Tag Archives: horticulture

SWIM WITH THE FISHES

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Creating the Hudson River Park

Environmental and Community Activism, Politics and Greed

By: Tom Fox

Rutgers University Press 2024

The looming question about the Hudson River Park has long been obvious. Why isn’t it better? In his book, Creating the Hudson River Park, environmental activist, Tom Fox tells us why, in copious, gruesome detail. For those of us concerned about creating and maintaining great public spaces the issues are laid out clearly, fairly, and with specificity in this excellent volume. It is an absolutely essential contribution to the literature of public space-making in America. Tom has gone deeply into the archives to tell as much as possible of the now 70-year history of this highly visible project. Perhaps most remarkably, he fairly explains the subjects, giving the competing ideas of those over the years who have (fervently) not agreed with him their due. Most of those concerns are ones that face the development or restoration of any large and/or highly visible public space.

The answer as to why the park isn’t better is because it is the product of decades of comprises that were the result of endless fighting over the shape of the park and the adjacent highway. The amount of conflict involved in the creation of the park is both heartbreaking and depressing. It may sound naïve, but “why can’t we all just get along?” The park’s origin was in the conflict over Westway – a highway cum real estate development plan concocted in the shadow of the era of Robert Moses that proposed to replace the southern portion of the West Side (Miller) Highway with an underground expressway, topped with new construction and public space adjacent to the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. So, controversy is unfortunately in its DNA. The project was stopped as the result of the early use of Federal environmental legislation and regulation enforced by legal action brought by private citizens and non-profit organizations. Continue reading →

TACTICAL HYPOCRISY

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Where is Charlie Brown?

It seemed great when the book “Tactical Urbanism” was published in in 2015. Here were a bunch of placemaking ideas that were easy to understand and implement. The first chapter was a promising summary of the principles of placemaking developed over the prior three decades. The rest of the book felt kind of skimpy – the case studies it described weren’t terribly impressive or interesting, but they were certainly a step in the right direction. And then tactical urbanism came to my block.

During COVID, New York City’s Open Streets program arrived on 103rd Street between Central Park and Riverside Park. Two metal barricades appeared at the end of each block each morning with signs noting that no through traffic was allowed, and that the speed limit was five miles an hour. 103rd came to a T intersection at each park – limiting its utility to through traffic. While no one was using the street bed to hang out in, and the street closing complicated bringing a Zipcar around from my local parking garage to my front door, I did enjoy the additional open space for walking the dog. I noticed over the years an occasional lame event advertised for the street being put on by “Park to Park 103/Open Streets.

 

          The Plan

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ROCKIN’ THE CANADIAN ROCKIES

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Olympic Plaza with no skaters

It is truly wonderful how many beautiful and great places there are in North America. Calgary, Alberta sits an hour from the Rockies and enjoys spectacular mountain views. Calgary is a little like Dallas, after having morphed into Houston. It started as a cow town (and I had a fantastic shell steak during my visit) and became an oil and gas city – the fourth largest city in Canada with a population of well over a million. It has eight buildings of over 40 stories in the downtown. The city was very much built around the car – with numerous parking structures in the center. You can drive downtown from the suburbs, park downtown and as a result of the extensive skyway system (called locally the “+15”), your feet never have to touch the ground in getting to and from your office.

My visit was sponsored by the downtown business improvement area (BIA), Calgary Downtown Association (CDA), as part of an exercise to revitalize Stephen Avenue, one of the city’s principal shopping streets. Several blocks of Stephen Avenue have been pedestrianized and are mostly made up of low-rise late 19th and early 20th century buildings. The street is shadowed by the surrounding office towers – which, at present, have in excess of a 30% office vacancy rate. The street abruptly “Ts” smack into the superblock containing City Hall.

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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

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This blog only represents the views of the author and does not reflect the policies of the City of New York or its Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. 

Is urban “revitalization” a mere expression of cultural preference – reflecting white, upper-middle class predilections? Was the pre-revitalization 42nd Street somehow a more authentic expression of something before it, and Bryant Park, became “Disney-fied.” Essays in “Deconstructing the High Line: postindustrial urbanism and the rise of the elevated park,” edited by Christoph Linder and Brian Rosa (Rutgers, 2017), suggest that prior to its re-visioning as an urban public space, the High Line of gay cruising and wild, invasive plants was authentic, organic and more correct. In an essay in Deconstructing the High Line, Darren J. Patrick even argues that the pervasive and self-seeding, but non-native, Ailanthus altissima, had more of a right to live and thrive in the along the abandoned elevated rail line than the artificial more native, highly curated plant selection that distinguishes the High Line now.

When we were working at Grand Central Partnership and Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, we were occasionally surprised to learn that there were academics, like Sharon Zukin, who thought that we were engaged in a misguided attempt to destroy the complex, authentic social ecology of “The Deuce.” We couldn’t understand how someone might prefer the porn theaters, prostitution, unpicked up trash and three card monte of 42nd Street of the 70’s and early 80’s to what we were envisioning. Continue reading →

A Memo from Brooklyn to Queens: Re: Amazon, HQ2

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Dechirico

Giorgio de Chirico, Piazza d’Italia.

This blog only represents the views of the author and does not reflect the policies of the City of New York or its Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. 

The original New York City highly incentivized corporate center was MetroTech in Downtown Brooklyn. MetroTech was built by Forest City/Ratner (FCRC) as back office space for Chemical Bank (now JP Morgan Chase), Bear Stearns (now defunct, as some may recall), Brooklyn Union Gas (now National Grid) – with some New York City government offices thrown in to sweeten the pot. Having worked in Queens for a decade, with an office now in Brooklyn at MetroTech, feel I have some credibility in bringing something to the spirited discussion now taking place about the advent of Amazon to the Queens waterfront.

The first point to get out-of-the-way is that no Governor or Mayor could ever let a project like H2Q slip through their hands without making a major effort to win the competition. It would be a political disaster to be seen as not having made a maximum effort to attract Amazon – even given the outcry now taking place on the part of some local elected officials. No one wants to be seen as the “the Mayor who let the Yankees move out-of-town.” In addition, these kinds of negotiations of necessity have to take place without publicity and with a minimum number of people involved. Complex economic development deals can’t be negotiated in public. For the deal to close there has to be a level of certainty to the outcome – hence the use of the Empire State Development Corporation to avoid the normal public review process. Putting the process behind closed doors and circumventing public review are political risks the Governor and Mayor took to get the deal done. If the electorate truly objects to the terms of the deal and the manner in which it was accomplished they have a remedy – vote them out of office at the next opportunity. That’s how democracy works. Continue reading →

Book Project: Learning from Bryant Park: Placemaking in Bryant Park. Revitalizing Cities, Towns and Public Space

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I have just contracted with Rutgers University Press for the publication of Learning from Bryant Park: Placemaking in Bryant Park. Revitalizing Cities, Towns and Public Spaces in the Spring of 2019. I am so fortunate to be working with the experienced publishing professionals Peter Mikulas and Micah Kleit on this project.

Putting Out in Public Space

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Thomas Hart Benton, Instruments of Power from America Today, 1930–31 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Providing a great experience to visitors to public spaces is something we know that Disney gets for its parks. It’s also essential to the hotel business. Even museums and other cultural institutions are focused today on being responsive to visitor needs – to providing great customer service. They do this because the visitor experience is essential to generating repeat visits and building brand loyalty. At not-for-profit institutions treating visitors well is also part of their development strategy – happy visitors are more likely to become future donors.

In the world of public space management we don’t talk much about the visitor experience – but we should. Most public spaces are operated by government agencies, and the incentive systems of government bureaucracies are oriented towards different goals – minimizing costs, preventing graft and corruption, minimizing risk and avoiding political problems (analogous in some ways to good consumer relations, but not exactly the same thing). Those goals can often be in conflict with providing park visitors with a positive time. Perhaps those of us in downtown revitalization and public space management ought to think a little more about how the individual visitor is treated in our spaces. Continue reading →

People Like/Love Grass

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Childe Hassam; Nurses in the Park; Harvard

Early on I learned that when people said to me that Bryant Park looked great, what they actually meant was “Wow, the lawn is really green.” I even got a letter once from the managing editor of the New York Times complimenting us on how good the lawn looked, and asking if I would come out to Long Island to give him a hand with his yard. There is no getting around that nothing communicates to folks that a public space is well-managed and under social control better than a verdant, well-kept lawn. It may be high maintenance and not ecologically correct, but it is what is. People want to look at, sit on, play on and LIE on a beautiful carpet of grass. And getting to a great lawn isn’t easy. At the same time, keeping people off the grass sends exactly the wrong message – you want the lawn to be open to use as often as possible. This signals that the space is somewhere that people are invited in and welcome to use. Continue reading →

Race, Class, Equality and Public Space

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1894 Bryant Park Dan Biederman Bryant Park Corporation

1894 Bryant Park before the physical changes. Looking north.

A serious challenge facing public space managers is people living in and engaging in antisocial behavior in public spaces. This seems to be a particular issue for cities on the west coast, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Eugene, Oregon. The situation is raising a raft of crosscutting concerns about individual rights, the causes of economic disadvantage in our country today, the sensitivities of upper-middle class urbanites and our society’s stubborn unwillingness to assist those suffering from serious mental health issues, including substance abuse. Conflicting interests and ideologies play out in policy discussions about how public spaces are governed and managed.

Successful restoration of social control to public spaces is not about enforcement. The apparent decline in the quality of the public space experience in the second half of the 20th century was driven almost entirely by how safe people felt they were on sidewalks and in parks. Many felt that the public realm of shared space was out of social control, and as a result, they feared for their physical safety. Some of this fear may have been exaggerated or even incorrect, driven by race- and class-bound assumptions and stereotypes. But even if the threat was not real, the perception of it kept people from visiting, working, shopping in or investing in public places perceived to be unsafe. Much of the success of improved public spaces over the last two decades has been based on improving those perceptions – making public spaces feel safer by employing “broken-windows” management (discouraging low-level disorder and providing high-quality, detail-oriented maintenance) and placemaking practice. Continue reading →

Say It With Flowers

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A view of the planting beds — on the south, shady side.

Nothing gives you more bang for your public space improvement dollars than plants. When people ask me what the one thing they should do to improve public space, my response is always to institute a horticulture program. Improving the perception of public space is about providing visual cues to users that the space is under social control. Colorful, well-maintained plants send that message in a number of ways. The physical material isn’t very expensive and the skills to maintain horticultural materials are widespread and easy to find. Putting plantings in places where people don’t expect them sends a powerful message.

I knew absolutely nothing about gardening when I went to work for Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1991. My father grew some terrific tomatoes in the yard when I was growing up (it was New Jersey, after all) and for some reason there was always mint growing outside the backdoor of the house that we put into iced tea. And that was the sum total of my agricultural experience when I arrived in the Park. From that day to this, I haven’t had a personal garden or even a yard. Continue reading →