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.

Getting out of the subway every day to go to work at MetroTech is something like entering a DiChirico painting. My office is on the 19^th floor of a MetroTech building designed for Bear Stearns and now mostly inhabited by City agencies. The facades of the buildings are flat, repetitive and boring. My double cube in a corner indicates my high status; with interior windows on a windowed conference room on the building’s top floor. Its lobby is on a Mussolinian scale – but unmarked by any troublesome indication of whose offices inhabit it – or anything else that might signal a hint of a human presence It is clad in elegant stone – both ceiling and floors.

Whoever thought that open plan offices promote creativity must have recently finished reading “1984.” I take phone calls on my mobile phone and talk with others in a conference room in order to gain a modicum of privacy – and to enable me, with my slight hearing disability, to hear others in conversation. It is terribly disruptive. I asked the Powers That Be if they would assist me in hanging up the extensive detritus of my career on the walls near my office and was instructed that such was verboten (I now have them lining the floors next to the walls near my cubes). It is certainly the most dehumanizing physical environment in which I have worked (by contrast, however, my colleagues are wonderful people).

The idea of the MetroTech project was to catalyze office development in Downtown Brooklyn. Like in Long Island City and Jamaica, planners were (are) certain that there would be demand for slightly less expensive office space outside Manhattan. The desks of planners are littered with the designs for the Citicorp Building at Court Square and the home of jetBlue in Jamaica. In the 1990’s the Dinkins Administration and Economic Development Deputy Mayor Alair Townsend went all-in with Forest City to assist with the project, rounding up Chase Manhattan Bank to participate, providing tax subsidies and other support and promising the City’s Fire Department and technology agency as anchor tenants. According to the New York Times, the project received $6 million in Federal Urban Development Action Grants. In addition to the UDAG subsidy, the city gave Forest City a host of incentives: a 22-year property-tax exemption, energy subsidies of up to 30 percent, a $10 million investment from the Municipal Assistance Corporation and a total of $35.5 million from city coffers to buy land and make improvements to sewers and utilities. But, like most top-down, planned projects, it didn’t work out as intended.

The dehumanization starts as soon as I exit the subway every morning and enter the MetroTech “plaza.” MetroTech has a kind a faux Venetian thing going on, with sort of loggias on two sides in front of office buildings. Two of the buildings have first floor retail and the third (with one of the loggias) has none. On the fourth side is the back of an NYU building, without even a door. In the middle is a two-acre-ish plaza. The maintenance and programming of the plaza are good — but not great! With just slightly more effort and imagination, the MetroTech Plaza could be the Bryant Park of Brooklyn. About half the plaza has grass panels (often roped off, and recently apparently unsuccessfully re-sodded). A relatively small number of moveable chairs and tables are hauled out everyday by building staff for a few hours and then put away each night. This time of year not at all. When I arrive in the morning, folks are scurrying across the plaza to get to work. Almost no one lingers. The building facades are nondescript and boring.

In better weather there are occasional events in the space. Every Thursday in the summer the local BID puts on some nice events. Big screen projections are done for major sporting events (particularly the World Cup – a very good idea in this diverse neighborhood). The restaurants in the two FCRC buildings have tables out front – which they restrict to their customers. This time of year, the two buildings managed by FCRC are elaborately festooned with lights and “Brooklyn’s tallest Holiday Tree” has been erected (quite nice, actually).

The plaza is well maintained – but no one is paying serious attention to the details that make a unique and vibrant public space. It’s a shame because the place has so much potential. The backlit wayfinding signs are faded and list the original tenants. Plantings are changed seasonally – but with an eye toward minimal maintenance and indestructibility rather than color. There are bossy, negative rules signs. During rush hours there are bunches of NYPD officers near the subway entrance. Occasionally I spot a member of the BID security team wandering through. The space does have great trees.

While nothing can be done about the design and architecture, it wouldn’t take much more in the way of resources and thought to make the plaza into a truly great public space. The owner and the BID’s hearts are certainly in the right place. But like so many other public space managers, they just don’t seem to get the fine points of how a really great public space is made. Dr. Manshel’s prescription for improving the MetroTech plaza:

• More movable chairs and tables, left out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. And, no, they won’t be stolen.
• Closer attention paid to watering and cutting the grass panels so they hold up better and can be accessed by the public more.
• Refresh the signs. Nothing says bad public space management like out-of-date, poorly maintained signs.
• A more imaginative and intensive horticultural program. More color, more annuals, fewer prickly shrubs – ilex and berberis get a big thumbs down from me. They send a message that the public isn’t trusted.
• Public events need to be frequent and regular enough for the essential critical mass to be created in order to have an impact. In addition, the events have to be well-curated. Once a week doesn’t create the required critical mass. Really loud pop music drives as many people from the space as it attracts.
• Having good stuff on two sides of the plaza, isn’t enough, unfortunately. Something has to be done with the loggia that has no first floor retail to activate. Maybe food service can be provided from the restaurants in the other buildings to outdoor tables and chairs.  Perhaps NYU can be persuaded to add a back door to it’s Tandem School building, as well as creating some other activity on the first floor that spills out into the plaza.

Leaving aside the public space aspects of the project, at its essence, MetroTech was a typical, highly subsidized economic development project. It has not created that critical mass of activity that produces an office district. Chase and National Grid are still there, but most of the other tenants are City agencies (Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications [my employer], the Fire Department HQ, and the Department of Social Services) or not-for-profits like NYU. As in Long Island City, the case for Downtown Brooklyn as a satellite office district hasn’t caught on with the private sector (although the Marriott hotel has been a huge success; by itself demonstrating the viability of an entirely new hospitality market in Brooklyn). Commercial tenants aren’t willing to pay rents high enough to induce office development in Downtown Brooklyn. Fulton Street, long anchored by the Abraham & Strauss department store (now Macy’s) remains an active, if uninviting, secondary retail corridor, like Jamaica Avenue (and unlike anything in Long Island City). I have found that very few sit-down restaurants have been attracted to Downtown Brooklyn.

Somewhat perversely, the dense commercial zoning that was planned to produce the office district has instead created a boom in the development of residential towers. Those towers generally don’t relate to the street, don’t have ground floor retail (and if they do, the retail is mid- to big-box formats, with limited street activity). They certainly haven’t created a walkable, attractive neighborhood – or the hoped-for “cultural district” around the Brooklyn Academy of Music (in the future I may write about why walking from my office along Fulton Street and Flatbush Avenue to BAM is a dispiriting experience. The reasons for which I haven’t yet fully figured out.).

What are the some of the lessons Downtown Brooklyn has for Long Island City as a result of the MetroTech experience?

• Public spaces need to be adequately maintained and programmed.
• Active ground floor retail tenants are essential (particularly sit-down restaurants with outdoor food service) and are hard to attract and retain.
• Use lots of colorful plants that change seasonally and don’t use shrubs that are thick or have thorns.
• Beware of heavily incentivized tenants. The vagaries of the market may leave you with i) empty space, ii) a less dynamic successor company or iii) government backfilling space with less highly compensated employees, with diminished secondary economic effects.
• Encourage place-making, walkable design – including midrise (rather than high-rise) structures, with lots of ground floor doors and some façade ornamentation and/or differentiation.
• Forget the cubes.

 

More photos of MetroTech: