Where is Charlie Brown?
It seemed great when the book “Tactical Urbanism” was published in in 2015. Here were a bunch of placemaking ideas that were easy to understand and implement. The first chapter was a promising summary of the principles of placemaking developed over the prior three decades. The rest of the book felt kind of skimpy – the case studies it described weren’t terribly impressive or interesting, but they were certainly a step in the right direction. And then tactical urbanism came to my block.
During COVID, New York City’s Open Streets program arrived on 103rd Street between Central Park and Riverside Park. Two metal barricades appeared at the end of each block each morning with signs noting that no through traffic was allowed, and that the speed limit was five miles an hour. 103rd came to a T intersection at each park – limiting its utility to through traffic. While no one was using the street bed to hang out in, and the street closing complicated bringing a Zipcar around from my local parking garage to my front door, I did enjoy the additional open space for walking the dog. I noticed over the years an occasional lame event advertised for the street being put on by “Park to Park 103/Open Streets.
The Plan
About a year ago, I noticed a sign describing the imminent implementation of a plan to impose traffic calming features on my block of 103rd, between Broadway and West End Ave. I found this odd, particularly given the degraded condition of the sidewalk on the north side of the block facing other NYCHA property (including the house where a plaque says Humphrey Bogart grew up). I filed a 311 complaint and wrote to someone I knew at DOT about bringing the poor condition of the sidewalk up to standard. I also wrote Mike Lydon, the author of “Tactical Urbanism,” who appeared to be involved in the “Open Streets” operation with my apprehensions about the lack of planned programming and maintenance of the space. I was particularly concerned about the upkeep of intended planters for the block. I got a defensive, rather snarky email from Lydon, criticizing my suggestions for improving the project. I responded by pointing out that tactical urbanists generally make a big deal about their community outreach efforts, that I had only recently learned of the project, and had not been engaged about it, that I wasn’t just “the community” – I actually lived on the block. I also think I have a pretty good track record when it came to planning and managing open space. I never heard back from him.
I did, however, begin a long correspondence with a very sincere guy who lives in the neighborhood, who was the project manager for the street improvement plan. I asked him about programming plans for the project, and he pointed with pride to a couple of dozen events that had been sponsored on the block over a period of about three years that he claimed were great successes. I pointed out that so few events over such an extended period of time weren’t enough to generate a critical mass of activity in the space, and that as a resident of the block I hadn’t noticed most of them. Even the photos of the event that Open Streets touted in its emails and on its website looked pathetic.
When planters were placed in the street bed, I expressed concern about who was going to maintain them. He assured me that the Horticultural Society of New York had been contracted with for maintenance of the planters (and until recently were doing a pretty good job of it – and that’s a problem, as public space management is 24/7/365 years long endeavor when done properly). The manager welcomed my involvement in the form of public support for the project and encouraged my writing a check to fund it but was otherwise uninterested in my assistance or my expertise. A prominent placemaking colleague of mine is known for saying “the community is the expert” (which, actually he doesn’t believe — he believes that HE is the expert, and that a right-thinking community will always agree with him.). Here I was, a real resident of the block, and they had no interest in what I might be able to contribute.
Scraggly plants
The manager’s particular concern was that I was aligning myself with the people who were opposed to the project, most of whom were upset about a loss of parking spaces. Did I really want to be seen as an ally of THOSE PEOPLE? He thought his trumping argument was that he was a well-meaning person, and a lot of time and trouble had been put into advocating for the project over several years. I responded that I cared about the credibility of public space improvement projects, and I was reasonably sure this one was not going to be a success.
Posted on my building’s bulletin board.
Recently, the project was completed – and I saw on social media that it was being credited as a resounding success https://parktopark103.nyc . (I had been able to get some of the adjacent sidewalk repaired, thanks to the intervention of City Hall, after a year of inaction at NYCHA). In brief, it was not. It was, in my view, worse than nothing. I was concerned about being seen as an aging neighborhood grouch, but this was my block, and I was not just some random guy throwing spitballs. Again, this was something I actually knew something about (and had written a book about, in fact, thank you very much).
Photos of the completed project and end-zone dancing can be found here: https://twitter.com/MikeLydon/status/1724476002938532339 and here:
The main elements of the plan are traffic calming bump-outs at the corners and the center of the block. The metal barricades are gone. The principal feature of the plan, as with many tactical urbanist projects, is the painting of the street surface with a non-representational design. The project also includes flexible bollards around the bump-outs and the planters.
- The painting is inert and does little to create a sense of place. It is interrupted by various infrastructure elements (grates, manhole covers and other utility access points). Of course, it will degrade quickly, and has already begun to.
- When the bump-outs were created, clever parkers drove over the bollards and parked in them. Unsightly boulders were placed at the edges of the bump-outs to prevent this practice.
- As anyone who has ever driven anywhere has noticed, those sliver flexible bollards also degrade quickly. First, they get filthy, then they get bent, and then they get knocked off their bases – with the ghostly bases remaining unmaintained.
- Winter has come (which, note to Open Streets, in New York is annual occurrence and lasts several months), during which the planters are now filled with dead plants and look untended. We’ll see if the Hort returns in the spring; and for how many springs to follow? I’d bet the ranch that empty, neglected planters will become a permanent feature of the block.
To make a project like this successful takes constant programming. I’ve suggested that restaurants on Broadway be permitted to set up tables and chairs and serve along the block – which would be a form of self-perpetuating activity. I regard the De Blasio administration’s Open Restaurants plan as one of its greatest successes – animating commercial corridors in neighborhoods all over the city during the pandemic – and after. Perhaps residents of the block would object, but perhaps not. It would be worth asking. The sidewalks on the west side of Broadway between 104th and 106th Street have been an activated by the restaurant tenants in a manner than can only be seen as an improvement. Our neighborhood is more vital and lively as a result of this important change (now that the pandemic emergency has ended, the City needs to start charging the restaurants an appropriate amount for the occupation of public space).
The bottom line is that the block sporting the “Street Improvement Plan” is WORSE as a result of the project. It now has degrading, undermaintained infrastructure that serves no useful purpose. It does not generate activity on the block. It doesn’t particularly improve safety – cars going down the block were already moving slowly. It’s not particularly attractive. What good is it? I couldn’t tell you. And yet, Open Streets has declared victory and gone home.
At the heart of the problem is the intellectual arrogance of the architects of the project. They likely sat downtown around a table at DOT with a map and said to each other “Oh, this looks like a great spot for this wonderful idea that we have,” without actually visiting and carefully observing how the space is used (as Holly Whyte would mandate). They went to a bunch of community board meetings and met with the local elected officials who didn’t care enough to object – and congratulated themselves for their community outreach (without actually engaging the people who live on the block). They set up a few events, and drew a few people, and declared the space improved. This is a real problem for the walk/bike/places people who seem to have fallen in love with their own ideas and lifestyle preferences, regarding those who disagree with them as troglodytes. One has but to look at the uproar over the poorly conceived bike lane on McGuiness Boulevard in Brooklyn, and the elitist vitriol being poured on local businesses and other opponents of a bike lane through an industrial zone by the “progressive” advocates of biking. They, and their allies within NYC DOT have succeeded in unnecessarily alienating New York’s Mayor with their “advocacy”, which may have the unintended consequence of spilling over into other, more worthy placemaking projects. What Holly has taught us all is that the at the center of successful placemaking is observation in real time and humility.
And while I am being churlish, let me similarly reflect on “Palaces for the People” by Eric Klinenburg of the NYU sociology department, which I just recently got around to reading. This 2018 book made even more of a splash in the public space world than “Tactical Urbanism,” with Klinenburg making a case for a broadening of the definition of the term “public space” beyond parks and sidewalks to include libraries and other community gathering places. He also, importantly, ties the support and strengthening of such places to the essential need to re-engage citizens with each other and the public realm. These are both important and serious insights. But unfortunately, the book is full of what I have come to call aspirational journalism. The Urban Land Institute is a major purveyor of this stuff. Their publications and conferences highlight projects that incorporate what their tastemakers want to see as best practices in real estate development and land use – and call them major trends. But generally, business in the real estate development world is as usual, and the featured projects are most often expensive one-offs that are non-replicable and non-scalable or have hyper-exaggerated claims made for them. The cited projects misrepresent the status quo and represent only themselves – and maybe (given the hyperbole) not even that.
Similarly, “Palaces for the People” is filled with cherry-picked anecdotes and citations to studies that support the book’s theses and doesn’t engage with counterexamples or other inconvenient facts. In addition, much of the book is filled with unnecessary ideological “progressive” “facts” that are actually broadly held, and counterfactual opinions. Klinenburg assumes that there is something pernicious called gentrification happening everywhere, that the U.S. has a vast slew of crises (housing, climate, economic) and so on. The book is devoid of useful tools and arguments for making libraries and other public spaces better. He meets and describes a number of charming, dedicated librarians and excellent library programs. But is video bowling really the answer to the loneliness and alienation of single older people – and are such programs scalable? “Palaces for the People,” is ultimately fluffy, unhelpful and frustrating.
Effective placemaking is difficult to do. That is why there are so few successful projects. Making great places requires careful observation and data collection, patience, an iterative process and the taking of risks. Attention to detail needs to be sustained over time. Great placemaking projects need not be expensive in terms of materials – but they are expensive in terms of the required time and attention. Unlike with tactical urbanism, there are no short cuts. The good news is that small successful, powerful ideas do catch on – and are replicated, like the movable chair. But painting streets does not make better places – and usually, as the paint fades, makes them worse.
