I will be on Top of Mind with Julie Rose at 4 PM Eastern talking about “Learning from Bryant Park.” The link is below. Also on Sirius Radio Channel 143.
It’s the official publication date for “Learning from Bryant Park.” I couldn’t ask for a better way to kick things off than with a review from Rich Rein, who blogs as “William H. Whyte,” and who is in the process of writing a biography of Holly.
The ADRR — The American Downtown Revitalization Review. Find out about this free new online journal for those active in the downtown revitalization field. It will start publication in June 2020.
New Yorkers soak up the sun and try to stay cool on what might be the last hot day of the year in Bryant Park in 2019.(Wes Parnell/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will emerge from our urban cave-dwelling into the sunlight and re-populate our parks, plazas, streets and commercial corridors — likely with a renewed appreciation for their value. I recently took our puppy for a walk in Riverside Park, sat down on a bench and watched the river. An acquaintance from a community group stopped to chat. I don’t know him well and hadn’t spoken to him in years. But our spontaneous social contact made my day, since I had been otherwise isolated in my Upper West Side apartment. I simply enjoyed the conversation.
When the coronavirus shutdown ends, New Yorkers will have spent more time out-of-doors near their homes as a result of being asked to self-isolate and work from home and are likely to have a renewed feeling for their local public places as a result of finding a welcome change (and perhaps even some safe social engagement) there.
With that re-energized valuing of the public realm, the public and private sectors should be taking advantage of the resulting support to properly manage, program and maintain those spaces going forward.
We need to focus our resources on adequately stewarding of our existing public spaces, especially before expending valuable capital dollars on building new ones or rebuilding old ones. The most important ingredients to great outdoor social experiences are in their operation — and not necessarily in their design.
So, here are some suggestions for public space policy after the pandemic abates.
One, the city should fully fund the operations of the Parks Department with sufficient resources to keep a full-time staff that can provide a high-quality public space experience to all users. Parks in every neighborhood should be maintained and programmed with an eye for detail and insistence on high standards. Lawns need to be mowed regularly, bathrooms need to be cleaned and trash needs to be picked up at the very least.
Two, public spaces need to be well programmed in addition to being physically maintained in order to draw people to them. The most effective programming elements are inexpensive and easy to implement. Moveable chairs and tables are emblematic of the kind of programming that works.
Three, we should find new ways to introduce commercial activity into more public spaces; this both animates them and makes them self-sustaining. Every public space, no matter how small, should have some food and drink for sale.
Four, while storefront retail is floundering, with seismic changes in the traditional retailing environment, pop-up, short-term stores are thriving. These range from the traditional farmers’ markets to urban food halls like “Turnstyles” in the New York City/Columbus Circle subway station (of all places!). More commercial corridors throughout the five boroughs need to capture this new energy.
Successful retailing in public spaces and downtowns will be smaller scale and more local than in the past. Food service and personal services (health care, beauty, spa) will predominate. Multi-channel (brick and mortar, as well as online) sellers of unique merchandise, like the hand-made or very high quality, will be more likely to be successful.
Last, even — in fact, especially — the sidewalks of commercial corridors of borough neighborhoods should be animated. Every place serving food on a commercial street should be encouraged to spill out onto the sidewalk (no matter how narrow), advertising to passersby that the street is active and interesting.
What we learned in revitalizing Bryant Park was that much of what works in public space improvement is counter-intuitive and contrary to the conventional wisdom. Our recent experience of social distancing and isolation made us appreciate the value of community engagement and the informal contacts with neighbors and friends make possible by active parks, plazas and downtowns. That renewed appreciation should energize us to rededicate energy and resources to the public realm. The benefits will continue to be enormous.
Manshel, former associate director and counsel at the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, is author of “Learning from Bryant Park.”
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.
The story of the green chairs in Bryant Park can be boiled down to an antidote to hostile architecture.
In the late 1970s, William H. Whyte, a journalist and urban planner, was commissioned by a foundation to write up a set of recommendations for revitalizing the underutilized green space at the corner of 42nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Whyte had spent hours meticulously documenting the habits of people in Midtown’s public plazas and came away with the dispiriting conclusion that for all of its conviviality, “New York is a tough town to sit in.”
Among the things that the park needed, he said, were movable chairs.
It was a seemingly simple solution, but the plan lay dormant for more than a decade.
Then in 1991, Andrew Manshel saw a job listing to become the associate director of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, the nonprofit founded in 1980 by Dan Biederman and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund that was spearheading the park’s renovation—and Whyte’s vision. Manshel, a former attorney with no planning experience, applied and got the position. Soon after, he set out to pick a chair. Continue reading →
The depth and breadth of social capital that exists in Utica, New York is astonishing. When down-staters and policy makers generally think about the string of industrial cities along the New York Throughway from Albany to Buffalo they/we envision hopeless, dark, hollowed-out downtowns and empty factory buildings. Because of the wealth generated in Utica from the late 19th Century to the mid-20th Century it has the cultural and social resources to meet the needs of a city of more than twice its size. Utica has an impressive collection of downtown commercial and civic structures by major New York architects (including Carrère and Hastings, Thomas Lamb and Richard Upjohn). The town has a City Beautiful era, 600-acre park system, that is way more than a city of 60,000 people could ever use, or even properly maintain. It also has an actively used, well equipped, professionally run public library. Utica boasts one of the country’s most recognized art museums, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, in a Phillip Johnson designed building. Like so many American communities that had periods of great economic expansion during the industrial age, among Utica’s legacy institutions is a significant community foundation. Utica’s has assets of around $150 million. The city also is situated in the Mohawk Valley, an area generally under-recognized for its incredible scenic beauty, and which is only minutes away from the foothills of the Adirondacks and their vast recreational opportunities. Continue reading →
