Stumbling Toward Tomorrow: The Decline and Fall of the New York Vision
Huxtable, Ada Louise
Nineteen twenty-nine was a banner year for visions of New York. In the heady atmosphere of the beautiful life and endless tomorrows of that doomed decade, just before the future died, all dreams...
...It is not laying a foundation for the future through the foresighted provision of a continuing base of employment and prosperity...
...But the trouble goes far deeper...
...Magnificence" had obviously not yet gone out of style...
...Felix Rohatyn, the man who headed the fiscal restructuring of New York and who can figure with the best of them, repeatedly urges more constructive policies...
...For developers and investors, this shimmering mirage is a money machine...
...What had started with the counterculture in the early 1960s, when architecture and planning students had literally taken to the streets, setting up storefront operations in the most troubled areas, had created a new agenda of social planning...
...Multilevel pedestrian and vehicular precincts separated people and cars...
...Sylvia Deutsch, who heads the Planning Commission, speaks of reestablishing the city's virtually extinct housing pipeline...
...The physical plan was the product of data, specifications, and projections from which a picture of a place could be made, to show how a city, or its component parts, would appear when the recommendations were carried out...
...The new downtown Boston is the result of such a plan made almost thirty years ago, and without a similar set of guidelines to build on its strengths today, many of the perceived virtues will be lost...
...As a vision, and as an actual blueprint for regional development, the First Regional Plan was enormously influential...
...Hindsight tells us what went wrong: New York was constantly changing under the planners' feet...
...The ad hoc approach was legitimized...
...No one is perceiving, or parlaying, the opportunities presented by unprecedented development for a comprehensive, coordinated or responsible overview that would put growth in context and in touch with the future...
...Deutsch is worth watching...
...It functions reactively to the proposals of others, reviewing them only after the developer's horse has left the barn at a fast trot...
...Ironically, this came on the heels of several years of notable planning achievements in New York that marked a high point of physical planning...
...From the 1929 Regional Plan book: "A terminal over the West Side Yards of the New York Central would have the superb advantage of a riverfront site for a development corresponding in size and importance to Grand Central Station...
...The Planning Commission is no longer the proposer of plans and projects, the initiator of ideas and interventions, the agency responsible for evaluation of the multiple effects of massive construction...
...it coincided with an increasing awareness of the complex social base of urban problems that remained untouched by physical improvements, coupled with a rising tide of community 456 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS activism...
...The most alarming finding of all is that the city's customary routes to employment and assimilation simply are not working...
...It was given the ultimate birthing push by government funding programs that required a master plan as a prerequisite for federal grants...
...Vision is a remarkable thing...
...It didn't deserve the bad rap...
...The scale and reach were small...
...And Earth Day...
...The idea that the hassle was the prelude to the prize, that living on the edge was a fun challenge in a town where all things were possible, is still part of the "I Love New York" mythology...
...For Henri Matisse, arriving in New York by boat and seeing the skyline with a painter's eye, the same buildings were dematerialized in atmosphere and color— "a sensation of gradation of tones from the base to the top . . . which evaporates in the sky . . . like a mirror of water . . . a ravishing spectacle . . . in a crystalline light...
...The charter changes also mandated a master plan...
...But the intellectual and creative drive directly involved with city affairs has not been equaled since...
...For the rest of the world New York's skyscrapers are still poetry and fantasy...
...Imagination, innovation, involvement—and vision—were in long supply...
...At its best, the Master Plan was conceived in broad, humanistic terms integrated with public and userfriendly needs from governance to quality of life...
...In 1961, zoning reform (yes, reform again) turned a faulty, much-amended statute into a revised set of rules meant to correct those faults, which immediately developed faults of their own...
...The architectural language, however, is something else...
...Large and small business departures are accelerating, while the default of giants, like Mobil and J. C. Penney, makes headlines...
...The Master Plan: End of an Era The recognition of urban planning and design as a real need, and its rise as an academic discipline in this country in the years before the Second World War, were part and parcel of this physical approach...
...The vision of Hugh Ferriss, forever co-opted in "artists' renderings" of the "city of the future," and the studies and recommendations of the Regional Plan Association, with their pragmatic ideals and goals, had one important thing in common: both were based on the idea of the physical plan...
...Through trial and error, a better understanding was emerging of the lessons of the past as well as more appropriate goals for the future, an understanding of context and character, of human scale and needs...
...The Commission on the Year 2000 report makes clear the connection between the city's social pathology, educational failures, hardcore economic problems, and a disturbing and uncertain future...
...If the company really means to stay, however, it would be nice if it replaced the dead trees that help make its public plaza one of the more doleful places in town...
...The new agency played a somewhat mysterious role in municipal operations at first...
...Obviously, the Regional Plan Association had its share of dreamers, too...
...The point was not to create a blueprint that could never be followed, but to define ways in which inevitable redevelopment could be integrated with desirable connecting tissue and public features to raise the quality and facilities of a related whole...
...It goes in and out of fashion, like clothes...
...Who would dare predict anything about the cyclical nature of an increasingly monolithic financial services economy...
...Their place in the public realm is off the bottom of a nonexistent list...
...But what eventually proved to be the Achilles' heel of physical planning and led to a near-universal reaction against planning in general (an upheaval still under way) was the fact that this kind of planning relied on a simplistic, static concept implying—and depending upon—a continuity of conditions during the years between formulation and realization...
...The comprehensive struggle to physically eradicate urban blight had failed to alleviate the pressures of poverty and deprivation or the growing cataclysm of drugs and despair...
...Although much valuable information was gathered and analyzed, the Master Plan was out of date the moment it was printed...
...One pays an obscenely high price for a way of life that is not much better than jungle warfare...
...We have now gone through physical planning, and social planning, and have entered an age of numbers planning...
...The drawings tell more than words," the description concluded in some awe...
...The city threatened to sue when AT&T announced plans to sell its headquarters building and move to New Jersey, in spite of the special tax advantages it had received...
...In the last twenty years, according to her figures, housing production has decreased from 60,000 dwelling units in 1966 to 7,000 units in 1985, and two thirds of those were not affordable homes...
...This study stands as a classic exposition of pragmatic concerns placed within a framework of future ideals...
...To attract and keep corporations under New York's "hardship conditions," when the flight alternative is more attractive, quick fiscal fixes are necessary...
...And it was charter reform, again, that institutionalized the Planning Commission's new and muchweakened position...
...The city's tacit or open helpfulness in the rise of real estate values (read rising tax base) through zoning that encourages speculators' escalation of those values is beginning to boomerang...
...By one of those portentous and cataclysmic quirks of fate, it coincided with the advent of the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s, which made the idea of large-scale planning even more unreal...
...Two-tier development along Manhattan's rivers was visualized by architect Francis S. Swales —the lower level for commerce, the upper level for drives along which "magnificent dwellings might arise...
...In the heady atmosphere of the beautiful life and endless tomorrows of that doomed decade, just before the future died, all dreams were possible...
...It cannot be called planning of any persuasion...
...They also change with the times...
...Most important, the climate in New York is antiplan —not in the ideological sense now in intellectual fashion, but in the most reactionary terms of exploitative economics since Manhattan's proverbial purchase from the Indians...
...Also in 1929, the First Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs appeared—an epochal document produced by the Regional Plan Association that was meant to carry the city and its surrounding territories into the tomorrow of 1965...
...In New York, the rising popularity of the idea of directed growth and the early history of the planning movement was paralleled by the creation of the New York City Planning Commission as part of charter revision in the 1930s...
...Giving Away the City And much more has been lost than faith, which has its natural limitations...
...In this bazaar atmosphere of temptations and tradeoffs, no one is addressing the deeper and more lasting problems that are immune to defensive accounting...
...Whether this is conscious policy or not, it is real policy, of a most shortsighted and dangerous kind...
...When a troubled (or smart) company finds that the value of its Manhattan headquarters is greater than the value of doing business here, it sells and decamps...
...But this is catch-up ball directed at the long-term damage wreaked by the disastrous cuts that started with the fiscal crisis...
...Environmental and historic preservation and community input became the watchwords of the newly sensitized...
...It is essential to this vision that it cannot be completed or fulfilled...
...its most clearly and earliest understood function was the use of commission vacancies for political payoffs (immediately) and more complex ethnic-borough-religion-andgender payoffs (later on...
...Although we are told that there is much less of this now, the arrangements made have usually reached well into the future, leaving the recipient the clear winner and the city the likely loser in uncharted economic uncertainties...
...But today a record 25 percent of the city's population, unemployed or poorly employed, lives below the poverty line...
...During the long reign of Robert Moses, who cast a very long shadow and stretched an even longer arm into all of the city's agencies, not surprisingly no one dared suggest a non-Moses master plan...
...charter reformers visualized a Solomon-like role for the planners in which they would adjudicate disputes and guarantee the long view...
...People were planshy...
...For Le Corbusier, on his first visit to New York in 1935, the skyscrapers were too small to match the image in his mind...
...Still smarting from community objections, and without funds, the FALL • 1987 • 457 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS city turned to the miniplan, to street-corner surgery, and sometimes to cosmetic surgery at that...
...He has lashed out at the city's delays in using MAC surpluses for desperately needed housing...
...Faceted, futuristic skyscrapers were bridged by overhead roads and trimmed with airplane platforms...
...But to those who do numbers planning, these buildings are beautiful...
...This includes zoning review, attention to the neglected outer boroughs, and an attempt to find mechanisms to help the commission function again as a planning unit...
...Some of those wonderful vibes—the ones that are supposed to guarantee that the future is here and you can have it all—have gone out of sync and sour...
...But New York is the home of the big teal estate leagues and it is easy to tell the pros from the pols...
...The redoubtable Eric Gugler would have extended and filled the Battery for a plaza with a "lofty monument" meant to be a "magnificent sea gate to the metropolis...
...What is gone is the vaunted upward mobility that was a tenet of the 460 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS American, and New York, way of life—the ability to move out and up, to become part of the mainstream...
...It dealt with metropolitan growth, population trends, land values, traffic, transit and transportation, the protection and regulation of buildings and land use through zoning, the role of government, issues of public health and recreation, consideration of neighborhoods and community planning, physical conditions, and public services...
...Not everyone is happy to draw sustenance and support just from New York's supercharged, polluted air...
...FALL • 1987 • 453 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS Model of Trump Television City, proposed for the West Side Rail Yards 1987 454 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS Harvey Wiley Corbett showed stacked streets for cars and pedestrians, lined with continuous arcades...
...the Public Development Corporation inaugurates huge, controversial projects that raise serious questions of scale, impact, and appropriateness...
...And sometimes Regional Plan of New York, Francis S. Swales, architect...
...The City Beautiful is a lost ideal that inspires nostalgia in the hearts of a fastculture generation full of fashionable retroromanticism...
...Who, for example, could have foreseen the extraordinary rise in Manhattan land prices...
...Some bodies, like the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Finance and Economic Development and the New York City Public Development Corporation, which should be working closely with the Planning Commission, are independent of it...
...While a good part of this, logically and properly, came from the agencies involved, and another part, inevitably, was vaguely conjured to cover the course, the point of the process was to provide a budget with a broad overview of the city's needs and priorities...
...To mistake the miasma, or buzz, or vibes that are constantly cited by the city's boosters as some magic penumbra of innovative energy is to confuse the sound effects with constructive creative focus...
...Such a plan obviously represented a Herculean task requiring sibylline skills and enormous staff time...
...The "artist's rendering" was always in demand...
...That figure, still rising, is the highest in the city's history...
...Every major new structure broke the city's existing scale and overpowered its streets...
...Duffus observed that "the art of the builder is making great strides in America . . . if [New York] seizes its natural opportunities [it] may find a whole new architectural language of its own, worthy of its magnitude and prestige...
...but hope, and generations, spring eternal...
...It does not matter that Ferriss reached unrealistically for the stars or that hindsight makes the First Regional Plan a mixed bag of fulfilled and unfulfilled expectations...
...Her vision is a practical and sociological one...
...As an example, the West Side corridor to the new convention center was studied in the 1970s by the Office of Midtown Development when the center's location was still under discussion...
...If the dreams ran high there were schemes to match...
...The rebuilding seems about to proceed as a series of independent actions and patchwork deals in which the city is simply the expediter for construction...
...The way one looks at them is as mathematical multiples...
...this was quite a remarkable document, whatever its conspicuous faults or omissions...
...Offices of Lower Manhattan and Midtown Development had been followed by similar offices meant to deal with onsite problems in other boroughs...
...A pioneering Urban Design Group had been created to work on projects at the local level, as well as larger public facilities...
...Visions have their uses...
...Automatic bonuses given for street amenities, permits and variances as trade-offs for special features, led to unprecedented building size and density...
...Developers are quick to tell you that they play by the rules and conditions the city sets...
...It would have been a good deal less than wonderful, even had it been possible, if all the plans of the 1960s had been carried out— such as raising the land level and narrowing the East River in Lower Manhattan, or building the Piranesian megastructure originally proposed for Battery Park City...
...With the fall of physical planning, a modern belief system died—the liberal conviction and optimistic faith in a perfectible, or at least predictable, future world...
...This magnificent Manhattan was rigidly organized into impressive formal "zones" for business, arts, and science, with supertowers marking the intersections of grand avenues...
...The commission had one charter-specified function, however, that gave it unusual purpose and power: it was charged with the annual preparation of the city budget...
...It helps to remember how much of the city's waterfront was used for garbage-dumping and slaughtering at the time...
...Physical planning was predicated on the idea that both the original assumptions and conclusions, and the form given to them, were unchangingly valid and desirable...
...Neatness and high-mindedness counted...
...You figure the maximum square footage and then calculate the real estate and/or occupancy taxes, business and sales taxes, and all their fiscal spinoffs...
...They commissioned architects' views of recommended land use improvements with possibilities of urban and artistic grandeur...
...The murmuring on the outer radical fringes about concerns that do not yield to the T-square had entered the academies as a new gospel of social planning, reflecting an increasing trend and backlash everywhere...
...Even with the return of good times, the position, prestige, and strength of the Planning Commission were never regained...
...In the intervening years, cities had been split and neighborhoods destroyed by bulldozer urban renewal...
...The skills and values that planners hold—concerns for the future in more than abstract terms, methods and techniques for guidance, a professional under458 • DISSENT DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS standing of the factors that control the quality of urban life, a sense of a balanced relationship between that quality and economic growth, the ability to visualize the results of an abstract proposal and to see the reality behind the artist's rendering and the increasingly esoteric legal maneuvers—those skills and values no longer command respect or credibility...
...But the accepted vision of New York today is of a process as much as of a place: it is a hyperkinetic, creative kind of multiframe supercity video in which chaos and hype are equated with an almost mystical vitality...
...Of course, all of this beauty is somewhat offset by the deals that have become the standard lure to the builder or corporate owner—the write-offs and write-downs, the special legislative incentives and exemptions, the subsidies and depreciations, including such items as forgiveness of sales tax on construction materials and special utilities rates...
...New York's burgeoning prosperity, its aggressive affluence, has not touched one quarter of its people...
...And then there is that timeless vision that will not die, brought by those whose names and color change with the years, of the city of opportunity, where the streets are paved with gold...
...The city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops...
...This was a different kind of vision...
...The commission has found a city more divided than it ever was before, divided ultimately by class rather than by race, divided by immovable and unyielding barriers...
...Recently he urged that the latest surplus be spent on the public schools...
...What the Planning Commission was left with was a largely unread, quasi-hypothetical Statement of Capital Needs—a document that became another dust catcher...
...At least one corporate real estate executive has said that New York gives away not only the store but the farm and the barn...
...She is a realist, and so is her program...
...We are watching the fallacy at work in Times Square now—with the Forty-Second Street Redevelopment Plan...
...FALL • 1987 • 455 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS the vision owed more to the logic of topography and land use than to local needs and characteristics...
...When construction boomed again, the dangers of a new kind of permissive, manipulatable zoning became clear...
...Through attrition and default, the only real planning game left in town is zoning...
...The powerful new agencies that arose to shape policies and expedite development have diluted and scattered the commission's authority and control...
...When New York's communities saw what their planners had wrought for them, there was revolt in all the boroughs...
...in fact, it no longer exists...
...It was New York's near-bankruptcy, however, that brought not only planning, but the city itself, to a grinding, ignominious halt— a catastrophe from which it has never really recovered in terms of its physical plant and services in spite of the return of a much-flaunted prosperity...
...q FALL • 1987 461 462 • DISSENT...
...Numbers planning is not real planning in that it does nothing to address the building of a stable economic base beyond the fine art of tax forecasting and financial packaging...
...It fell as flat as a pancake and has been reviled ever since...
...The city had turned out to be a fragile and interdependent, highly unpredictable, fractious, erratically functioning entity far beyond planners' conventional ideas or projections and often in conflict with them...
...Flagrant overzoning became a visible reality as economic conditions favored the unprecedented abuse of its possibilities...
...Nor did the region's planners ignore visions of a more aesthetic nature...
...In the words of Robert Wagner, Jr., who headed the study, New York "no longer offers the same opportunities or absorption in terms of race or poverty" that have long been its traditional pride...
...Corbett's image is not only memorable, but almost spookily postmodernist prescient...
...Almost sixty years later, it would seem that all natural and unnatural opportunities have indeed been seized...
...planners were surprised to find that it wasn't always what the natives wanted...
...The course was to the swift, and for the less swift, at least, the way was still open to the good, or decent, life...
...Less noticed, but of critical importance, the commission's budget-preparing function was eliminated under the rubric of reform (by now, city-watchers should see "reform" as a red-flag word hoisted by each new generation substituting its own mistakes and bad judgment for the errors of its elders...
...Their connections to the future, beyond tax projections, are tenuous...
...Television City's proposed bid for grandeur, on the same site, would be pinned on the illusory glory of the tallest building in the world...
...A 1930 book devoted to the Regional Plan by the author and journalist R.L...
...It is clear now that New York City's Master Plan marked the end of physical planning and the beginning of another era in municipal policy and practice...
...The physical plan culminated in the all-encompassing prescriptions of the Master Plan...
...The perspective drawings of balloon-holding happy families in banner-decked pedestrian plazas against backdrops of sleek new housing and sailboatflecked harbors joined the topographical maps and transportation networks in the permanent municipal dust...
...On to the Twenty-First Century The report of the Mayor's Commission on the Year 2000, a recently completed municipal think-tank effort with observations that can hardly be called upbeat, has come to the appalling conclusion that New York is no longer the city of opportunity...
...She is also a source of some succinctly Big Apple quotes about the tastes and choices of the defectors...
...Wagner, now president of the Board of Education, has welcomed Felix Rohatyn's call for the use of MAC funds as direct aid to the public schools...
...A Terminal over the West Side yards of the New York Central" was presented as "great masses of buildings with mighty arches spanning the cross streets," a megastructure in an inflated Early Park Avenue apartmenthouse style as notable for its sedate uniformity as for its monumental ambitions...
...Matters of public policy and the quality of urban design have been routinely left to the developers until the belated appointment of an independent review panel, which operates in a limbo of droit economique and a priori design unconnected to any planning jurisdiction...
...Even if the loss of faith in planning and the power plays among agencies had not been decisive factors, the fiscal malpractice employed by several administrations preceding the debacle eventually made it necessary to give control over all major money matters to a higher authority, the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC)—the fiscal policy and planning agency that bailed the city out and set it on the road to financial stability...
...Ferriss's vision is high fantasy and high art...
...This didactic, concrete prescription built a certain rigidity into the vision...
...At its worst, the Master Plan became a dehumanized exercise in bureaucratic map- and picture-making, creating a series of urban fairy tales with mythical happy endings told in four-color overlays destined to gather dust on planners' shelves...
...Understandably, Mr...
...Currently, MAC funds have been earmarked for hiring police and rebuilding the city's neglected infrastructure and some current budget needs...
...In all of this activity, the broad and interrelated concerns of the planning process have been subverted and reduced to revenue-producing operations...
...With the leverage of development pressures on the city's side, it calls none of the originating shots except to auction off sites for superprojects that relate to nothing much farther away than the megabuilding next door, usually through no more than the purchase of its air rights...
...The New York City Master Plan was finally completed in 1970, in 440,000 words and six handsome volumes, about thirty years late...
...The monstrous became ludicrous when mediocrity (never in short architectural supply) began to come in fancy dress with the advent of postmodernism, in which silly raids on history in the hands of shrewd image-salesmen and their abetting architects raised the ante and the buildings to a sickening scale, turning the merely silly into a remarkably sinister product...
...It was flexible enough to give guidance and coherence to private development while rolling with the urban and economic punches...
...But they have ceased to be beacons of hope...
...Back in the hands of the budget bureau, different priorities were inevitably set...
...Responding to this altered planning climate, charter changes of the 1970s established community boards, environmental reviews and ULRP, the Uniform Land Review Process, cumbersome but useful additions that have proved, on balance, to be wise and worthwhile...
...It is the reach that is important, the sense of a larger destiny than the bottom line...
...In 1929 the architect-delineator Hugh Ferriss published his drawings and descriptions of "The Metropolis of Tomorrow," a crepuscular Elysium of wide-spaced, soaring spires in perfect axial symmetry that managed to combine the aura of the traditional Beaux Arts City Beautiful with futuristic intimations of Le Corbusier's towers-in-a-park...
...Anyone remember advocacy architecture...
...The Deputy Mayor for Finance and Economic Development, Alair Townsend, a wonderwoman with numbers, juggles employment and industry figures and the pluses and minuses of the ins and outs with impressive skill...
...They were staffed by some of the best and the brightest young professionals ever attracted to public service, who still believed that the future lay in some other direction than Wall Street...
...What is missing today in New York is the spirit that inspired Hugh Ferriss's vast pictorial idealism and the Regional Plan Association's initial farsighted goals...
...The essential elements for such a base are a work force with sufficient education and skills, adequate FALL • 1987 • 459 DAYS OF THE DEVELOPERS housing and schools, functioning transportation— all those factors that afford an acceptable (meaning competitive with other places) quality of private and public life...
...It combined a comprehensive survey of the city's and region's conditions and needs with specific short- and long-term recommendations in a series of eight volumes (followed by two more in 1931) for what might be called the beginnings of realplan (as in realpolitik) in New York...
...If you consider the price of the land and the profits to be made, which have a certain constancy that transcends boom or bust, that is the one realistic vision that endures...
...Even the most schematic indications were immediately translatable into recognizable reality...
...They continue to intimidate and exhilarate in a perennial sky show...
...Prizes of publicly owned land, such as the Coliseum site at Columbus Circle, are handed out by the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the city for purchase or lease on a highest-bid basis...
...The text detailed the ways in which this ideal New York would increase the convenience, pleasure, and well-being of its inhabitants...
...But it was doomed because its timing was fatal...
...The budget charette (and eventually, charade, after New York developed its unique hanky-panky with capital and operating funds in a kind of Ponzi scheme of delayed but inevitable fiscal disaster) took place every year...
...Skills are required today that the school system does not provide...
...That budgetary function, which dealt with the coordinated needs of the city on all of its interlocking levels, had made the commission much more than a physical planning agency...
...Yuck," she says eloquently...
...Now that the convention center is completed, activity is accelerating...
...Cleansweep replacement remains popular with politicians in part because it makes for a more predictable bottom line for the developer...
...She is neither antidevelopment nor inclined to architectural judgment—both proper stances for the Planning Commission— and she does not appear to be about to go toe-to-toe with the Manhattan real estate crowd and their friends at City Hall...
...A former head of the Board of Standards and Appeals, where she dealt with development, she evidently plans to focus her energy and experience where they can be made to count...
...Among its frequently restated principles was "the promotion of the highest economic uses that are consistent with true social purpose," which included "restraining the actions of owners who obtain profit for themselves to the injury of other owners and the community...
...The master plan was always put off...
...How will J. C. Penney feel when it wakes up rich in Dallas instead of poor in New York...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
