Visions of a Division

I went with a friend to the Museum of the City of New York two weeks back. The museum is located in a beautiful building facing Central Park at 5th & 103rd. After enjoying an exhibit on Manhattan before 1609, we left the museum and walked one block over to Madison Avenue to look for a place to eat and to head for the subway at 96th & Park.

What met us as we walked south on Madison Avenue was a startling transition. No matter how many times I looked at a map of Manhattan in my life (there's even one on the wall across from my bed at home), it never once clicked in my mind that the Upper East Side and Harlem are right next to each other. That's right - the toniest neighborhood and the most notorious neighborhood sit side by side. I was curious. What divided these two distinct zones? Would there be some sort of 'ragged', blended edge, or would there be a clear marker?

The answer, as with any question of this type, is multi-layered. First and foremost, Harlem is characterized by the misled "slum clearance" movement of the 1960s, in which blocks of mixed-use walk-up buildings were replaced by midrise towers in parks. Anyone familiar with Le Corbusier understands this type of planning, but to see the contrast in street vitality and urban life is striking:
This first photo is taken facing north on Madison Avenue midblock between 98th and 99th, looking toward Harlem.

This second photo is taken in the exact same spot as the first photo, except facing southbound on Madison toward 98th and the Upper East Side.

Locator map. Without even drawing the Nolli, you can see from the air how slum clearance rewrote the face of Harlem while leaving the Upper East Side untouched.

Four factors contribute to the abrupt shift, and the same four factors have prevented any portion of Harlem from slowly becoming the Upper East Side, or vice versa:

1. The Corbusian "projects" - they exist only in Harlem. South of 96th Street, the street grid is virtually uninterrupted. The fabric was almost never violated and looks the same as it was originally platted. North of 96th, the opposite is true: it is rare to see even 6 to 8 blocks of historic fabric along any one avenue without it being interrupted by towers in a park.
2. Street grid interruptions - created by the towers in a park parks.
3. An elevated train line - south of 97th, the principal rail artery leading to Grand Central Terminal is underground. North of 97th, the rails are elevated, and to make matters worse, they are elevated on a stone-walled embankment instead of a permeable structure. If the towers in a park parks and the hospitals weren't bad enough for creating divisions, this effectively cuts the Harlem community into two isolated parts*.
4. Two large hospital complexes - Mount Sinai Medical Center (which is between 98th and 99th where I'm standing) and Metropolitan Hospital (which fills out two blocks further east) act as giant roadblocks and dividers. They create single-use blocks with monolithic, and frequently uninviting buildings, with hardly any street-level interest.
   

Area map. Pictures taken from yellow mark. Mount Sinai Medical Center is the left red complex and Metropolitan is the right. Cross streets in blue (with 97th in purple). Notice how few cross streets there are north of 97th. From 97th south, not a single cross street is interrupted.

What lessons can we learn from this? Firstly, and the most obvious, is don't do towers in a park. Secondly, don't interrupt the street grid, and thirdly, if you have to have an elevated train, make sure its structure is permeable.

But I think one issue that even good urban planners might miss in their grand schemes is the problem created by the hospital complexes. Urban, governmental, and education projects have increasingly become fortified entities through which people (and cars) cannot pass. These impenetrable islands drain life out of their immediate surroundings. And here, they have helped to bitterly and uncompromisingly divide two different neighborhoods. There is no chance for that nice-looking intact urban block north of Mount Sinai to become part of the Upper East Side. The hospital is a veritable barrier to the natural ebb and flow that might have occurred in this area.

Even if the population as a whole is beginning to understand walkability as a concept, government leaders, religious leaders, hospital CEOs and school superintendents might still be under the impression that a hermetically sealed place is best. Going forward, we'll have to look for good examples of permeable or semi-permeable institutions. We need to show how "liner retail" can be applied to places like hospitals, as both good for the city and as a moneymaker for the hospital. Most of all, we must be ready to fight what is now a prevailing mentality about how places like these "should" be designed.

*Note: In case you're wondering, the change in the train line from tunnel to elevated is not a deliberate backhand to Harlem's collective face. North of 96th Street, Manhattan's topography quickly drops off into what was formerly a tidal swamp and creek. This area was filled in as the city grew northward to create more developable area, so it is considerably lower than areas directly to the south. Hence the change - Park Avenue falls while the rails stay at relatively the same elevation and become an elevated line.

Awesome Website

If you've got some time to kill online and you're a city buff, a history buff, a subway/train buff, an architecture buff, or you just like New York, go to Forgotten NY: www.forgotten-ny.com.

Be forewarned: it is entirely possible to spend several hours here, sifting through thousands of photos, articles, neighborhoods, and streets of the Big Apple.

Wasilla and Werdau

I saw two different photos of important government buildings in the past 24 hours. First, the City Hall in Wasilla, AK (Kunstler's "Eyesore of the Month" last month):

(from http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200907.html)

Contrast that beauty to today's featured image on Wikipedia, the town hall in Werdau, Germany:

The State of Architecture Elitism in 2009

The NY Times architecture critic released a story on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas. Nicolai Ouroussoff is your typical high-brow avant-garde architect who pooh-poohs any attempt at traditional design, but I was happy to see his criticism of the location of the new stadium in the middle of Dallas-Fort Worth's endless urban sprawl. He pines for an earlier proposal that had the stadium located in a "more contained urban setting." This location would have spurred the revitalization of older historic landmarks in need of new life.

I give Nicolai kudos for actually caring about the city, and I think it shows how far the mindset of the architecture establishment has changed in the past few decades. Even the pure-bred modernists, the ones who give absolutely no creedence to using a brick or a cornice anywhere on a building, no longer dream about skyscrapers in the park or a fractured urban fabric.

I decided a long time ago that strict traditional architectural style was the least important feature of New Urbanism, and that if we could arrive at a human-scaled, traditional city and fabric, the architectural details could be in any style and work as long as they kept to the idea of a form-based code. When I visited Stapleton and Belmar in Denver, I was pleased to see that the designers had been more daring in their style, allowing large openings and new materials, including metal balconies, columns, etc. The places both worked because the architecture was consistent (in Stapleton, consistent by neighborhood) among the buildings as, reflecting a respect for placemaking and consistency of form.

For me the most unfortunate part of Nicolai's article comes at the end, where he makes a remark about the jumbovision screens that loom over the field. Noting that the screens are so huge that they have already gotten in the way of a punter's kick, he states "It’s a nice irony that for all the space, there may not be enough room at Cowboys Stadium to play a game." This remark signifies a major problem with (Post)Modernist thinking (as opposed to its style). If a building is anything, it absolutely must be useful. We can argue venustas and perhaps firmitas (maybe temporary buildings are more practical?), but if a building doesn't even make the cut of utilitas on day one of its life, we have a real problem. And rather than decry an astonishing functional fault in the building, Nicolai makes light of it, like a playful little architectural joke. I just finished reading From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, and while it is over-the-top in its romance novel-y journalistic flair, it points to the notion of 'irony in architectre' as one of many scholastic constructs that have made the profession so out-of-touch with reality. Twenty-eight years after writing, Wolfe would be sad to see that our avant-garde still thinks this way and is still trying to impose its will on the public.

Water, Water Everywhere...

A very important article about more industrial abuses shows us, again, that we are ruining our environment at an even faster rate than we can imagine - and this time it's water, our lifeblood. Just another victim of the pollution caused by the very unnatural, toxic and lethal ways we make things today... and the industries that shirk their legal and moral responsibilities all in the name of making a few bucks.

Getting the Most Bang for Your Billion Bucks

The third and final entry in a group of posts about high-speed rail.

The vision for American HSR is a bold one, and like any bold move we must be sure that it is a wise one before we thrust ourselves into it. As urbanists we are all for increasing modes, uses, flexibility, efficiency, and sustainability - so is HSR the best use for our money?

LEED is a Work in Progress

A good New York Times article today discussing some of the kinks in LEED, specifically how some LEED certified buildings perform with regard to energy and water usage ("life cycle costs" in LEED terms). Newer versions of LEED seem to be taking this into account by requiring higher minimum numbers of energy credits so that "gas guzzler" buildings can't qualify by getting all their credits in sitework and materials and ignoring energy completely.

The USGBC plans to continue raising the bar, and the article cites that it is considering moving more toward the Energy Star model, in which buildings only get kudos for energy usage for the year or period in which the award is given.

The bar for LEED will also inevitably get higher and higher as we move forward. A presenter at CNU 17 described an aggressive track for increased standards that many are pushing the USGBC to implement. With this model, the standards for LEED Gold today will ultimately become the standards for simple LEED certification over the next decade. Concurrently, net zero energy usage for buildings would become a requirement to attain a higher-tier award like gold or platinum, and ultimately would be demanded of any LEED certified building.

The time is now to start pushing designers and builders with more stringent requirements. The fifth paragraph of the NYT article from before describes how "builders covet LEED certification" as a major marketing tool and a way to obtain tax credits. LEED has become so recognized by the general public that developers are now pursuing certification to attract clients. This is great - we want sustainability to be "in", the norm, the next cool thing, but as long as it's the right kind of sustainability. The USGBC needs to tweak the standards higher and higher starting now and over the next few years now that it has the collective attention of the nation. If this does not happen now or soon, LEED risks being lost forever in the growing greenwashing market.

High Speed Rail: A "Case Study"

This is the second part of a group of posts on high speed rail (HSR) in America.

I recently completed a four-week grand tour of the East Coast of the United States - well let's be honest, four weeks of couch surfing with family and friends. At different points on the trip, I tried to imagine making the journey without a car, either by plane or by train... and each time I realized that it would be nearly impossible.

I'll chronicle one leg of the trip, a long jaunt I made from Hilton Head Island, SC to Lewes, DE, 655 miles total:

The Question of High Speed Rail: Concerns

The first of several parts of a series of posts on high-speed rail in the United States.

High speed rail (HSR) is the most important component of Obama's recovery package. Folks all over the country have been crowding town hall style meetings with signs, chanting "No we won't!" at their senators as security tries to escort them out of the room...

Awesome Project

Every now and then you found a project that really makes you smile and have hope for the future of urbanism.

This Sacramento Railyards project looks absolutely awesome. It has everything an urbanist could want to start: abandoned but very usable historic buildings, a brownfield/infill site, adjacency to downtown, and an economy ready to grow again (how many LEED credits do we have already?) Even better, Sacramento is building a new transit hub just across the tracks from this project.

But what really made me like the project was its plan:

This plan is smart, compact, and easy to understand - because it is a grid that actually cites the exact urban fabric (even the scale!) of downtown. Unlike many newer projects with all sorts of funky twists in the roads, odd-shaped plazas, and streets that never run for more than a few blocks, this plan is actually good. It doesn't try to be anything more than a warped grid, and that is certainly commendable. It even includes a "Regent Street"-type avenue with a gentle curve that, if done right architecturally, could become something really special.

Bravo to this one.