Tag Archives: revitalization

AN EXCELLENT POINT: JOY IN PITTSBURGH

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It is a surprising thought, but the past has actually been very good to Pittsburgh, leaving it with both an excellent architectural and institutional infrastructure.  The downtown, at the juncture of, and surrounded by, the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, is crammed with great examples of early skyscrapers, art deco office buildings and even distinctive 1980’s glass and steel towers. On a recent very cold mid-winter weekday afternoon there was a fair amount of pedestrian activity in the downtown – and a few dozen hearty skaters taking advantage of the rink in PPG Place (Johnson/Burgee, 1984). Pittsburgh, with a current population of about 300,000, has the amenities of a much larger city, with two large universities and the center of a huge regional health care system (metro population of 2,400,000, 20th in size in the U.S.). At its maximum, the city’s population was almost 700,000, the 12th largest in the US. Today it is the 66th largest). The legacies of the Frick, Heinz, Mellon and Carnegie fortunes, in terms of both private philanthropy and cultural institutions are evident. The Carnegie Art and Natural History Museum has important collections, and the Symphony is one of the country’s historic important orchestras (although never considered one of the “Big Five”).

One of the things that appears to make Pittsburgh’s success as a city is a relatively unified and enlightened civic leadership. Of course, a “power elite” can be an opaque and anti-democratic force, exclusive of historically disempowered communities. Pittsburgh’s population is over 20% African American, and its black community has been legendary for creating its own independent culture – importantly chronicled by one of America’s most gifted playwrights August Wilson. The Pittsburgh Courier was a Black newspaper of national significance, publishing from 1907 – 1966. That progressive elite leadership continues in the form of the The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, which, among other things, is a major Downtown property owner. I note with pleasure that Don Carter, a Pittsburgh architect and urban planner, sits on the Trust’s board. Don is one of the most thoughtful and articulate people I know in the field. He is a tremendous resource for the city. Also to be noted, is that Richard Florida was a member of the community when he taught at Carnegie Mellon for eighteen years.

Walking around the downtown, even in subfreezing weather, is a pleasure – with its great store of architectural gems, quite a few of which have been, or are the process of being converted into residential structures. One loft conversion advertises in its windows that units are available in the “800s.” By any measure the downtown seems to be a success – even without major shopping offerings (the 1.2 million square foot former Kauffman’s department store closed in 2015 and looks to be largely empty). Downtown Pittsburgh has a “gap-toothed” quality and lacks a critical mass of street level activity. This is something that the Trust might focus on among its holdings on Penn Avenue, including a major undeveloped parcel at 8th, now used for parking.

By contrast, The Strip District, north of downtown, does have that critical mass of activity that has developed organically. At 10 PM on a Saturday night with temperatures in the teens, local bars were jammed, and parking lots were full. The Strip was historically the wholesale food market for the region. It continues to have a diverse array of food offerings, many of them of ethnic character. Former commercial buildings have been adaptively reused for both commercial and residential purposes. We had lunch in a second floor food court that included both beer and wine bars with wide selections. Residential developments were scattered among more commercial uses, with a feel something like Long Island City, without any high rise development. A good deal of the land is devoted to parking lots and garages. Even so, Penn and Liberty Avenue feel like they prioritize pedestrians. Downtown needs exactly more of that feel.

The cultural district to the south of The Strip has its own presence and potential – while not yet quite as active at street level. The Pittsburgh symphony plays in a former movie and vaudeville house in the cultural district, part of the downtown. The Heinz concert hall is surrounded by places to eat and drink. It seats about 2,700, with a very large mezzanine, feels huge and has a neutral acoustic. The performance I attended was about two thirds sold to a very engaged and enthusiastic audience, including a great many young people (although the only person of color I noticed was an orchestral flute player). Unfortunately, the orchestra’s press staff chose to seat me in the fifth row on the side, which was far to close to the orchestra given the size of the hall and the program for an optimal sonic experience. The ensemble is led by Austrian maestro Manfed Honeck, whose recordings with the PSO have been widely praised in the press.

The program began with a chestnut, The William Tell Overture (for those of a certain age, the source of the theme from The Lone Ranger) by Rossini and concluded with the Strauss showpiece, Ein Heldenleben. While the Tell Overture was once a pops staple, the opera itself is something of rarity, because despite some wonderful music and a dramatic story, it feels endless. The high ranging tenor part is also difficult to cast. In between, the Orchestra presented the world premier of a Concerto for two bassoons and two clarinets, by composer, Juilliard dean and Serkin family scion, David Ludwig. The lively, shortish concerto was a virtuosic showpiece for members of the of the orchestra and could become a popular curtain raiser for orchestras with players with the chops for the solo parts. The concerto is made up of eight short movements named for renaissance dances (familiar to lutenists. The balances between the more penetrating sound of the clarinets and the muted bassoons, were difficult to maintain, but the piece was skillfully composed for both soloists and orchestra and was clever and entirely entertaining. In remarks before the performance Ludwig noted that he had tried to write a joyful piece. He succeeded. Joy is right now at a premium and is certainly much appreciated. I also heard a new work by the Pittsburgh Opera, while I was in town, but that is not my department (Heidi’s review can be found here: https://wordpress.com/posts/andymanshel.nyc, The performance was at the Bitz Opera Factory, an adaptive reuse of a commercial structure in The Str. It is significant and worth noting that two local musical organizations presented the debut of new works in the same weekend (both by New York City based composers).

The Orchestra is the equal of any major American ensemble. All of the sections were equally strong, with no apparent weak links. Honeck left the setting of tempi and balances to rehearsals and focused his performance efforts on phrasing and articulation, which were clean and superlative. The Rossini was appropriately very fast in the prestissimo, beginning with a beautifully played cello solo, by associate principal David Premo (marked Andante). The required rush of blood was induced by the performance.

There is also a rather Alpine feel to Strauss’ Op. 40, which has one of my favorite Strauss themes in the horns (at marking 74 in the score), beautifully played by the Pittsburgh brass. Also extraordinarily beautifully played were the violin solos by guest concertmaster, soloist and chamber player, Daniel Chong (the concertmaster position in Pittsburgh is open). The orchestra’s of performance of Ein Heldenleben was balanced, controlled and splendidly executed. It’s extraordinary that America has two great orchestras based within 130 miles of each other (the other being Cleveland), a legacy of the region’s mighty industrial past.

Pittsburgh has skillfully transformed itself from a metropolitan area of dying, environmentally degrading heavy industries (glass, coke, steel) to one of the country’s most livable metros. The legacy of those industrial giants has been leveraged to sustain major social and cultural institutions. The transition has been a great success. The city is now known for advanced manufacturing, healthcare, energy, financial and business services, and information technology. Legacy companies maintaining a presence in Pittsburgh include U.S. Steel, Alcoa, PPG, H.J. Heinz and BNY/Mellon.

The city needs to bring a little of the density of activity of the Strip District to the downtown. Market square is a fine example. It is adjacent to PPG Place but doesn’t relate to it well. On a cold winter day, while the skaters animated PPG Place; Market Square, with a number of active restaurants facing it, seemed deserted. There is a market and a night market in the square from May through October. Perhaps the season for the markets, particularly for the night market need to be extended. The square ought to have movable chairs and tables – yes, even in the winter. Similarly, Mellon square has been completely abandoned for the winter months – being roped off (although it sports a few desultory chairs). The local Conservancy has posted a sign saying it has thrown in the towel on keeping the space safe to use in the off-season. As I’ve noted in the past, I’m wary of flying into town for an overnight trip and making judgements on local decisions, but in my book closing off a major downtown public space is a bad business. My thought is that the resources ought to be found to program and maintain Mellon Square year-round.

I also noticed a number of interesting lighting features around the cultural district. Here is another example of why critical mass is so important. On their own they have very little impact. A more extensive program of light features that are within view of each other can make an important contribution to animating public space during the long, dark periods of winter. There need to be more of them!

Also remarkable are the narrow streets, like Fourth Avenue, with a wonderful array of architecturally significant structures, many converted or in the process of being converted to housing. Those structures, built as headquarters for financial institutions, were not designed to host first floor retail activity, so, much like the office canyons of Downtown Manhattan, they will be problematic to animate. This presents a issue for the perception of safety and quality of life downtown.

Similarly, while there are many beautiful and interesting buildings downtown, there are also a great many generic taxpayers, with either empty or obsolete retail uses. This, perhaps, is where the Cultural Trust can play a major role in continuing to build a critical mass of lively ground floor uses in the cultural district, like Vine Street down the river in Cincinnati, which then might spread more widely around downtown. Frankly, downtown needs more to attract more shoppers. The street level Phillip Injeian Violin shop is the kind of funky use that needs encouragement to flourish. Even with its two dozen or so modern office towers scattered throughout the downtown (notably, the US Steel Tower [Harrison, Abramowitz, 1988]) Pittsburgh has the potential for a truly twenty-four-hour mixed-use downtown. Those towers, while breaking up the continuity of the street wall, provide a density of potential shoppers, eaters and drinkers that could be essential to retail success.

Pittsburgh’s evolution, taking advantage of the wave of urban revitalization of the last two decades is gratifying. It has built on its legacy institutions to compensate for the loss of manufacturing jobs, to become a 21st century city. It is a great American success story that needs to be more widely recognized in a time when the public sphere is dominated by news of failure, decline and self-recrimination. My contention is that the U.S. doesn’t have a housing “crisis.” It needs more great places – and Pittsburgh is shining example of what that looks like. As recognized by composer Ludwig, we need more joy, and Pittsburgh, like its symphony, delivers it.  The beauty part is that there is room for Pittsburgh to grow (its metro once had 400,000 more residents) and continue to expand its appeal.

UNCONVENTIONAL SUCCESS 1

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American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life, Richard K. Rein, Island Press, 2022.

Richard K. Rein has written a much needed, well researched, beautifully composed biography of William H. Whyte. That, I hope is a clear, declarative sentence of the sort which Rein tells us Whyte would have encouraged and approved. Rein not only skillfully relates the story of an important, if much neglected, thinker on a wide range of social phenomenon, but also puts in the hard journalistic work of drawing together the many seemingly disparate strands of his life’s varied work to highlight its significance. Of course, Whyte was the mastermind of the revitalization of Bryant Park and the careful observer of human behavior in public spaces. But he did so much else. He was the author of one of the most influential books of the 1950’s in the U.S., The Organizational Man, which described the social forces within the new, post-war, highly successful American corporations (and other large institutions) then dominating life in the West. Whyte, according to Rein, created the vehicle of the conservation easement, a key tool in preserving not just open space, but also structures of historic and architectural significance. He enlisted in the Marines, saw action at Guadalcanal and went on to do important strategic thinking for the military. He was influential in shaping the character of Fortune Magazine, an important cultural force in America in the 1940’s and fifties. And, perhaps, most unrecognized, Whyte encouraged and published the work of Jane Jacobs who, while acknowledging Whyte’s contribution to her work, thinking, writing and career, obscured recognition of Whyte’s major cultural, social and political impact.

Whyte worked quietly. He rejected being the leader of any kind of movement.  His work was based on careful observation of social phenomenon, notably using time-lapsed photography in his research in seeking out patterns of human behavior in public spaces. Also key to his technique was listening. He placed a high value on encouraging and heeding what citizens contribute to public decision-making processes about local issues.  He was, unusually, a highly disruptive thinker, without being a disruptive person. He was culturally part of New York’s establishment – a denizen of the prestigious and exclusive Century Association on West 43rd Street for fifty years.  He was supported by Rockefeller related organizations and Laurence Rockefeller personally for decades. Fortune Magazine was a bedrock institution of the mid-20th Century American corporate establishment. But in his good humored, wry way, he didn’t hold back. He shared with the world the conclusions he drew from the data he reviewed, even if they seemed incredible and at odds with the prevailing conventional wisdom. His work from the 40’s on was about making social institutions more effective by challenging their first principles, without threatening their powerful principals. His insights were usually spot on, and not just intelligent – but useful. His personal example, philosophy and modus operandi remain highly relevant and important, even more important, today. His self-abnegation, kindness, thoughtfulness and seriousness of purpose are exactly what our public realm needs more of. 

            Whyte came from the world of WASP privilege (St. Andrews School, Princeton University), enlisted to serve his country in combat and made major contributions to the American quality of life, particularly the return to the City of the 1990’s signified by the success of the reopening of Bryant Park. But, unfortunately, Whyte ended his life in semi-obscurity and not-so-genteel poverty. There seem to me to be two lessons from this arc. First, is the decline of WASP culture in America, and second the ascension of an American “meritocracy” that rewards aggression and attention seeking – qualities that WASP culture famously (and probably not actually entirely) rejected.[2] Rein, a Princetonian both by education and by current residence, gets this precisely right.

While a white, male Episcopalian, Whyte did not come from particularly great wealth. For years, according to Rein he was reliant on Rockefeller largess. He did not seem to desire fame or money – but did appear to enjoy operating at a high level – testifying before Congress, consulting with important government entities and writing in important publications. He, unlike Jane Jacobs, was not a rabble rouser. My sense is that Janites, who are particularly protective of the legacy of a woman whose professional accomplishments were remarkably ahead of her time, see recognition of Whyte as casting shade on Jacobs. It has also been in the particular professional interest of a number of strong-willed, skilled, self-promoting individuals who owed their success in large measure to Whyte’s ideas and support, to, while crediting Whyte for thought leadership, minimize his contributions to their own success. For example, Rein tells the story of how Whyte was excluded from the dais at the 1992 re-opening of Bryant Park, while Whyte’s work was absolutely the bedrock of that revitalized space’s extraordinary success. Rein sadly recounts how when Whyte’s health and finances were failing in the 90’s, unlike some others, he received little by way of financial benefit from that success. While the Rockefeller family provided him with philanthropic resources, given Rein’s recounting, it seems hard to describe that support as generous. 

In addition, the simplicity and counter-intuitiveness of many of Whyte’s ideas (like the deployment of movable chairs in public spaces, to which the poo-bahs of Princeton University, according to Rein, continue not to get) make the essence of his thinking a difficult sell, particularly to the politically attuned. Urban planners and policymakers still see the implementation of Whyte’s ideas as risky, requiring the surrender of control, and subject to derision upon failure. While every major city seems to want a Bryant Park, few are willing to give themselves up to Whyte’s wisdom – of which Pershing Square in Los Angeles is a prime example. 

Rein’s research is comprehensive and impressive. His journalism is impeccable. Whyte’s life history is recounted including many telling details. Rein, probably wisely, doesn’t attempt to sort out the current state of affairs among Whyte’s acolytes and evangelists. The complete history of the founding and recent changes at Project for Public Spaces remain to be fleshed out. Rein talks also about Whyte’s influence over the “New Urbanist” movement, which has, however, unfortunately focused for much of its history on greenfield development outside of major cities and has had little impact on improving historic downtowns. There is no getting around the fact that the public space improvements encouraged by Whyte’s ideas lead to what many now characterize negatively as gentrification, making people pointed to by Rein in the book as keepers of the Whyte flame, including at Project for Public Spaces, uncomfortable with Whyte’s legacy (and happier with citing Jacobs as an influence). The current situation of Whyte’s immediate legacy is unfortunately complicated by competing egos and personal agendas, which is ironic, but perhaps unsurprising, given Whyte’s personal modesty and soft-spoken manner. 

As Rein makes clear, the power of Whyte’s ideas may ultimately prevail. Richard Florida, perhaps the most influential urbanist of our time, has begun to say that he recognizes that no writer and thinker in urbanism has had more influence over his work than Whyte. Whyte’s message of the importance of maintaining an open mind, listening to community members and the value of disruptive thinking based on factual evidence presented with humility and a willingness to be found incorrect present a clear path forward to addressing the most important problems facing the U.S. and other Western democracies. The need for the toleration of risk taking, and even idiosyncrasy with organizations is, perhaps, Whyte’s most universal lesson[3]. Whyte’s was a quiet but imperative voice to which we would be well advised to listen, as Rein so persuasively makes clear. 

[1] With apologies and thanks for swiping his title, to the late, great David Swensen. 

[2] The novels of Centurion, Louis Auchincloss, describe this process in detail.

[3] Whyte, himself, was occasionally described as idiosyncratic – usually by establishment types. 

THE BEST OF TIMES

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San Francisco/San Francisco Symphony

San Francisco is one of the most desirable places on the planet to live, both because of its climate and because of its amenities. As a result, many, many people want to live there. A good many of those people have substantial resources. A lot of those people are also highly skilled and/or unusually creative. That is why real estate in San Francisco is expensive. High demand. Step-function availability of supply. Basic economics: demand outstrips supply. Result: high prices. It is just not very complicated. And, more importantly it is a good, rather than a bad, thing.

            Admittedly, my recent visit was on spectacularly beautiful, cloudless days. The adjective “Mediterranean,” often used to describe the climate, could not have been more apt on this trip. We went to North Beach for a classic cioppino at Sotto Mare, we took the bus to the Pacific and sat on a park bench in the sun facing the ocean (with no sign of the generally ubiquitous “Carl the Fog”), reading the wonderful new, posthumous La Carré novel. We took in the Symphony and the Opera. We lingered at the new Salesforce Park. I was ready to start shopping for a new place to live. San Francisco, another city, like New York, is often described by the punditocracy as an astronomically priced hellscape; inhabited only by trustafarians, over-paid young techies and the wild-eyed, violent homeless. Sorry: not.

            We stayed at the wonderful Intercontinental in SOMA. The hotel has over thirty stores and floor to ceiling windows, with spectacular views of the City (many older San Francisco hotels are short and dark, with small rooms). However, the location, at Howard between Fourth and Fifth, exposes the walker to the epicenter of San Francisco’s un/under-housed population, which appears to be at 7th and Mission. The walk through the Civic Center on a Saturday night after a concert by the Symphony, while not dangerous, required passing through large groups of individuals sleeping on the sidewalks, selling things from blankets, with some acting out and appearing to be seriously mentally ill, surrounded by piles of stuff. Avoiding feces on the sidewalk was a non-trivial endeavor. There were pairs of men who appeared to be a private unarmed security force labeled “Urban Alchemy,” who appeared to be ineffectual. We also passed people sleeping in doorways in The Castro and other folks who pitched tents around highway ramps near the Embarcadero. My rough estimate is that the total number of individuals occupying public space we passed was more than 500 and less than 1500. Notably, in most other neighborhoods we visited, people visibly living in public spaces or behaving in obviously unpredictively ways were not present (Richmond, Sunset, North Beach, Glen Park).

            It’s worth observing that it is individuals visibly acting out who most contribute to a perception of physical danger. People yelling at passers-by or even to themselves, punching the air, kicking the sidewalk or zigzagging along the sidewalk appear unpredictable. They create for many pedestrians the possibility of unwanted physical contact. These, perhaps clinically psychotic folks, can also be the most difficult to engage and reach for professional outreach workers.

            While this sounds like a large population, it is by no means beyond addressing. Walking down Market Street, and particularly at 7th, it is apparent this is not a problem primarily about housing – there is social activity taking place among these San Franciscans that is part of what draws them to these locations, and their issues need to be addressed socially. At the same time, despite what I have been reading in the national media, there is new multiple dwelling unit residential construction happening all around the downtown, and lots of recently completed projects – even on Market Street itself. We spent an intrigued hour watching the process of the erection of an enormous construction crane across the street from our hotel.

We went for a walk in the expanding Mission Bay community, just south of the baseball stadium (the Giants lost the playoffs to the Dodgers our first night in town); a midrise, mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhood being built from the ground up. All the right moves seemed to have been made. While eating lunch in a parking space shed (kombucha soda, falafel sandwich — $45 dollars for two), I was reminded of our West End Avenue mid-rise neighborhood in New York, a highly desirable and successful product type. THIS is what Hudson Yards should have been. A vital, human scale place to live.

San Francisco needs to get past its politics and adopt a data driven, client centered approach to addressing the needs of its citizens living in public spaces. It should recognize that the issue ISN’T (just) housing and come to terms with that it’s never a rational life choice to sleep on the sidewalk. It needs Built for Zero and Community Solutions (https://community.solutions/built-for-zero/). It’s also important for the community to come to a consensus that people living in shared public space are monopolizing places that belong to everyone and should be available to be used in common. Someone playing loud music, engaging in commercial activity or even laying in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk, is EXCLUDING other folks from enjoying the experience of public space that, particularly post-COVID, we have learned is absolutely essential to urban living. No one should have the right to exclude others from quiet enjoyment of the limited resource of urban public space.

Creating a data base that includes a record for each client, working with them as individuals to get a medical and person history, building a trusting relationship with (potential) clients, and then linking them up with the benefits to which they are already entitled and the services they require. This is difficult, time-consuming work. But it can succeed, as Community Solutions is demonstrating across the country. In a city of 900,000, reaching a couple of thousand of people in distress, while important, is by no means a monumental task. It also doesn’t define the city.

Given the breadth of cultural offerings available in San Francisco, it is easy to forget that it a relatively small city. The depth of cultural and social resources is just remarkable. During our visit we took in an intellectually and visually overwhelming show of the paintings of Joan Mitchell at the SF Museum of Modern Art, a production of Fidelio at the Opera and a fascinating and engaging program at the Symphony. While I will leave to those more knowledgeable than myself to comment on the Mitchell show (Jed Perl has a long essay in the New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/11/04/joan-mitchell-painting-colors-conversation/) and to my spouse to review the Beethoven (staying in my conjugal lane), I would like to talk a bit about the Symphony concert. In fact, over the coming months, it is my plan to visit a different city every month, hear its orchestra and spend some time visiting and thinking about its downtown. Next month I’m planning to visit Cleveland. I’m particularly eager to go to Kansas City and Indianapolis – places to which I’ve not previously been.

The San Francisco Symphony has been widely admired in recent years both for its sound, as well as for its unique programming under its music director of two decades, Michael Tilson Thomas (now, unfortunately, recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor). Most critical observers agree that the orchestra is the most interesting one, certainly west of Chicago, and perhaps in the country. With MTT’s retirement last year, he was succeeded by Essa Pekka Salonen, the former music director in Los Angeles – and long the object of desire of the New York Philharmonic, of which he has made clear he wants no part. The program that the SFO presented was a knock-out, including Debbusy, Messiaen and Saariaho, following an important stream of French composition from the late 19th through the early 20th Century – a current of compositional thought to which I am particularly drawn. Under Salonen’s baton the orchestra sounded, sharp, bright and tightly disciplined. While it didn’t particularly convey that characteristically mellow, French sound for which the Boston Symphony, for example, was once known, the performances did great justice to the music presented, and at the conclusion of the concert, I was delighted not to have to peel myself out of my chair as a result of the enthusiasm of the brass section as is so often the case at the end of Debussy’s La Mer. Debussy also kicked off the concert with Prelude à L’Après-midi d’un faune, showcasing the distinctly personal playing of the woodwind soloists.

But the concert’s featured events were (Oberlin alums) Jeremy Denk playing Oiseaux Exotique and Claire Chase playing Saariaho’s 2001 flute concerto Aile du Songe. Both were outstanding. Worth remaking on is that the Messiaen dispensed with the ensemble’s string sections and the Saariaho was played without winds other than the soloist, setting up an engaging contrast. Both performances made compelling arguments for each of the works. Denk, playing this rhythmically non-intuitive piece from memory, demanded attention – highlighting the contrasts with orchestral writing, and stressing the exotic nature of the bird calls that form the inspiration of the work. Chase’s performance was theatrical and intense. In both cases the orchestra was a committed and skilled partner, making the most of the coloristic writing of these composers, without blurring their impressionistic edges. The playing in La Mer sounded highly rehearsed and polished, reserving dramatic power for the appropriate places. One might argue, after hearing this concert, that the harmonically complex, French impressionist compositional style has ultimately proved a more productive path for composers than the spiky, audience alienating Second Viennese School – which seems to have proved to be something of a dead end.

This engaging program is one, unfortunately, we would be unlikely to ever hear in New York, and it must be said that about a quarter of the auditorium was unsold. This was the sixth concert in a big auditorium we had attended this fall (two at the Met in New York, one at Carnegie, one at Chicago Lyric and one at St. Ann’s warehouse), and while masking is certainly a suboptimal experience, all of those other shows played to full or nearly full houses and I have lived to tell the tale (so far). Fidelio at SFO also appeared to be fully sold.

We visited San Francisco’s newest public space, Salesforce Park, which is on the fourth-floor roof of the new downtown transit center. The transit center is actually a surprisingly appealing bus station – a more unlikely application of an adjective I can scarcely imagine. The loading platforms are airy and bright – as different from New York City’s Port Authority Bus terminal as one might possibly conjure! The park is six acres (the same size as Bryant Park), and most distinctively features a fabulously wide array of plant species from Mediterranean climates around the globe. The creation of roof soil and irrigation conditions to support this biosphere, particularly mature tree specimens of considerable height, is absolutely remarkable.

The operation of the park by BRV Redevelopment Ventures is nearly flawless. The “B” in BRV is Dan Biederman, my former Bryant Park boss, who has outdone himself, fixing a number of the problems we faced on Sixth Avenue, with the possibilities presented by ground-up new construction – particularly an attractively designed and appropriate performance area, something that Bryant Park lacked from day one. The park incorporates the successful Bryant Park tropes – movable chairs, well maintained restrooms, a complete slate of daily programs, a working water feature, meticulous trash removable and discreet security. The sinuous path around the space is often flanked by shaded benches facing the continuously varied gardens. The maintenance of those complex planting beds has to be a major undertaking. Bravo to Dan, his staff and to the design team for a massively, magisterially successful collaboration.

Certainly, the park can only be accessed by a one-way gondola from the Salesforce Plaza and a reasonably large number of elevator banks (and we thought Bryant Park was set off from the street!), making it somewhat inaccessible. I visited on a quiet Saturday – so I didn’t experience the park with a large crowd. But simply the idea of a quiet Saturday in the park is a luxury no longer afforded by Bryant Park, even on a rainy day. That inaccessibility presents the challenge for the park of becoming only an amenity for workers in the Salesforce Tower (now San Francisco’s tallest). But, unlike New York’s High Line, Salesforce Park is a real park (rather than a tourist attraction) which can be enjoyed in a multitude of ways (rather than being principally the experience of walking from one end to the other). It is a triumph for San Francisco and will likely increase in viability and strength as food and other concessions are developed over time.

San Francisco is a great, livable, vibrant city – and its real estate is expensive as a result. It has some serious problems, particularly its underperforming school system. Our reaction to San Francisco as urbanists shouldn’t be to denigrate or bemoan its success, but to work for the creation of more great places in order to enable more people to enjoy the benefits of living in a vital city.

Why Is This So Difficult?

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Why haven’t there been more successful placemaking projects?

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Pershing Square in Los Angeles remain under-populated as a result of been insufficiently well-maintained and programmed

A trip upstate to Gloversville last week brought into focus issues I have been thinking about since completing the manuscript for “Learning from Bryant Park” two years ago. I’ve been wondering why there are so few successful public space and downtown revitalization projects across the country, given that several ventures employing similar strategies have been widely publicized for effective public space improvement. The demonstrated key ingredients to downtown revitalization are neither expensive nor complicated. And yet they are not often actually used or well executed. A number of knowledgeable, talented people and organizations have made themselves available to towns and projects as consultants – and while they certainly add value to the places they work on, there still aren’t dozens of success stories. Pershing Square in Los Angeles is the most visible blemish among failed urban public spaces and was the object of my thinking about this issue since completing the book. I wrote the book, in part, as a tool for public space managers to use with stakeholder sceptics of the approach – and a couple of downtown managers have reported buying multiple copies for board members (those people know who they are and have my sincere thanks).

Before the collapse of Pershing Square Renew, working with the gifted Philip Winn of Project for Public Spaces, I made myself available to the various Downtown LA stakeholders to help advance the project. At the request of former local Council Member Jose Huizar, I flew out to LA at my expense to meet with him and his staff. He didn’t show (Huizar was indicted and removed from office in June). I also contacted the newly appointed Chief Design Officer of the City of Los Angeles and asked if we could persuade the Mayor to get involved, without success. Again, flying out at my expense, I met with a very interested local BID leader to attempt to persuade him and the BID to take Pershing Square on as a project. While this individual clearly got what I was trying to communicate to him and was very sympathetic (and has said some very nice things to me about LFBP), the BID remains uninvolved. Most startlingly, using my professional network, I got in touch one of the highest profile real estate and civic leaders in LA. The person who made the connection for me, said that the civic leader would be pleased to meet and talk with me by phone – and then listed for me the actions the civic leader said would be non-starters – these were most of the important things that I felt needed to happen in order for the park to be successful; including wresting control of the space from the Department of Recreation and Parks. The civic leader conveyed that if I wanted to talk about those things, I shouldn’t bother calling him. I sent him a long e-mail explaining what I thought were the key elements to turning Pershing Square around and didn’t hear back. What was up with this? Why has this proved to be to be so hard? Continue reading →

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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CHANGES ALONG THE MOHAWK

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Looking down Genesee Street

     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 →

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

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02-crossing-brooklyn-ferry

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 →

Landing in Flyover Country

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330px-CirrusSR20Landing

A Cirrus SR 20

Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America

By: James and Deborah Fallows

432 Pages

http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-8373827-11819508?sid=PRHEFFDF5A7F1&url=http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/?ean=9781101871843

Owning and being able to fly your own plane creates a tremendous opportunity to learn about what is happening in communities across the country. There are thousands of landing strips outside cities large and small, and while a small plane is highly subject to the vagaries of the weather and only travels at a speed of about 200 mph, it sure seems to beat driving – and the views can be both amazing and illuminating.

James and Deborah Fallows have a Cirrus SR 20 (retail price $329,000, in case you’re asking), and Mr. Fallows knows how to fly it. The SR 20, a reader learns from the book, is the most popular single engine propeller plane on the market – and it comes with its own parachute – for the plane. They took advantage of this resource to travel around the United States, from northern Maine to southern California, to explore non-gateway cities and their progress towards revitalization. The largest of the places visited was Columbus, Ohio (now the largest city in the state). But most of the towns were much smaller: Duluth; Greenville, South Caroline; Bend, Oregon.

I’ve often heard speak of James Fallows as a fellow traveler of the placemaking movement, and his writing for the Atlantic and its City Lab reflect that. The book’s acknowledgements cite Fred Kent, Bruce Katz, Amy Liu and Richard Florida, names we know. But James and Deborah Fallows bring a particular perspective to their odyssey. First they are people who can afford to buy and keep that plane! Second, it’s clear from the text that they are members in good standing of the “inside-the-beltway” establishment. Not only does Mr. Fallows write for the Atlantic, but he was, early in his career, a White House speech writer (for President Jimmy Carter). While an SR 20 can’t fly much higher than 10,000 feet, and generally flies at lower altitudes, the D.C. native perspective tends to be from 30,000 feet. Indeed the Fallows’ attempt to take the same approach in gathering information about each of the two-dozen towns they visit (starting with visiting the editor of the local paper) and try to draw out patterns among what they find. Continue reading →