Author Archives: Andrew Manshel

MAKE NO GRAND PLANS

The $600,000 Mistake

Daniel Burnham was wrong. I learned this from making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake. Placemaking/tactical urbanism is an iterative process. You need to learn as you go. It is essential to effectively improving public space to take risks – but those risks ought to be small, manageable ones; ones you can back out of with minimal damage. When ideas don’t work out, for example when they aren’t effective in drawing people into the space, then you need to bite the proverbial bullet and reverse course. That is an important part of listening to the community – admitting that what you’ve done isn’t working when they are voting with their feet (in the wrong direction).

At Grand Central and 34^th Street Partnerships in the 90’s we created a sidewalk horticulture program. Our President, Dan Biederman, came back from a vacation France where he saw sidewalk planters and hanging baskets and decided that replicating that experience in Midtown Manhattan would improve the streetscape and the pedestrian experience. Our horticultural team, led by Lyndon B. Miller had already scored a great success with the perennial gardens in Bryant Park. So we went to work trying to figure out how to extend that success to the streets around Grand Central and Penn Station. We were furrowing new ground here because, while some smaller American towns had hanging baskets (like Cooperstown, N.Y.), we weren’t aware of any large city where baskets and planters had been implemented on a large-scale. It was several years before Mayor Daley (who sent his staff to spend time with us in Bryant Park to take notes) implemented the spectacular Chicago State Street streetscape redesign, with its beautiful horticulture program – which eventually expanded all over the Loop. Continue reading →

TAKING SUBURBIA SERIOUSLY

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The house in the suburbs in which I grew up.

Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, poses some serious challenges to those of us who focus on urban revitalization, downtown development and the improvement of public spaces. In essence, he asks the question: “What about the suburbs” and using persuasive data argues that it is where most people want to live – and not just here in the United States, but in most developed and developing places around the world. Kotkin’s point is that most people want an affordable place to live, where they can bring up their children, have a yard, a sense of community and good schools – and that means places outside the urban core.

Kotkin distinguishes his analysis from that of Richard Florida, New urbanists and such-like, by saying that while it may be true that over the last couple of decades people are moving back Downtown, and that this may be a good thing, the data shows that it is rather a limited phenomenon and most people still want to live in the ‘burbs. But he goes much further than that. He argues that because of limitations put on housing unit expansion in desirable cities, and the resulting increased density, they are becoming too expensive for any families but the most wealthy. As a result, fertility rates in urbanizing countries are beneath replacement level. Kotkin says that in many/most major cities around the world, since having kids is so expensive, people have stopped having them. His ultimate argument is that in order for countries to grow and remain economically healthy, they need to create policies to encourage affordable housing creation on the peripheries of cities; and those homes should be detached, with yards and a sense of neighborhoods and have good schools. In his final chapter he demonstrates that there are plenty of resources and space to accomplish this. Continue reading →

Gentrification and its Discontents

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The claim that successful urban revitalization results in “gentrification” and is therefore a bad thing is one of those hypothetical objections to placemaking strategies that isn’t based on hard data, a phenomenon about which I wrote as an obstacle to the implementation of placemaking strategies. For the most part, the objection to gentrification by “advocates” for lower-income people is an objection to hypothetical “displacement” of existing residents by new, higher income folks. To put it as plainly as I can, while those advocates (and journalists) often point to anecdotal evidence of low-income people being forced from their homes by avaricious landlords, I have seen no reliable aggregate data in support of that theory.

I’m a student of the strategies for social change that are about bringing people together – not driving them apart. To Dr. King, integration was not only about bringing economic benefit and political power to dispossessed people, but also creating a society where everyone, regardless of background, is treated with equal concern and respect. Social integration is a good in and of itself, creating communities that honor difference. In addition, it seems likely to me, based on observation and experience, that housing and educating low-income people in the same communities as higher income people may well provide those lower-income people with the tools for economic advancement. Segregating and concentrating low-income people seems to lead to higher levels of social dysfunction.

The Furman Center’s most recent “State of New York Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015” (http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/NYUFurmanCenter_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf) demonstrates that in New York City displacement through gentrification is not a significant effect, but also tells us some interesting things about the dynamics of improving neighborhoods. I find the Furman Center to be an indispensable, and non-ideological, source of measurable information about real estate trends. They are also quite careful about drawing conclusions from the data – and not confusing causes and effects.

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Snowed by Buffalo

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View from the City Hall Observatory

Surprise! It’s a great place!

Back in March, at the invitation of my wonderful colleague, Dave Stebbins, the Vice President of the Buffalo Urban Development Corporation, I spent a couple of days poking around in Buffalo. It was my first trip there. Dave not only graciously showed me the city, but also invited me to sit in on a board meeting of BUDC. I was tremendously impressed by the BUDC, what it has accomplished, what the public and private sectors are doing apart and together and by the incredible urban legacy that the city embodies

The reason for the title is that for years we down-staters have been told that the upstate New York region – and particularly Buffalo – was a devastated economic disaster area. Senators and Governors (including Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton) have in their public remarks emphasized the problems upstate and worked to direct funding and programs there – including Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion.” Whatever has been the past in Buffalo, the future looks incredibly promising. I don’t mean by this to suggest that Buffalo and the rest of upstate New York are no longer in need of Federal and State support – but rather, that the efforts of public and private partners appears to be paying off.

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Sign up for The Place Master Blog

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There is now a place on the blog where you can get them by e-mails.

Changes In Jamaica

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Jamaica, Queens is now experiencing dramatic change. It was for literally centuries the civic, transportation and commercial center of Long Island. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that began to change, as businesses and white families began to move out of the Downtown and further east on the Island – in the same pattern that economically decimated so many American downtowns in an arc that runs from St. Louis to Hartford. Downtown Jamaica, home to the first supermarket and the first Macy’s store outside Manhattan, lost its three department stores, its daily newspaper and its three local banks all within a decade.

What was left was a rich physical and social infrastructure. Jamaica was an early rail center, and remained the home to the Long Island Railroad’s main transfer station. As a result it was the center of the Queens County bus network, with scores of lines passing through or terminating there. The Downtown was also served by three subway lines – two of which were elevated as they arrived in Jamaica. Nearby, was the JFK International Airport. It was the home of the Queens Supreme and Family Courts, as well as the central library for the huge Queens Library system. Demographically, it had become one of the largest communities of African-American (largely middle-class) homeowners in the country. Continue reading →

More Bryant Park Midcourse Corrections

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Bryant Park Current Site Plan

The screen between showings opening up the view corridor.

In my last post, I discussed some problems that arose during the early years of the restoration of Bryant Park in order to illustrate that there was nothing inevitable about the project’s success, the importance of close observation in noticing how public space users actually behave in the space and the need to admit that a strategy isn’t working and figure out and implement an alternative. Of course, these are also cautionary tales, from which others can learn in improving existing downtowns and public spaces and creating new ones. In this post, I will set out a few more.

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Learning from the Mistakes of Bryant Park

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Bryant Park Before the Restoration

Bryant Park, from the same angle, taken After the Restoration

The details matter!

There are two widely held mindsets that often stand in the way of public space improvements. The first is the assertion of objections to proposed actions or changes based on hypothetical predictions of negative outcomes drawn from assumptions that aren’t based on actual observations or data. An example is the automatic reaction to proposals for public seating — that they will become a magnet anti-social behavior – particularly for the homeless. This is something that “everyone seems to know,” that, actual experience with public space demonstrates isn’t necessarily the case.

The second is that successful public space or economic revitalization strategies that work in one place aren’t transferable to another place – because one of the two places is somehow unique or different. I have been told that the success of Bryant Park is unique because it is in Manhattan, or that it is in midtown – and therefore programs and strategies that worked there won’t work in other places. In fact, before Bryant Park reopened, we were told that many of our ideas were impossible because of the park’s unique location. Moveable chairs, outdoor movies, elaborately planted gardens all wouldn’t work at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42^nd Street, we were often told. Now all of those strategies seem obvious successes.

But nothing about Bryant Park’s success was inevitable, and a number of the elements of the park’s redesign were failures (although none of those were among the recommendations made by William H. (“Holly”) Whyte in his 1979 analysis of the park’s problems). The important take-away from this is that these failures were quickly identified and new programmatic or design solutions were created to address them. At the center of great public space management is an iterative process of observing how real people use public space and adjusting strategies to deal with issues as they arise. It is difficult to admit failure, particularly in a political environment, which comes with the territory of public space. But successful public space managers have to be nimble, identify problems and attempt new solutions until they get it right – and be willing to recognize what isn’t working. Continue reading →

Getting It Right

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My only prior trip to Cincinnati was in 2004. The downtown was deserted, particularly the central public space, Fountain Square. The neighborhood north of the downtown, called Over-the-Rhine, is the home of The Cincinnati Music Hall (now under extensive renovation), where the orchestra and opera play, had a terrible reputation and not too many years after my visit was the site of political protests related to racial and economic issues.

But a recent visit showed an incredible transformation. The downtown was lively and busy – including at night and on the weekends. Fountain Square had been redesigned – moving the historic fountain. And while it still has a lot of hard surfaces, it has moveable seating, constant activity, food trucks and really attractive and well-maintained plantings. It was busy all the time, and was surrounded by a lively retail mix.

And Over-the-Rhine has become a dynamic, active neighborhood. Most striking to me was that all of the retail along Vine Street, the main commercial corridor, was local – rather than national chains. The stores were a great mix of interesting food, clothing and other offerings. There was a great deal of development activity – particularly adaptive reuse of architecturally interesting commercial buildings into residential developments. Over-the-Rhine, given its 19^th Century history as a home to European immigrants, has an abundance of high quality, funky revivalist structures (French, Dutch, German, Moorish and who-knows-what).

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Photos from Cleveland’s Public Square

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Most/all public spaces can be made to work with good programming and maintenance. Below are some images and suggestions as to how to improve this one.

Low maintenance planting beds send exactly the wrong message -- that the space is designed to defeat human intervention.

Needs more colorful, more imaginative plantings. This is a really inexpensive fix. Low maintenance planting beds send exactly the wrong message — that the space is designed to defeat human intervention.

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