The City of Deals

...New York bears the scars of fights lost or half won...

...Underground, its extraordinary transit system had deteriorated along with miles of buried pipes, wires, and tunnels...

...But it is worth pausing and considering what kind of city New York has become...

...New Year's," you might tell your children, "we used to have a street for that...

...Because of its low building heights for midtown, Times Square is an unusually spacious and unclaustrophobic area, which debates about its grit and undeniable social problems have tended to obscure...

...The present clamor for notoriety is not new...

...The destruction of Penn Station and the distrust of the open street have marked New York's paranoid urbanism of the last three decades, 368 • DISSENT setting the stage for its recent brutal plans for Times Square and Columbus Circle...

...Initial critical attention was paid only to the relatively benign Chippendale top, but Philip Johnson and John Burgee's first completely postmodern building imposes an imperial scale...

...The lobby dwarfs the visitor with multistoried Roman arches and oversized heroic sculpture...

...Boston Properties has been forced to discharge its architect and absorb losses of $15 million...

...The monotonous redundancy of flat-topped towers and sunken plazas, built to achieve zoning variances and now abandoned black holes, gives a ghost town effect when the daily army of office workers has departed...

...Civic groups attacked the project for its bulk, siting, and lack of harmony with other buildings in the neighborhood...

...This is not urban planning...

...New York Landmarks Preservation Commission) SUMMER • 1988 • 369 citizen's group that brought the suit in front of Judge Lehner, argued its concerns: The proposed building would be one of the three largest buildings in Manhattan...

...When completed, there won't be much happening outside...

...it would strain the ability of the public transit and streets to handle the added traffic...

...Supplanted by the Javits Convention Center, there is no longer any need for the Coliseum to occupy the corner southwest of Central Park...

...Now at each location there is a rare sense of open space...

...By putting on a nice cold shining skin for skating, Trump was doing what he does best...

...Unconstrained by city regulations and free to hire the best people available, Trump was able to complete the work quickly and under budget...

...Trump shrewdly understood the city was ready to deal, allowing all sorts of unnecessary incentives so as not to do the hard work itself...

...But at that point, the market in the city was very hot, the prices seemed very high, and I was unable to find a deal I liked—meaning a good piece of property at a price I found affordable...

...Irreplaceable legitimate theaters have already been demolished to make way for ugly hotel bunkers, fortified in concrete and set up and away from the pedestrian flow and menace of chance encounters...

...Where developers bought zoning variances in the past through setbacks and sunken plazas they now secure them through a commitment to build suburbanlike shopping centers...

...In particular, Sixth Avenue has been denuded of services and character...

...This ad hoc relocation of the city's population (now from Columbus and Amsterdam avenues and the park side of Harlem) has been a constant of urban renewal since the turn of the century and has always presented a hardship for those forced to leave their homes because of increasing property values...

...The two men recently have been reduced to calling each other names over the rebuilding of the public skating rink in Central Park...

...The kind of advocacy planning now being used to reclaim the great buildings of Europe is still negatively associated in this country with the broader anti-urban schemes of Le Corbusier and of Robert Moses during the later years of his career...

...Ruin of main waiting room...

...Trump watched the folly from a window in his triplex year after year as money was poured into this shallow hole...

...it has been a consistent and not necessarily negative part of the city's development, sometimes resulting in remarkable buildings...

...Enter Donald Trump, who sold the old Penn Central yards to the city for its new convention center...

...Ideally, the grid is a concrete reminder of equality of opportunity, where no single property is distinguished topographically...

...With names like Lever and Seagram, they and the corporations they invoke became more important than the larger city upon which they are dependent for labor and status...

...The best New York architecture of the 1950s employed plans that sharply divided private from public...

...In his opinion Acting Justice Edward H. Lehner declared, "Zoning benefits are not cash items," thus dooming Moshe Safdie's plan for twin 925-foot towers in place of the relatively modest eyesore now on the spot...

...It was sold to developers for $455 million, although in December 1987 a New York State judge called the sale "null and void...

...The profit motive usually produces faster results but is not often known to wait for public consensus to develop before acting...

...Trump's great mistake in this instance was to dare to be effective and then claim public credit...

...Like the potholed streets and dirty parks, the crumbling underground is a soulful counterpoint to the horizontal gentrification along select avenues and the vertical glitz of the new skyscrapers...

...Donald Trump likes to present himself as a dreamer growing up in Queens...

...Son of Fred Trump, a successful builder in the outer boroughs, young Donald is the most flamboyant and public of the city's "developers...

...The Wollman Rink was just 370 • DISSENT one of many rotting New York landmarks...

...On that day, vandals with a court order began to raze Pennsylvania Station more efficiently than their predecessors did the Roman Baths of Caracalla that inspired the prominent New York architect, Charles Follen McKim (1847-1909) at the height of his career...

...It also marks the site of the old station with its grand waiting areas, restaurants, modern steel train sheds, and stairways, a vanished urbanism that used architecture to elevate the living of everyday life...

...He persevered and has become a formidable political force...

...In 1785, the United States Land Survey made the practice law, culminating with the Homestead SUMMER • 1988 • 367 Act of 1862...

...In doing so, he understandably embarrassed the mayor and brought attention to the sorry plight of the city's management skills, some of which he had directly profited from...

...Notice how a good street offers anonymity, a special kind of freedom: a place to walk, carry on and maybe act out a little...

...Residents of the "improved" areas have lost something too—if only in missed vitality and essential human energy...

...They are no match for single-minded, wellfinanced builders like Trump...

...His book is an inadvertently revealing self-portrait that tells us much about the state of New York in the 1980s...

...The street was no longer the mediating element and was replaced by architectural elements that were clearly the property of the building...

...Trump considers his microcity potentially available to all...

...Before there was any consideration to make over the abandoned structure for civic use, the city saw a chance to sell the site for a profit...

...The Municipal Arts Society, a After: Pennsylvania Station, 1964...

...The city is currently appealing the decision, thereby delaying the project indefinitely...

...Public amenities were now part of feudal dispensation, made to appear as if they were provided through corporate largess...

...His six levels of malled streets have supplanted all those lost on the south side of Fifty-Seventh Street...

...New York architects have always sought a specific identity for their buildings to associate them in the public imagination with the corporation or organization that financed them...

...They are only nominally public, consistent with the trade-off he made to receive zoning concessions...

...Nothing got done until Trump offered to do it himself...

...The result will be to push the vice district further west into newly gentrified Clinton, itself only recently known as Hell's Kitchen...

...From the moment Boston Properties showed its designs for Columbus Circle, where the Coliseum now stands, heated debate surrounded the plan...

...New York is being overdeveloped in the name of improvement...

...You might not have noticed, but the street is disappearing and the buildings have been turned...

...Conceived by Alexander Cassatt, president of the railroad at its dedication in 1910, to be not only a monument to his own success and ambitions but an elegant public place for all New Yorkers, it exists now only in memory...

...Gone with the grit, sleaze, and risk will be any reason to go there...

...At both projected sites, overly dense or tall buildings will radically alter life on the street by boxing in the areas, malling-up the stores for "security," and by straining existing services...

...Stores no longer face out but exist inside secured and climate-controlled malls...

...Johnson and Burgee's plans for four chunky office buildings with FARs (floor to area ratios) as high as forty, or three times as dense as even the most crowded midtown structures, will replace the signs and flash of Times Square in exchange for an official air of normalcy and order...

...The postwar violation of the Park Avenue cornice line—the consistent and pleasing imaginary plane extending from the buildings' roofline to the street—was complete...

...In developer Donald Trump's words, they have replaced city building and governance with the "art of the deal...

...Three prominent buildings in midtown —Trump Tower, IBM, and Metropolitan Towers—are rotated at least 45° against the right-angled grid...

...With its great bulk the building appears to compress the street and to hijack part of Madison Avenue in an open-air arcade, seemingly inspired by the nightmare cityscapes of the painter de Chirico...

...Think of Madison Square Garden as its own tombstone, marking its developer's short-lived ambition and greed...

...By the end of last year the project had received two major blows...

...All you need is money to get past the piano player guarding the lobby with concert-style elevator music...

...It is one thing to take a rocky potato field on Long Island or an abandoned dirigible base in New Jersey to build a "shopping center" and quite another to decimate systematically life at the city's core by moving the streets inside so they are no longer communal property but are sponsored like art exhibitions or shows on PBS by AT&T, IBM and Mr...

...The collection of signs and neon is set to catch the eye and are a welcome relief from the anonymity of the usual rows of office blocks...

...Now Columbus Circle has been singled out for treatment...

...Earlier, for example, the Woolworth, Empire State and Chrysler buildings all became instant markers on the cityscape because of their power, beauty, or sheer audacity...

...Invariably," he has said, "people comment that the atrium—and the color of the marble particularly—is friendly and flattering, but also vibrant and energizing —all things you want people to feel when they shop: comfortable, but also pumped up to spend money...

...By use of setbacks, streamlining, or active commercial level, they made their statements on the skyline without obliterating the street, whereas both Lever House and Seagram were severely withdrawn from Park Avenue, with elevated or removed plaza areas that seriously stigmatized the street, making it suspect...

...New York's grossly understaffed City Planning Department and Urban Development Corporation are at best reactive organizations...

...Although an active Landmarks Preservation Commission was formed in the wake of the Penn Station debacle, little progress has been made in protecting the city against its own ruinous ambition endlessly to make itself endlessly over for profit...

...I had my eye on Manhattan from the time I graduated from Wharton in 1968," he wrote...

...SUMMER • 1988 • 371...

...Squandering millions of dollars through incompetence, the city had worked unsuccessfully since June 1980 to renovate the Wollman Rink...

...He and others like Harry Helmsley, Mortimer Zuckerman, and Harry Macklowe are contemporary versions of the old-style robber barons...

...When associated with a strong plan like Rockefeller Center, the results have enhanced the city...

...Setting Trump loose in Central Park was the most obvious image of a city that had achieved a lustrous look of prosperity by selling itself to the highest bidder...

...Plans like those for Times Square wish to control the necessary disorder of a democratic city...

...The financial services company Salomon Brothers was supposed to have been both an investor and the chief tenant of the building, but it withdrew from the project on December 3. On December 7, the Municipal Arts Society won a lawsuit in State Supreme Court that charged that the process by which the developer was chosen for the project was flawed...

...The rebuilding of the Wollman Rink reveals in microcosm the decline of public policy and the rise of the entrepreneur...

...The Vietnam War was fully engaged and there were race riots in all of our cities...

...Stumpy columns with encrusted yellow metallic paint, befouled concave tiled walls, and the deafening noise make the subways a more accurate reporter of the city's real condition...

...Today the "city builder" is not an idealist hero like Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, who in The Fountainhead blows up a housing project because it compromised his design, or a social advocate like Robert Moses...

...There will be no outcry from preservationists and concerned citizens to save it...

...Instead of a uniform wall of public or commercial space immediately adjacent to the street, they cut like a blade...

...Modern architectural classics like Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House and Mies's Seagram Building are rotated away or set back from the street to make themselves more prominent than the grid of which they are an integral part...

...Although saved, Grand Central Station was mortally wounded by the Pan Am Tower clamped on top of it...

...he is a pure egotist like Trump, who wants to build the "world's tallest building" on the West Side because he believes "tall buildings would make the project more majestic and alluring...

...In 1968, Donald Trump was twenty-two...

...At a time when Europeans are reconsidering their own architectural heritage and preserving buildings or transforming historically important and aesthetically pleasing works like a deserted railroad station in Paris and a palace in Barcelona, Americans are caught in a mad exchange of property and architecture for cash...

...Will you want to celebrate the New Year among the atrium bamboo trees and humming surveillance cameras...

...It would cast a shadow up Central Park West past 73rd Street, and across the Park up to and beyond Fifth Avenue...

...His work in tacit cooperation with the city offered an attractive surface and the illusion of general well-being...

...In it Trump is the shadow of the city's mayor, Edward Koch, who speaks with the same hortatory self-conviction...

...Years after the old station's rubble was removed to the Jersey wetlands and sculptor Adolph Weinman's huge stone eagles and classical maidens were dumped in the weeds, the "new" Madison Square Garden is itself threatened with demolition...

...Donald Trump has this same directness of purpose...

...Trump Tower is the developer's own small city...

...In its place stands Madison Square Garden, a banal drumlike structure that squats on the old monumental site like a discarded trash barrel next to its own office tower...

...Sixth and Third avenues experienced this change in the 1960s and early 1970s...

...The direct, unapologetic brutality that leveled Pennsylvania Station provides an undeniable clarity for the contemporary builder...

...it is a temporary form of dispersal where the population as liquid is squeezed out of one container and spilled into another...

...His are not available to New Yorkers twenty-four hours a day like the old ones, but are guarded by a private security force responsible only to him and his high-rent tenants...

...For years the South Bronx has been the ultimate safety valve through which all the extra liquid flowed...

...Letting Trump take over a city responsibility to rehabilitate its own essential properties was an unintended acknowledgment by the mayor that he had failed the public trust...

...Trump's streets are different from even the rarefied ones that once existed outside his doors...

...Like Richard Nixon's, Trump's form of certainty will be attractive to many people as long as he continues to be successful...

...But unlike Gatsby, the young man never got distracted and "way off his ambitions...

...Trump...

...But the relocated are not the only ones to suffer...

...Gridiron planning—a rectilinear layout of streets and building lots—has a long tradition first experimented with in rapidly growing colonial cities like Philadelphia and New York because it offered equal access to land and the "least inconvenience" to development...

...and it would significantly worsen, and in some cases cause, violations of Federal air quality standards...

...More recently, Philip Johnson's AT&T Building did much greater violence to Madison Avenue—a building wildly overscaled with its willfully provocative neofascist entry and alienating public spaces...

...They included, among others, the sweet zoning variances and tax abatements that allowed him to build the exotic and dense architectural form of Trump Tower...

...Like Gatsby, he looked toward New York and imagined making his mark there...

...This is only a temporary victory for citizen groups still faced with the inevitable development of Columbus Circle...

...With the help of Tony Schwartz, a contributing editor of New York Magazine, the developer has written a memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal, complete with photographs of his favorite projects...

...Although the Baths still stand in Rome as ruins, nothing remains of McKim's great neoclassical railroad station that once enclosed a full six blocks—nothing except some of its supporting steel, buried deep under the street...

...While you still can find one, I suggest you go to an unimproved city street...