Tag Archives: New York City

Book review revives battle between Chicago and New York City

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A recent piece in the The New York Times Book Review reignited the debate between Chicago and New York:

Rachel Shteir, writing in the New York Times Book Review, took aim this week at both the city of Chicago and the people who defend and promote it. “Boosterism has been perfected here because the reality is too painful to look at,” Shteir postulates, while reviewing (mostly unfavorably) a handful of new books about the city for Sunday’s cover.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for the angry letters to be printed in the next Book Review. The counter-manifestos are already here! In the past few days, it seems, everyone from Gary to Milwaukee has read Shteir’s “Chicago Manuals” piece, resulting in a groundswell of angry rebuttals. (Even New York City reached out: New York deputy mayor Howard Wolfson tweeted that he was “mystified by the offensive, mean spirited & inaccurate attack on Chicago… a great city deserves better.”)…

But, Shteir digresses, she has a bone to pick with Chicago that’s bigger than any book review. She singles out Chicago’s early 20th century optimism, which nearly every Northern and Midwestern city shared (Burnham and co. also made grandiose predictions for New Haven, among other cities), and also its destructive urbanism of the mid-century, which, again, was hardly particular to the Windy City. She groups some real issues—last year’s shameful murder rate—with some not-so-serious problems, like the continual failures of the Cubs. She implies that Chicago is going the way of Detroit, when in fact the city’s population has been more or less stable for the past 20 years. Her praise, and there is some, seems deliberately facetious: “Thanks to global warming, the winters have softened.”

But her central beef with Chicago is how resolutely proud everyone seems to be of the city, despite its issues. It’s the opposite of New York, where everyone complains about everything all the time. In Chicago, per Shteir, the city’s unshakeable sense of greatness is wildly incongruous with its problems, a willful blindness that has become something of a civic calling card.

This sounds like a battle of urban “personalities”: a more critical viewpoint of New Yorkers versus a more optimistic Midwestern view in Chicago. Both cities have very real problems to face even as they are both major global cities.

But, it is not surprising to see this battle flare up again. Chicago is somewhat skittish about its position vis a vis other major cities, Chicago already lost its status as “Second City” to Los Angeles, and recently fell behind the population of Toronto, and New York is the clear lead city in the United States (if not the world). These “personalities” may be affected by these relative statuses: New Yorkers can afford to be critical because they are already at the top while Chicago is competing with other cities and has a long history of boosterism (including its early booster efforts in the late 1800s that were aided by some transplanted New Yorkers).

Is New York City friendly or unfriendly to developers?

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While New Yorkers may think they and the city are relatively open to development, Megan McArdle argues the city is quite unfriendly to development:

Outside of the Observer’s home city, and a few similarly restrictive metro areas, the presumption is that developers should be allowed to build whatever they think will sell, subject to reasonable concerns about thinks like flammability and sewer connections.  They don’t let the neighbors tie up your project for years with tangles over landmark preservation or zoning or frivolous complaints to the building commission.  They don’t slap height limits on attractive, centrally located neighborhoods.  They don’t pass “inclusionary zoning” or affordable housing mandates forcing you to devote a certain number of your units to below-market rents.  And as a result, housing is affordable.

I am constantly surprised by the extent to which New Yorkers regard all this not only laudatory, but normal–even as they bemoan the high cost of housing.  Some of my lefty neighbors on the Upper West Side were at one point simultaneously enthusiastically supporting “affordable housing” organizations–and agitating to block construction of a new building that would ruin their lovely natural light.   Obviously, some of this is sheer hypocrisy; everyone is theoretically in favor of affordable housing, but they are also in favor of getting a high selling price for their home, and when those two conflict . . .

But as that Observer snippet suggests, much of it isn’t hypocrisy.  It’s a genuine belief that allowing any developer to build anything at all is an aggressively pro-capitalist position; allowing them to build where you live is extreme generosity.  Coupled with a genuine failure to connect all those neighborhood review boards and zoning restrictions to the fact that there don’t seem to be enough apartments to go around.

New York is probably strange in this regard considering its density and demand for expensive housing. But, McArdle also seems to suggest that most of the rest of the country doesn’t have many rules about development. Is this true? Lots of big cities as well as communities within metropolitan areas, even conservative ones, have some restrictions on development. For example, take a look at some of the debates over teardowns taking place in communities across the country. These debates aren’t just taking place in communities like New York City even as these communities take a variety of positions on how to proceed regarding teardowns.

My guess is there is a continuum of responses in metropolitan areas to development. Places like New York City and Portland, Oregon are unusual in the restrictions they have placed on development. On the other hand, not all places are like some of the more expansive Sunbelt cities that are characterized as allowing anything. It would be interesting to see such a continuum and where communities can be placedon it.

A lack of automatic penalties for a New York City driver hopping the curb and killing a pedestrian

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Sarah Goodyear highlights an interesting legal area: New York City drivers whose cars kill pedestrians on the sidewalk do not automatically receive penalties.

In New York, unless the driver flees the scene (as happened in the Queens case mentioned above) or is intoxicated, crashes that kill pedestrians rarely result in criminal charges. “No criminality was suspected” is the mantra of the NYPD when it comes to pedestrian and cyclist deaths in general. The tepid police response to traffic deaths is even more jarring when applied to cases in which the vehicle actually leaves the roadway and enters what should be inviolate pedestrian space…

I talked to Steve Vaccaro, a lawyer who frequently represents victims of traffic crashes and is an outspoken advocate for pedestrian and bicyclist rights in New York City, and asked him to explain how running your vehicle up onto a sidewalk crowded with pedestrians can be seen as anything other than reckless. He explained to me that recklessness is in the eye of the beholder.“The standard for criminal charges is that the risk you take has to be a gross deviation from the risk a reasonable person would accept,” he says. “It’s about the community norm.”

And the community norm is to accept the explanations proffered by drivers such as the one who killed Martha Atwater – who, according to an unnamed police source quoted in the news, said he had suffered a diabetic blackout. Other drivers are let off the hook after simply “losing control” or hitting the gas instead of the brake. The ease with which pedestrian deaths are accepted by police as just unfortunate “accidents” has led to a deep cynicism among many observers of street safety in New York.

Shouldn’t the community norm instead be an understanding that if you drive your car in such a way that you end up on the sidewalk in the middle of one of the world’s most pedestrian-rich environments, you have somehow failed in your responsibility as a driver? Obviously, there are extreme circumstances, such as mechanical failure, in which a driver is not in any way at fault. But why are we so quick to dismiss the mayhem caused by motor vehicles as inevitable?

Seems odd to me. Frankly, pedestrians are not that protected on sidewalks. The speed and size of cars means the short jump up to the sidewalk isn’t much of an obstruction. But, perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising considering how much Americans love cars and how much cities have been redesigned to accommodate cars.

This reminds that New Urbanists often make this argument about their neo-traditional designs for narrower streets that allow street parking and both sides and trees in the parkways. These conditions both slow down drivers, which could give pedestrians more time to react, and also provide barriers between drivers and pedestrians. Better that drivers who lose control hit inanimate objects than also harm other people in the process.

“Creating Hipsturbia in the Suburbs”

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What happens when hipsters move to the suburbs? The New York Times takes a look at a few New York City suburbs where hipsters have moved:

You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.

As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.

But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.

To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives — culturally attuned, sprawl-free New York river towns like Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown — and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.

My quick thoughts:

1. If the future of American suburbs is indeed densification, as a number of experts have suggested, then this is something that was bound to happen. At the same time, it remains to be seen how much hipsters will really change or adapt to these communities.

2. Hipsters may be in the suburbs but I suspect some suburbs are a lot more palatable to them than others. In other words, perhaps they are more likely to move to places with artistic or creative backgrounds, where travel to the big city is relatively easy, and where there is room to create a small community. Additionally, perhaps these suburbs have to be friendly to hipsters – and this might require having a population of relatively educated residents.

3. Perhaps hipsters might even like the suburbs? This might go against their general outlook on life but the hipsters in the article, like many other Americans, can see some of the benefits of the suburban lifestyle. And if hipsters can survive and like parts of suburbs, why not academics?

Cool images of underground subway construction in NYC

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Building new subway lines is a massive undertaking and this gallery of photos gives some indication of the scale of the work. Here is what New York is undertaking:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has taken on three massive projects: East Side Access, the No. 7 subway line extension, and the new Second Avenue subway line. Construction for the projects is taking place deep underground, much of it simultaneously. The three projects span 14 miles and are expected to be finished in 2019 at an estimated cost of $15 billion.

This indicates a few things: New York has the kind of capital and ability to build such lines and the trouble it takes to construct such things suggests new lines must be needed in a city where a large percentage of residents use mass transit on a daily basis.

Repeat argument: Washington D.C. is the real second city in the United States

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Aaron Renn argues that Washington D.C., and not Los Angeles or Chicago, is the real “second city” in the United States:

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous metropolitan area in America.The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front. Since 2001, Washington has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate of its peer group. Over the course of the entire decade, it ranked second in job growth, trailing only Houston. That wasn’t just because of the federal agencies and gigantic contractors of Washington stereotype. The region has also been a hotbed of entrepreneurship—much of it, to be sure, dependent on federal dollars. During the 2000s, it had 385 firms named to the Inc. 500 lists of fastest-growing companies in America, according to Kauffman Foundation research—by far the most of any metro area. From 2000 through 2011, according to rankings developed by Praxis Strategy Group, Washington’s low-profile but powerful tech sector had the country’s second-highest job growth, after Seattle’s. The region is also one of America’s top life-sciences centers.

Then there’s economic output. During the 2000s, per-capita GDP grew faster in Washington than in any of its peer regions except the Bay Area. Today, Washington’s per-capita GDP is the country’s second-highest—again, after the Bay Area. Unlike Washington, however, the Bay Area hemorrhaged jobs over the course of the decade. Related to Washington’s impressive output is its astonishing median household income, the highest of any metro area with more than 1 million people. A remarkable seven of the ten highest-income counties in America are in metro Washington. And during the 2000s, per-capita income rose in Washington faster than in any of its peer metros.

Finally, Washington’s population is the best-educated in America. Almost half of all adults in the Washington region have college degrees, the highest proportion of any metro area with more than 1 million people. The same is true of graduate degrees: almost 23 percent of Washingtonians hold them…

But what solidifies Washington’s emerging status as America’s new Second City isn’t its economic performance or its emerging global-city profile. Both of those are secondary effects of the real change in Washington: the increasingly intrusive control of the federal government over American life.

Washington has changed in recent decades and Renn highlights some of these shifts. Three things strike me about his analysis:

1. Washington still lags compared to Los Angeles and Chicago in being a world city. According to the 2012 A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index, New York is #1, Los Angeles #6, Chicago #7, Washington #10, and Boston is the next American city at #15.

GlobalCitiesIndex2012ATKearney

This may not be a huge gap but L.A. and Chicago particularly have edges in business activity, human capital, and cultural experience while Washington has the clear edge in political engagement.

2. The choice to build a new capital in the United States back in the late 1700s is still having far-reaching implications today. Imagine New York City as both #1 global city and center of US government. While Renn argues the federal government in Washington is helping propel it up the rankings of cities, I wonder how government centers will fare in the future versus business and trade centers like New York, L.A., and Chicago (which aren’t even the state capitals). We might then benefit from a cross-national comparison with other countries that have similar set-ups.

3. Renn has made this argument before. I wrote a post titled “Washington D.C., not Chicago or LA, the real “second city” of the United States?” back on April 7, 2012 based on Renn’s piece on newgeography.com titled “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” So Renn is making this argument…is anyone else?

h/t Instapundit

Celebrating “a cathedral for commuters”

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Grand Central Terminal is 100 years old and NPR provides part of its story:

Seven is one of the 750,000 people who walk through Grand Central every day. To put it into perspective, that’s more people than the entire population of the state of Alaska — a handy fact you can learn from Daniel Brucker, an enthusiastic New Yorker who’s managed Grand Central Tours for the past 25 years…

Fortunately, the Vanderbilt family, who owned the New York Central Railroad, had the money. And what they built was a 49-acre rail complex with more tracks and platforms than any other in the world. The buildings on Park Avenue, to the north, are built over it. And it’s an almost unfathomably busy place — during the morning rush hour, a Metro-North commuter train arrives every 58 seconds.

“It’s like a cathedral that’s built for the people,” Brucker says. “We’re not going through somebody else’s mansion, through somebody else’s monument. It’s ours. It’s meant for the everyday commuter, and it’s a celebration of it.”…

“It is the largest interior … public space in New York,” Monasterio says. The windows on the east and the west side, those windows used to open, they used to draw air from the east side, through the terminal, over and out the west side.”

Having been there a few times myself, it is a remarkable building. Public spaces that are so crowded, functional, and well-designed are rare.

It would be interesting to hear more about how Grand Central fits into the fabric of New York City. On one hand, it seems like quintessential New York: classical exterior, busy space, busy yet functional. At the same time, it doesn’t exactly fit with Midtown Manhattan and the modern skyline. It is a relic of the past, a building that had to be saved through the first federal conservancy act from the 1960s.

The winner of NYC’s micro-apartment contest

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With more cities interested in micro-apartments, the announcement of a winner of the New York City micro-apartment contest may be influential:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winner of the city’s adAPT micro-apartment competition yesterday, a contest to design a 250- to 370-square-foot living space that launched last July. The winner, chosen from 33 applicants, is a collaborative effort between Monadnock Construction, the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and nARCHITECTS called My Mirco NY, which will have its design implemented in a 55-unit building scheduled for completion in 2015…

Like many others, the winning design incorporates high ceilings and dual-use furniture to make the space seem larger. Although the press release called the winning proposal “fresh”, “striking”, and “innovative”, the long, narrow floor plan is similar to comparable projects like San Francisco’s SmartSpace, with fold-up furniture, micro kitchen, floor-to-ceiling storage, and loft space.

The mayor’s office had to waive some zoning regulations to make My Mirco NY legal, but it did not release any information about the competition’s runners-up or what their designs were like…

nARCHITECTS designed the building around prefabricating the units and stacking them on a foundation, then adding a brick facade. It will be the first multi-unit prefab building in Manhattan.

It will be interesting to see how people living in the units as well as people in the neighborhood respond. It is one thing to win a design competition, another to put it into practice and achieve the desired results.

It is also worth noting that the city had to bend some zoning rules. If communities are serious about micro-apartments and other similar smaller housing units, they have to find room in zoning regulations. This could be a more difficult task as zoning changes can draw the attention of neighbors and others in addition to stirring up political discussions involving elected officials, city employees, and builders and architects.

Fighting over the most expensive Christmas tree lot in New York City

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Prices are higher in New York City. This even extends to the cost of renting Christmas tree lots which has led to a battle between two New York City Christmas tree entrepreneurs:

“SoHo Square,” says Scott Lechner, who pays the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation close to $50,000 a year to sell trees here, “is the most expensive site in the world.” He doesn’t sound proud of it.

But Lechner must bid high to stay ahead of his onetime protégé, George P. Smith, who has been on something of a spending spree since he outbid Lechner and took over his Washington Market space in 2007. Smith has also made waves with a huge takeover bid for the Marine Parkway spot in Brooklyn, and has tried to do the same in SoHo and elsewhere.

Smith now has seven locations; Lechner has nine. The two are bitter enemies. Lechner calls Smith an “unsavory individual,” who was “fired by my organization for malfeasance and dishonorable conduct.” (“He hates my guts,” Smith says.)…

The contested Washington Market space — one of 21 the parks department has auctioned off to vendors for the month — was the site, in 1851, of the first urban tree lot in the United States, for which a Catskill woodsman named Mark Carr paid a silver dollar in rent. Today, Smith says he plays close to $30,000 a year for a mere 33 days of sales.

Even in the nation’s most expensive ZIP codes, these rents are, for the moment, somewhat unusual. Rents for many other tree sales sites in the city remain in the low thousands. In 2011, a space on Central Park West was $1,150. DeWitt Clinton Park on West 44th St. was $2,500. Essex Playground, $3,960.

The rest of the story notes that this has been a good thing for the city’s parks department whose is raising more revenue in the competitive bidding for these lots. With many cities facing fiscal issues, I’m sure New York City is happy to have this extra money. Of course, this has repercussions: people buying trees at these lots now pay higher prices.

This could lead to an interesting discussion about whether Christmas trees should be treated more like public goods that shouldn’t be so expensive. For a resident of Manhattan who has no individual vehicle, acquiring a Christmas tree, real or fake, could be a difficult task. This sounds like a more limited market where the consumer is already behind and may not be able to comparison shop much. The average suburbanite, on the other hand, has more options.

This also reminds me of sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s ethnography Sidewalk. Toward the end of the book, Duneier discusses how a family who comes to the city for a month each year to sell Christmas trees is treated much differently than the homeless black men who are street vendors in the community all year long. The contrast is striking: because the tree vendors are white and respectable, local residents interact with them regularly while having more antagonistic relations with the black street vendors. Apparently, getting into the Christmas tree game in New York City takes some major money and this limits who can can sell such goods and participate in community life.

Look for a F(underpass) near you

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A New York City pedestrian underpass is getting a makeover and a new name: F(underpass).

The news broke that the New York City Department of Small Business Services had awarded a $75,000 grant to the Atlantic Avenue BID to transform the dark, empty stretch of Atlantic Avenue beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway into a funderpass. (Or, as it’s sometimes spelled, F(underpass).)

The details of the funderpass — a collaboration between the BID, Planning Corps, and the Design Trust for Public Space — are still being hashed out. It could include colorful artwork by Groundswell and a bicycle pump, and will bridge the space between the shops of Atlantic Avenue and the brand-new park space beyond.

These sorts of pedestrian underpasses are often dreary affairs: the lighting often isn’t very good, they can attract graffiti, and they may be noisy if the overhead noise is loud or consistent enough. This all is not very inviting to pedestrians. So including artwork and help for bicyclists might bring some vibrancy and perhaps even connect two spaces.

Here is what I wonder: once these improvements are made, how much work would it take to maintain it and who will do it? This could just be the details that need to be worked out but this is an important question as an improvement like this should be sustainable.