The Battle For Gotham Part 9

The Upper West Side reflected the best and the worst of what was happening in New York in the 1970s. It was one of the most concentrated Robert Moses battlegrounds but also in the vanguard of incremental renewal. This area was a trendsetter nationally for row-house living in a similar way that SoHo was for loft living. The New York City lifestyle, personified here, made good media copy. Brownstone living, especially the "urban duplex," was making it into national magazines. My editors recognized what was happening and knew I was living in the midst of it. They a.s.signed me to write at length about the West Side.

Today, the West Side is actually chic, a shocking development for longtime residents like myself. But in 1974, it was far from it. In fact, you had to be a keen observer to recognize the precursors of good things to come. In December 1974 I wrote: The area seems to sp.a.w.n more urban chauvinists per square foot, more promoters of community spirit and defenders of have-not groups than any other neighborhood. It seems, as well, to contain more activists in far-flung causes, more aspiring politicians, more improvement groups and, certainly, more beards and blue jeans than any area outside Greenwich Village.Most West Siders will recite as if by rote the same litany of advantages that makes their neighborhood so appealing-sound housing of every kind, sometimes even at rational prices; excellent transportation including two subway lines and a variety of buses; ethnic diversity that is not only reflected in the faces and accents of residents but in the local stores, restaurants and cultural groups; small playgrounds and large parks; museums, uncrowded movie theaters and of course, Lincoln Center.

Back then, West Siders lamented the loss of local businesses, the pushing out of more low-income residents, and the unending influx of the rich and famous who do not share the civic activism that was once the West Side trademark. Movies were getting crowded. Tourists seemed to be everywhere, and the idea that, as one observer noted at the time, "the city seems smaller here" was a fading memory.

Historically, the West Side has always been "the other side of town." It was always twenty years or so behind the East Side in development trends, and it wasn't until mansions and townhouses spread over the East Side that the developers gave serious attentions to the West Side north of Fifty-ninth Street.

When in 1880 Singer Sewing machine heir Edward S. Clark began construction of the city's first luxury apartment house-a chateau of gables, bay windows, and incomparable detail at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West-observers teased that he was building so far into the country that he might as well be in Dakota Territory. The name Dakota stuck, and today it is still considered one of the city's most exclusive addresses.

Soon after, the Ninth Avenue El (elevated train) was completed, opening the West Side to the first of many waves of upwardly mobile middle-cla.s.s families and the beginning of serious development. Row houses were built in great numbers for single-family elegance through the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Gracious high-rise apartment houses-not as opulent as the Dakota-started going up slowly on Broadway after the turn of the century with the Beaux Arts Ansonia at Seventh-third Street and the more spa.r.s.ely ornamented Apthorp at Seventh-ninth Street and Belnord at Eighty-sixth Street. By the 1920s and '30s, Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive were lined with fashionable high-rises that remain the housing anchors of the entire area.

After World War II, as the middle-cla.s.s Irish and Jewish occupants moved farther north to the Bronx, to the East Side, or to suburbia, brownstones were subdivided to house waves of new immigrants-blacks from the South and the West Indies, Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and South America. Because the units were small, overcrowded, high in price, but low in maintenance, many rapidly deteriorated.

CATACLYSMIC CHANGE KICKS IN.

Then, in the late 1950s and early '60s, came the beginnings of the city's two largest urban renewal programs-the twelve-block (fifty-three-acre) Lincoln Center and the twenty-block West Side Urban Renewal Area between Eighty-seventh and Ninety-seventh Streets-and construction of two large-scale middle-income developments, Lincoln Towers at West End Avenue in the Sixties and Park West Village at Central Park to Amsterdam, Ninety-seventh to One Hundredth Streets.

When I referenced this urban renewal area in my 1974 articles, I didn't mention Robert Moses's connection to Urban Renewal policies up to that time. But I did note in my article a major population shift taking place: "Co-operative conversions of pre-war high-rises started in the 1960s, anchoring the professional middle-cla.s.s that had moved there for the large rent-controlled apartments. The brownstone movement spread north and south from and west of the Urban Renewal Area, reclaiming some of the most solidly built housing in the city for young middle-cla.s.s families seeking s.p.a.ce, elegance, value and backyards."

The article noted that the scores of low-income residents displaced by a.s.sorted Urban Renewal projects were now concentrating along Amsterdam Avenue and north to the Manhattan Valley area, 107th to 110th Streets, Central Park to Broadway. Many also relocated into the ten public housing projects containing 4,628 apartments scattered around the area or in buildings leased by the Housing Authority and rented to low-income families. The West Side's low-rent apartment supply filled up, and many displaced families moved to other boroughs.

More than just the housing supply was rapidly changing when I observed this scene in the mid-1970s. Seven new public schools had been built since 1960. Private schools, too, had built new facilities or expanded old ones. And there were now seventeen day-care centers, including four Head Start programs. Block a.s.sociations had planted trees; Broadway malls had been relandscaped. Playgrounds had been rebuilt.

Signs of renewal were showing more and more in the commercial fabric of the West Side as well. The impact of the women's movement was evident in the growing number of entrepreneurial women opening the small, local businesses appearing on the scene. This trend-women-owned businesses-was new, and it was emerging early, as many trends did, on the Upper West Side. Restaurants and bars, in the blocks from the Eighties through the Nineties along the avenues, offered live jazz and had become favorite spots for the steadily growing black middle cla.s.s moving into the area.

Slowly but surely, theater groups were taking hold, with G.o.dspell G.o.dspell in its fourth year at the Promenade Theater and in its fourth year at the Promenade Theater and Sgt. Pepper Sgt. Pepper at the newly renovated Beacon. New restaurants gained a loyal local following. "We won't eat anywhere but on the West Side, where prices are still reasonable," I quoted one resident saying. at the newly renovated Beacon. New restaurants gained a loyal local following. "We won't eat anywhere but on the West Side, where prices are still reasonable," I quoted one resident saying.

In the second of the two articles I wrote on the Upper West Side, I focused on the problems. I wrote in part: Behind the facade of renewal and renaissance that covers great chunks of the West Side from 59th to 110th St., there are areas of great discontent and frustration.The "great sore" of the West Side-the Single Room Occupancy-Welfare Hotel problem-floods the area with unsupervised former mental patients, alcoholics, junkies, multi-problem families, and leaves the elderly vulnerable and the younger families scared.A 1969 city-wide study of s...o...b..ildings indicated that almost 50 per cent of the entire city's SRO tenants live on the West Side, occupying some 25,000 apartment units between 74th and 110th Streets. Although the hotels Hamilton and Hargrave have been converted to housing for the elderly and the Kimberly at 73rd and Broadway is vacant, not much has changed in five years.

The West Side Urban Renewal Program was initiated in the 1950s as the nation's model for economic integration within buildings. Promoted by Planning Commission chair James Felt as an alternative to Moses's clearance strategy, the plan had been stumbling past the half-completion mark with a few years of stormy community debate. Some groups called for increasing the proportion of low-income housing. Others claimed any increase would cause the community to tip into a slum or ghetto. The argument was whether 20 or 30 percent was the right amount of low-income housing. And while the conflict was enough to cause some of the bitterest community battles the neighborhood had seen in years, federal housing funds stopped and made things worse.

The spreading phenomenon of the fast-food chains was another issue of debate. At one point a rumor circulated in the area around Seventy-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue that a McDonald's would open. "The community was up in arms," said the late councilman and then congressman Ted Weiss. "Five years ago a McDonald's would have been considered a neighborhood improvement. Today it's an anathema."

Fast-food chains have become an accepted way of life today in almost all urban neighborhoods. Now they are not as threatening as in the time I was writing these articles. A generous selection of local food outlets of every scale and price exists and flourishes.

Crime, of course, was a constant worry, but statistics don't seem to affect the way people live with the reality of crime as much as people's "feel" for it does. As more stores stayed open late, as new restaurants proliferated and nightlife in general picked up, many residents felt the community had gotten safer. One guide was the newsstands. Only a few years earlier, none stayed open late except at Seventy-second Street. Now they were open late up and down Broadway.

The article also noted the small-town feel of residents: Consistently, when you speak to residents about what's good and bad on the West Side, they will tell you everything that's happening within a small radius of their home. They know who lives above and below them, those their children meet in the playground. They organize food co-ops or babysitting services and they know the local shopkeepers as well as their neighbors.Actor Jordan Charney, who lives in a 10-story apartment house on 74th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, talks of "the marvelous shops offering home-made things" and "the a.s.sortment of people going into their own business.""Lincoln Center has pushed problems uptown," Charney says, "hiding them a little better because they're out of my neighborhood. Up there it's as scary as it used to be when we moved here seven years ago."

Boundaries differed. Problems varied. But a do-it-yourself state of mind pervaded each subcommunity. Whether it was tree planting, day care, playgrounds, block-by-block security guards, or housing problems, West Siders didn't wait for City Hall to solve them. Residents lived with the realities of the problems; alternatives were less desirable. Sometime in the 1970s and '80s, however, a real upward shift began. Government money for big projects had stopped flowing, as it had in the heyday of Urban Renewal in the 1950s. The city was flirting with bankruptcy. The state was suffering serious financial setbacks, and the federal government was no friendlier to New York than in the "Ford to City: Drop Dead" 1970s days. The cessation of the big projects gave license to the smaller ones to advance. No one thing is identifiable. Instead, an acc.u.mulation of successive steps occurred. It was a clear case of incremental change, if ever there was one.

A variety of new stores opened, more upscale now, a sign that someone thought the area was an underserved market to which nonneighborhood shoppers would also come. New children's clothing stores appeared, a clear reflection of the increasing number of new families. Until then, one small children's department store, Morris Brothers, had been the sole outpost for shopping parents.4 East Siders began to consider the West Side's private schools for their children. An a.s.sortment of new ba.n.a.l apartment houses went up across from Lincoln Center, a sign that big developers decided the district had value. And young singles and families kept buying and fixing up the brownstones not destroyed by Urban Renewal. East Siders began to consider the West Side's private schools for their children. An a.s.sortment of new ba.n.a.l apartment houses went up across from Lincoln Center, a sign that big developers decided the district had value. And young singles and families kept buying and fixing up the brownstones not destroyed by Urban Renewal.

THE LINCOLN CENTER MYTH.

Credentialed experts often attribute urban regeneration of any kind to the official plans and developments of the day. Most planners and government officials and observers don't give credence to the gradual block-by-block and business-by-business improvements that mark organic incrementalism. They can't recognize it until it is full-blown. They insist that ad hoc change is insignificant. They are wrong on all counts. One needs to recognize the often small precursors of positive change to understand its emerging appearance. The precursors were in abundance on the West Side, as all the gradual changes already mentioned indicate.

According to conventional wisdom, Lincoln Center was the catalyst for regeneration of the West Side. This is a myth. Simple observation ill.u.s.trates how this was not the case. If If this were true, renewal would this were true, renewal would only only have occurred in the late 1960s and '70s on the West Side around Lincoln Center, or in proximity to other big new construction projects. This was definitely not the case. SoHo, the Lower East Side, areas of the South Bronx, and the many areas of brownstone Brooklyn showed early signs of nascent rebirth at the same time as the Upper West Side. Positive change was bubbling up in small doses all over the city. It was observable, anecdotal, and nowhere yet ready to be measurable. And, indeed, it was happening in many traditional and historic neighborhoods all over the country. Thus, experts and the press did not recognize its significance as the beginning of a shift. They couldn't imagine this happening without a big catalyst like Lincoln Center. have occurred in the late 1960s and '70s on the West Side around Lincoln Center, or in proximity to other big new construction projects. This was definitely not the case. SoHo, the Lower East Side, areas of the South Bronx, and the many areas of brownstone Brooklyn showed early signs of nascent rebirth at the same time as the Upper West Side. Positive change was bubbling up in small doses all over the city. It was observable, anecdotal, and nowhere yet ready to be measurable. And, indeed, it was happening in many traditional and historic neighborhoods all over the country. Thus, experts and the press did not recognize its significance as the beginning of a shift. They couldn't imagine this happening without a big catalyst like Lincoln Center.

Ignoring where else regeneration was slowly taking hold, the myth prevails that Lincoln Center rejuvenated the West Side. In reality, it did not. The rebound of the Upper West Side and scattered neighborhoods throughout the city was people driven by the vanguard of urban pioneers. Value-hunting brownstoners and apartment dwellers were attracted to the solidly built historic building stock and middle-income apartment towers. They were resisting the expected move to the suburbs. In neighborhoods farther out, way off the radar screen of city experts, immigrants were filling largely vacant housing where people had moved out. With them came new businesses as well. The Russians went to Brighton Beach and the Syrians to Atlantic Avenue, both in Brooklyn. The Chinese filled the Lower East Side. The Koreans went to Astoria, Queens. In each neighborhood, the new residents sparked a gradual rebirth that is explosive today.

Trends always start small, almost invisibly. Values and lifestyle choices brought new settlers to the West Side. Lincoln Center was clearly a sign that government and financial inst.i.tutions thought the West Side was worthy of reinvestment in big government-supported projects. But what Lincoln Center really did was bring East Siders and suburbanites to the West Side in the evening-all visitors who had been afraid to venture into the area because of its reputation for crime and poverty.

Visitors, whether from other neighborhoods or out of town, are never enough to spark rebirth. Local residents and businesses do the spade work, reenergize a place or district, give a place character, and make visitors comfortable. Visitors follow locals in the process; they are never catalysts for the rebirth process. Years later, after the Upper West Side had turned dramatically upscale, many of those visitors came there to live, too.

If anything, Lincoln Center and, later, Lincoln Towers made rejuvenation more difficult, if one understands rejuvenation as the gradual return of young, middle-income families and new businesses to a stabilized, existing population mix with new buildings fitting in with existing ones. Enlivened street life, diversity of population and activity, and social interaction follow that new population. That was not what followed the development of Lincoln Center. What did follow were several large new developments, including a series of dull residential towers across Broadway. Together with Lincoln Center, they do not add up to a definition of natural, positive change. In fact, unrest caused by the displacement of seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses5 in twelve blocks demolished for Lincoln Center complicated life and made it unsettling and stressful for longtime residents and new. in twelve blocks demolished for Lincoln Center complicated life and made it unsettling and stressful for longtime residents and new.

It is worth pausing for a moment to look further at why Lincoln Center is a signature Moses creation. This is difficult to do now without offending many good people who have worked hard to make this world-renowned seat of culture a great success. But that success is due to the content and programs, not the vessel they come in. As soon as a critical word is said about the physical design of the complex, such people take offense, even though they had nothing to do with designing it, only in making it succeed as an artistic center despite itself.

First, it must be said loud and clear that the inst.i.tutions of Lincoln Center have become star performers on the city's cultural stage. But that is about cultural programming, not bricks and mortar and urban design values. Paul Goldberger wrote a very perceptive Sky Line column in the New Yorker New Yorker, "West Side Fixer-Upper: New Ideas for Lincoln Center That Don't Involve Dynamite," giving high marks to the first steps in a planned redesign. He credited architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro with "figuring out ways to weave the atoll back into the fabric of the city." He noted, "There were complaints about the facilities at Lincoln Center from the beginning." But more significantly, he hit at the heart of the matter: But the raison d'etre for Lincoln Center was dubious from the beginning. . . . Moses didn't care much for opera, or theater, or symphony orchestras. He just figured that they could serve as a magnet for development. Using culture in this way was a new idea in the fifties, although almost everything else about Lincoln Center was stuck in the past. As a piece of design, it was as retrograde as the halls that it replaced-and much less successful. . . .The idea of a cultural campus set apart from the city never made much sense, even though Lincoln Center did, to be fair, promote the urban renewal effect that Robert Moses intended. The neighborhood would probably have been gentrified without Lincoln Center, of course, but hardly in the same way, or on the same timetable. . . .Lincoln Center has sometimes seemed less the vibrant source of the neighborhood's energy than the empty hole in the middle of the doughnut. . . . Lincoln Center reflected [Moses's] social philosophy, which was on the side of public subsidies for middle-cla.s.s amenities and against the visible presence of the poor.6 Centers, like other big stand-alone separatist projects, breed more new development mislabeled revitalization. But more than anything, they continue nibbling away at traditional streets and diverse uses, the ingredients of real places. Here, too, Moses (in partnership with John Rockefeller) led the way, as Martin Filler notes: "This cultural one-stop shopping center launched a nationwide boom in performing- and visual-arts complexes."7 Moses was a separator, segregator, and isolator, designing the world for the car. He was a "centerist"-meaning cultural (starting with Lincoln Center), retail, industrial, sports, entertainment centers-isolating uses within the city, suburb, or town in a way that disconnects them from the rest of daily life, creating islands of singular activity in the urban fabric. Again, he created the model, and the nation followed.

The Moses pattern undermines the potential of vibrant, vital, economically and socially robust, integrated, and connected "places" in a city, suburb, or town. And it is a form of growth that annihilates and replaces versus replenishes and adds. Communities throughout the country today are trying to reconnect what that separating era of planning destroyed. Now, Lincoln Center, cited as one of Moses's great achievements, has embarked on a billion-dollar effort to remodel itself in a more urbanistically connected way, undoing Moses's isolationist vision.

Lincoln Center is a good place to understand the Moses philosophy, even though its widespread popularity as a cultural destination blinds people to the underlying fallacies of its creation. Understanding what was wrong with the barracks-style high-rise housing projects is easy today, especially since so many of them have been and continue to be blown up and rebuilt around the country. And widespread understanding exists more than ever that ma.s.sive highway building and disinvestment in ma.s.s transit were the fatal domestic flaws of the second half of the twentieth century. But there are few signs of public or official understanding of the antiurban nature of cultural centers or, for that matter, entertainment centers, sports complexes, or similar concentrations of singular uses. Superblocks, whether for residential towers or entertainment, are disruptive and destructive in a city. Robert Moses launched his approach to city building in a big way on the West Side.

WEST SIDE STORY.

Elizabeth Yampierre's family displacement saga was recounted earlier. Yampierre actually lived on the site, known as San Juan Hill, where the musical West Side Story West Side Story purportedly takes place. A number of scenes in the movie were actually filmed on those streets. The movie's producers had persuaded Moses to hold off demolition a short time while they used it as a stage set. purportedly takes place. A number of scenes in the movie were actually filmed on those streets. The movie's producers had persuaded Moses to hold off demolition a short time while they used it as a stage set.

Looking at the stills of those scene shots now is startling to anyone who thinks what Moses was clearing was really a slum by any honest standard. Not that deterioration wasn't clear, and not that living conditions weren't seriously deficient. But if one studies the photos of empty tenements and small apartment houses with windows already missing and evidence of the accelerated decay that sets in once urban renewal is declared, it is hard not to question how so much reusable, renovatable fabric could be consigned to the garbage dump. Many comparable buildings today have been converted to upscale apartment houses and condominiums. As Filler also wrote, "Today, that 19th-century housing would be gentrified before you could say Jane Jacobs, but in the 1950s, tabula-rasa development was standard operating procedure."8 THE REAL DRAW OF THE WEST SIDE.

The traditional mix of dense and architecturally masterful West Side buildings experienced a real image problem during the era of ma.s.sive slum clearance and new project building. The incomparable prewar apartment houses of Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive north of Lincoln Center had never lost their appeal, although they had lost their status as chic. For a long time the "chic" label applied only to the Upper East Side. But the architectural appeal, solid construction, and size of apartment rooms could not be matched by anything built after World War II.

In time, the West Side became overchic, and for many longtime West Siders, it lost its charm. Real estate values are off the charts. The area is so overrun by tourists at the southern end around Lincoln Center, where I live, that little local flavor remains. Mall stores dominate. This is one of the city's worst traffic-congestion hot spots. More and more superwealthy people have moved in and brought their sense of ent.i.tlement. Three lanes of traffic on Central Park West, for example, are sacrificed for angled parking for private cars of the policemen and double-parking (sometimes triple-parking) for private cars and limousines at the Trump International Hotel and the new superluxury condominium 15 Central Park West. This new addition to the West Side opened in 2007 at such through-the-roof sales prices that the area was dubbed "the new Gold Coast."

Essential qualities hold strong. Some things are almost immutable because a large swath of the area was declared a historic district in 1990. Actually, several historic districts cover a lot of the Upper West Side. The largest is the Central Park West district from Sixty-second to Ninety-sixth Streets, with parts of Columbus Avenue included. A scattering of smaller districts is found along Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. Effectively, nothing within those designated areas can get torn down or altered without approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. That is not to say things don't get torn down that shouldn't and that new large-scale buildings of mediocre design don't get built. But the basic effectiveness of the area's landmark protection is clear. Enormous change has transpired on the Upper West Side, but its essential physical character has been sustained. The glaring compromises remain isolated and contained. That is the fundamental virtue of designated historic districts in the first place. Change evolves within the context of authenticity, a good definition of regeneration.

POSITIVE CHANGE, NEGATIVE CHANGE.

The West Side exhibits the result of two kinds of change-change that is regeneration and change that is replacement. This kind of duality can be found in cities around the country. Here it is dramatically p.r.o.nounced because of the large scale of both kinds of change.

The substantial areas of the West Side most dynamically regenerated are those with the large stock of renewed brownstone and limestone row houses, small-scale and large-scale prewar apartment buildings, and the varied a.s.sortment of combined residential and commercial structures that line the three primary commercial corridors. Then there are the replacement areas: Lincoln Center; the eight-building, 3,837-unit apartment complex of Lincoln Towers (Sixty-sixth to Seventieth along West End Avenue); the six-building Park West Village (Ninety-seventh to One Hundredth from Central Park to Columbus); and a number of public housing projects north of Ninety-sixth Street that totally replaced a diversified fabric. Robert Moses had declared each of these areas a "slum." One has to question how much of a slum these areas could have been when comparable a.s.sortments of diversified buildings that stood on the cleared and rebuilt sites are today significantly upgraded and regenerated.

The replacement projects have remained static-physically no different from when constructed under Urban Renewal. Granted that Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall has had to be rebuilt inside twice because of poor acoustics. The central plaza, too, was rebuilt, and recent years of creative outdoor programming have dramatically enlivened that s.p.a.ce. The open-air band sh.e.l.l of Damrosch Park at the southwest corner was added after completion. But Lincoln Center remains the isolated and isolating island of culture it was meant to be. And while sections of Lincoln Center are being redesigned to connect to the vibrant area across Broadway, no attempt appears to be in the planning to open up the west side of Lincoln Center that is walled off in the most hostile way possible from the public housing projects on the other side of West End Avenue. North and south along West End Avenue across from the public housing, street-level retail can be found. A solid brick wall in the rear serves as both an impenetrable boundary and a break in that retail strip. Clearly, it was designed to be fortresslike.

DEFINING PROGRESS.

The impact of Urban Renewal is probably more benign on the Upper West Side than in most other New York City neighborhoods. Several things explain this. To start, the area was a dense, rich fabric with a variegated texture that could sustain considerable loss without losing its essence. And considerable losses it did indeed sustain. Ironically, the large swaths of alleged slums that were demolished and rebuilt would be gentrified middle-cla.s.s neighborhoods today. Additionally, the replacements, besides Lincoln Center, are an a.s.sortment of well-maintained and well-managed middle-and low-income developments. Over time, they have woven themselves into the surrounding community. Nevertheless, they represent big tears in what was and could be today an untorn urban fabric that could have had a diversified a.s.sortment of economically and socially mixed housing of every scale, national and local businesses, and varied inst.i.tutions, simply more of what it already is in the regenerated areas.

Many neighborhoods and downtowns in New York and around the country are not so lucky. They have sustained too enormous a scale of clearance. From Bushwick in Brooklyn and the South Bronx to St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Detroit, Buffalo, Charlotte, and others, only remnants are left. To regenerate by building on a modest remnant is possible but much more difficult. The cities regenerating the best today have the most traditional fabric left; the ones having the most clearance damage are experiencing the more difficult time. It is staggering to think of the damage done across the board to American cities after World War II in the name of progress.

With Lincoln Center, as had been true with the highways and housing towers, Moses created a template that would deceive the world into accepting the notion that this was a good way to redevelop cities-Moses style.

8.

WESTWAY.

A Conversation with Jane Jacobs You take some things as given: you don't want a city that's built for automobiles and not people first.JANE JACOBS

In the end, will Westway be remembered as but a symbol of abstract and competing concepts of urban renewal-the automobile against ma.s.s transit; the slow-growth philosophy of targeted renaissance against the glamour of grand-scale construction? Indeed, will it be remembered at all?SAM ROBERTS, "Battle of the Westway: Bitter 10-Year Saga of a Vision on Hold," New York Times Jane Jacobs sits at the dining room table of her three-story Victorian house in the leafy Toronto neighborhood known as the Annex. It is 1978. She is pondering the news I am bringing her from New York City, primarily the latest chapters in the ongoing fight over the Westway-the ma.s.sive replacement of the West Side Highway along the Hudson River-then raging in New York. Her white hair and large eyegla.s.ses give her an owlish look that can turn from severity to impishness at the switch of urban topic. "Why aren't you writing about this, Roberta?" she asks in her most challenging voice. Her unrelenting gaze remains fixed on me.

8.1 Jane loved to sit and chat on her front porch, which we did many times. Herschel Stroyman Herschel Stroyman.

This is my third or fourth visit since being introduced to her earlier that year by the first editor of my first book, Jason Epstein, Jacobs's editor. 1 1 We had just begun a long friendship from which I benefited enormously. Over twenty-eight years, she nurtured, nudged, challenged, and enriched my own thinking, writing, and activism. She reinforced my skepticism of official city planning precepts, occasionally rescued me from acceptance of a misguided notion, and showed me the universal lessons of Toronto's enduring urbanism. Her willingness to take controversial stands and to contradict conventional wisdom was an inspiration for my own activism. We had our differences that only made our conversations more lively. Jacobs and her family had moved to Toronto in 1968. She, more than anyone, opened my eyes early to the defining impact of transportation and manufacturing issues on cities. We had just begun a long friendship from which I benefited enormously. Over twenty-eight years, she nurtured, nudged, challenged, and enriched my own thinking, writing, and activism. She reinforced my skepticism of official city planning precepts, occasionally rescued me from acceptance of a misguided notion, and showed me the universal lessons of Toronto's enduring urbanism. Her willingness to take controversial stands and to contradict conventional wisdom was an inspiration for my own activism. We had our differences that only made our conversations more lively. Jacobs and her family had moved to Toronto in 1968. She, more than anyone, opened my eyes early to the defining impact of transportation and manufacturing issues on cities.

On this occasion, our mutual friend Mary Nichols was also visiting. Nichols, a resident of Greenwich Village and former columnist for the Village Voice Village Voice and then an a.s.sistant to Mayor Kevin White in Boston, had kept the expressway in the news through her and then an a.s.sistant to Mayor Kevin White in Boston, had kept the expressway in the news through her Village Voice Village Voice coverage when the mainstream press was less interested and editorially supportive. coverage when the mainstream press was less interested and editorially supportive.

Both Jacobs and Nichols were intensely concerned about the Westway progress. They both saw a direct link to the Moses Lower Manhattan Expressway. Jacobs and her family had moved to Toronto in 1968 during the Vietnam War when her two sons were draft age. The final defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway occurred after her 1968 departure. Nichols was working and living in Boston and would return to New York soon to work for her old friend and mayor-elect Ed Koch. Yet both urban activists still cared deeply about New York.

On this particular visit, Jacobs and Nichols both grilled me about the Westway fight and persuaded me to write about Westway-the twelve-lane highway proposed to be built on landfill along the West Side of Manhattan-when criticism of it in the press was rare.2 Did I know how critical it was to the future of New York? Did I realize how important to a city its public transit is? Did I realize that so many American cities were dysfunctional because they had spent decades investing in automobile access while destroying the neighborhoods, downtowns, and transit systems they all once had? Did I realize that New York could go in the same direction? No. I had not realized any of these things to the extent they were presenting them. My focus was on neighborhood and downtown regeneration around the country: the South Bronx, Savannah, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere. I had just started research for my first book, Did I know how critical it was to the future of New York? Did I realize how important to a city its public transit is? Did I realize that so many American cities were dysfunctional because they had spent decades investing in automobile access while destroying the neighborhoods, downtowns, and transit systems they all once had? Did I realize that New York could go in the same direction? No. I had not realized any of these things to the extent they were presenting them. My focus was on neighborhood and downtown regeneration around the country: the South Bronx, Savannah, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere. I had just started research for my first book, The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way (1989). (1989).

I had been coming to Toronto to explore causes of recent urban decay with Jane, as well as to share with her the signs of rebirth that I was observing in my research but that conventional observers and professionals were dismissing as ad hoc and too inconsequential. She was so enthusiastic about what I was describing as the early rebirth of the South Bronx generated by community-based improvisations that she insisted I take her there when she was next in New York. We subsequently visited the People's Development Corporation and Banana Kelly in the South Bronx in 1978, led by Ron Shiffman, then head of the Pratt Center for Community and Economic Development, who first took me there in 1977.

She was, however, relentless in pushing me to stop and write about Westway. In many ways, the most important aspect of our expanding relationship was her willingness to be critical of what I was saying or thinking. My slowness to recognize the significance of Westway was one of those occasions. Sure, transit was an important issue in the urban regeneration story, but I did not yet view it as an overarching one. Jane and Mary turned my head on this topic. Transportation, they convinced me, was central to the economic, physical, and social life of all of urban America.

Persuaded, I decided to switch gears. Michael Kramer, then an editor at New York Magazine New York Magazine, liked the subject, if I could get Jane to consent to an interview on it. A few months later, she agreed. These kinds of interruptions were intolerable when she was writing. Consenting to this interview, however, was not just rare but sudden, and I asked why. "Westway is different," she said. "I just think it's the single most important decision that New York is facing about its future and whether it can possibly reverse itself, or whether it's hopeless," she explained. "This is in part because of the practical damage that Westway will do to the city. And it's also very important as a symptom of whether New York can profit by the clear mistakes and misplaced priorities that it's had in the past or whether it just has to keep repeating them."

Her son Jimmy, who lives down the block, told her she was crazy to agree to this interview. "But I told him, 'Jimmy, this is important for the fight, and what if that Westway is built and I think, 'Maybe I could have made some difference; I can't live with that.' And he said, 'Ah yeah, sure,'" she laughed.

We spent many hours over several visits discussing this subject, all of which was taped (the tapes were transcribed).3 The substance went way beyond Westway. She talked a lot about recent New York development history, providing tales and tidbits she had never written or spoken about. The substance went way beyond Westway. She talked a lot about recent New York development history, providing tales and tidbits she had never written or spoken about.

Jacobs's art is to accessibly outline a specific issue while making clear the broader implications of the substance. So much of what she covered when referring to either the Lower Manhattan Expressway or Westway-like every other issue she wrote or talked about-can be applied to highway and urban renewal fights anywhere.

At its simplest, Westway was just another piece of the Interstate Highway System, stretching from Forty-second Street down to the island's tip. The complexities are not visible at first. No neighborhoods would have been bisected or erased, although plenty would suffer through the increased traffic of the expanded highway. No land would have been taken away. In fact, land would be added with landfill under which the highway would partially go through a tunnel. Together with the six-lane inland service road, Westway would equal twelve lanes. On top of the landfill, two hundred acres of new city would be created for housing, parks, and commercial development. New highway proposals across the country often looked that simple. Sometimes they still do. Deceptively, the Westway route was drawn as a straight line on all maps. The highly land-consumptive on-and off-ramps were rarely shown. Only two ramps were apparently planned, but it wasn't clear if more would have been added.

8.2 Jane took special pleasure in the view from her porch down through the whole row of porches. Herschel Stroyman. Herschel Stroyman.

As she proceeded through this conversation, Jacobs primarily explained the damage Westway would inflict on New York City and how it would transform the city. But she went way beyond this as well. Most significantly, Jacobs ill.u.s.trated the importance of any highway debate to the future shape of all cities of any size. This was long before this fundamental debate went mainstream. Essentially, how one views a highway proposal directly relates to one's fundamental understanding of how a city functions best.

THE HEART OF THE ARGUMENT.

Two fundamental points formed the heart of her argument against Westway. The first is that Westway was part of the same original overall highway network plan of 1929, as was the Lower Manhattan Expressway, thus their intrinsic connection. That plan for all of Manhattan, she argued, improperly favored development geared toward the car, not ma.s.s transit or the pedestrian. The second point was the internal contradiction between economics and the environment evident in the argument for both highways. "These are really very obvious things, but I don't think they're obvious to most of the public," she said. "The first point is that Westway is only part of the 1929 plan. Just think of that. It's almost fifty years old, almost half a century old. New York prides itself on being up to date, but it's being run by a half-century-old plan. Only pieces of it keep surfacing. n.o.body would ever consent to the insanity of doing the entire thing. And yet, if, piece by piece, it gets done, the whole thing is inevitable, because each part depends on another."

In this case, if Westway were built, the same expanded highway would inevitably be necessary from Forty-second Street north and from the Battery south around and up the East Side. Robert Caro, she pointed out, ill.u.s.trates well in The Power Broker The Power Broker the Moses technique of building a bridge without saying there's got to be a new or wider highway on either side. "And the bridge gets built," she said, "and aha, now the wider highway becomes necessary. Or he builds a road and says nothing about a great big bridge that's going to have to come, and aha, all of a sudden, the bridge is necessary. It's piecemeal. People would have a fit if they saw the whole thing." But, she said, that's the way these highways have been pushed and not just in New York but everywhere. "In essence, the plan is a ring, an oval really, all around the outside of the island, and then it has lacings across the middle. It's a net, catching Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was one of these crosstown lacings for the whole system." the Moses technique of building a bridge without saying there's got to be a new or wider highway on either side. "And the bridge gets built," she said, "and aha, now the wider highway becomes necessary. Or he builds a road and says nothing about a great big bridge that's going to have to come, and aha, all of a sudden, the bridge is necessary. It's piecemeal. People would have a fit if they saw the whole thing." But, she said, that's the way these highways have been pushed and not just in New York but everywhere. "In essence, the plan is a ring, an oval really, all around the outside of the island, and then it has lacings across the middle. It's a net, catching Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was one of these crosstown lacings for the whole system."

During the fight over the Lower Manhattan Expressway, opponents had seen the 1929 Regional Plan, both the maps and the written volumes. This put their effort in perspective. The existing West Side Highway (six lanes) was the first piece of the plan, originally called the Miller Highway. The East River Drive (six lanes), built in the 1930s, was also part of it. "The plan ran into trouble when it began to involve the lacings across the city and the ramps off of them," noted Jacobs. A crossing at Thirtieth Street was the first defeat, she said, because it would have destroyed the Little Church Around the Corner where many theatrical weddings took place. It had a loyal const.i.tuency.

"The story is told," Jacobs recalled, that "an actor and an actress wanted to get married at, I think, Marble Collegiate, and they got short-changed there, and somebody said, 'Go to the little church around the corner.' It had a different name [Church of the Transfiguration]. They were treated there with dignity. It became the church of theater people and became known as 'The Little Church Around the Corner.' This was either before the war in the '30s, or right after, not long after the Regional Plan was proposed. That would have been the first lacing across Manhattan, but because of the church, they hit resistance. So that piece was dropped. Then there was the hiatus on construction during the war."

Early tunnels, bridges, and ramps, Jacobs pointed out, were on the periphery of Manhattan. Few viewed them as affecting the city center. "There's a certain logic, you see, to drawing this through traffic over to the edges," she said. "But the plan always presupposed these lacings, this whole net, to get cars into the city expeditiously and across town. A Los Angelizing of the whole city." The "Los Angelizing," Jacobs said, is what traffic engineers want to do to all cities, a one-size-fits-all approach to any city.

This is probably what they all are taught, that no place within a city should be more than a quarter of a mile from a ramp onto an expressway. Los Angeles comes closest to that. Everywhere in Los Angeles is fed by expressways. This is the basic idea.And this was always the plan for New York. But you see, it wasn't evident when it was just on the outside. The 1929 plan did not show entrance ramps, nor do Westway maps. Ramps require enormous demolition to create. The minute the real plan for Los Angelizing Manhattan ever goes into operation, it alarms the h.e.l.l out of people because the destructive implications become very vivid. The Thirtieth Street crossing got that kind of opposition. The Cross Bronx Expressway did too, but that opposition didn't succeed.

The road through Washington Square would have been one of those ramps. Yet it wasn't clear to people for a long time, she said, that it would connect to the expressway.

FIGHTING CITY HALL.

"Some people," she said, "would like New York to turn into a Los Angeles, or don't have any sense of the highway's impact on the fabric of the city, or are like Robert Moses, and there are plenty of people like this. There is no use-we found out in these fights-trying to convince these people. You fight them. If you spend all your time trying to persuade the people who really want this, instead of fighting them, you lose. This is the way to get defeated." This is a key Jacobs principle: cultivate your const.i.tuency rather than trying to persuade your opponents. "You could spend all that energy on trying to bring reason to Robert Moses, or people like him, showing him how he was harming the city, and you would waste it all because his idea of improving the city is really to wipe it out and start over with big projects."

8.3 This cover story of my interview with Jane about Westway gained a lot of attention in 1978. Jane's voice had not been heard in New York for a number of years. New York Magazine New York Magazine.

People meet with officials at City Hall, hear expressions of empathy, even maybe agreement, think they have made their case, she said. When it doesn't go their way, they get discouraged. "That's where the expression 'You can't fight City Hall' comes from. But you can fight City Hall if you understand that trying to fight it is different from trying to persuade. You can't persuade them, but you can fight them."

The viability or regenerative potential of some areas is often not easily evident to the casual observer. Thus, officials declare blighted a neighborhood that is anything but. Deterioration along the Westway route was obvious. Buildings had been neglected for a long time in antic.i.p.ation of the highway. Few people recognized it as a cla.s.sic condition, like SoHo had been, where the plan for the highway decades earlier made possible the a.s.sumption that nothing else could occur there, an ill.u.s.tration of "planners' blight," as described in the SoHo chapter.

The question arose about what would happen to traffic without Westway. It would either continue south around the tip of the island or find its way across the streets, Jacobs predicted. But "the faster you make it for the traffic, the more of it will use these facilities, and also, the less money you have for other kinds of transportation. It's no accident that transit has gone down, while enormous amounts of money have been spent on highways in New York."

HIGHWAY AS CURE FOR DECAY.

Driving down the West Side revealed the many things that were happening to make the area look bad. Aside from derelict and neglected buildings, landlords had readily rented to raunchy nightclubs, like the Anvil. Nevertheless, Jacobs insisted, "no defense is needed of how good the area is, or why it seems so bad. This highway can't be justified on the grounds that it's so bad there that things need to be taken out. What a ridiculous idea that you put in a billion-dollar highway to manicure a place!"

I raised a larger issue, arguing that the pattern of designating one area after another for renewal or a highway, as Moses did, caused the constant uprooting of people. Jacobs grew a little impatient: I know, but that's still a very peripheral argument against the expressway, because plenty of expressways have been put into areas-or proposed for areas-chosen precisely so that that will not happen. They've been put through parkland, through ravines, along old railroad tracks. They've been put through all kinds of places where they will not uproot people, or where displacement is minimal. And it still does enormous damage to a city. And it's still the wrong priority for the money.This is a wrong way to treat transportation in the city. And it's an uneconomic way and it's a polluting way, and it's got internal contradictions that cannot be justified. And it is a national problem. It doesn't mean that, aha, if you can, in another city, find an expressway that actually doesn't uproot anybody and doesn't cut off the waterfront, and doesn't do one of these specific things, yet cuts through the city, that it's okay. It's not.

For Jacobs, it all boiled down to certain irrevocable givens. One of those givens is that if the plan brings more cars into the city, it is wrong. And, she added, it was "cutting down the amount of money, inevitably, to deal with city transportation in other ways."

TIDE TURNING AGAINST CARS?.

Neighborhood traffic has long been a sore point in many places, but most people a.s.sume that providing more parking opportunities takes moving cars off the streets. Yet, just as critics argued and showed in the Washington Square Park fight, the more you provide for cars, the more cars will come. The easier to park, the more people will drive. But how traffic cripples, if not kills, a neighborhood is not always understood.

In Death and Life, Death and Life, Jacobs summed up the problem as she had done in our interview-the erosion of the city in favor of the automobile. Roads become wider. Sidewalks are narrowed. Noise, pollution, danger increase. It's a process of erosion of everything else. When too many automobiles start coming into a neighborhood, deterioration inevitably occurs. When every other amenity of the neighborhood, or of the city, is sacrificed, and inordinate proportions of transportation money are devoted to cars, then you're eroding the city. Jacobs summed up the problem as she had done in our interview-the erosion of the city in favor of the automobile. Roads become wider. Sidewalks are narrowed. Noise, pollution, danger increase. It's a process of erosion of everything else. When too many automobiles start coming into a neighborhood, deterioration inevitably occurs. When every other amenity of the neighborhood, or of the city, is sacrificed, and inordinate proportions of transportation money are devoted to cars, then you're eroding the city.

Jacobs was not anticar, just against transforming the city primarily for cars. "There are people who must have this metal coc.o.o.n," Jacobs added.4 "If they will accept some of the disadvantages of it-that it's a very slow way to get about, very aggravating to be caught in traffic, and so on-okay, they make their choice. But when they want the whole city remodeled to accommodate their phobia, that's the problem. And furthermore it's an impossible thing. You cannot do it. You just can't, especially in dense and large cities, accommodate all the potential cars. Inevitably, you're eroding things." "If they will accept some of the disadvantages of it-that it's a very slow way to get about, very aggravating to be caught in traffic, and so on-okay, they make their choice. But when they want the whole city remodeled to accommodate their phobia, that's the problem. And furthermore it's an impossible thing. You cannot do it. You just can't, especially in dense and large cities, accommodate all the potential cars. Inevitably, you're eroding things."

And, of course, it came back again to priorities. "Westway is a prime example of not only, my G.o.d, the cost," Jacobs said, "but also the vision of what the waterfront will be, and what it will do to the rest of New York streets."

This becomes the first step in a new erosion process. "And a very big one," she added. "A very big step. The amount of money involved is sort of a measure of that."

THE INTERNAL CONTRADICTION.

This was where her second fundamental point came in. The first was that Westway was part of the same network as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, all first provided for in the 1929 Regional Plan. The second point, similar in both fights, was the internal contradiction of the proponents' argument.

Here it is, their big vulnerable point: two contradictory things. One is, if they say that what this expressway is going to accomplish is to accommodate a whole lot of additional traffic, then they run into the problem about air pollution. Even if they say the traffic is going to move faster. If it's going to accommodate over the next twenty years 2 or 3 percent more traffic a year, or whatever, and you begin to convert that into air pollution, it's horrifying, and it will never meet the air pollution standards. So they have to minimize the increase in traffic and downplay that it is encouraging more and more automobile traffic at the expense of transit.But these things cost so d.a.m.n much, how are you going to justify spending billions of dollars on this highway if it's not going to handle any more traffic than is being handled now? The enormous costs require arguing that there is some commensurate enormous service it will do. And yet that service, carrying and generating increased traffic, implies horrendous damage to the environment. So, in one case they argue the one thing. Then they have to be inconsistent and argue the other one.

Thus, if it's going to do what it's supposed to do and justify its cost, more traffic will be created, and pollution will be generated. If you minimize the traffic projection, you're minimizing the job the project will do, and therefore you forfeit its justification. The cost can't be justified. "We may think we have problems," she laughed, "but we don't have any built-in inherent intellectual inconsistency, terrible inconsistency, ruinous inconsistency, which they do."