the city-approved-actually encouraged and subsidized-Ikea superstore, the largest in the country, on Brooklyn's waterfront in Red Hook. In addition, they are huge automobile and truck traffic generators, low-wage job creators, and magnets for more vehicular-dependent businesses. In manufacturing districts, they squeeze out industry. Take, for example, the city-approved-actually encouraged and subsidized-Ikea superstore, the largest in the country, on Brooklyn's waterfront in Red Hook.23 Why, one might ask, would the city want to encourage a mile-long site with spectacular harbor views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan to be given over to a windowless superstore surrounded by parking? Why, one might ask, would the city want to encourage a mile-long site with spectacular harbor views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan to be given over to a windowless superstore surrounded by parking?24 But that is the least of questionable notions apparent in this project. But that is the least of questionable notions apparent in this project.

Peninsula-shaped Red Hook once formed the heart of Brooklyn's rough-and-tumble working waterfront with multiple cargo piers, location for the immortal film, On the Waterfront On the Waterfront (actually filmed in Hoboken). Here is the Erie Basin, the southern terminus of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, and the reason for its vibrant shipping history. In the 1930s, bustling streets and solid housing were cleared to build the Red Hook Houses, a twenty-eight-building public housing complex with 8,000 residents, the city's biggest and most insular. A combination of two- and six-story redbrick buildings, this was the country's first high-density public housing and Brooklyn's largest. Another eighty acres were cleared for an enormous containerport. But after many buildings were demolished and businesses displaced, the project was considerably downsized and land left vacant. To accelerate the area's demise, also under the direction of Robert Moses, the Gowa.n.u.s Parkway was built on the pillars of the former elevated BMT subway line, bisecting South Brooklyn along Third Avenue. The once job-rich waterfront was cut off from the upland neighborhoods and the rest of the borough. More than 1,300 families and 100 businesses were erased and the area sent into a permanent downward spiral. (actually filmed in Hoboken). Here is the Erie Basin, the southern terminus of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, and the reason for its vibrant shipping history. In the 1930s, bustling streets and solid housing were cleared to build the Red Hook Houses, a twenty-eight-building public housing complex with 8,000 residents, the city's biggest and most insular. A combination of two- and six-story redbrick buildings, this was the country's first high-density public housing and Brooklyn's largest. Another eighty acres were cleared for an enormous containerport. But after many buildings were demolished and businesses displaced, the project was considerably downsized and land left vacant. To accelerate the area's demise, also under the direction of Robert Moses, the Gowa.n.u.s Parkway was built on the pillars of the former elevated BMT subway line, bisecting South Brooklyn along Third Avenue. The once job-rich waterfront was cut off from the upland neighborhoods and the rest of the borough. More than 1,300 families and 100 businesses were erased and the area sent into a permanent downward spiral.

After the war, federally subsidized mortgages and the new suburbs did the rest to undermine Red Hook. The 1990 census showed 11,000 people living where 22,000 lived in 1950. Most of them were then and still are on public a.s.sistance. Containerization and the Port Authority's shifting of waterfront work to New Jersey accelerated the decline. The most imaginative idea city planners could come up with for this view-rich acreage of waterfront was luxury high-rises with ferry access to Manhattan so residents didn't have to pa.s.s through the rough neighborhood.

While city planners plotted rezoning scenarios, one man had a different vision. Greg O'Connell, a former cop, started buying Civil War-era warehouses on abandoned piers in the late 1980s. He renovated and slowly converted them for small businesses hungry for the s.p.a.ce. Rejected for financing by banks and with no public money and, in fact, in the face of official government skepticism, O'Connell single-handedly proved experts wrong. More than 120 businesses and 1,250 jobs occupy O'Connell's seven buildings, everything from a gla.s.sworks to a music set-making studio.

I first encountered O'Connell in the 1990s while researching Cities Back from the Edge Cities Back from the Edge, and I included the beginning of his story in that 1998 book. But O'Connell, probably the star example of the civic-minded developer, was really just beginning then. He had transformed only the first warehouse, a nineteenth-century ma.s.sive brick structure with heavy timber frames, some with terra-cotta arches. Subsequently, he renovated more waterfront warehouses and other s.p.a.ces, gave free s.p.a.ce to community groups and community activities, built a public park and walkways along the water using all recycled materials and solar night-lights, and renovated neglected inland residential properties for affordable housing.

Slowly, officials and the public took notice. Artists were moving into Red Hook, priced out of the string of earlier successful artist neighborhoods. Then O'Connell redeveloped a former warehouse for the city's premier fresh food market, Fairway, founded on the Upper West Side in the 1940s. The plan was both brilliant and community sensitive: supermarket on the first floor, prepared-food operations with jobs for local residents on the second floor, and live-work s.p.a.ces on two floors above. And since Red Hook is nowhere near a subway stop and is served poorly by bus service, Fairway-at O'Connell's insistence-developed a shuttle bus going to the public housing where few residents had cars. The city has since improved regular bus service, and a water taxi stops at its waterfront entrance.

By then, it was all over for Red Hook as a fairly priced, remote outpost of the city. Red Hook was on the map. Ikea landed the next choice site. But a very significant and historic business remained on this twenty-two-acre site-a Civil War-era graving dock, one of the few working graving docks left in New York Harbor. Graving docks are used for ship repair and are based on relatively simple technology-a ship floats in, a door closes behind it, and the water is pumped out, leaving the hull exposed for repair. Red Hook's dock was in continuous use from 1866 until evicted by Ikea. In fact, it was where the city's own sanitation and sludge-removing vessels were repaired and one uniquely large enough to handle a 750-foot vessel where others can't.

Ikea went through the motion-pro forma, of course, for every new development-of promising jobs, "500 or 600" of them, none of which would be promised for local residents. Understandably, even the remote prospect of jobs was enough of an enticement to excite the local job-seeking population.

Now this was curious. This 346,000-square foot facility would be Ikea's largest in the country. But the 311,000-square-foot Ikea in New Haven, Connecticut, has only 350 employees. Why the Brooklyn store would need 50 percent more than that number of employees is inexplicable indeed. (Ikea refuses to disclose the actual number of jobs created and how many are local.) Nearby neighborhood businesses see the Ikea traffic go by, but none of it also comes to them.

Speaking of jobs. The graving dock had 100 well-paying skilled jobs with additional ones added when a supersize ship repair came in. Apart from their own inherent value and higher pay scale, these kind of jobs are better than retail jobs as an economic multiplier for goods and services in the community. Certainly, no economic growth will emerge from Ikea, no innovations or new work. That all happened years ago in Sweden, Ikea's home country. Instead, what is emerging is more big box development nearby where a fabulous old manufacturing building sits. It will probably be demolished instead of creatively reused.

So first we have a spectacular waterfront site given over to a big box. Then we have a singular and significant operating business displaced. Then we lose 100 solid skilled jobs. But there is more, much more.

The graving dock is paved over for a 1,400 car parking lot even though even though two alternative designs showed how Ikea could have the same parking lot just as conveniently on the store's other side, sparing the graving dock. This parking supplements generous parking under the building. Here is yet another cla.s.sic example of where the city could have had both, two alternative designs showed how Ikea could have the same parking lot just as conveniently on the store's other side, sparing the graving dock. This parking supplements generous parking under the building. Here is yet another cla.s.sic example of where the city could have had both, not not either-or, but both big box either-or, but both big box and and big boats. Officials chose not to force Ikea to move the parking lot to achieve both. As of April 2009, the parking lot has been full twice! big boats. Officials chose not to force Ikea to move the parking lot to achieve both. As of April 2009, the parking lot has been full twice!25 Most weekdays it is completely empty. Most weekdays it is completely empty.

Also on the site were two significant rows of historic redbrick warehouse buildings, of the same Civil War vintage as the O'Connell buildings and several designated city landmarks elsewhere on the Brooklyn waterfront. In these buildings could have been the kind of innovative new businesses incubated in O'Connell's buildings and more economically beneficial.

That the graving dock was of great local and national historical significance apparently made no difference to city officials who treat preservation lightly. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Preservation League of New York State, the city's Munic.i.p.al Art Society, and other similarly prestigious organizations appealed to city officials to intervene but were ignored. In fact, it was pointed out that the whole Ikea project was contrary to the Planning Department's own 1992 Waterfront Plan for the site, which strongly called for this piece of the waterfront to remain zoned and dedicated to continued maritime activity. Public access and commercial activity were to happen in other areas of the peninsula, including where Fairway opened. So much for official "plans" and officially protected economic uses.

All this comes while the city is expanding its use of the waterways for commuting, commerce, garbage transport, ocean liners, and park development. Where will the ferries, tugs, pa.s.senger ships, and other vessels be maintained and repaired? The city is reportedly investing a half-billion dollars for new pa.s.senger ship terminals, ferry landings, and transfer stations, yet eliminated a functioning graving dock. In fact, now the city is reportedly looking to create three new graving docks.26 Where is the logic in that? A Maritime Support Services Location Study, begun in the summer of 2006 by the city's Economic Development Corporation, noted that the "port has experienced a resurgence in waterborne transportation" and a considerable increase in the barge and tugboat fleets in recent years. Where is the logic in that? A Maritime Support Services Location Study, begun in the summer of 2006 by the city's Economic Development Corporation, noted that the "port has experienced a resurgence in waterborne transportation" and a considerable increase in the barge and tugboat fleets in recent years.

So many of these development conflicts are presented erroneously as either-or, take-it-or-leave-it proposals. Invariably, alternatives offered by the public make possible a better combination. But without pressure from city officials or the city council that rubber-stamps these Planning Commission approvals, Ikea and all developers hold fast. The fallacy of designating protection zones while destroying viable places has never been satisfactorily explained. "Conformity and monotony, even when they are embellished with a froth of novelty, are not attributes of developing and economically vigorous cities," Jacobs wrote. "They are attributes of stagnant settlements."

In the press, the favorite themes are jobs versus home owners, gentrifiers versus the poor, affordable housing versus historic preservation, all individually legitimate issues made out to look like they are in intractable conflict, a compet.i.tion among worthy values. These are easy, formulaic interpretations that include some truths but miss the bigger picture, the picture that ill.u.s.trates the potential for balance that achieves multiple goals, not just blind development goals. Ironically, this comes at a time when new fields for innovation are clear and in need of the s.p.a.ce to incubate. Products and processes are in demand to address the market for green products, environmental cleanup, new sources of energy, building restoration. s.p.a.ce for these economic opportunities continues to diminish. Jane Jacobs foresaw this potential in 1969 at the end of The Economy of Cities The Economy of Cities: "In highly developed future economies, there will be more kinds of work to do than today, not fewer. And many people in great, growing cities of the future will be engaged in the unroutine business of economic trial and error. They will be faced with acute practical problems which we cannot now imagine. They will add new work to older work."

Less and less of this is possible in New York City.

7.

THE UPPER WEST SIDE.

What Moses Couldn't Kill A living city is always becoming.SANDY IKEDA, economist Then as now, it is spoken of as THE West Side-sometimes Upper, more often just the the-but in reality it is dozens of communities lumped together under one geographical umbrella, running roughly from 59th Street to 110th. More than a community, the West Side was and still is a state of mind.

The earliest hints of the city's turnaround were first recognized in the 1970s on the Upper West Side, even though signs could also be seen in other parts of the city, notably Brooklyn. But the Upper West Side was in the spotlight with all the ma.s.sive urban renewal clearance projects going on and the presence of Lincoln Center. And the press was, at the time, very Manhattan-centric. Lincoln Center kept the media's attention.

Flanked by two great Olmsted parks, divided by three distinct shopping streets, and served by two subway lines and several crosstown buses, the West Side had solid urban a.s.sets that helped it sustain considerable urban renewal erosion without killing it entirely. What the West Side also had that served as a crucial ingredient of rebirth was a wealth of solid, if badly abused, brownstones-blocks after blocks of them. Renovators started slowly buying them in the 1960s. In 1969, Donald and I bought and fully renovated a four-story brownstone, creating a duplex for ourselves and two floors of rental apartments above.1 7.1 Our brownstone on Eighty-seventh Street. We occupied the bas.e.m.e.nt and parlor floor and rented the top two floors.

Most West Side brownstones had been built in the late 1890s for middle-cla.s.s families but had not fared well over time. They had been broken up into tiny apartments and neglected by absentee landlords. But they were easily converted back to single-family, double-duplex dwellings or other combinations. House tours became a popular vehicle for early "brownstoners" to publicize the alternative lifestyle they were pioneering. Donald and I happened to go on one, were impressed, and thought a brownstone was the answer to our desire to stay in the city. We were already comfortably settled in a two-bedroom apartment on West Eighty-first Street across from the Planetarium and a half block from the Central Park playground. But the brownstones we saw were extremely attractive and still cheap. A house, backyard, barbecue, sandbox, and still be in the city? What an appealing concept, a compromise for the suburban resister.

I never thought of Donald and myself as urban pioneers, but when we bought the brownstone on the Upper West Side, many of our friends and relatives thought of us as such. How could we not want a house in the suburbs? When the kids started to come, most young couples at that time in the late 1960s headed out. This was the pattern expected of our generation. Neither Donald nor I would hear of it. Donald had been raised in a near-in suburb but wanted to stay in the city, as I did. Other city couples were resisting the outward trend, finding ways to stay in the city.

A NEW URBAN RENEWAL PARADIGM.

Three years later, we were gone, back to apartment house living. It was too much "pioneerism." The neighborhood was in a state of flux. Our area of the Upper West Side was under intense pressure from the thousands of legitimately angry West Side residents displaced for Lincoln Center and Lincoln Towers to the south. We were on the southernmost block of the West Side Urban Renewal area that uniquely called for a combination of brownstone conservation on the midblocks and new apartment-house construction on the avenues. This plan was promoted by the City Planning Commission, under chairman James Felt, in contrast to the Moses total-clearance pattern. Here, primarily the avenues were cleared and replaced with both public housing and high-rise, economically mixed apartment houses; the midblock brownstones were, for the most part, spared. These were the same quality brownstones Moses declared irredeemable elsewhere. This was a new urban renewal model, new for New York City and, in fact, for the country.

The AIA Guide AIA Guide notes: notes: The concepts that emerged were radically different from those of earlier renewal efforts. Exploitation of the highest possible rental scales was abandoned. Clearance and rebuilding from scratch, once the only redevelopment tools, were combined with rehabilitation and renovation, particularly of the basically sound side-street brownstone row houses. Steps were taken to ensure an economic and social mix within the district by providing not only separate low-rent projects but also low-rent families within middle-income developments. Finally, the plan provided for phased development from West 97th Street south to encourage the relocation of on-site tenants.2 The idea of a neighborhood of mixed-income housing really appealed to us. But understandable unrest on the part of displaced low-income families to the south had resulted in frequent protests, community conflict, and personal unease. Hundreds of displacees were now demanding replacement housing.

Urban renewal never produced new quant.i.ty as much as it destroyed old. The bulk of what was built, in this case Lincoln Towers just north of Lincoln Center and most of the West Side Urban Renewal area, was intentionally for the middle cla.s.s, beyond the financial reach of the displaced poor. Keeping the middle cla.s.s in the city was the avowed purpose. Thus, the legitimate pressure for more low-income housing made life difficult and unpleasant for many pioneering young families. The tensions, heated community meetings, and angry protests were unsettling, to say the least. Neighborhood stabilization was difficult to achieve. An overall tension in the community impeded the potential for community spirit and comfortable integration. Crime was already a problem. All this discouraged us.

It was a particularly painful situation for me, already juggling full-time work at the newspaper with motherhood at a time when this combination was not common and very difficult. The idea, so accepted today, of taking a few years out of a career to stay home with young children was for me not an option. I would never have gotten my job back. Some of my editors were already leery of having a working mother as a reporter. I was the first at the New York Post New York Post since World War II. Other women reporters were married, but the only other one with children was the fashion editor and she was a grandmother. I did, however, find ways to restrain my career in order to give me more time with my kids. Feature a.s.signments allowed me to leave home late in the morning or come home early in the afternoon. Occasionally, I persuaded an editor to let me write the story at home. I also had wonderful child care, but our babysitter even felt unsafe taking the children to the playground during the day. since World War II. Other women reporters were married, but the only other one with children was the fashion editor and she was a grandmother. I did, however, find ways to restrain my career in order to give me more time with my kids. Feature a.s.signments allowed me to leave home late in the morning or come home early in the afternoon. Occasionally, I persuaded an editor to let me write the story at home. I also had wonderful child care, but our babysitter even felt unsafe taking the children to the playground during the day.

My mother lived around the corner, frequently visited my kids, but she, too, was uncomfortable walking with them in the neighborhood. The acc.u.mulated tensions were too much. I was confident that in another decade, the neighborhood would be fabulous, but in the meantime, we had two daughters to raise and a life to lead. We couldn't wait. I was correct about the neighborhood eventually being fabulous. I was off by only a couple of years. It took a little longer than a decade, but, for sure, today the area's an established winner.

THE ERA OF FEAR.

It is easy to forget the well-founded fears we lived with in the New York of the 1970s. Crime seemed rampant. Fear was the emotion of the day. It motivated many residents to move away. The 1970s saw the explosion of drugs, especially crack.

Gold necklaces were torn off pedestrians. Handbags were s.n.a.t.c.hed, giving rise to the popularity of the shoulder bag. Young kids had the sneakers they were carrying taken away from them as they traveled to and from school. In parks, kids were known to have their bikes taken out from under them by menacing kids. Flower boxes were emptied or taken in total. Cars were constantly broken into or stolen. And bikes were an immediate invitation to disappearance even if locked with a heavy chain. These were facts of life all New Yorkers lived with, not just pioneering brownstoners. But despite the hurdles, slowly but surely, more families were buying brownstones and were taking the risk.

Not us. We tried but wanted out. We jumped at an opportunity in a wonderful Central Park West apartment house, one of the Art Deco twin towers that makes the Central Park West skyline famous. Back to traditional door-man apartment-house living. We sold the brownstone at a loss and have not moved since. That was 1972.

We had experienced petty crime firsthand. Most was nonthreatening. Prowlers on the roof. Unsuccessful break-in attempts. Stolen bikes and plants. But the worst occurrence I recorded in the following story. Ironically, this style of the firsthand story became a New York City journalistic art form in the 1970s-writers detailing their personal encounter with crime. In the New York of today, this experience isn't remotely antic.i.p.ated.

It might seem strange, but the following incident was not what caused our departure. It was more of an acc.u.mulation of things-disappointment in the neighborhood, the hostilities and tensions in the community, the difficulties raising young children under tense conditions, and, of course, daily fear. But many families remained undaunted, and some neighbors and friends from those days are still in place and happily so. And although the following occurrence did not drive us out, it was indeed traumatic.

"Mugged: A Victim's Story"New York Post Daily Magazine, February 6, 1971"You've now had the prototypical New York City experience. You've totally committed yourselves to remaining here and raising your children here. You've renovated a brownstone and now you've been mugged."--A Friend.It is the ultimate fear we all live with in this city, the fear of being mugged. It is the nightmare that all New Yorkers shared but until it happens to you, it remains just an abstraction, something you've heard about or read about, something that happened to someone else.Then it happens to you and you discover that the reality is more brutal, more psychologically devastating than you imagined possible. You know it could have been worse physically, you know you could have been killed. But you can't imagine how anything could jar your psyche more.It happened to me. I know.It was a weekday evening. My husband and I had just come out of an apartment house on 86th St. between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. The hour was 11:30. We had only a three-minute walk to our house around the corner on 87th. It was snowing slightly. The ground was slippery. We walked carefully, focusing on the ground.Eighty-sixth is a major crosstown street, rarely deserted, always plenty of cars and buses pa.s.sing by. Upper West Side residents hardly concern themselves with the major thoroughfares; it is the side streets, like the one we live on, that we worry about. They are frequently deserted. Anyone with normal city fears would antic.i.p.ate a mugger lurk