THE CASEY JONES CONUNDRUM

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            Heavy rail investment in the 21st Century

Not!

The new Grand Central Madison Train Station is a success. The Moynihan Trail Hall is not. Why? Because GCM is a useful, efficient train station. Both had the challenge of fitting new railroad equipment in between decades of development of urban infrastructure – a near impossible task.

 Moynihan is an inconveniently located facility, with clunky access to the western end of the former Pennsylvania Railroad train platforms. By contrast, GCM can be accessed to the street from a number of nodes between 42nd Street and 48th Street. There are somewhat squirrelly passageways that lead both to Grand Central Terminal and the Times Square Shuttle Platform. There is a huge amount of space in the new station to accommodate commuter movement. The new GCM track cleverly goes to an East River tunnel through two double decker tubes, creating four new platforms with service to Jamaica Station in Queens, where one can make the proverbial “change at Jamaica.” It should be a boon to Long Island commuters, once they figure out how to use it, and overcome their innate resistance to change. It greatly expands access for Long Island commuters to Manhattan transit centers. 

It’s a stroke of brilliant engineering that much of this thing has been squeezed in underground to the WEST of the current Grand Central. I had always assumed that the East End Access project would be EAST of Grand Central. But, no, the engineers have put the concourse deep under Vanderbilt Avenue. Given that the track tunnels were dug into the Manhattan schist, there is no sunlight to the concourse, mezzanine and platforms – unlike the skylit Moynihan, which is that facility’s best feature. But the station is decorated with a number of mosaics and other displays from the MTA’s essential and successful Arts in Transit program – which pop and contribute greatly to the bright, active atmosphere of the project (as they also do somewhat less visibly at Moynihan).

And, no, it does not take a long time to get to the platforms – which is the first comment I heard from early users. I clocked it at nine minutes from the information booth in Grand Central to the platform, including the time to purchase a ticket from a concourse machine. That’s probably less than half the time it takes walk from 7th Avenue to Moynihan (the worst feature of which is the cumbersome need to go down and then up stairs to get under 8th Avenue to reach the train hall). GCM is smack in the middle of town. And the corridors and vertical transportation have been designed for relatively easy access to the capacious and well-lit platforms. 

The problems: there are quite a few. First is that after years, actually decades of delay, the project was delivered on the tail of the COVID pandemic which has decimated commuter rail ridership. Was this $11 billion investment wise given the changes in commuting patterns? It’s impossible to predict the trends in future LIRR customer use, so we can’t know now (and couldn’t have known about the pandemic before).  Given, that social patterns tend to regress to the mean over time, and the likely population growth in Queens, Nassau and particularly Suffolk counties the answer could be “yes.” We’ll have to wait it out. $11 billion is a big number.

As in Moynihan, there is almost no place to sit. That is a mistake. Public spaces should not be designed around an inability to program, maintain and police them. Adequate resources should be expended on programing, maintenance, social services and public safety sufficient to make waiting comfortably for trains possible. It’s just not that difficult – and is essential to make this gigantic investment successful.

Grand Central Terminal and Grand Central Madison are run by two different railroads, which should be invisible to the commuter – but it’s not. When I asked a Metro North ticket seller in Grand Central Terminal how to get to Grand Central Madison, he told me that there was no such place. The wayfinding signs and nodes of interconnection between the two stations are not obvious or seamless.  There are many street entrances to GCM, but to get from Metro North Grand Central to LIRR Grand Central, you go down the stairs on the west side of the Terminal to the food court. You do a 180 back behind the stairs you just came down, down a shortish escalator and through a set of the kind of skanky doors that one finds at Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal to get to the GCM Concourse under Vanderbilt. The big drop in depth is on the escalator from the Concourse to the Mezzanine and Tracks deep below Park Avenue. 

The lame entrance from the subway to One Vanderbilt

Another, personal gripe, is the small, hard to find entrance from the subway (and GCM) to S.L. Green’s new One Vanderbilt skyscraper adjacent to GCT on 42nd Street, which was locked when I tried to use it. I reported same to the excellent MTA boss, Janno Lieber, who was very kind to look into it. Once, it was considered an amenity to have direct access from the subway to the Greybar, Chrysler, Chanin, Pershing Square and Lincoln Buildings – but I guess not to the asset managers of S.L. Green, who don’t want the hoi palloi in their cold, quadruple height, 30’s Italian design lobby. Of course, one change in the world due to Zoom and COVID is that very few people are visitors to office buildings they don’t work in.

As I write, the ever predictable, but factually unreliable New York Post, has stirred up complaints about the transfer situation in Jamaica. Commuters to Brooklyn have been quoted to be incensed about the changes in service between Brooklyn Terminal to Jamaica and points East. The new service is something former LIRR President Helena Williams called “The Scoot.” The idea was a frequent shuttle between Brooklyn and Jamaica’s downtowns to a dedicated platform in Jamaica, replacing more occasional service to Far Rockaway and a couple of other LIRR eastern terminals from Atlantic Terminal. On my visit to Jamaica from GCM, the Scoot system didn’t seem to yet be fully operational on the new platform serving tracks 11 and 12 (at the south of Jamacia Station near AirTrain), which are devoted to only Brooklyn service (there is also an art installation next to the stairs down to the new platforms. I had a great experience as a member of the committee that selected the artwork [about ten years ago!]). Brooklyn service was still leaving from track 3 going west-bound. Once this change is fully implemented it should be yet another improvement for LIRR riders with no downside; like the new Midtown East option at GCM.

So far the “Dashing Dan’s” of the LIRR (a long retired moniker) seem to be a pretty inflexible, change resistant and crabby bunch. Billions of dollars have been spent to ease their commute to Manhattan, including on the not yet completed third track of the main line, on top of their highly subsidized daily ride (more per ride than on the NYC subway). Long Islanders – talk less, smile more!

The big issues arising out of the billions spent on East End Access, Moynihan Station and the Second Avenue Subway (among other mega-projects) is what to do about heavy rail projects in the 21st Century, given that heavy rail is a 19th Century technology that has become absurdly expensive to build. An old friend of mine, one of the country’s leading railroad attorneys, coined the term “FRN” – fucking railroad nuts – to describe a species of human being with an irrational attachment to heavy rail. These people think that trains are the solution to every human problem from curing cancer to solving who killed Judge Crater. They want to build high speed rail from LA to San Francisco and solve upstate New York’s economic problems by expanding passenger service on old New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad rights of way. The numbers never work, mostly because squeezing new rights of way and tracks in between existing development faces tremendous (even overwhelming) political, cost and engineering challenges in a world that is already built out. They point to Europe which has great inter-city train service where there are dense networks of in-place rights of way that have either never existed in America or were replaced with highways decades ago. And they point to China, which has built out extensive systems of high-speed rail in recent years. The Chinese projects have been built without much regard to pre-existing property rights, sensitivity to environmental issues or concern about the welfare of construction workers. They have also experienced calamitous issues of construction quality once operational. Rightly, those circumstances will never fly here. Personal idiosyncrasy doesn’t make for good public policy – no matter how often and articulately expressed by otherwise “serious people.”

Heavy rail projects in the United States, particularly in the dense Northeast, seem to make sense either to maintain existing routes (like the Gateway project, replacing antiquated rail tunnels under the Hudson) or to efficiently expand on in-place assets (presumably like the LIRR third track). The decisions to proceed with such super-expensive service expansions need to be made with care after serious analysis of their projected economic (as opposed to political) benefits. Does Grand Central Madison pass this test? I, for one, don’t know. But that decision was made at least two decades ago, and the engineers for the MTA have made the best of it. Long Islanders, show a little gratitude, will ya? 

THE SAD SAGA OF THE GARBAGE CAN AND 311 – And 311 Garbage In – Garbage Out

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We live a couple of blocks from Straus Park, a large traffic triangle, dominated by a lovely fountain dedicated to the memory of Isidor and Ida Strauss who died on the Titanic. In the spirit of the revitalization of public spaces in the 90’s, a neighborhoods group took over the programming and maintenance of the horticulture of the park – and they do a lovely job. This little space is a terrific neighborhood amenity. 

            Six months before the onset of the pandemic we got a dog, and part of my regular dog walking route was through the park. As a result, I came to appreciate the parks virtues all the more. I enjoyed the sparrows splashing in the park’s fountain. In the spring, the bulbs planted the prior fall are a colorful pleasure. The vibe from people reading, eating and just relaxing on the many benches speaks to the virtues of urban life, bringing together people from many backgrounds to enjoy sharing a public space. 

            When I first started my dog walking routine in 2019, I noticed that the park had several “BigBelly” trash cans. There are large rectangular structures of utilitarian design, which are advertised to compact trash using solar power, enabling pickups from them to be less frequent. One of the cans in Straus Park was not functioning and was conspicuously wrapped in black plastic bags. It is worth noting, but not worth dwelling upon, that I have long found BigBellies to be the pirates of street furniture and was dismayed that the Parks Department thought it appropriate to deploy them (in large part because the emptying of trash bins is something to be encouraged, as it provides activity in otherwise dormant public spaces, creates “eyes on the street,” as well as the low skill, entry level employment so much needed in New York). But, jeez, if DPR is going to use them, they ought to at least be maintained. 

           Every day, sometimes several times a day I would walk by this piece of junk, and it would annoy me. It came to a point where my wife demanded I stop talking about it. The pandemic came and mostly went, and four years later the damn thing was still there. This was important because non-working features of a public space are an indication of disorder – suggesting to users that anti-social behavior is tolerated. That i) leads others who are so included to engage in anti-social behavior and ii) gives other the idea that anti-social behavior is possible/likely in that space – leading to a perception of lack of safety there.  In Straus Park there were lots of other ques that the park was being well maintained and that there was an understanding among park users about certain standards of behavior: the horticulture was highly and visibly tended, the fountain worked, trashed was routinely picked up. All kinds of people used the park – and clearly subscribed to the social contract regarding conventions of acceptable behavior. The broken BigBelly itself wasn’t a tremendous problem – but it could have been the first incline on a slippery slope to neglect. 

In the fall of 2022, I finally decided to try to get it fixed. I took pictures of it. I emailed a request that it be repaired and removed to 311 on October 27th with the photo. I got back a service request confirmation from 311 and then nothing happened. On December 28th, I a sent a copy of the service request confirmation to our local City Council Member, the Riverside Park Conservancy (which in the past has taken some responsibility for Straus Park), the Parks Department general email box and the Parks Commissioner (I guessed at her email address). The email to the Parks Commissioner bounced back. I contacted former Parks Commissioner, Adrian Benepe, our neighbor, who pointed me in the right direction and gave me an attaboy for trying. The Commissioner, who I don’t know personally (unlike most of her recent predecessors) I have only heard referred to a Sue Donoghue, uses Susan in the Parks protocol email address. 

            I also called the BigBelly corporate office in Boston and tried to persuade them to fix or remove the thing. They told me to buzz off, as the can belonged to Parks and they weren’t responsible for it. 

            I then left for a month in Hawai’i. 

            Three weeks later, while in Waikiki, given the magic of mobile phone technology, I got a call from a Parks Department employee (at 5AM local time). I later returned the call.  The Parks employee acknowledged receipt of my request to the Commissioner’s office (not the original 311 request) and told me removing the BigBelly from Strauss Park was now on his “to do” list as the district manager for the park, and it would likely be removed in the next few months. I zealously advocated with this nice person that DPR should be embarrassed that this broken piece of equipment had been open and notoriously existing in Straus Park for at least four years without repair or removal. Given my knowledge of DPR operations, I suggested to him several ways of getting the resources (like a Riverside Park pick-up truck) required to get rid of the can. We ended the call amicably and he said he would see what he could do.

            Upon our return from the Mid-Pacific, I made a beeline to Straus Park to see what was up – and the can was at last gone. I felt a smug sense of accomplishment and returning home, sent around a thank you email to all concerned. I doubt anyone else noticed. And it certainly wasn’t a big deal. But it does tell us two important things. First, that the Parks Department does not have sufficient resources to do basic park maintenance, which has been obvious for some time (as evidenced by routine overflowing trash baskets and un-mowed turf in Riverside Park).

311 

But more importantly it is an object lesson in the failure of the City’s 311 system – which has become a data collection program, and not a way to improve delivery of services. In my time at DoITT, I was excoriated for not routinely closing out cable complaints as had been done by my predecessors. We closed out complaints only when issues had been resolved to a customer’s satisfaction, or when we had made a determination that the customer’s issue wasn’t susceptible to satisfactory resolution. My team was rebuked for not meeting our SLR (service level requirements). In my experience, 311 requests do not result in effective and appropriate city action. Requests get routinely closed out by the bureaucracy because its internal standards for resolution have been met – which has nothing to do with actually solving the problem. 311, with all of its elaborate software and hundreds of employees taking calls, appears to be a Potemkin Village. While the Annual Mayor’s Management Report may record and report the number of type of requests, it does not reflect the actual resolution of problems in the real world outside the bureaucracy. It is virtually useless as a management tool, as far as I can tell. 

            My original service request said that I would receive a response within thirty days. I’m still waiting. [Note to spouse: sorry about this post. It’s now out of my system. You won’t hear about it again.]

IMPROVING THE PUBLIC REALM

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Bryant Park — the ne plus ultra of public space

The Adams Administration recently announced the appointment of a “Director of the Public Realm,” a newly created position. The idea for this post was advanced in recent years through the advocacy of civic groups concerned about public design, like the Municipal Art Society and the Design Trust for Public Space. The creation of the office became something of a (quiet) rallying cry during the last Mayoral election. The Mayor has appointed Ya-Ting Liu to the job, who, while not someone I know (not that it matters), seems well qualified for the role, with degrees from Berkely and MIT, and time spent at Transportation Alternatives and City Hall. Presumably, in the eyes of the public design and placemaking communities this is a professional who is both for the right things and is knowledgeable about the workings of city government, reporting directly to a Deputy Mayor. As someone who has worked on improving public spaces, streets and sidewalks in New York City for 30 years, including as the long-time chair of the Streets and Sidewalks Committee of the MAS, I can only wish her well. 

            Unfortunately, though, having a Director of the Public Realm probably isn’t a particularly good idea. It’s unlikely to contribute much to making public spaces better. It does give the civic groups (which during the Bloomberg Administration became quiescent) someone they can talk to in City Hall, and who would presumably be receptive to their ideas. However, based on my experience in City government, the office has a low probability having much impact, and over time will add to the bureaucratic dysfunction of city government as senior officials in City Hall lose interest in the initiative and/or are replaced by people who don’t see it as the priority Mayor Adams and Deputy Mayor Joshi presumably do. 

           

The news rack designed by Ignacio Ciocchini for Grand Central Partnership. Ciocchini has designed most of New York City’s best street furniture

  I experienced this firsthand in my time at the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT, now Office of Technology Innovation, OTI). DoITT was a relatively new City agency, established as a home for the once important city cable franchises (after the elimination of the discredited Bureau of Franchises as a result of a charter change) and the new and growing in importance technological support functions for other City agencies. It grew into a sizable bureaucracy that included the City’s 311 service, its procurement of hardware, software and telecommunications services, with its own capacity to code software to meet the City’s routine needs and with the capacity to house and support redundant servicer capacity for data and software. 

            A parallel Office of the Chief Technology Officer was created during the Bloomberg Administration. A key strategy of Mayor Bloomberg in accomplishing his administration’s goals appeared to be working around existing bureaucracies, by setting up offices in City Hall focused on the Mayor’s policy priorities, like sustainability and technology innovation. I speculate that Bloomberg and his staff decided that working through the existing agencies would frustrate their initiatives, and that life was too short to attempt to reform the deep dysfunction in City operations, particularly with respect to procurement and human resources. 

            While the CTO might have had some viability when it was first established in driving new ideas in municipal technology, it became just another bureaucratic power center. After Bloomberg, in the De Blasio Administration, it was staffed by smart, committed advocates dedicated to closing the digital divide (I have previously written here about my skepticism as to whether there actually is a digital divide https://www.theplacemaster.com/2022/07/31/expanding-the-reach-of-the-internet-in-new-york-city/). The Bloomberg priorities became orphans. The De Blasio CTO announced lots of grand plans that never came to much. But more significantly, the CTO spent much of its time sparring with DoITT over turf, credit for accomplishment and the Mayor’s attention. All three of the Commissioners whom I served made clear that the CTO was an adversary and encouraged ignoring them and engaging in parallel projects. There was much energy wasted in sniping at each other. Personally, I tried to leverage the resources available at the CTO, swiping my best staff member from them and trying to improve the CTO’s work product when and where I could (including spending two weeks editing and rewriting the Internet Master Plan, which when it came to me was drafted by a consulting firm the City had hired in a language that only remotely resembled English). Recently, that Master Plan, a signal achievement of De Blasio CTO’s office was abandoned by the Adams Administration (in my view no great loss, despite, or maybe even because, of my contribution). 

Ciocchini’s proposed design for the telecommunications kiosk. Far superior to the design approved by the design commission

            In my experience, there is simply no substitute for hiring talented, dedicated, well-trained, right-thinking officials in the relevant agencies and empowering them to take risks and make decisions in order to enable the bureaucracies to “get stuff done.” Setting up offices in City Hall to coordinate policy and spearhead thoughtful new initiatives isn’t a thing that actually functions in the real world. It just doesn’t work, and over time because of the fighting over turf, makes the bureaucracy worse. Over time, the managerial vectors have moved in the wrong direction, with decision making power drifting up and being centralized in the Mayor. The order of the day in the agencies has become avoiding making mistakes and waiting for direction from City Hall. 

            In the design and public space realm in City government there have been agency staff who have had a positive impact on in making good design in public space a priority from both the top and middle management of agencies, some over and some under the radar. As Design and Construction Commissioner, David Burney created a Design Excellence Program, which has become partially embedded in the agency’s DNA – employing a wider range of architects and engineers, some of whom have established high design credentials. At the MTA, Wendy Feuer and now Sandra Bloodworth have made its Arts in Transit program a huge success. They created a gold standard selection process for artists that has produced outstanding results – most recently in the Times Square/Sixth Avenue subway connection and in the new Grand Central Madison. Wendy took her design sensibility to the City’s Department of Transportation’s Urban Design group, and, working with Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, successfully inserted design and public space management interests into DOT’s day to day work. 

            In my time at DoITT I sought out others in City government concerned about quality design in public projects and on the streets and sidewalks and tried to create an informal network of like-minded bureaucrats. At the same time, I attempted to imbue our DoITT team with a sensitivity to design issues and the impact of telecommunications infrastructure on public space. The first two commissioners for whom I worked were technologists who didn’t have design top of mind, and I was able to work under the radar. Later, we rammed through a number of utilitarian objects of streetscape, the implications of which are only now being realized (and resisted) and my ability to influence policy went to nil. Newly installed larger mobile telecom 5G transmitter enclosures on light and signal poles and very tall, utilitarian LinkNYC 5G structures (about which I have previously written) are now beginning to appear on the City’s streetscape.

A decrepit dining shed removed by the City

            Best case, Ms. Liu seeks out those with design sensibility and expertise in public space programming in the agencies and provides support for their efforts, works to encourage the agencies to create centers of good design (and I can’t think of any agency that doesn’t have an impact on structures and streetscapes) and creates programs encouraging the incorporation of design and placemaking sensibilities in all of the City’s endeavors in public spaces and City facilities. To advance my own hobby horse, creating a striking, distinctive purpose-built telecommunications structure to replace the eyesores now going up all over town, would be a lay-up and great place to start. I’d also suggests securing resources to program DOT’s Open Streets initiative. The Administration’s excellent New New York Action Plan would be a good place to start to find worthwhile ideas for revitalizing commercial corridors and improving public spaces.

Ms. Liu’s initial assignment will probably to come up with rules institutionalizing the tremendously successful Open Restaurant and Open Streets programs created during COVID. As is typical with New York open space issues, there are loud voices seeking to shut those programs down, and to heavily regulate commercial activity on streets and sidewalks. Those forces need to be boldly resisted. My suggestion is to get rid of the dining sheds in the roadbeds, which have outlived their COVID pandemic usefulness, some of which have become derelict. Putting chairs and tables on sidewalks should be made as streamlined as possible – with the City getting a license fee per square feet occupied – calibrated by borough and neighborhood. Economic actors who use public space to generate revenue should pay for the privilege (that includes you, broadband providers!).

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE/CONSUMMATION IV (of IV), SCHENECTADY AND TROY

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Storefront on State Street, Schenectady

The downtowns in Schenectady and Troy are both success stories. They are similar-sized small cities, with commercial centers that developed in very different ways, likely because of the different periods that proved to be their hay-days. Both have populations substantially below their peaks (Schenectady, now 70,000, peaked at 95,000 in 1930; Troy, now 50,000, peaked at 76,000 in 1910). Both have anchor institutions of higher education. Union College, founded in Schenectady in 1795, and now with 2,200 students. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institution was founded in 1824 and has 8,000 students in Troy. Neither particularly has the feel of a college town, though. They are certainly archetypes of what the downtown of a post-industrial Mohawk Valley city can be—even despite a one-third decline in population from their largest. What signifies that these places are successful? They are busy and lively, they have few empty storefronts, their buildings are architecturally interesting and well maintained, and they have an interesting mix of ground floor uses. 

What is particularly impressive about Schenectady is the harmony between old and new buildings along State Street, its main commercial corridor. All down State Street the street wall is continuous, the building heights are consistent and the facades of the new developments, several of them mixed-use retail/residential and others retail/commercial, are respectful of their context. None of these new developments draw attention to themselves, and all are knitted into the urban fabric, while clearly marking themselves as someplace interesting and new. It appears that several of these structures were designed by a local firm. State Street has to be one of the best main streets in the country, by most measures. For example, it feels more substantial and more modern (less like a stage set), than Corning’s famous downtown. 

A new, mixed-use structure that fits right in

Schenectady was the corporate home of General Electric (before it veered away from manufacturing to become a brutally managed ponzi scheme of financial services), which retains a small presence in the town – but is nowhere near what it once was. GE had both corporate offices and manufacturing facilities in the town. A large historic factory structure continues to bear a gigantic sign for the company. A fun fact is that because of GE’s presence, it had the country’s second commercial radio station. Railroading was also a major factor in Schenectady’s economy. The New York Central stopped in town, and it continues to have Amtrak service. But, at least equally important, it was the manufacturing home of the American Locomotive Company, a major American builder of steam, and then diesel, engines for trains. That company no longer exists.

Jay Street Mall

The city mostly has the feel of a leafy suburb with an attractive downtown and a self-contained, traditional college campus. One of the features of the commercial district is a very good looking and interestingly tenanted pedestrianized alley that leads from State Street to the near the train station, called the Jay Street Pedestrian Mall. It is clearly well managed and maintained. State Street also features a 1926 Proctor’s Theater that remains active and in use. The beautiful homes lining the residential streets are very much the result of the cadre of well-compensated GE executives who once made their homes in Schenectady and a community planned by the company to attract them. 

It seems pretty clear from walking around that Schenectady’s is a planned, managed success. Civic leaders focused their efforts on State and Jay Streets and created and enforced smart zoning and design standards. No doubt it was just as devastated by the GE’s downsizing and ALC’s demise, as Amsterdam was with the collapse of the local carpet manufacturing business. But use was made of its in-place social infrastructure to produce what is likely a very, very nice place to live, work or shop. 

A taste of Troy’s charm

Troy is different. It has more of a downtown area than a main street. Troy was a major commercial center very early in the history of the country. Located on the Hudson River at the point where it ceases to be navigable, it was already a locus for transportation before the construction of the Erie Canal, which met the Hudson near Troy and super-charged the local economy. The railroads, similarly, used Troy as a center, where the Hudson could be bridged to connect them to the West. If you were traveling west from New York City, you either had to take a ferry across the Hudson to Hoboken or Jersey City, or a train which turned to the west at Troy. This was true, and mostly remains true, for both passengers and freight. The Amtrak station in Rensselaer, just south of downtown, serves the city of Albany and is a major link between the state’s capital and its largest city. 

Troy Savings Bank Music Hall

With its access to coal and iron via waterways, canals and ultimately railroads, Troy was also an important, early steel manufacturing center. As a commercial center beginning around 1800, it is interesting to note that Troy’s population peaked before then that of other Mohawk Valley cities, but began to decline at around the same time. 

Today you can get a sense of Troy’s history by watching “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes American version of Downtown Abbey, where some of exteriors are filmed, and are easily distinguished from the scenes with absolutely dreadful computer-generated backgrounds (the CGI exteriors being the worst part of an otherwise enjoyable entertainment). The downtown retains its early 19th century character and charm. Troy is also known for the concert venue in a (now former) downtown bank, with renowned acoustics often used for recordings during the gold age of the LP. Troy’s historic downtown is made up of many full blocks. It is more of a neighborhood than a commercial strip, I would imagine this reflects its early 19th century origins and development patterns from that period. It has the kind of vibe that you find in New York City’s Greenwich Village or Brooklyn Heights, developed at around the same time, and now are among New York’s most desirable and visited places. While Troy had a number of major 19th Century fires, the blocks of the downtown remain remarkably well preserved. Venerating these blocks isn’t simply historic preservation idolatry or some kind of return to a romantic ideal, but a recognition of the importance of human scale and the centrality of a mixture of uses to creating the kind of places where people want to be. There certainly are people who spent millions of dollars to live on high floors in Hudson Yards, but I would venture to say that those are people who have values that are in the very skinny end of a bell curve in terms of their distribution. 

Troy is a little different, in having a commercial area, rather than a commercial corridor. That makes it less of a model for many other small cities. But like Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, a vibrant commercial district can be an ever more powerful driver of urban vitality, and is certainly a place worth looking at for examples of success.

One of the many retail blocks in Troy

The Mohawk and Hudson valleys are places that continue to stop human beings in their tracks with their beauty. The construction of the Erie Canal was a critical milestone in every aspect of the growth and development of the United States. The area has an abundance of natural and social assets, including a large number of important educational and cultural institutions. It also has access to water (not a given in many places today) and a climate that, for better or worse more globally, has grown more temperate as the climate changes. Some of the cities whose growth was fostered by the canal have not yet recovered from the post-World War II deindustrialization. While others, like Schenectady and Troy are thriving. They are models for what is possible. What places like Syracuse and Amsterdam (as well as Utica) need are most importantly a desire to change and a willingness to accept new people, new ideas and new forms of economic and social activity. We know how to do downtown restoration, and we have the cities that demonstrate that. Where an old guard clings to the remnants of the dregs of former expansive wealth and power, desolation remains. 

The Consummation of the Empire, Thomas Cole

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE III/DESOLATION – SYRACUSE

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The Course of Empire, Desolation, Thomas Cole

Why do the prospects for downtown Syracuse seem so much bleaker than those for Rochester? Syracuse has a current population of about 150,000 (from a peak of 220,000 in 1950), while Rochester’s population is 210,000 (peak of 330,000 in 1950). Those seem like about the same orders of magnitude, and in fact, the depopulation of Rochester over the decades has been more severe. Syracuse has a very important anchor institution in the Upstate Medical University, with over 10,000 employees and a budget of almost $2 billion. It also has Syracuse University, with 4,500 employees and 21,000 students. The University, unlike any of those in Rochester, has a noted sports program, with a high-profile basketball team. The Syracuse metro has a population of about 670,000.

Clinton Square on a Friday afternoon.

But something about downtown Syracuse gives it a feeling of desolation and lack of activity. Its public spaces are empty and poorly maintained. It has acres of surface parking lots (presumably where abandoned buildings were demolished), while Rochester has an extensive network of structured parking. Syracuse’s nods to current trends in urbanism, like shared scooters, fixed public seating, Victor Stanley trash baskets, and expensive newly installed hardscape like distinctive pavers and traffic calming bump-outs (traffic calming, where there is no traffic?) feel like afterthoughts. This is probably because they are so static – with almost no pedestrian activity. Of course, at one point in the 80’s built pedestrian skybridges were built, to get office workers off the “unsafe” streets and out of the winter weather – a move that has proven disastrous for most places. There also appears to be a small amount of residential development downtown, following the trend (including adaptive reuse of commercial structures) – but I would imagine downtown life in Syracuse to be a hard sell. 

One observation I drew from the Rochester/Syracuse comparison is that in terms of a perception of safety and activity downtown, parking structures do way less damage than open lots. This isn’t something I had previously noticed. Garages continue the street wall and give at least some sense of activity – although they generally, unless they are well designed, present blank walls to the street and create pedestrian dead zones. But walking around Syracuse leads one to conclude that flat parking conveys a much stronger feeling of a lack of activity and dereliction. Continuous street walls, even ones without ground floor retail activity, are important to a sense of urbanity. Lots full of cars lead to a feeling of abandonment, particularly if the lots are mostly empty. 

New multi-family housing in downtown Syracuse.

It is highly worth noting that I walked to dinner through the dark, bleak downtown, past the city’s main public space, Clinton Square, which looks abandoned and ominous, to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. I was told that there was a half hour wait for a table. The place next door, Apizza Regionale, was also hopping. So, people were coming downtown on a Friday night for dining and drinking – even though there appeared to be no one on the street. 

My internet search for a distinctive place to stay yielded only chains along highways, with almost no acceptable options downtown (the Trip Advisor reviews of the non-chain places downtown were hair raising) – so we stayed at a bleak Quality Inn, with small (clean) rooms, no closets, outdoor corridors, and a plexiglass window with a slot where customers once slid their credit cards through for payment. The motel was located right next to the elevated IH 81, which slices through the middle of town, and is charged with much of the city’s ills. Planning is underway to tear down the highway as a vehicle for revitalizing the downtown.

The lobby of the Hotel Syracuse.

Oddly enough, Syracuse has a great, historic hotel. The Hotel Syracuse, built in 1924, is beautifully maintained with spectacular public rooms. It is both a Marriott and a member of Historic Hotels of America. Why I didn’t find in in my internet search is a mystery to me (and no one recommend it to me as I was planning the trip). The property also doesn’t come up on Google Maps until you have magnified the image to the maximum. The hotel is a major civic asset, and I was glad I eventually found it during my walking around. It is likely the grandest hotel in Upstate New York. The dark, cramped Quality Inn, at $285 per night, was the most expensive place we stayed on our bi-state odyssey. I have to think this whole business a detriment as to the way Syracuse presents itself to the world, even if I am an embarrassed, incompetent internet searcher. 

Buildings facing Clinton Square

Clinton Square is truly awful. It has some important neo-gothic buildings around it, and those two restaurants are adjacent to it. It is organized around an impressive City Beautiful era Civil War monument completed in 1910. The monument was erected adjacent to the Erie Canal, which in time was covered over and became Erie Boulevard. The square also has seen some recent rebuilding of adjoining sidewalks and curbs. There is ice skating on the square in the winter and it appeared that the infrastructure for the ice rink is just left lying around during the off season. The square looks unused and neglected, with a few scattered desultory benches and picnic tables cemented to the ground. The extensive hardscaping is windswept and empty. 

A historical map of the downtown, showing where the canal used to run

South Salina Street was once the main shopping district of Syracuse and today has many empty stores. One bright spot on Salina is the recently opened Parthenon Books, a large bight store, with a carefully curated inventory. There are a half a dozen midcentury modern office towers nearby. The city has quite a few older architecturally interesting commercial and civic buildings, but they are spread out around the downtown and don’t create any sense of urban synergy. It would be hard to say what the 100% corner of Syracuse is. The downtown doesn’t have a center. Given that, I’m not sure what good tearing down the highway is going to do towards revitalizing Syracuse, particularly if it is replaced with a multi-lane boulevard. The theory is that removing that highway will “reknit” the city. Under present circumstances, there isn’t actually enough downtown activity to be connected. A better focus for Syracuse’s boosters would be to pick a corner (near the book store?) and focus on creating a constant stream of activity at that place – through incentivizing food and drink (with outdoor dining and drinking) and other distinctive retail uses; as well as in activating nearby public spaces with activity. The billions of dollars that will be expended on bringing highway traffic to ground level might be better spent on filling in the gaps in pedestrian activity created by the flat parking. 

The downtown skyline

The University is a good long walk from the downtown and seems to be off by itself. This is most likely by design, to separate the campus in its marketing to prospective students from a drab urban setting. The University certainly needs to be encouraged to be more aggressive about attaching itself to the downtown, by moving high visibility, street level uses there. Also, two and half miles from downtown Syracuse is Destiny USA, built in 1990 and formerly know as Carousel Center. It is a 2.4 million square foot project (the country’s 8th largest), featuring over 250 stores. The mall markets itself as a travel destination. That probably explains a lot about the absence of pedestrian life downtown. 

This about says it all

It is telling that while the Rochester Philharmonic is a first-class organization, the Syracuse Symphony, conducted at one time by Christopher Keene, was allowed to fold in 1991. It may well be that civic leaders of Syracuse don’t much care about how the downtown works. It certainly looks that way. Likely for the corporate leaders who drive in to Syracuse in the morning and leave for the suburbs in the evening, the situation is good enough. The political structure, no doubt, fears that economic or demographic change will threaten its grip on the reins of power, the otherwise comfortable lives they lead outside the downtown and the contracts they let and control. 

There is positive energy to be harnessed in downtown Syracuse as the two busy restaurants and magnificent hotel demonstrate. Again, as with Amsterdam, there is a lot of stranded social infrastructure in downtown Syracuse, at a time when pundits have declared a national housing “crisis” and tens of thousands of people are eager to move their lives to the United States from the many places across the world in turmoil and economic decline or stagnation. It just doesn’t make any sense not to use and leverage Syracuse’s still substantial resources to address those problems. It will take small scale risk taking and large-scale civic leadership, particularly by private sector anchor institutions to make the downtown once again a great place. 

Why are these seats here? Who is going to sit on them? Why would they?

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE/DESTRUCTION – II – AMSTERDAM, NEW YORK

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The Standard Approach to Economic Deevelopment in New York State

Amsterdam is an object lesson in how downtown revitalization and economic development strategy might be better implemented in New York State. Replacing a project-centered and economic sector strategy with a place-centered approach to improving conditions in Amsterdam would likely make a substantial difference in outcomes. A number of expensive, major initiatives implemented in Amsterdam to revive its economy over the past half-century have been failures. 

This small city, located on the Mohawk River between Rochester and Albany, was for decades a major center for the manufacturing of carpets. In addition to access to the transportation advantages of the Erie Canal, the Chuctanunda Creek, running through the middle of the city drops three hundred feet during its last three miles, provided the power that drove the many mills that became central to Amsterdam’s development. With the carpet and other mills running at full production, by 1930 the city’s population grew to 34,000. With the transfer of mill operations away from the unionized north to the lower cost south beginning in the 1960’s, the population has dropped to just over half that. The mill buildings have now either been demolished, abandoned or are lightly tenanted. Nothing approaching the economic vitality of the high value-added textile business has replaced them. 

The New York State Thruway, the major transportation corridor across the state, runs by and has an exit hundreds of yards from the city’s center. This has been less than a blessing for Amsterdam, as the street though the downtown that became the access road to the bridge over the Mohawk leading to the Thruway (built in the 50’s), Route 30, appears to have been widened to increase its capacity, while bifurcating, and effectively obliterating the downtown. 

The Amsterdam RiverFront Center facing Route 30.
Inside The Riverfront Center

Two major traditional economic development projects in Amsterdam illustrate clearly the problems with traditional capital intensive, large scale, “silver bullet” redevelopment thinking. Adjacent to Route 30, just as you drive over the bridge is the RiverFront Center (formerly, the Riverfront Mall). It is a 250,000 two-story, grim structure that appears to sit directly in the middle of what used to be Amsterdam’s main street. The Center has a rather small presentation to the street but stretches way back. It is about half leased, poorly lit and poorly maintained (including non-operating escalators). Most of the tenants are government agencies, social service organizations or health care providers. This project had to have cost tens of millions of dollars and is a net negative for the city, not only because of its utilitarian design, but also because of the sense of failure about it. 

The Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook crossing the river

By contrast, the Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook, is beautifully designed and well maintained. The Overlook, completed in 2016, is a pedestrian bridge over the Mohawk leading to a well-landscaped riverbank park, principally designed for occasional outdoor performances. However, access to the bridge and park are very difficult to obtain – making any positive contribution the project might make to Amsterdam’s vitality clearly minimal. The bridge can be accessed from a parking lot across the river from downtown, a few hundred yards from Route 30. We had a difficult time finding it. The greenspace is on the same side of the river as the downtown but is cut off from downtown by the former New York Central Railroad tracks (now used by Amtrak). I saw a bridge over the tracks from the RiverFront Center to the park, but a rather thorough investigation of the Center yielded no access to the bridge – which leads to a very substantial stair structure (with a non-working elevator). As a result, in order to get to the park, one has to drive across the river, find the parking lot, and then walk back across the river on the pedestrian bridge. In addition, in my experience, having a few outdoor concerts during the season provides little economic benefit to the vitality of a downtown. In order for cultural programming to generate the kind of activity that makes a difference, it has to be on a daily, or near daily, schedule. There was no one else visiting the park or the bridge on the day I was there. It’s a shame, because walking across the Mohawk on the pedestrian bridge is a lovely experience, and the riverbank park also provides attractive views of the river and its surroundings. The location between the tracks and the river provides a sense of the richness and importance of the location in the state’s commercial history (even if it is an obstacle to access). There is also an unusual view of the Chuctanunda pouring through an arched viaduct into the Mohawk from the Overlook – providing a tangible idea of the energy of the water that powered the mills. 

The bridge over the railroad tracks and stair tower at the Overlook park

No doubt both of these projects provided local elected officials and civic leaders with a sense of pride and a great opportunity for media attention when they were completed. But then what? Downtowns are rarely revitalized by “projects.” And it is obvious that these two aren’t contributing. Big projects often involve extensive planning and large capital outlays, and if they have problems are difficult to improve or correct. The same is true about industrial parks and multi-million-dollar industrial plant subsidies, often the go to strategy for local economic development. At their best, those kinds of traditional economic development projects are viable for only as long as government hands them money. They rarely become self-sustaining.  For example, projects like the RiverFront Center (and, for example, the former NYC World Trade Center) usually rely on government tenants to fill them up, when the market demonstrates its lack of enthusiasm for a development that isn’t market driven. 

What’s left of Main Street, Amsterdam

Much better is the iterative process of making incremental changes and providing continuous programming, which has worked in successful downtowns (like Corning, Schenectady and Troy). The placemaking approach takes time (and patience) and rarely provides for photo ops, but they generally involve much less money. I did notice one interesting center of activity in a former mill in Amsterdam, a company called “Sticker Mule,” which does internet printing and claims to have an international customer base, seemed to have a full parking lot. I’d certainly want to know a lot more about how they ended up in Amsterdam, what they see as it’s benefits and try to build on that. 

I also wonder whether the kinetic energy of the Chuctanunda continues to have commercial value? Would it be economically possible to install micro-turbines to generate electricity in the old mills built on the banks of the creek? Those mills were designed to use its power to turn the spindles driving the mills, and so might be relatively straightforward to retrofit. Are there other efficient uses of that sustainable source of energy? Gravity has been pulling water down that 300 foot drop of the Chuctanunda for centuries, and will continue to do so without further investment.  

The Castle hotel in Amsterdam — ready for Halloween!

I should also note that while in Amsterdam we stayed in a former National Guard armory that had been converted into a hotel and event space called The Castle. The armory was built in a neo-Gothic style and has all the external attributes of a castle perched on a hill overlooking the river, on the opposite bank from the downtown. The drill hall has been turned into a feasting hall, with suits of armor, heraldic banners and period paintings covering the walls. It’s a total trip. And the rooms are modern and comfortable. It was close to the parking for the Overlook, and equally out of the way, but a find. It is an usual resource that has been turned into a civic asset. The kind of creativity that went into buying and restoring it is what Amsterdam needs more of. It was an obsolete government-owned structure, that rather than being demolished and redeveloped using subsidies, was repurposed into a viable business. 

I note, with a considerable sense of irony, that the Member of the U.S. Congress for Amsterdam is Mega-MAGA Elise Stefanic. It is not a sense of victimhood, nationalism or xenophobia that will improve the quality of life of the people of Amsterdam. It will take some risk taking, creativity and hard work. New York State’s economic development agency ought to make Amsterdam into a laboratory for exploring a range of placemaking initiatives through its underfunded Main Street program. In addition, given that it is half the size it once was, it is another place that might benefit from an infusion of energetic refugees and other immigrants. Clearly, what has been done in Amsterdam over the last century hasn’t worked. It needs new people and new ideas. 

The Course of Empire, Destruction, Thomas Cole

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE – ROCHESTER

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The Rochester Philharmonic in Kodak Hall

The cities that flourished as a result of the construction of the Erie Canal during the first half of the 19th Century are great places, blessed with abundant natural beauty around them. I took a recent driving trip to Rochester, Syracuse, Amsterdam, Schenectady and Troy (with visits to Auburn, Seneca Falls and Corning in the Finger Lakes region as well). Rochester, the state’s fourth largest city by population has a tremendous depth of anchor institutions, and a downtown with great potential for a mixed-use 24 hour downtown. Schenectady and Troy have beautiful, active downtowns. Syracuse and Amsterdam have serious, but solvable, problems. Over the next several weeks I hope to share my thoughts about these visits – my first to all of these places – a trip which I have long wanted to make. This week I will focus Rochester and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Over the distance of almost two hundred years, it is difficult to appreciate the historical significance of the Erie Canal to New York City, New York State, and, in fact to the country as a whole. The Mohawk River Valley, which more or less encompasses the geography between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, is the only flat body of water that crosses what is otherwise the transportation obstacle of the Appalachian Mountain range. The Appalachians, running from Maine to Georgia, served as a barrier to commerce and communications between the eastern and western portions of the early United States (before railroads and the telegraph). When completed, the canal enabled the shipping of commodities from the all over the Midwest to the East, utilizing the Great Lakes, the Ohio River and the Mississippi as feeder routes. At the same time, it permitted manufactured goods to be shipped from the industrial states of the North and the cotton growing states of the South to the growing Western states. At the fulcrum of this commerce was New York City, and its deep and sheltered harbor at the end of the trade route at the mouth of the Hudson River; between east and west, and between the US and Europe as well. It is hard to imagine today, but the rise of the New York City as the financial and commercial center of an empire was nearly entirely originally based on commerce supported by the canal. 

The canal was built over about seven years beginning in 1825, in an effort led by Governor DeWitt Clinton. While it used the water and geography of the Mohawk River, much of the canal had to be dug by hand parallel to the shallow, non-navigable river. The canal was a truly amazing accomplishment of human effort – and of engineering. While the canal was used for almost a century, the development of railroad infrastructure came hard on the heels of its completion, with the final leg of what became the New York Central Railroad across New York State finished in 1839. The “Age of the Erie Canal” was short but world shaking.

The canal required 83 locks along its 350-mile route to move freight vertically along its route, in many places enabling the circumnavigation of waterfalls. The vertical drop between the Lake Erie and the Hudson was only about 700 feet. But even more impressive were the 18 aqueducts that were built to cross over other rivers. The idea of building a structure over a river to carry freight loaded barges on water over other bodies of water is hard for the modern imagination to conceive. The longest of these aqueducts went through what became the city of Rochester over the Genesee River. 

Innovation Square Building

Over the next 150 years Rochester became the silicon valley of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox all got their start in Rochester. The huge Gannett newspaper chain was based in Rochester until recently. Rochester, and the region, also played a large role in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movement. For a large part of his adult life, Frederick Douglass lived in Rochester with his family and published his newspaper “The North Star” there. The level of political and intellectual activity in Rochester and the nearby small Finger Lake towns was truly remarkable (and the number of 19th century-founded institutions of higher education in the region is reflective of that).

The civic and business leadership of Rochester over the many decades took establishing a major metropolis seriously. They created the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and more recently the George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film. Rochester became an essential part of the US’ art music ecology as the home of the Eastman School of Music (one of the country’s two or three best) and the Rochester Philharmonic. 

The RPO is in the second tier of American orchestras by budget size as designated by the League of American Orchestras. Led music director Andreas Delft, however, it plays at a level that matches those of our largest ensembles (his predecessors in that role included Eugene Goosens, Erich Leinsdorf and David Zinman). It plays in Kodak Hall of the Eastman Theater at the Eastman School of Music. Originally built with 3,500 seats, it is a very, very large, high-ceilinged room – although the seating was reduced by 1,200 in 2009. When I stepped into the tremendous mass of space that is Kodak Hall, sitting about halfway back, I was concerned about the sound possibly being hollow and swallowed up. The orchestra, dressed in the now decreasingly used white tie, filled the space with a rich, clear, accomplished sound. I heard a program that included Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28,” Saint-Saen’s “Carnival of the Animals, with duo pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.” The program was billed as “Orchestral Showpieces,” and that provided a first-time listener a good idea of the group’s musical capacity. 

The performances were simply excellent with a warm string resonance and glitch free solos – no small achievement in the Strauss’s exposed wind and horn parts. The Strauss was played in technicolor, with the piece’s humor and theatricality highlighted. The color coordinated and brightly dressed Naughton twins attacked their pianos aggressively, with precise coordination in the “Carnival of the Animals”. So much of this music has worked its way into the heart of the culture and is very familiar, none more so than The Swan movement, beautifully played by principal cellist Ahrim Kim. The soloists’ moments in all three pieces were played with great musicality and skill, but without showy virtuosity. This is an orchestra that clearly enjoys playing together with its music director as an organic ensemble. It was particularly evident in the “Petrushka,” another colorful work with comic moments. “Petrushka” is rhythmically complicated and spare, with much of the exposed orchestral scoring that is so characteristic of Stravinsky’s early music (the piece premiered in 1911). The orchestra made a tight, delightful show of its contrasts of both dark and light moments. I walked out after the concert into downtown Rochester musically contented. 

The former headquarters of Gannett Newspapers

Downtown Rochester suffered from the degradations of the now mostly discredited ideas of mid-twentieth century urbanism and design. Its peak population was in the 1950’s, and only in the last decade has the population stopped declining. The downtown is filled with structured parking (and very few parking lots) and has a good number of daunting, tower in the park-like office buildings. The lack of lot parking gives the downtown a feeling of continuity. The city, though, has superficially followed a number of the latest urban trends, with some restored public spaces, scooters and bike lanes (without many people using any of them). Most distressing to me was the empty complex of buildings once occupied by Gannett newspapers in the center of town, before it decamped to a suburban Washington, D.C. office park in 1984 and moved the production of the local paper to another Rochester location in 2016. These are massive art deco and Albert Kahn designed buildings created around now obsolete technologies like the printing press and the typewriter. I am an optimist and have thought that the market will find uses for the post-pandemic half filled, midtown Manhattan, midcentury modern office towers. But walking around the Gannett complex gives one pause about the destructive capacity of modern capitalism and the difficulty of recycling gargantuan 20th century edifices. 

Across the street from the Gannett complex, at the foot of what was the aqueduct across the Genesee, is an 80,000 square foot, mixed-use – loft, office, retail – adaptive reuse development in a former mill that may demonstrate what the future of Downtown Rochester could be like. However, in order to get there, Rochester needs to veer away from both obsolete planning doctrine and the superficial trappings of up-to-date urbanism – a bench here, a planter there, public sculpture somewhere else, and dig deep into placemaking practice in order to become a mixed-use, 24 hour downtown. I even saw a sign opposing the formation of a business improvement district – a thirty-year-old concept, the best days of which have passed, particularly in cities of fewer than one million people.

An unused bike lane on the Aqueduct Bridge over the Genesee. The bridge also has nice, unused benches and planters.

Right now, downtown Rochester is a place designed to accommodate people who drive to work in an office building, and drive home to adjacent neighborhoods and suburbs at night. There is a mindset in Rochester that needs to change to make the most of its substantial social infrastructure. The blank walls and lifeless plazas around the downtown’s major office buildings are a challenge. I even saw a sign on steps leading to what appears to be the city’s leading office building prohibiting sitting on the steps up to its plaza! That is exactly WRONG. Property management ought to be encouraging step sitting and working to animate the baren plazas. The city needs to select a promising central location and build a critical mass of activity around that place. Scattered residential loft buildings throughout the downtown aren’t going to build that critical mass of activity. Especially given the lifelessness around the major office towers. The downtown needs sidewalk activity in the form of restaurants with outdoor seating and public spaces programmed with activity like Bryant and Dilworth Parks. The deep cultural resources of the community, like Eastman School and the excellent RPO, can be leveraged to bring vibrancy downtown, particularly at night. 

Steps to the plaza of the Metropolitan office tower
Sign next to the steps
The tower

With 100,000 fewer residents than at its peak, Rochester is excellent evidence that we don’t have a housing crisis in the United States and in New York State, but rather we have a lack of great places (and a failure to provide adequate mental health services to our most disadvantaged neighbors). Rochester and its neighbors have capacity. Tens of thousands of people, most recently from Venezuela, want desperately to be in the US. Upstate New York needs those people and their expertise and energy. We need policies that move them from the Southern border to our postindustrial cities. The Erie Canal corridor is a place of great beauty and opportunity. Utica, for example, has been recharged by an influx of Bosnian immigrants.  The legacy of the Erie Canal could be more great places across one of New York State’s most naturally stunning locations. More on that when we move on to other Mohawk Valley cities. 

By Thomas Cole

NEWSRACKS ARE ANCIENT HISTORY

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The multi-vend newsrack has become an obsolete blot on urban streets all over the country – and I am mostly to blame. It is the solution to a problem that no longer exists. Its useful life has come to an end, and the business improvement districts and cities that erected them need to put them out of their misery. They are a legacy of one of the symptoms of social disorder of the 1990’s that has been largely forgotten or were never known by those who are younger. Like public telephone kiosks (which I still notice in cities around the country) they need to be removed. 

In the mid 90’s structures selling or distributing printed material became a highly visible blemish on streetscapes, contributing to the perception of disorder that was the principal obstacle to urban revitalization all over North America. In midtown Manhattan, there were hundreds of them, most of them put out by free publications. Many were helter skelter chained to light poles and signal stantions. A detailed narrative of the problem and the creation and implementation of the solution can be found at length in “Learning from Bryant Park,” and in an earlier form on the blog here.

But those publications are almost entirely gone or have gone on-line. In some cities the racks retain some economic value as vehicles for outdoor advertising (in San Francisco, digital ad panels). But they are empty of printed material, and in some places, like with phone kiosks, they appear to be abandoned. There is no reason to keep them, and every reason to take them down. 

I hereby lay down the gauntlet to my BID colleagues, to tear them down. As their father (along with the late Arthur Rosenblatt), and in the spirit of the return of Cherubini’s Medea to the Metropolitan Opera stage later this month, I encourage their demise. They have become an orphaned symbol of bureaucratic lethargy and sclerosis – a failure to change with changing conditions. 

THE BEST LAID PLANS FOR FREE WI-FI (Part 3 of 3)

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THE ELECTRONS HIT THE FAN.

CityBridge amended its privacy policy to enable it to collect the MAI on a unilateral basis over 4th of July weekend of 2017. A bad move both politically and legally. A cease and desist letter was sent to CityBridge by the City and CityBridge reversed itself. If the relationship between the City and CityBridge had not already been sufficiently soured, the unilateral change in the privacy policy was something of a last straw. At that point, while CityBridge was not meeting its deployment targets, it had put out LinkNYC kiosks at most of the high value Manhattan locations. They had told me that there was no increased revenue to be gained for them by putting out more kiosks. The kiosks their advertisers required had been built. 

Coincidentally, CityBridge began to argue that, notwithstanding the Second Amendment, and the assurances of viability attached to it, that without the collection of the MAI there was no way the franchise could be financially successful. Without a further change in the structure of the program, they claimed, they would go out business.  In August of 2017 they stopped building new kiosks, in part blaming delays on Con Ed’s lack of responsiveness and arbitrary imposition of hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional charges (which were at least partially caused by CityBridge’s arrogance and high-handedness in dealing with Con Ed).  Later in the year, claiming financial disaster, they stopped paying the minimum monthly guaranteed payment. The City entered into a series of monthly “forbearance agreements” saying that it would not default CityBridge while negotiations took place to resolve the outstanding issues. But CityBridge was in an excellent position. They had the kiosks in the locations they needed and had stopped spending money installing additional ones, they had stopped paying rent, and they continued to sell ads on the kiosks. What could have been better for them? 

An incidental result of this delay was the failure to remove the payphone kiosks on the timeline set out in the franchise agreement, another default under the agreement. Not only were the payphones a technology that had been superseded by mobile phones, but they were also an unsupported technology. Replacement parts were impossible to source. The copper wire system that they relied on was entirely degraded and non-functioning. As a result, all were eventually converted to battery operated wireless service. The batteries frequently went dead. There were per diem liquated damage provisions for non-deployment of kiosks and penalties for the failure to maintain the phones. DoITT had a half dozen individuals who had been inspecting the phones and writing violations against them for decades. The liquidated damage amounts built up into the high six figures and became yet an additional issue in negotiations of the default and discussions of a possible third amendment (Ultimately, the City waived the accumulated liquidated damages in the third amendment).

In 2022 there was a blizzard of publicity about the removal of the “last phone booths” with panegyrics to a lost age. This was not entirely accurate. First, because none of the stories noted that CityBridge was supposed to have removed them all six years prior and second, because there were still plenty of phone kiosks around if you just looked. This is not to mention that there were hundreds of places where phones had been pulled and the sidewalks had not been properly restored, a not insignificant ongoing failure by CityBridge. 

With respect to CityBridge’s claims of financial distress, my view was that first, in my judgement CityBridge had done a poor job in selling the ad panels – and based on my twenty years of experience with the outdoor advertising industry (beginning with the very lucrative and novel sale of panels on the Bryant Park newsstands in the late 90’s), I couldn’t understand why they weren’t doing better. There was something wrong with their sales program, in my view, probably having to do with their attempting to sell only to national accounts. Just for example, I thought that if they made a deal with Miller Beer to blanket Manhattan with ads from four to six PM on weekdays that might say “It’s Miller Time” on the ad panels, it would be easy to determine how many additional six packs of beers were moved as a result of the campaign, and put a value on that (although this is a bad example because ads for alcohol were prohibited from the program).  But they weren’t doing anything creative like this (that were the signature of TDI, the out-of-home advertising firm which had the subway system franchise for many years – for example the wrapping of entire subway cars for single advertisers). 

Second, it wasn’t the City’s business to get involved int CityBridge/Intersection/Sidewalk Labs bottom line or their cost structure. The City and CityBridge had a franchise agreement that was hard negotiated over, and approved by the Law Department, OMB and the FCRC through a highly public and formal process. The franchise agreement had a complete panoply of potentially effective remedies in the event of default, including the $100 million in security. The City had the capacity to strictly enforce the provisions of the agreement; including, exercising the City’s rights to the $100 million dollars in security to pay outstanding franchise fees and build the required number of kiosks. It was our job under the City Charter to enforce the contract. We didn’t have the right to change terms and to do so wasn’t good public policy. In addition, the failed bidders for the original franchise, as well as the holder of the City’s other outdoor advertising franchise for bus shelters and newsstands (a competitor to the Link program, which also claimed to be losing money under its deal), would have a legal right to complain about any such changes. 

Finally, based on my thirty years of business experience, with particular involvement with out of home advertising and street furniture (which is why they recruited me for the job in the first place), I was sure that CityBridge, Intersection and Google were bluffing. They wanted to get a better deal, and because of the extensive knowledge within Sidewalk Labs of how the City operated, they knew that the City tended not to enforce the terms of its contracts, to fold in negotiations, and to lose in litigation. I argued internally that once the City exercised its right to cash the letter of credit (which involved faxing a letter to the bank issuing the letter), CityBridge would move quickly to pay its arrears and remedy its deployment breaches. The franchise was just too valuable to lose and consortium members would sacrifice a great deal of money in the event of a termination. I also came to understand that the letter of credit was personally guaranteed to the bank issuing it by the principal of the venture capital investor member of the consortium. He would have moved heaven and earth not to have the LC, which was essentially a cash deposit, drawn on. We transmit the fax, the City gets the money, the bank sucks the money out of the VC investor’s account. End of story. The unsigned letter drawing on the $25 million LC sat on the top of my desk for months, with CityBridge at one point in default to the City in an amount that was twice that. 

Another interesting aspect of the capital structure of CityBridge was that they had a line of credit with a bank, and a more than $150 million in a loan from what are called EB-5 investors. The EB-5 investors were a group of foreign nationals, recruited by local financial brokers, who were promised by the Federal government green cards in exchange for significant investments in US projects in distressed communities. If the City called a default under the franchise agreement, that would have also caused a default under the terms of the bank and the EB-5 loans. The EB-5 investors would lose their right to green cards. The bank lenders would likely lose their jobs (or at least their annual bonuses). Both groups would also be highly motivated to take over CityBridge (as they were entitled to do under the terms of the franchise agreement) and cure any default.

[It’s worth noting that there came a time when I enquired at the City’s Law Department about who was the City’s letter of credit law expert. I got a call back from someone senior at the Law Department asking me how much prior experience I had with letters of credit. I explained that I had routinely dealt with them in my law practice and real estate finance transactions, but that I was by no means an expert in this highly technical area of the law. The person on the phone said to me “Good, you are now the City’s LC expert.”]

But no one was interested in my opinion. It is interesting to note that between me and the Mayor, who was the ultimate decision maker on the issue, were at least four layers of bureaucracy – my boss the General Counsel of DoITT, the DoITT Commissioner, the Deputy Mayor for Operations, the First Deputy Mayor and the Mayor’s Chief of Staff. There is an argument to be made that given the relative lack of importance of the Link program in the grand scheme of city things, the issue shouldn’t even have risen to the Mayor’s level. But anything that had the potential for a bad story in the newspapers, was deemed worthy of Mayoral attention. Any information I was sending up the pike, was going through several layers of edits before it got to Mayor De Blasio. My staff and I, who had the firsthand sense of what was happening with the LinkNYC program, never met with anyone more senior than the General Counsel of DoITT to discuss strategy or our evaluation of the various probabilities of possible outcomes.

This is not to dismiss City Hall’s desire to negotiate with CityBridge out of hand. The Administration did not want to get involved in “protracted litigation with CityBridge” and most particularly did not want to take the risk of CityBridge’s shutting down this high-profile system. By coming to some kind of agreement with CityBridge City Hall could be certain that neither outcome would eventuate. This was their reasoning. The senior officials at Sidewalk Labs, who were now publicly saying that they had very little to do with the Link program, and were knowledgeable former senior city office holders, were lobbying City Hall hard to come to an accommodation. [This would be an appropriate place for me to point out that no one has ever elected me to anything, that no one would ever elect me to even the lowest elected office one might care to suggest, and that in an unlikely and bizarre set of circumstances were I to be elected to anything, it would be an impossibility that I might be reelected.] 

At the same time, the Franchise Administration Unit at DoITT was being audited by both the City and State Comptroller on the LinkNYC franchise. The City Comptroller was auditing the operation of the kiosks (which by any reasonable measure was excellent). The State Comptroller was auditing DoITT’s compliance management with the franchise agreement. The City Comptroller’s methodology was unsound. The State Comptroller’s staff were Javert like in their pursuit of what they thought was perfidy – particularly with respect to the alleged (mis)-calculation of a very small amount of owed franchise fees (about which they were incorrect). Neither, though, blew the whistle on CityBridge’s failure to make good on its financial or deployment obligations and the City’s failure to exercise its extensive set of rights in the event of defaults under the franchise agreement while they were performing their audits. The State audit went on for months and continued through the COVID pandemic via teleconference. Their not calling out the City’s failure to exercise its contractual remedies and more importantly, CityBridge’s material defaults, seemed to me evidence of the lack of efficacy of Comptroller audits. 

After almost two years (much of it during the pandemic) of negotiations, the City proposed a third amendment to the franchise agreement essentially releasing CityBridge from about $200 million of its minimum annual guaranteed payments, waiving the accrued liquated damages, lowering the minimum number of kiosks from 7,500 to 4,000, and most importantly essentially transforming the franchise from one focused on providing fee Wi-Fi service in public spaces, to one empowering CityBridge and a new partner, ZenFi, to turn the kiosks into 30 foot high hosts for multiple mobile telecommunications small cell transmitters. The City got no increased value from the contract in return. 

Another, better, kiosk solution. Look on the right.

During the pandemic, the Partnership for New York City, lobbied the De Blasio administration hard that New York City was falling behind in the deployment of 5G transmitters, something I discussed at length here: https://www.theplacemaster.com/2022/08/18/online-porn-gambling-and-5g/. The Administration put on a full court press to attempt to accelerate the deployment of small cells on light poles around the city, to remove obstacles to building macro transmitters on building roofs (created by Buildings Department and Fire Department safety regulations) and to convert the CityBridge Wi-Fi kiosks to mobile telecom transmitter stations. The amendment to the CityBridge franchise agreement to convert it to a mobile telecommunications station, and the approval for a design for a new Link kiosk design which could host the small cells of multiple companies became a high priority, rush project.

While at all times as a city employee I tried to be a loyal soldier, advancing the Administration’s goals and priorities to the best of my abilities, I regarded then and continue to regard the third amendment to the franchise agreement as a bad deal for the city, with particular respect to its financial terms, which was essentially a gift to a private entity of hundreds of millions of dollars to which it was contractually obligated. That being said, after lots of questions being asked and objections raised by the City’s Office of Management and Budget and the Law Department, both signed off on the substance and form of the amendment. The amendment then, as required, went to the Franchise and Concession Review Board for approval – which it duly received. Only the Staten Island Borough President identified the problems with the deal and voted against it at the FCRC. The New York City Comptroller and the four other Borough President, having been fully briefed and informed, all voted in favor of handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to CityBridge essentially because they claimed they were bad at their business. To give credit where it is due, the free public Wi-Fi system has continued to operate without interruption. After the approval of the amendment, CityBridge paid a portion of its arrears (as of March 2021) and resumed paying (reduced) minimum guaranteed monthly payments. 

The best telecommunications infrastructure solution.

Similarly, while raising a number of concerns, the New York City Public Design Commission approved the design of the ZenFi kiosk, which is industrial looking, utilitarian and unimaginative. Not at all the signature purpose built multi-use telecommunications street furniture about which I have previously written. But to reiterate – every aspect of this transformed telecommunications franchise has been properly approved by the requisite authorities. There is nothing illegal or untoward here – just, in my view, a bad policy outcome leaving the City hundreds of millions of dollars poorer, with a badly designed poorly located 32 foot high tower, that fails to address the needs of an equitable 21sttelecommunications system. I was recently told that CityBridge has missed the revised deployment targets of the third amendment. But, as I say, no one ever elected me to anything. 

THE BEST LAID PLANS FOR FREE WI-FI (Part 2 of 3)

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WI-FI FOR THE PEOPLE

Deployment of the kiosks wasn’t as straightforward as either the City or CityBridge had assumed. First, as it turned out the energy service and conduit for fiber optic cable to the payphone sites turned out to be degraded and entirely useless for purposes of the LinkNYC kiosks.  As a result, CityBridge would have to do more trenching than it anticipated and Con Ed would need to be called upon to provide electrical service to all of the Link sites. That became a pinch point in the speed of deployment because Con Ed had a lot of demands on the staff that provided new service to business sties (requiring street openings), and because of the swiftly developed bad blood between CityBridge and Con Ed staff, CityBridge requests for service went straight to the bottom of the request pile. 

Con Ed then decided that CityBridge needed to pay its maximize charge for delivery of service because the LinkNYC kiosks were “permanent” (like buildings), and that each kiosks would have to be individually metered and billed (unlike street lights). This was a large unanticipated additional cost to CityBridge, which it challenged unsuccessfully at the State Public Service Commission (a decision incorrect on the legal merits, in my judgement).

Siting the kiosks also turned out to be more complicated than anyone expected – because the kiosks were larger and differently shaped from phone kiosks they couldn’t just be replaced one-for-one. Also, site conditions had changed from the time the phone kiosks were installed, and by the time CityBridge surveyed sites for Link kiosks. Plans for each site had to be review by DoITT staff, and then inspected by DoITT inspectors (who were retrained from having been payphone inspectors for decades) for compliance with various siting criteria – particularly clearances from other street furniture. Pre-COVID outdoor cafes proved to be a significant obstacle to Link kiosk siting. CityBridge never made the deployment targets (each Borough had its own targeted minimum number of kiosks to be deployed each year) required by its franchise agreement. 

Most of the publicity about the Link program during its yearly years arose out of concerns that they were a magnet for the homeless. There was widespread publicity that homeless individuals were watching porn on the internet tablets built into the kiosks. The charging ports were also seen as drawing folks looking to recharge their phones (although the question of how it was that apparently destitute people had handheld devices and monthly phone service plans was never raised or explained). In a number of places in midtown Manhattan, homeless people did congregate around the kiosks, it seemed to me for reasons unrelated to their functionality that I couldn’t figure out (we also found people sleeping under derelict telephone kiosks that had no functionality). For a while, we were reasonably successful in working with the outreach teams under contract to the City’s Department of Homeless Services to get services to people congregating around the kiosks. But, fundamentally, the situation wasn’t a problem generated by the LinkNYC program, but by the Administration’s failed multi-billion dollar strategy for dealing with street homelessness (but that is the subject for another long blog). The basic fact was that the LinkNYC kiosks did not cause homelessness.

I spent a fair amount of my time when working for DoITT trying to understand who was using the Wi-Fi and the other features of the kiosks and how they were using them. CityBridge provided data on usage (which is available on the City’s open data portal) which I reviewed monthly. I also tried to spend a couple days a month wandering around city neighborhoods, checking on their functionality (as did our terrific team of six inspectors), and observing, a al my guru, William H. Whyte, how people were using them in real time. I made sure my site visits were in neighborhoods far from the city’s center and were ones I hadn’t been to before. 

The system was highly utilized – with millions of users and millions of terabytes of annual downloads. I concluded that the bulk of the use in Manhattan was by tourists and other visitors. Most New Yorkers have data service. That’s not to say that making the service available to that user group isn’t of value – but it wasn’t exactly advancing the goal of closing the supposed digital divide. What was interesting was how the kiosks were being used outside Manhattan. They were becoming a kind of social center. I saw people setting up chairs near them, using the Wi-Fi or charging their phones. Businesses put out tables and chairs in front of their storefronts for Wi-Fi users. I observed people using the telephone functionality – making very long calls, much to my surprise. The data showed that the top websites accessed and phone numbers called had to do with contacting social services – finding out about missing SNAP and other transfer payments. Clearly, the Link kiosks were becoming an important resource in otherwise underserved communities and had a great deal of value there. They were enlivening the sidewalks in commercial corridors in Brooklyn and The Bronx. This is something that should continue to be a focus of the Link program.

At one point I recommended, following the Holly Whyte formula, that we work to place movable chairs and tables near the kiosks, since many of the complaints about their use were about people sitting near them on the ground. My thinking was that this would “normalize” this use and support the vitality of commercial corridors around the city. This suggestion was not well received, despite the near universal acknowledgement among urbanists of the utility of movable chairs to animate public space, as evidenced by their success in Bryant Park.  

MORE PROBLEMS ARISE

In 2017, CityBidge began to complain that it wasn’t making its advertising sales targets, in part because of deployment delays and in part because ad sales weren’t living up to expectations. As a result, the franchise agreement was being amended when I arrived at DoITT around that time, to provide a slower roll out of kiosk deployment and a deferment of payment of a portion of guaranteed minimum payments. A forensic audit of the financial records of CityBridge was performed for the City by a highly respected CPA firm to determine its financial condition. All were assured that the terms of the second amendment would solve CityBridge’s financial problems, based in part on representations made by CityBridge and Sidewalk Labs staff, and in part on the audit results. 

Immediately after the approval of the amendment to the franchise agreement (by City Hall, the Office of Management and Budget and the City’s Franchise and Concession Review Board, made up of representatives of the Administration, the Comptroller and the Borough Presidents. The FCRC is an interesting vestige of the City’s powerful Board of Estimate, made up of the Mayor and Borough Presidents and which once controlled the City’s zoning and franchising functions until it was found to be unconstitutional on the basis of being undemocratic – given that each Borough President had an equal vote), CityBridge requested of the City permission to amend its privacy policy to be able to collect the Mobile Advertising Identifier generated by peoples’ mobile phones and use it in order to increase the value of its ad panels (and by the way, you can turn off the generation of an MAI by an iPhone by going into its privacy settings). 

There was some degree of bad faith in this request, since the claim of CityBridge was that the ability to collect the MAI was essential to the economic successful of the franchise – a success that was supposedly assured by the adoption of the Second Amendment to the Franchise Agreement (the first amendment involved approval of a change in the members of the consortium making up CityBridge). The request caused tremendous ructions within the De Blasio administration which had privacy hard-liners in charge of its electronic privacy policy. The Administration had also gone through a laborious process of gaining the approval of the electronic privacy advocacy groups, like the New York Civil Liberties Union (also ardent privacy hawks) to not oppose the LinkNYC program. The reality of the privacy protections built into the franchise was that the Wi-Fi use of the LinkNYC signal was more secure and had higher standards of privacy than that provided by the any of the cable companies’ internet service to homes. The Link program collected the email addresses of the users in order for them to sign up for using the program, and nothing else about the users. Those email addresses were prohibited to be used for any other purpose or to be shared with any third party. The privacy protections were, as far as I could determine, rock solid. 

Much was made of the potential for privacy invasions from the kiosks. They had three cameras. One was for use with embedded tablet for telephonic and emergency communications, and two on either side of the kiosks were for the monitoring and prevention of vandalism of the kiosks. To the best of my knowledge those side cameras were used only occasionally, and the videos generated were kept for a maximum of seven days and then erased. The kiosks also had a range of sensors that, to my best knowledge, were never used. These sensors had the capacity to collect pedestrian traffic, vehicle traffic, weather and seismological data – all which might have been of great value to the city and none of which were ever used. My understanding was that since the data was found by Sidewalk Labs to have little economic value (nobody wanted to pay for it), the sensors were never turned on. There was nothing the slightest bit “big brotherish” about City use of LinkNYC as far as I could tell, and I would have known.

I am actually something of a privacy dove. The MAI had the potential for huge value for both CityBridge and the City. It was anonymized, so it had a very limited impact on user privacy, but it upped the efficacy of the value of the ad panels. Most interesting to me was that the MAI could enable the Link system to relate the passing of an ad by a pedestrian to a sale to that person minutes later through their mobile phone. Let’s say an ad for Brooks Brothers was shown on a panel and an individual walked by it. If within a short period of time that individual went into a Brooks store a purchased a shirt, the Link system could get a commission on the sale. This was the kind of effectiveness/outcome metric that is so difficult to determine in the out of home advertising market – and would have provided the system with a huge competitive advantage. It would also have allowed Intersection to precisely determine how many viewers each ad panel had, something of great interest to advertisers, and would enable a more precise value to be placed on each ad. 

Finally, much of the internet advertising sales world is driven by algorisms and a complex computerized marketplace by which ads are sold through instantaneous electronic auctions. Billboards, obviously, unlike internet banner ads, can’t participate in that electronic pricing system and as a result, are limited in their value. Tapping into the MAIs captured by the Link system would enable those ads to be sold through the electronic auction marketplace. The system would know how many people were seeing an ad at a particular location at a particular time and could auction off an ad at that time and place. Without the MAI data, the Link ads were not able to easily participate in this process (although I did argue internally that using data available from smartphones collected by Google without the MAI, such sales were possible, without success). 

The City’s Chief Privacy Officer and the DoITT General Counsel were adamant. No way was CityBridge was going to be able to amend its privacy policy to collect the MAI under this administration. This was communicated to CityBridge quite clearly in June of 2017.