Pink Granite
If your organization has unlimited resources and wants to spend tens of millions of dollars on surface treatments, go ahead and make my (and your contractor’s) day! But in my experience just about the least effective, most expensive thing you can spend your public space improvement/downtown revitalization money on is distinctive sidewalks, signature corners, curb cuts, crosswalks and inset plaques. Nobody notices them. Nobody looks down. And this was true even before people’s’ eyeballs became glued to their phones. These fancy capital improvements create unnecessary maintenance issues. For some reason a lot of groups think they haven’t done anything unless they’ve spent tons of money on hardscape. But that’s not what makes space users perceive public places as great. Here’s another example of where programming and maintenance are more important than design and construction. That money is better spent on a fully blown-out horticulture program – which people WILL notice and which DOES improve the perception of public space.
Green Spent on Pink
Granite Pavers in front of the Lincoln Building. I could find no pictures of the corners. What does that tell you?
At Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships we floated tax-exempt bonds to pay for streetscape improvements. That money went to new lamp and signal stanchions, new metal halide luminaires, trash baskets, planters, benches and pink, stony creek granite signature corners. The corner treatments gobbled up what I recall to be about half of the capital budget. Because of underground infrastructure issues they were difficult to install. But what I really noticed about them was that nobody else did. Even today, after twenty years, no one knows they are there. Yes they are nice looking, and yes, they demarcate the boundaries of the BID – or they would if anyone noticed them.
They are also difficult/impossible to maintain. All of the various agencies and enterprises that need to get at the infrastructure in and around the roadbed jack hammer away at them. The BIDs need to monitor this work, to make sure that the corners are properly replaced after the infrastructure work is complete. The BIDs have a continuing obligation to pay for the higher quality surface treatment, as well as to replace broken pavers due to ordinary wear and tear. It is not the contractors’ for the local utilities highest priority to maintain the integrity of these high design corners.
The “Walk” That No One Can Find
Library Walk introductory plaque
Library Walk representative plaque.
At Grand Central we also used bond money to commission bronze artist Greg LeFave to do sculptural panels to be installed on the sidewalk on East 41st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in order to create “Library Walk” leading up to the front entrance of the New York Public Library. The panels included one hundred quotations from great literature selected by the Library’s staff and edited by James Keller, then of the New Yorker Magazine. My colleague, Val Dent, and I spent hours reviewing the images proposed by Greg to match the quotes, and then proofreading the plans for the panels – maybe a hundred times. When you are casting in bronze, whiteout doesn’t quite do the job for fixing typos.
The panels turned out quite beautifully: if anyone sees them — which they definitely don’t. I suspect that Val and I are the only ones who remember that they are there. It’s likely that no one reading this has ever noticed them. Go look. They are quite nice. But the process of creating them took two years and millions of dollars for fabricating and installing the panels. All for naught. The concept of a “Library Way” added no value.
Time and Decay
Jamaica Avenue Red Brick Pavers
Downtown Jamaica had two of the first business improvement districts in the city and state on 165th Street and on Jamaica Avenue. The principal motivation for the creation of the BIDs at that time was the maintenance of streetscape improvements paid for by Federal transportation dollars in the late 70s. There two corridors got near identical treatment to the failed State Street transit mall in Chicago: metro-modular lamp and signal stanchions integrated with traffic directional signs; red brick pavers and Belgian block crosswalks. The crosswalks are now eyesores, dotted with black asphalt patches and in many places nearly completely destroyed. The brick pavers may not have been properly set and create substantial trip and fall liability for the BIDs. The BIDs don’t have nearly the resources to keep the pavers in a good state of repair and to pay for the required insurance. Those expensive surface treatments are now a liability rather than an asset. They generally look crummy.
I often counsel public space managers not to design in anticipation of poor quality maintenance. High quality maintenance puts eyes on the street and communicates that a public space is under social control. It is essential for successful public space improvement projects – so when designing for improvements, it is best to assume that the resources will be put in place for proper upkeep. But because the maintenance costs are so out of scale to the benefit distinctive pavers provide, I regard this one as an exception to this rule. As a practical matter sidewalks simply go mostly unnoticed by pedestrians. My experience is that high design sidewalks and other surface treatments don’t set the stage for an improve public space experience (the way trees or improved retail presentation do) or create a higher quality aesthetic environment because people using public space not only are unaware of them, but they don’t perceive them at all. They don’t have visual impact. It’s not what you’d expect, and it seems counter-intuitive, but actual experience leads to the conclusion that this is the case.
Pavers on Jamaica Avenue. The building on the far left, is the landmarked facade of the Jamaica Savings Bank building.