9
The decline of New York’s essentially efficient, energy-saving, decrepit transport system has reflected the decline of the city. But the massive rehabilitation of this arterial lifeline through a trade-in of Westway funds would be the most significant present step this city would take to assert its inner vitality and to underpin its future growth and development for the benefit of the masses of people who live and work here.
JOHN OAKES,
New York Times (op-ed, 1978)
And that is what happened with the defeat of Westway.
No mayor could have as much of an impact on the city as did the official defeat of Westway in 1985. In fact, Westway would have cost endless billions of dollars and stunted the rebirth of the city that is so universally admired today.1
Citywide, the benefits are many but not easy to recognize and hard to measure. Transportation investments were fundamentally altered. Transit, on which 85 percent of New Yorkers depend, became a priority for the first time since the 1930s. Car-oriented policies were significantly challenged and seriously rethought. The years of debate resulted in a sea of change in urban development thinking. As a result, many destructive urban policies that evolved after World War II were reversed or, at least, moderated; transportation, after all, shapes development anywhere.
9.1 The Westway landfill would surely have seen towers rise on it at least as tall as ones like this rising on the Williamsburg waterfront. Ron Shiffman.
The defeat of that massive highway project changed the transportation debate in New York City. It also helped change the debate nationwide. And it helped change the debate about how we understand and view cities. As Jacobs noted in conversation, one’s view of the city shapes the feeling about this highway. Above all, the defeat helped renew New York City in many unrecognized ways.
If it had been built, the disruption and construction in Manhattan would rival the Big Dig in Boston. Expected federal funding would have been exhausted long before completion. Where the money would have come from to rebuild the subway and regional transit system is anybody’s guess. The state legislature is unlikely to have filled the gap. The distinctively revived neighborhoods along the far West Side—Tribeca, the West Village, Gansvoort Market, Chelsea, and the West Thirties and Forties—would instead be coping with the impact of that disruption. The full range of consequence is hard to imagine.
Westway was more than a debate about a highway or even the larger transportation issues. It focused attention and drew out differences over how cities function and how they are reinvigorated. In the broadest sense, the battle over Westway should have been the final chapter—a postscript—in the long-standing clash of urban strategies defined by the battles in the 1950s and 1960s between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.
Neither Moses nor Jacobs played a direct role in the Westway saga. Moses was long out of power; Jacobs lived in Toronto by then. But their urban philosophies were central to the argument over Westway.
The idea of massive highways through cities, as we’ve seen, was heavily promoted by Robert Moses. And while Westway was not Moses’s project, it was clearly in keeping with his legacy.2 In fact, Moses had his own plan to rebuild the West Side Highway, about which he said: “There isn’t a project I’ve been connected with in forty years that would have been built if I had consulted [the public] prior to announcing it.”
By the time the Westway fight was engaged, the highway resistance, inspired by Jacobs’s victory with the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had strength. Proponents like to attribute the Westway opposition to the total dedication of one woman, Marcy Benstock, an environmental activist most identified as the opposition leader. They like to blame her for Westway’s demise. Her vigorous opposition was, in fact, dedicated, formidable, and effective. Clearly, she was the leading public voice. But that opposition was broader and more widespread than recognized or acknowledged. A CBS poll in 1976, for example, found 67 percent of New Yorkers asked wanted the money spent on transit, not a highway.3 The opposition was, in fact, a diverse but loose alliance: environmentalists, local legislators, transit advocates, community boards, preservationists, fiscal conservatives, and liberals aided by some transportation and environmental officials inside government agencies.
The Westway battle raged during the 1970s and into the 1980s until Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Hugh Carey opted to trade in the federal highway funds in 1985 for a combination of transit and highway investments just as the opportunity for all the states to trade in such funding was about to expire. “There is no question the debate over Westway, in the end, was a plebiscite on mass transit or highways,” says Kent Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society. “It crystallized the issue and strengthened the resolve of transit advocates. The Lower Manhattan Expressway victory was a mere skirmish in comparison; Westway was the Armageddon of highways in the city.” “The real impetus was anticar,” adds Albert Butzel, the lead lawyer in the fight against Westway. “It was an opportunity to get rid of a superhighway and to use the money for mass transit. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was the beginning of the end of the automobile fixation; Westway expanded the debate. People realized that the lifeline of the city was mass transit, not highways.”
TRANSIT REINVESTMENT WAS HUGE
The defeat of Westway resulted in an enormous reinvestment in the city public transit system, the most in decades. Nationally, trading in highway funds for transit investment was rare. A 1974 federal law first permitted this. Portland, Oregon, was the first to take advantage. Boston traded in highway money to reinvest and reopen some closed suburban rail lines. Later, for the Big Dig, House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA) got a special allocation of four billion dollars. Other cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore traded highway for transit funding.
The 1985 trade-in set a pattern for New York trading in highway funds for transit funds that has continued ever since with each five-year Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) capital plan. But it took that significant early trade-in money (only part, but a significant part, of the total funding) to begin to reverse decades of neglect that had accumulated since 1956. In that year, the year of passage of the Federal Highway Act, the building of the Interstate Highway System began, and New York instituted a policy of “deferred maintenance,” as Robert Caro points out in The Power Broker. “So superbly engineered and maintained had the system been previously (New York had been enormously proud of its subways) that it took years for this systematic neglect to take its toll.” By the late 1960s, it had almost reached bottom. “When Robert Moses came to power in 1934,” Caro adds, “the city’s mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst.”4
The first reinvestment was critical to the dramatic turnaround and total upgrade of the citywide system. Today, many users take for granted reasonable subway conditions and find plenty of weaknesses to complain about. But in the mid-1970s, conditions were horrific. Train cars regularly broke down and were taken out of service. Graffiti covered every car. Doors didn’t close. The schedule was erratic. The system’s infrastructure, invisible to the public, was in terrible shape. Signals and switches failed. Tracks were unsafe. Garbage overflowed station containers. Subway cars and buses were in use well beyond their replacement time. Most stations were deteriorated.
In 2004 the New York Public Interest Research Group Straphangers Campaign mounted an exhibit at the Municipal Art Society titled “The Riders and the Rebirth of City Transit: 25 Years of Advocacy.” A companion booklet noted, “It may be hard for many of us to imagine now, but our city’s subways and buses were close to collapse in 1979, the year the New York Public Interest Groups founded the Straphangers Campaign. Subway . . . service was so horrendous that a daily commute was enough to make residents question why on earth they chose to live here. The same thoughts occurred to the city’s business leaders, who often cited poor transit as the leading reason for moving out of New York.”
In 1981 frequent track fires and derailments prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to launch an investigation into the safety of the subway system. Ridership fell to the lowest level since 1917. All of that has been substantially reversed. The station upgrades are particularly visible because the “Percent for Art” policy has meant inclusion of artwork in every renovated station. Nearly 200 stations have been upgraded and artwork installed since 1985 in the 722-mile system, the Works Progress Administration all over again. Sadly, some of the first rebuilt stations are beginning to show their age, primarily for lack of regular cleaning and maintenance. Money for capital projects, with contracts available for the well placed, is always more readily available than the operational funds necessary to maintain the facilities, which requires salaried, union labor.
REINVESTMENT PAYS
Since Westway’s demise in 1985, approximately $1.4 billion in Westway trade-in funds have flowed to fix the subways and buses. Additional funds have gone into the regional system. The trade-in for transit funding, what Westway opponents advocated from day one, was the leverage that rebuilt the system. The enormous borrowing the state initiated under MTA chairman Richard Ravitch would not have been possible without it. “It is scary to think what city transit would be like without that support,” says Gene Russianoff, staff attorney of the Straphangers Campaign. “Some people remember Westway as a symbol of what couldn’t get built, a symbol of how David held off Goliath and saved the subways. The $1.4 billion in trade-in funds was a pittance in terms of need,” notes Butzel, “but it came at a critical time at the beginning of the refocusing on transit that that controversy stimulated.” The system was in terrible disrepair, Butzel adds, so the trade-in funds were just the beginning. But the beginning of a real turnaround they were.
Today, trains are nearly twenty times more reliable. Graffiti on subway cars is negligible, and transit crime, fires, and derailments have all been dramatically reduced. Every subway car and bus has been either rehabilitated or replaced. The subway fleet has been expanded by four hundred cars and buses by eight hundred in order to meet growing demands. Miles and miles of tracks and antiquated signals have been replaced. Mayor Giuliani’s administration slowed that reinvestment when it resumed in 1995 the old pattern by cutting the subway rebuilding program by $625 million over the following five years.5 In 2004 annual ridership had reached 1.4 billion, the highest since the subway’s heyday in the 1950s. In September 2005, the number of daily bus and subway riders reached 7.5 million during weekdays, the highest average daily ridership since June 1971.
The transformation is enormous, but, as historian Mike Wallace points out, “the tangibility of the trade-off” remains elusive. People either forget or downplay the impact of the trade-in money on the subways. “If,” Wallace adds, “you could point to a new Second Avenue subway, people would feel differently.” Under Mayor Bloomberg, construction of that desperately needed subway line was resumed.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Mort Downey put it all in perspective probably better than anyone else could. He was with the Federal Department of Transportation from 1977 to 1981, chief financial officer for the MTA from 1981 to 1993, and then back to the federal Department of Transportation as deputy secretary for transportation from 1993 to 2001. Downey remembers this period well, having been in the eye of the storm for more than a decade. “The needs of transit were being debated independent of the Westway issue,” says Downy, but they weren’t making any headway in gaining new funding from either the governor or the legislature. Politically, however, it became clear to Governor Hugh Carey that in order to get Westway approved, he would have to create the illusion that he was also delivering funds for transit. “He announced publicly that he had applied to Washington for $600 million,” remembers Downey. But it was not at all true. When Washington denied that an application had been made, “Carey, then desperate to save face, persuaded [DOT secretary Neil] Goldschmidt to say that ‘it was not beyond the realm of possibility.’ But it was all done within the context of getting Westway through.”
Then Carey appointed Richard Ravitch as chairman of the MTA in 1980, and everything began to change. Ravitch started talking about the real conditions and needs of the MTA to rebuild the city’s transit and the suburban railroads. According to Downey:
He said a basic minimum capital investment of $1.5 billion a year was needed, when the whole capital budget was holding at $200 million a year and some of that money was being used not for capital but to save the fare. Ravitch was told not to talk about this because they had to get Westway approved, but he basically said, “I have to do the job you appointed me to do.”
Ravitch went around the governor, directly to the legislature, to get the first five-year [1982-1986] capital budget of $8 billion, so the time of the trade-in decision [1985] was such that it gave a nice boost to the MTA effort. It was a momentum builder. We would not have gotten the second five-year plan without it. It set the pattern. By 1987, we had the second plan, and by the third, the legislature just knew they had to do it. Ravitch got the debate going, but until he lit the fire under them, they were not supportive of doing both.
By 2007, Downey estimates, $74 billion has been spent rebuilding the system of the subway, buses, and suburban railways.
THE BIG DIG FACTOR
Another significant factor demands consideration. Let’s call it the “Big Dig” factor. One disastrous news story follows the next, it seems, about Boston’s Big Dig, the tunnel highway that connects the city and Logan International Airport. The tunnel is part of the larger central highway system through Boston. Concrete in the walls of the tunnel seems not to be of required quality and may be giving way. Ceiling panels in the tunnel were discovered to be faulty after one fell on a car and crushed a passenger to death. Other construction defects have been exposed over the years. Overruns have kept costs mounting from an original $2.7 billion estimate to what seems to be probably a $15 billion final cost. Started in 1991, the connector tunnel was opened in 2003 and replaced the elevated highway that had divided the city from the waterfront and the North End. Significantly, it does more than replace; it adds capacity.
Does anyone really believe that Westway’s construction would not have gotten the city and state into similar trouble, at least financially? Westway’s budget was expected to grow from $2 billion to $4 billion just because of inflation. Downey figures it might have hit $10 billion before completion, less than the Big Dig because the Big Dig may be more complicated, Downey says. It crosses a river and goes through the heart of downtown Boston. Yet Westway was also largely to be an underwater tunnel.
But the much heralded aspect that Westway would have been funded with 90 percent federal and 10 percent state funds would not have lasted the duration of construction. That commitment expired before Westway would have been finished. “Between 1978 and 1981, the picnic was over,” Downey says of unbuilt segments of the Interstate Highway System like Westway. “The mood in Congress was ‘get it done’ and let’s move on. The first deadline was set in 1978 and changed in 1981 to 1983, unless, as in the New York case, there was litigation.” Then it was 1985. The litigation was ongoing. That was the reason Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo finally agreed to the trade-in that year. There was no guarantee of Westway funds, but the trade-in was secure.
Every other state except New York and Massachusetts had finished their interstate highway segments or were in construction. “There was a total of $6.5 billion to cover trade-ins around the country, not enough for both projects, so those two would have been hanging out there looking for money,” Downey explains. New York, like Massachusetts, would be scrambling for money, and mostly it would have to come from the state and city budgets because enough could never again be extracted from Congress that wouldn’t take up the transportation budget for the entire state. In fact, Downey adds, subsequent allocations to Massachusetts included a provision guaranteeing that a certain percentage of the money go to projects other than the Big Dig because “it was sucking up so much of the state allocation.”
STEEL-WHEEL JOBS VERSUS RUBBER-TIRE JOBS
Westway proponents vociferously argued that Westway was important for the creation of jobs at a time when the New York economy was seriously hurting. Union leader Peter Brennan said on CBS’s Eye On program in 1976, “Will we build a Westway, and open the doors to jobs, whether it be office buildings or warehouses? . . . Do we talk about getting New York turned around, or do we want to put a China Wall around New York and all die of starvation looking at each other? . . .”
The jobs issue pulls at the heartstrings, but what kind of jobs and for whom were never understood. Jacobs focused on this in our conversation:
The jobs argument breaks down into a few things. The Lower Manhattan Expressway debate was the first time the question was ever raised as to where are these jobs? Outside or in New York? And the ones that are in New York, how temporary are they? How long do they last? The other thing about jobs is that under this kind of scheme, permanent jobs are eliminated for the sake of temporary jobs in construction.
In fact, this is what New York has been doing for years: it’s been cannibalizing itself for the sake of temporary construction jobs. It has lost all kinds of low-cost industrial space. It has driven out—apart from those that want to leave the city for various reasons—businesses and all kinds of jobs, not only for highways but for urban renewal, for public housing, for anything.
It was the expressway that I first saw this issue confronted head-on [at a public hearing], and I had a conversation with Harry Van Arsdale, who was head of the Central Labor Council. In fact, I quoted this somewhere in Economy of Cities where a study of how many jobs there were in the SoHo area, before it was SoHo, and how many would be wiped out by the expressway. Van Arsdale was there with a lot of paid construction workers who were given a day’s pay, they told us, to come to City Hall and cheer or boo at the right points. They all left promptly before five o’clock.
Van Arsdale was speaking in favor of the expressway, and I said to him, “What about the jobs of all those people that are going to be wiped out by the expressway?” And a lot of those people are blacks and Puerto Ricans who have a very hard time getting work. And he said, “Oh, I can’t be concerned about those jobs.” And he wasn’t. He was concerned with construction only. High-paid construction workers, temporary jobs. To this day, that’s the basis on which jobs are talked about for Westway.
This is still true in debates on highways, stadiums, casinos, malls, and similar big projects.
In reality, highways and transit are both job creators, at least for jobs that last the duration of the construction project. The same energy and advocacy never seem to get behind the kind of entrepreneurial investment that creates long-term jobs not in construction.
An important distinction exists, however, in the jobs created by highways and transit. Most of the highway jobs are on-site, with cement, steel, and other supplies coming from distant places. With transit, more meaningful jobs and more of them can be created off-site but within the state.
In 2005 the MTA distributed an eight-page brochure highlighting dozens of subway, bus, and commuter rail parts that are made around New York State. A map of the state showed forty-four locations of parts subcontractors for subway, bus, and railcars. Diagrams of the hybrid buses, subway, and railcars identified the location at which each component is produced. The minimum number of scattered manufacturing sites was ten for hybrid buses produced in Oriskany in central New York; the maximum was twenty-eight for the Kawasaki railcars produced in Yonkers, a city north of New York City. “The economy of the southern tier of the state is very dependent on this work, especially the rebuilding of subway cars,” Downey points out. The shells of 660 new subway cars were delivered by ship from Brazil to the Port of Albany, for example, and trucked to an assembly plant with eleven hundred employees in Hornell, in the southwest corner of the state. The Hornell plant is producing the propulsion and gear units. All the parts work, Downey adds, is highly labor intensive. The lighting for new cars comes from Buffalo, the ventilation system from Auburn, and fabricated metal parts from Kingston and Farmingdale. The propulsion system for the new clean-fuel city buses comes from Johnson City and the sheet metal from Utica.
BEYOND TRANSIT: REGENERATION OR REPLACEMENT?
It would be a mistake, however, to evaluate the Westway defeat only on the basis of the enormous transit benefit from the trade-in funds. Multiple positive ripple effects are equally significant:
• The Westway corridor from the Battery to Forty-second Street along the Hudson River has been transformed on both sides of the roadway.
• Neighborhoods around the city experienced tremendous infusions of new residents, lured, in part, by vastly improved transit service.
• A stronger awareness of and interest in the full 575 miles of New York City waterfront evolved or were accelerated after the intense focus on this 5-mile section.
• The regional transit network shared in the new system investments, improving access to the city for local users, commuters, and visitors.
9.2 One of those lovely moments with Jane, a martini break in a conversation. Stephen A. Goldsmith.
The benefits are not obvious, until one appreciates the critical and beneficial role of transit to urban life and the destructive role of highways. Few New Yorkers living in neighborhoods revitalized in recent decades connect the improved transit benefits they enjoy today to the defeat of Westway. “The Westway trade-in and subway investment made all the difference in my life,” reports a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Park Slope. “Before that, you could never count on getting back and forth to Manhattan to make a business meeting on time. You never knew whether your kid’s lateness from school was something to worry about. And, you wound up spending a fortune on cabs at night (if you could get them to take you across the bridge), because you never wanted to trust the subway after dark. I’d say the subway improvements maybe doubled the value of my house.”
The transformation of the far West Side of Manhattan below Forty-second Street is probably the most visible testimony to the post-Westway change. What Jane said would happen if Westway was killed has, indeed, happened. “There is so much there,” she said of the so-called decrepit area. “Plenty of room exists for fill-in development between buildings and on empty lots. Much of that vacant space certainly ought to be developed before you add new landfill at enormous expense, if that’s ever necessary. And the new land wouldn’t be a success until these fill-ins were done in any case.”
During the Westway debate, proponents vigorously argued that the highway and landfill development were absolutely necessary to spur the revival of this stretch of the West Side. Without Westway, the area was doomed, the experts said. They were wrong. This area was certainly “ramshackle.” The condition was not debatable; the cause of the condition was. And Westway as the cure was a joke. As Jane said: “What a ridiculous idea that you put in a billion-dollar highway to manicure a place!”
ORGANIC REGENERATION GETS A CHANCE
Anyone who has observed the organic regeneration of urban districts understood how erroneous this notion was. Grand plans, for highways, urban renewal, stadia, and the like, work as impediments to authentic regeneration, and their defeat makes regeneration possible. Regeneration after defeat is not guaranteed; other conditions are necessary.
In the 1970s many properties along the route were turned into sleazy bars and illicit sex spots, supporting the image of extreme deterioration. Owners waited for the big payoff that would come with condemnation. The bars served as a useful, very visual prop for Westway advocates. Mysteriously, all of these places disappeared after Westway’s demise.
Something was ready and waiting to happen there, and it did—after Westway’s defeat. Now, property along the West Village, Gansvoort Market, and the Chelsea waterfront is among the highest-valued real estate in Manhattan. “The neighborhood is now part of the richest ZIP code in New York City and the 12th richest ZIP code in the country, according to a study by Forbes,” the New York Sun reported on August 14, 2006.
Many buildings have been renovated, and numerous trendy restaurants and shops opened and new buildings have been built. Too many architecturally distinctive buildings, however, were torn down, viable businesses lost, and residents displaced while the death threat hung over the area and the Landmarks Preservation Commission delayed expansion of the Greenwich Village Historic District. An expansion was passed in May 2006. A small additional district was designated—the omitted remnants of the rich district that existed when the original Greenwich Village Historic District was designated in 1966. But even this time, certain landmark-quality buildings were omitted, enabling developers to replace them with high-rise condos.
Old industrial buildings have been converted to residential lofts in the pattern established in SoHo after the demise of the Lower Manhattan Expressway plan.6 And although residents complain that the new high-rises are intrusive and out of character, the scale of some of the new buildings—notably the three best known, designed by architect Richard Meier—are only twelve stories. This is modest for the city, especially in contrast to the excessive scale—forty stories plus—permitted in a 2005 zoning change for the industrial neighborhood of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
If Westway had been built and the new land created for development, can one imagine zoning for fewer than forty stories, and probably more with incentives? Would a wall of high-rises on a hundred acres at the river be better than what is emerging now? Most people complain about the scale of the apartment towers Donald Trump built along the river between Sixty-fifth and Seventy-second Streets, and they are lower than forty stories. Would the West Side have received zoning less than Greenpoint-Williamsburg’s forty stories plus?
THE NEW PARK—BIG IS BIG
The creation of the Hudson River Park along the waterfront puts the lie to the oft-repeated ridiculous belief that nothing big can get done in New York City. Even the New York Times, long an ardent advocate of Westway, noted that “this modest park is as big an urban planning success story as anything that has taken place in New York City in 100 years.”7 Modest it may be, but it is still the largest Manhattan park built in more than a century.
Not only is this already a huge accomplishment on its own terms—about three-quarters completed—but it is the largest physical change in the city’s waterfront land use since the days when cruise ships and commerce filled a rich assortment of finger piers. The opening of the first segment in Greenwich Village in 2003 marked the beginning of serious city and state efforts to transform for recreational use waterfront areas in neighborhoods throughout the city. New segments seem to open annually.
The first segment—a ten-acre swath in Greenwich Village—included three piers extending a thousand feet offshore with lawns, playing fields, playgrounds, a children’s ecology stream, and a display garden, not to mention the spectacular views of the city’s skyline from the end of the piers. Users disagree as to how difficult it is to cross the highway. Either way, millions are indeed crossing. Any weekend, people are coming from all parts of the city. Diehard Westway proponents argue that with the highway underground, access to the waterfront would have been better. But there still would be a road to cross, an access road, not much narrower than the present highway.
Only six years since that 2003 opening, one marvels at how much more of the five-mile park already exists, with more constantly under construction. Within some common design elements, like railings, lighting, and comfortable benches, the diversity of uses and potential experiences is remarkable. Boating options range from sailing and kayaking to touring, with more boating opportunities planned. Lawns for picnicking, sun-bathing, or socializing are plentiful. Playgrounds, tennis courts, a fabulous historic barge, and more are found along the way. Even a small, protected wildlife sanctuary for migrating birds exists with a variety of plantings and flowers to attract whatever Mother Nature brings.
Protecting the fish was at the heart of the Westway battle, and the new park seems to do this well with a generous assortment of habitat preserves. The areas between the piers are off-limits to filling and platforming and continue to function as they have for years. The piers and pilings slow the river flow and create calmer areas, providing shelter for the fish. Decking has been removed from what used to be piers, creating a series of protected pier ruins—pile fields that are both fish habitat and sculptural reminders of the waterfront’s history when piers lined the water’s edge, one after another. Their function as habitat is preserved; if more than 30 percent of the pilings in one field is lost, replacement is required. What is sadly missing, however, is any kind of interpretive signage to remind the visitor of some historic events and activity. This waterfront was the incubator of the city’s and, in effect, nation’s economy in the 1800s. Not a clue is offered.
9.3 The Tribecca boardwalk section of Hudson River Park. Albert Butzel.
Nevertheless, born out of the Westway defeat, this is the greatest park development since Central Park and not just because it is the largest park added to the city since then. It is a balanced blend of new park space, recreational uses, city service structures, and nearby new development. The design evolved out of a three-year planning process with definite input from the assorted adjacent neighborhoods. Because the end result reflects that input, Hudson River Park feels more like a string of contiguous but varying parks, some more passive or active than others.
How do you value a five-hundred-acre park attracting people from all over the city? Kayakers, sailors, even swimmers can get into the water, and everyone gets close to the water. It turns out to be an incredibly well-used city park, not the neighborhood park that people expected. The waterfront-park momentum it precipitated spread to Brooklyn’s DUMBO, Red Hook, Williamsburg, and elsewhere in the city. The significance of the spread of this momentum is enormous.
Unquestionably, this is a different park from what Westway would have produced. The intention was to create a passive park on the landfill, recalls one Westway defender, who worked on the never-completed design. That meant trees, walkways, and lawns, with ball fields down around Christopher Street. Some argue that it would never have worked out that way and instead would have been an extension of Battery Park City with a continuation of the same bulkhead and uses. There is nothing wrong with that, but that is not the same as what now exists, with the variety of designs and uses in between rebuilt piers. Being out on the pier, a thousand feet from shore, is a unique experience. “The piers,” one planning commissioner commented, “are the best thing to happen to New York in 50 years.”
9.4 Hudson River Park grassy Pier 45 in Greenwich Village is a popular gathering place. Albert Butzel.
Equally interesting in a diverse, urban way is the variety of residential and commercial development evolving across the West Side Highway on the inland side facing the river. An interesting mix of new and old of reasonable scale, including numerous innovative conversions of unusual commercial buildings, it is a variable stretch that changes from community to community, reflecting both the city’s earlier and its recent development history. And talk about serendipitous planning—the celebrated High Line neighborhood, with its own new park paralleling the highway two blocks inland, ties in nicely with the waterside park. In fact, what is evolving along the inland side should be called “Starchitect Row,” with buildings by Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Robert A. M. Stern. None of them exceeds twenty stories, and happily none overshadows such incomparable landmarks as the Art Moderne Starrett-Lehigh Building. In fact, as a group, the recent new waterfront buildings are among the highest quality of new structures because of high design standards imposed by the City Planning Commission.
None of this would have happened if Westway were built with one hundred acres of solid, continuous park versus piers and one hundred acres of new development that would be towers like Trump’s Riverside South above Fifty-ninth Street. None of the inland-side development would have happened as well, or at all, knowing that a wall of towers would be built in front.
THE TRANSPORTATION DEBATE
Until the mid-1980s, the idea that more and bigger highways solved traffic problems still prevailed. Few observers recognized that highways through cities and increased vehicular traffic in cities were inimical to urban life. Few experts understood how crucial public transit was to the functioning of a vibrant city.
Some of this is still true. After all, word usage reflects beliefs. Officials talk about “investing” in highways but “subsidizing” transit. Federal funding for roads and airports is infinitely more generous than for transit. News reporters fail to distinguish between infrastructure investment as code words in legislative proposals for highway funding rather than sewers, utilities, streets, and other systems, which used to be—and should still be—what the words connote.
The overwhelming predominance of highway provisions in transportation legislation is accepted as the norm. Some transportation legislation mentions only highways and makes little or no attempt to fund transit. The very central concept of mobility is lost. The transportation question should be: mobility for what? Highways are designed to move vehicles; transit is designed to move people. The difference is like night and day. For mobility of people and goods, public transit should be paramount. “Traffic engineers think of moving vehicles from point A to point B,” Jane noted in conversation. “But the kind of mobility systems cities need—and once had—link all kinds of places within the city in multiple ways.”
VEHICULAR DOMINATION STILL PREVAILS
The deadest downtowns in cities across America are car dominated. The vibrancy of New York’s bustling streets depends on pedestrian, not vehicular, traffic. Unquestionably, New York City has been much more accommodating of vehicular traffic than it was during the 1970s when the City Planning Commission was forced to clamp down on the number of parking spaces in midtown, among other strategies, to discourage driving. This move was a response to a Friends of the Earth air pollution lawsuit in 1977, but the parking-space restriction expired. Garages have not stopped proliferating since. Traffic gets worse. Every new building seems to have another enormous parking garage. The City Planning Commission maintains antiquated standards requiring too much new parking for each new building and residential unit. Curb cuts are granted for private residences on residential blocks where no garages ever existed, allowing one more suburban intrusion to erode vibrant urban streets.8 Resistance is fierce to tolls on the East River bridges, even by residents in neighborhoods accessible to transit. Tolls, of course, would impose some of the city’s costs on commuters and visitors and encourage more transit use. Mayor Bloomberg appropriately and vigorously fought for this to no avail. But he was 100 percent correct to do so.
Delivery trucks get bigger and longer, causing traffic jams at every corner they can’t easily turn. Private tourist buses are larger and more numerous than ever and crowd out local buses from public bus stops. For the tourists’ convenience, taxpaying residents are inconvenienced. Nothing is done to encourage visitors to use the subway or buses, and hotel doormen only put visitors in taxis, rarely recommending transit. Transit maps should be given to every visitor. And why not a metro card with ten dollars’ worth of trips in every hotel room to introduce visitors to transit use? And why not give permit and financial advantages to smaller tour buses with operable windows and no luggage space?
Police, fire, and many other city employees have free workplace parking, even though some of them also get free subway passes and live in transit-accessible neighborhoods. If they don’t live near transit, they could park at a transit locale and continue by subway. Imagine the added security if police and firemen took the subway to work like most city residents.
The parking-garage lobby has achieved enormous strength, boldly evidenced after 9/11. To ease the postdisaster traffic congestion, Mayor Bloomberg wisely and firmly required all vehicles coming over the East River bridges to have two passengers. Garages reportedly suffered the loss of business. They were not alone, but they claimed erroneously that people wanting to shop were not coming in because of the limitation. The restriction did not last long. The garage-lobby investment in maximum vehicular traffic was never more clear until its opposition to congestion pricing.
Permit parking for taxpaying residents in neighborhoods burdened by suburban drivers—as is done in Cambridge, New Haven, and other cities—is rejected whenever it is proposed. The city’s efficient trolley system and Second and Third Avenue elevated trains—called the El—were eliminated during the Robert Moses era to make more room for cars. As a result, the city has a smaller transit system than it did almost a century ago. But new replacement streetcar lines are dismissed out of hand because it is unthinkable to interfere with street space for cars. New York is way behind European cities, which have extraordinary streetcars, bike-ways, and congestion pricing.
So some of the transportation ideas dating from before Westway was killed may still dominate. And some may even be worse. Nevertheless, one should not ignore the differences. The sea change is enormous. Public transit is valued more now than before the Westway fight. New York and the country could have become car-centric without Westway but not without Robert Moses. Yet in small, incremental ways, the public’s desire for the return of more mass transit is having an impact as light rail systems are built city by city, section by section, and downtown sections of elevated highways are being dismantled in a number of cities.
Surely, on many levels, the death of Westway marked the end of an era. And, despite dire warnings of gridlock to come if the roadway’s capacity was not expanded, traffic flows no worse than twenty years ago, heavy but manageable. And while traffic has increased, adjustments have been made to avenue and crosstown streetlights by the Department of Transportation to assist a smoother traffic flow.
BIG PROJECTS DO GET DONE
Whenever a project like Westway is defeated, the cry is heard: “You can’t get anything big done in New York anymore.” Every time I hear this lament, I wonder what city they are talking about. Sometimes big proposals—usually for a new overscaled construction project—actually are defeated. But does that mean all big projects are defeated? Evidence indicates otherwise.
Is not the rebuilding during the past twenty years of the city’s mass transit big, in fact huge and more complex than any singular building project? The mass transit system is not yet good enough, yet it is on its way. Extension of the Number 7 subway line west along Forty-second Street and downtown to Thirty-fourth Street is under way with an estimated price tag of $2.1 billion, even though the long-proposed Forty-second Street Streetcar would have made more sense. Although it would have been built faster and cheaper, it would have taken minimum surface space away from cars. Horrors!
And what about the ongoing construction of the $6 billion Third Water Tunnel, not due for completion until 2020 and billed as the biggest public works project in America? Planned since 1954 and under construction since 1970, enough progress was made for the city to open a finished 13.5-mile segment, about a quarter of the whole tunnel. This allowed the city to close one of the other two tunnels for repairs. New York was facing a veritable crisis with its old, leaking water infrastructure.
The Third Water Tunnel is as big and ambitious a project imaginable and proceeds with little interference. Funding has varied through six administrations, but under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, even with budget shortages, the city investment in the tunnel was twice the amount of the prior five administrations combined. When finished, New York’s water capacity will have been doubled.
One of the largest water-filtration plants in the world is under construction in the Bronx in a ten-story-deep hole blasted out of bedrock. Scheduled for completion in 2012 but already behind schedule and over budget, the plant will be capable of purifying 300 million gallons of water a day. The plant, which will filter water from the Croton watershed, was estimated to cost $660 million when announced in 1998 but by 2008 had reached a projected $3 billion. Considerable opposition to this project occurred because it is under Van Cortlandt Park. The opposition legitimately questioned the selection of the underground Bronx park site when the city owned an alternative site in Westchester where the plant could have been built aboveground. Opponents argued the aboveground site would be cheaper and quicker, which logically makes sense. But the project moved forward, and it will be important to see if the city lives up to its commitment to restore the park better than ever, a commitment that does not seem to be true in the Yankee Stadium neighborhood of the Bronx.
Both Yankee and Shea Stadiums were replaced at the same time. These are enormous undertakings. Stadia have been the favorite big project for cities across the country, even though every economic study has shown they are economic losers. But political and business leaders love their branding and boasting value, even though they exclude fans of modest means. Yankee Stadium is, perhaps, the most egregious in its unfairness to the public, especially the Bronx community. For additional parking garages, a much loved and well-used local park was taken. In return, a less appealing, somewhat distant park space was created. One park is actually located atop the garage and called a replacement. The community will experience the additional vehicular traffic while the Steinbrenners and the Yankees reap the financial profit of the garages. The one good thing that came out of the public debate is the opening of a Metro North train station within walking distance of the stadium. The Steinbrenners always opposed this since it could, it was hoped, get Westchester fans to come by rail instead of car.
A rail link to JFK was built, no small accomplishment given the dissension and debate that preceded its approval. The first proposed route was ludicrous and defeated. A link to La Guardia Airport, however, just as important, doesn’t seem to be on anybody’s priority list. A connection of the Long Island Railroad to the east side and Grand Central, however, is under construction.
And what about the $200 million restoration of Grand Central Terminal, one of the grandest public spaces and urban gateways almost lost during the era of transit devaluation and lack of interest in historic preservation? It is easy to build from scratch, harder to adjust and revive what exists. But the satisfaction comes with accomplishing what makes urbanistic sense. Grand Central is New York’s best face to the visiting and commuting world—a better brand, if you need one, than a stadium—but it does not only benefit the outsider; it is also a destination for New Yorkers. A terrific food market, assorted small local retailers, high-end restaurants, and a food court were added during the restoration, an appropriate diversity of uses bringing in activity of all kinds. This is the best measure of success.
Then there is Central Park, reclaimed and restored to its original Olmsted-Vaux glory over three decades. Its transformation is still ongoing, and Prospect, the Battery, and Riverside Parks are following similarly impressive paths. Central Park’s restoration was a big vision accomplished in manageable increments until the large-scale whole was revived by its small-scale components. The park is not big in a build-new way but big in a restorative way. The revival of Central Park parallels the restoration of the city itself.
None of these projects is about real estate. Instead, they are about critical infrastructure, of the kind that either makes the city function or adds to the quality of life that makes it a desirable place to live. When one understands the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure, it is nothing short of amazing that New York is proceeding to address some of these crucial infrastructure needs.
Sweeping new gestures in the form of big new real estate projects garner political appeal and grab headlines when proposed, regardless of the legitimacy of their claims; more satisfying and productive gestures are the ones made up of smaller components that are quite complex and stun you in their completion. They don’t emerge fresh out of the ground on a huge, cleared site.
GOVERNMENT CAN DO IT BIG AND WELL
One of the most staggering accomplishments achieved primarily by a city agency is the reclamation of the more than a hundred thousand vacant city-owned housing units contained mostly in old tenements and brownstones, the kind Robert Moses invariably demolished when he could.
In the early 1980s conditions were so embarrassing that the Koch administration put trompe l’oeil decals depicting shutters, potted plants, and Venetian blinds to cover windows of city-owned abandoned buildings along the Cross Bronx Expressway. Instead of improving the image of the area and camouflaging the massive problem, it brought more attention to it.
New York was losing thirty-six thousand residential units a year to abandonment. Pushed by community groups looking to occupy and renovate these buildings for affordable units, the city under Koch initiated a number of innovative programs. Grassroots efforts instigated these policies with little public notice. City officials, overwhelmed by the problem, wisely responded to community-based proposals. Mayor David Dinkins aggressively continued the new policies, and momentum was firmly established. Dramatic federal cutbacks under President Reagan pulled the rug out from under these efforts nationwide, and Mayor Giuliani showed no interest in trying to maintain the momentum or look for new creative ways to confront the problem. The momentum slowed. But Mayor Bloomberg recommitted to creating affordable housing. There is some question as to whether the city is losing as many as it is gaining because of gentrification and rent deregulation, according to the New York Times.9 Developer-built projects seem to dominate, but the renovation trend continues uncelebrated. Community-based efforts that contributed enormously in the past continue the regeneration momentum today.
Local efforts reseeded with modest resources the neighborhoods by the late 1980s. Developers followed, built new projects with big tax or zoning incentives or on low-cost city-owned land, gained the attention of the media, and eventually took credit for scores of neighborhood turnarounds, especially in the South Bronx and Brooklyn.
LOW-DENSITY MISTAKES STILL HAPPEN IN A BIG WAY
Unfortunately, what was built on vacant lots was mostly low-density, suburban housing, instead of the traditional two-family or more row houses containing the density needed for well-functioning urban neighborhoods. Vacant land is now scarce for badly needed affordable housing. Many neighborhoods now lack the density appropriate for their infrastructure or to attract new local convenience stores and small businesses. In contrast, the New York City Housing Authority is now wisely offering parking lots at some public housing sites for development of new moderate- and low-income apartments. This is an important new infill initiative. In fact, other infill potential exists in public housing sites for more than just housing.
Re-creating density where it’s been lost is critical. Every recently built single-family home should be allowed to expand or build its unit into a two-family dwelling immediately, even to have the ability to add another floor or two. Many already function as two-family, sometimes three-family, homes illegally. If legalized, health and safety regulations can be instituted and monitored.
Owner-occupied two- and three-family units are a successful, low-scale housing resource in many urban neighborhoods, mixed in with high-density low-rise apartment buildings, creating the population necessary to support local retail, transit, schools, and social institutions—in other words, the components of real communities. The infrastructure already exists to support this. Allowing the expansion of the suburban-style homes is no guarantee it will occur, but permitting it offers new regenerative possibilities. This is the kind of big initiative in small increments that could have a big citywide impact.
One of the bizarre twists in the changes to the city’s zoning and building codes is that it has long been illegal to build the city’s most successful housing form—the classic brownstone. The four- or five-story brownstone is the perfect structure to serve a single family or as multiple apartments. Easy to reconfigure over time, new brownstones would make infinitely more sense than the single- and two-family suburban housing that has been built in too many neighborhoods over the past twenty years. Between erroneous setback requirements and excessive handicap-access rules that require elevators for more than three floors, the return of the brownstone is stymied. Yet rebuilding brownstones in a big way around the city would go a long way toward adding affordable housing.
MORE BIG THINGS GETTING DONE
Historian Mike Wallace, whose brilliant slim book New Deal for New York was published one year after 9/11 and presents a clear and sensible agenda for public actions, goes further. He cites even more big things than I have enumerated, all accomplished by the city but either taken for granted or unrecognized. These are the kind of big projects that matter the most to the overall health and functioning of the city, its neighborhoods, and its economy but never count as “big projects.”
Starting with water, Wallace of course cites the tunnel, “fabulously successful and profoundly under-celebrated. The Big Dig is nothing in comparison.” He continues: “Great strides have been made with water in general, in controlling pollution, both by private actors and by public agencies, in stopping chemical discharges into our rivers, in instituting critical controls, and in building the North River Pollution Control plant, an astonishing intervention into a massive problem.” For years, the Housing Authority has been replacing windows, appliances, and toilets in all public housing units to conserve water and energy.
Wallace also cites the institution of a citywide recycling program, even though not as comprehensive as could be but at least a beginning effort to tackle the enormous garbage problem. And major inroads have been made in controlling air pollution, starting with outlawing the burning of coal in 1966. And in a different direction, he cites the area of policing. Giuliani takes more credit for this than is his due, Wallace says. The intelligent upgrading of technology started before him, under Dinkins. The drop in the crime rate shows the city is capable of responding to big problems. “You can’t look at this array of big accomplishments and say the public sector is not able to get big things done,” Wallace says.
The big but uncelebrated successes share common threads. None were accomplished by one leader or one developer. None occurred quickly; nothing big ever does. Many responded to citizen pressures or were initiated by individuals. Others responded to new conditions, such as the need to conserve energy and water. Almost all gained public consensus or went ahead without it. None were stopped by the culture of confrontation and contention that interferes only sometimes successfully with the mammoth one-shot, top-down projects that inspire complaints about what can get done in the city. And each in its own way both fortified the connections of the larger city and inspired further efforts, feeding the critical momentum of renewal that produces constant but positive change throughout the city. Authentic regeneration, as already indicated, is a process, not a project. This concept cannot be articulated often enough. Beneficial change is ongoing, but it is beneficial because it does not erase or overwhelm a place.
Not to be overlooked in any examination of big things getting done are the projects that have gotten done over time. Battery Park City is in its fifth decade and almost finished. Large waterfront parks are emerging on several sites in Brooklyn. Time-Warner went up overscaled but up nonetheless. After an intense battle with Trump in the initial phase, Riverside South, overlooking the Hudson on the Upper West Side, with its oversized buildings but commendable waterfront park, is two-thirds complete after twenty years and under new ownership.10 The theater district and Forty-second Street have been totally transformed into a glitzy office park and shopping mall for tourists with restored historic theaters as the only authentic anchors. The district is a classic replacement, not a regeneration. And, of course, huge buildings have gone up all over town.
DEFEAT WITH GOOD REASON
In my experience observing and writing about the New York development scene, big things are defeated because they are too big, inappropriate, and alien to the area for which they are proposed. Less grandiose schemes are accepted after intense and often meaningful public debate and genuine participation. Consensus is key. When achieved, projects go forward, as witness the convention center, Battery Park City, and the train to the plane, all of which were at various points quite controversial.
The death of Westway, and before it the Lower Manhattan Expressway, led to some of the best big new development in the final decades of the twentieth century—big in the overall sense, not big in the sense of one new project or one place. SoHo, of course, and everything it inspired around New York and the country would never have occurred with the Lower Manhattan Expressway built. On the West Side, the Hudson River Park continues to unfold, bit by appealing bit. The Gansvoort Historic District, just north of Greenwich Village, is one of the hottest new real estate markets. Westway would have decimated it. The transformation of the Nabisco Building into the Chelsea Market is a model of small, diverse uses in a huge building with the city’s first Whole Foods Market in the ground floor. These are only a few of both the waterfront and the near-inland developments that occurred in the Westway corridor with the defeat of the highway.
Cumulatively, all this adds up to big development, not big development all in one place, at one time. But it is big development nonetheless, in small doses all along the West Side and around the city. The process of authentic regeneration has unfolded in many places, sprouting a potpourri of innovative projects.
Beneficial change is ongoing but never overwhelming. The positive spin-offs are endless and widespread. The geographically varied and diverse nature of the assorted developments cited above are components in the process, not singular projects. That is the kind of change Westway’s demise unleashed, adding up to enormous change in the larger city.
Urbanism at its best.