Part 5 (1/2)

By the 1960s, drugs and fast-paced tourism took their toll. By the 1970s, most of the individually owned stores and cultural sites had closed, and the local character was completely gone. Eighth Street continued to get worse. Cheap shoe stores, head shops, and low-end clothing invaded like locusts and endured right up to the turn of the new century. The Eighth Street Playhouse, its facade gone, is now a cheap dollar store.

A few good things have occurred, however, and indications point to a slow but sure turnaround, especially with new restaurants opening. Barnes & n.o.ble replaced Nathan's fast-food hot-dog chain. A few years ago, a merchant group organized a business improvement district. Store upgrades are concentrated on the east side of Fifth Avenue. But west of Fifth, the sidewalk is widened, traffic is calmed, new historic-style lampposts are installed, and various events promote the positive qualities of the street. The balance between pedestrian and car is better, and people feel less pushed aside. A Belgian sandwich shop with fresh baguettes, pastries, and coffee opened on the west corner of Fifth Avenue, the first new sign that upgrading is moving westward. An upscale restaurant opened next door to my father's former store. Other new and better uses are sure to follow. Ironically, the current economic collapse has shuttered many more of the cheap shoe stores, leaving several vacancies. What will replace them when the economy turns around will be interesting to see.

For me, the Village has mostly been defined by the geography of my own experience growing up there and then attending NYU. And while Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park is central to all of it and NYU is the overarching presence, the Village is really an a.s.sortment of very distinct enclaves with a history and character different from each other.

As Jane Jacobs observed about Greenwich Village years ago in conversation, ”It is not small. In fact, it is a pretty big district. Parts were always considered better than others and all different. The South Village was heavily Italian and before that I guess mainly Irish. That area was considered bad. Sullivan Street is considered very chic now, but I remember when it was just teeming with poor children and tenements, so I suppose it was considered bad.”

Jacobs had moved to the Village with her sister in 1934, selecting it because ”she found so many people walking in such a purposeful way and so many interesting stores and activities to observe.” This iconic neighborhood became the incubator for her ideas. It was a study area, a laboratory. She observed the different elements that added up to vibrancy in city life. She recognized the same characteristics in other vibrant neighborhoods, large and small, and a.s.sembled them into a web of related precepts. ”Of course, the West Village where I lived was considered bad,” Jacobs said. ”We didn't know it when we moved here, fortunately, but it had been designated a slum to be cleared first way back in the 1930s when Rexford Tugwell, who would become one of Roosevelt's 'brain trusters,' was chairman of the Planning Commission.” But one official's slum can be someone's definition of a good neighborhood to live in. And the Village has always drawn a place-proud population.

WEST VILLAGE HOUSES: KNOWN AS THE JANE JACOBS HOUSES.

Parallel to the Hudson along the West Side Highway and a few blocks inland are the West Village Houses built in the mid-1970s. This complex could serve as a national model of everything that was wrong in postwar development policies and everything that is right when community sensibilities prevail. A community fight there defeated the Robert Moses Urban Renewal Plan-apparently, the first defeat nationwide of an urban renewal plan-that would have wiped out the entire fourteen square blocks of historic urban fabric filled with owner-occupied, well-maintained one-and two-family houses, tenements, and individual buildings. All had been restored with private money. But it was designated a ”slum,” a necessary official step to qualify for urban renewal money. Residents and businesses in the area knew it wasn't a slum. They thought well enough of the area, in fact, even with its service and physical limitations, to remain there, open businesses, and invest money. ”The people in the Village had watched urban renewal around the city with its waste and profiteering vandalism,” Jacobs recalled.

So much land was being taken, and so much was being lost. The West Village people understood the negative impact all these plans were having on the city.The sin of the Village was that it had all these mixed uses. All the manufacturing buildings were to be demolished and replaced with high-rises. There would be a little enclave left of all the most expensive and aesthetically appealing houses. The rest would go. Now all those former manufacturing buildings are turned into the most expensive lofts in the city. These people, even the real estate experts, they didn't know from nothing. They were so ignorant, not just about what they were destroying but what people would like.

The term slum slum is very subjective, differing according to who is using it. Poor conditions in an area may be due more to a lack of munic.i.p.al services than anything else, as we will see throughout this book. A few buildings may be in need of repair or even in danger of imminent collapse. Some may be fire hazards, or abandoned and run-down. None of these individual conditions should qualify an entire area as a slum, especially when renovation and new infill options have not been explored. More than anything else, the terms is very subjective, differing according to who is using it. Poor conditions in an area may be due more to a lack of munic.i.p.al services than anything else, as we will see throughout this book. A few buildings may be in need of repair or even in danger of imminent collapse. Some may be fire hazards, or abandoned and run-down. None of these individual conditions should qualify an entire area as a slum, especially when renovation and new infill options have not been explored. More than anything else, the terms slum slum or or blight blight reflect the motivation of the people using them. reflect the motivation of the people using them.6 All of this was clear in the fight against the West Village Urban Renewal Plan. All of this was clear in the fight against the West Village Urban Renewal Plan.

A survey of the area, for example, revealed the presence of 1,765 residents, including 710 families, plus warehouses, truck depots, and mom-and-pop businesses. More than 80 businesses employed hundreds of people. In fact, this designation of ”slum” was not too different from the designation applied to many other city neighborhoods declared ”blighted” and cleared by Moses in the name of slum clearance. ”We took Lester Eisner, regional administrator for the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, on a tour so he would learn what the community was really made of,” recalled Jacobs, who led the resistance.7 ”It convinced him this was not a slum. He was floored, couldn't believe the great range of incomes. He said it was wonderful. But this is the secret he told us: Never tell anyone what you would like. As soon as you do, you will be judged a partic.i.p.ating citizen. You're hooked, trapped. They can ignore you. Eisner alerted us to this. People in New York never knew why we were only so negative. Wagner eventually decided the urban slum designation had to be lifted.” ”It convinced him this was not a slum. He was floored, couldn't believe the great range of incomes. He said it was wonderful. But this is the secret he told us: Never tell anyone what you would like. As soon as you do, you will be judged a partic.i.p.ating citizen. You're hooked, trapped. They can ignore you. Eisner alerted us to this. People in New York never knew why we were only so negative. Wagner eventually decided the urban slum designation had to be lifted.”

One of the brilliant things about Jane but little acknowledged was that she believed in and followed smart tactics that she often learned from observing others. She came across as very confrontational and anticompromise, all of which had a purpose. But in this anecdote she reveals that the lesson learned from Eisner was to resist saying what you want until what you don't want is defeated. Jacobs also believed that it was vital to cultivate your own const.i.tuency instead of trying to persuade opponents.

3.2 The Little Red Schoolhouse on Bleecker Street with the expansion into the smaller brick building next door. My elementary school and still a great one.

After the defeat of the Moses Urban Renewal Plan, the successful citizens group the West Village Committee, led by Jacobs, hired its own architect and promulgated its own plan and design for new housing. A basic, modest-scale apartment-house configuration was designed to flexibly fill in the district's vacant lots, avoiding any demolition or displacement. ”Not a single person-not a single sparrow-shall be displaced” was their slogan. The result is an a.s.sortment of plain redbrick five- and six-story walk-up apartment houses of different shapes and sizes and three different layouts with an occasional corner store on the ground floor.8 The planning establishment hated this proposal because it was initiated by the community and left intact the organically evolved mixture of residential and commercial uses. ”We hired Perkins and Will, not a New York City firm, so they wouldn't be blackballed for working with us as all city architects feared,” Jacobs explained. ”The West Village Committee was totally self-organized. Anything self-organized is inimical to planners who want control. The city was furious. We had an informant in the Planning Office who told us what was said: 'If we let this neighborhood plan for itself, all will want to do it too.' Planners always pick control over spontaneity. If one believes things can happen spontaneously and work well, it diminishes the importance of planners.”

City officials, especially then housing and development administrator Roger Starr, did everything possible to strip the design of appealing amenities. He succeeded, nibbling away at the design in every little way possible. It was twelve years of delays. Costs escalated. The result is bare-bones architecture. Yet a waiting list of potential renters existed from the day it opened. Architecture critic Michael Sorkin has written, ”West Village Houses fits un.o.btrusively within the intimate weave of its surroundings. It's a model piece of urbanism because of this careful integration; because its architectural expression is not treated as a big, determining deal; and because it grew out of the self-organizing impetus to provide new and better housing for people of modest means for whom the market had little empathy.”

The West Village Houses are probably the country's first and most significant example of genuine infill housing design. Today, the ”infill” description is inappropriately applied to whole blocks of new developments on cleared land inserted into existing neighborhoods, often like an alien species introduced among the natives. Genuine infill is inserted in s.p.a.ces within a block, not in subst.i.tution for a block. However, neither the West Village Houses' infill value nor other innovations were ever spotlighted by critics, professionals, or professors for the lessons they ill.u.s.trated. Thus, most people are unaware that it was probably the first successful community-designed challenge to the conventional planning and development policies of the day.9 West Village Houses started as a moderate-income Mitch.e.l.l-Lama rental under a program conceived in the 1950s as a solution to a shortage of low- and middle-income apartments. Named after State Senator Mac-Neil Mitch.e.l.l and a.s.semblyman Alfred Lama, the 1955 law offered owners and landlords tax breaks and favorable loan terms in return for keeping rents within the range of low- and middle-income tenants. It also permitted owners to ”buy out” of the program by paying off the mortgage and other debts after twenty to forty years, depending on the date and type of project. Once the developments exit the program, they can either go to market rate or go under rent stabilization, unless successfully challenged by owners.

In 2007, the tenants of West Village Houses successfully organized to buy the buildings from the landlord who was planning to opt out of the program. After four years of negotiation with the landlord, the deal struck by the tenants to convert to a cooperative and rental mix guaranteed no evictions for tenants, a twelve-year period of rent restraints (rent stabilized), the right of tenants to buy their apartments at an insider price, the right of the new owner to sell the 10 vacant units out of the total 420 at market rate, and a guarantee new buyers would meet the federal middle-income standard. Other sensible terms were provided, but suffice it to say that this represents a reasonable compromise that affords the owner a fair profit without losing the larger city value as a middle-income enclave.

In recent years, the city has been losing too many Mitch.e.l.l-Lama middle-income apartments. From 1990 to 2005, the surviving number of rental units developed under this program dropped from 67,000 to 44,000, according to the Community Service Society. And according to the magazine City Limits City Limits, another 3,691 apartments were lost in 2006 alone.

If its success had been recognized, West Village Houses could have become a model for other Mitch.e.l.l-Lama projects that were privatized after the legislated thirty- to forty-year period, especially the large-scale ones like Stuyvesant Town, the thirty-five redbrick buildings in typical housing-project style with 8,757 units on East Fourteenth Street and First Avenue that were privatized a few years ago.10 The privatization of Mitch.e.l.l-Lama units is one of the significant causes of the recent loss of middle-income housing units all over the city. The privatization of Mitch.e.l.l-Lama units is one of the significant causes of the recent loss of middle-income housing units all over the city.

FARTHER WEST.

Just west of the West Village Houses along the Hudson River waterfront is, perhaps, one of the most interesting districts in the Village and the city. Perhaps I should say ”was,” since so much has been lost in recent years. Presumably, the far West Village was omitted from the first Greenwich Village historic district in 1969 because of continuing hope among some public officials of pus.h.i.+ng through the urban renewal and West Side Highway widening schemes. In a 1963 letter to the Landmarks Commission promoting the inclusion of these westernmost streets, Jacobs noted, ”From its beginnings, the old river-landing settlement combined work, residence and transportation, and these activities, while local were not provincial. They all had ties, in part, to the larger settlement of New York. With truly remarkable integrity and fidelity, this historic land use persists today: work, residence and transportation, with very similar links and the same quality of being local but unprovincial.”

Nevertheless, this veritable heart of the city and country's economic beginnings-the locus of activity that shaped the larger Village-was omitted. Not much change occurred, however, in the years in the 1970s and '80s during the fight over Westway, the highway-expansion scheme. Everything was on hold, antic.i.p.ating the government buyout for the highway. But once that scheme was killed, speculators took a new look and started buying, demolis.h.i.+ng, or renovating and slowly rebuilding.

Three highly publicized and aesthetically appealing sixteen-story gla.s.s towers designed by architect Richard Meier now sit amid the remaining intimately scaled nineteenth-century houses, stables, and maritime hotels. Yet the Greenwich Village Historic Society, aggressively pus.h.i.+ng the Landmarks Commission to expand the historic district, noted that the area still contained fifty-five nineteenth-century buildings as well as dozens of period factories, warehouses, mills, and bakeries. Correctly, the GVHS argued that this area's ”gritty and more heterogeneous architecture was mistakenly consigned to the dustbin of preservation history when it was overlooked for inclusion” in the historic district. However, since one of the commission's guidelines devalues areas that have been substantially altered over time, the commission was slow to respond.

JACOBS MAKES THE CASE AGAIN.

In 2003, shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, I was asked by Deputy Mayor Patti Harris to serve as a commissioner on the Landmarks Preservation Commission. When I went on the commission, Jane was skeptical at first but then agreed it would be a worthwhile thing for me to do. Subsequently, she urged that I promote the designation of this ”most interesting and historically illuminating and valuable part of Greenwich Village.” In a letter to me for transmittal to the Landmarks Commission, she wrote: For many people, like the New Urbanists for instance, the important ideas of mixed uses, functional diversity, and self-organization and organic adaptability are little more than trendy planning and design fas.h.i.+ons, susceptible to being used inauthentically and meaninglessly . . . [but] the far west village . . . is the authentic seed bed and nursery of these qualities in Manhattan, beginning in colonial times and persisting thereafter. It may well be the most important historical area of New York, for that reason. It was the place of origin of many of the city's important industries, such as machine manufacturing, food preserving, publis.h.i.+ng and printing, to name a few, and . . . remnants of this history persist there, still appropriately very mixed, along with evidence of trains and adaptations. Even the roots of the meat market district itself were there.It has been overlooked and undervalued, I think, precisely because it has never been considered trendy, like the meat market district in recent times and the Henry James rowhouses and the bohemian village before the meat market. But it is something better than trendy. It is authentic. It was deeply influential. It will be a great pity if its remaining witness and evidence are wiped away in favor of towers with expensive views, empty of history . . . I beg of you, don't let this happen . . . .

The far West Village was designated a week after Jacobs died in April 2006.

THE EAST VILLAGE-ANOTHER WORLD Greenwich Village is a microcosm of the city, an a.s.sortment of very different communities in close proximity to one another. The East Village is the most different from the rest of the Village, and it is here that some of the precursors of regeneration were first occurring in the 1970s, as noted earlier regarding the Cooper Square Committee and other citizen-based efforts.

Like the South Bronx in the 1970s, officially no one cared. And no one paid attention to the small things happening in the East Village. No money was available anyway to do a Moses-style renewal on an area best known for high crime and deteriorating housing. Slumlords predominated. City services were almost nonexistent. With a history of Irish, German, East European, and Hispanic immigrants, the East Village defied easy categorizing. Pockets of social and economic energy, however, produced an almost sub-rosa vitality to which mainstream New Yorkers were oblivious, unless, of course, they dared venture forth to dine at vintage East European restaurants or delicatessens or attend a performance at the avant-garde La Mama or one of the offbeat music venues. St. Mark's Place was as far east as most venturers would go, where Yoko Ono performed at the Bridge Theater or Andy Warhol presented the Velvet Underground at the Dom, formerly a Polish entertainment hall. Beats, hippies, punks, and postpunks all settled or pa.s.sed through here. Artists found studios. Galleries followed. Music venues appeared everywhere.

It is here-in empty lots-that the Green Guerillas launched the community garden movement that is today international in scope. The city under Mayor Giuliani auctioned some off to private developers, but after an intense, contentious battle and the intervention of philanthropists, some of those locally created parks survived and are now overseen by the Parks Department. Squatters took over city-owned abandoned buildings that the city had no program or money to deal with. A variety of community-based efforts evolved and were replicated in derelict neighborhoods around the city, as mentioned in chapter 1.

The tag East Village East Village was meant to clearly distinguish the area from the rest of Greenwich Village. So far, except for incursions by NYU, the East Village has been spared much of the march of high-rise development so visible elsewhere in the city. This predominantly tenement district has also been spared an excessive proliferation of ma.s.s retailers, primarily due to the small scale of most of its retail s.p.a.ces and a lower population density than found in areas of large-scale apartment houses. As such, it remains an incubator for fledgling designers of all kinds looking for small and cheap s.p.a.ce to test their new offerings. Like the rest of Greenwich Village, this ever-changing enclave has its share of community activists willing to take on the large-scale forces that could bring corrosive, not productive, change. was meant to clearly distinguish the area from the rest of Greenwich Village. So far, except for incursions by NYU, the East Village has been spared much of the march of high-rise development so visible elsewhere in the city. This predominantly tenement district has also been spared an excessive proliferation of ma.s.s retailers, primarily due to the small scale of most of its retail s.p.a.ces and a lower population density than found in areas of large-scale apartment houses. As such, it remains an incubator for fledgling designers of all kinds looking for small and cheap s.p.a.ce to test their new offerings. Like the rest of Greenwich Village, this ever-changing enclave has its share of community activists willing to take on the large-scale forces that could bring corrosive, not productive, change.

If history had taken a different turn and the community had been less vigilant, all of Greenwich Village, East and West, would be a completely different place today. Instead, it is both different, reflecting many small changes, and the same, its basic physical, social, and economic fabric intact. The economic and social mix is not as diverse, but this is a citywide phenomenon visible in many neighborhoods, not just a Village issue.

Jane Jacobs is probably most popularly known for writing about the Village, especially Hudson Street, where she lived. Too many people make the mistake of defining her observations there as advocacy for the replication of its small-scale and ”quaint” mixtures. This could not be further from the truth. It was not about tall buildings versus short, modernist versus Federalist, loft versus residential, small business versus large. The Village was her laboratory to observe the larger truths about urban life. Hers was not a prescription of what should should happen but an observation of what happen but an observation of what does does happen when certain genuine urban conditions exist. In all her writing, she used specific examples to ill.u.s.trate observable truths, never intending them to be prescriptive. In her description above about the importance of the undesignated portion of the Village, she referred to ”the important ideas of mixed uses, functional diversity, and self-organization and organic adaptability.” In this case she was referring to the Village, but she applied those ideas to many urban areas that look nothing like the Village. happen when certain genuine urban conditions exist. In all her writing, she used specific examples to ill.u.s.trate observable truths, never intending them to be prescriptive. In her description above about the importance of the undesignated portion of the Village, she referred to ”the important ideas of mixed uses, functional diversity, and self-organization and organic adaptability.” In this case she was referring to the Village, but she applied those ideas to many urban areas that look nothing like the Village.

Each area of the Village offers lessons applicable elsewhere in the city and beyond. These are lessons from community-based resistance to inappropriate change or from successful community-based solutions to real, not manufactured, challenges and problems. But none of the Village battles or victories compare to the next area in the spotlight, SoHo.

4.

SOHO.

A Moses Defeat, a Jacobs Victory New York seems to be finally repairing itself after decades of ”urban renewal”-wiping out small businesses, dislocating thousands of families, and frittering away its wealth on projects that were supposed to compensate the city's tax return. Consider SoHo; big plans for a highway and urban renewal would have wiped out most of that district's people, buildings, and potential for new and existing businesses. Now that district is one of the richest in the world and a great benefit to the city's tax structure. For thirty years after the war, the city was not behaving like this. It was throwing away its potential.JANE JACOBS, 2000 The public takes SoHo for granted. Few people are familiar with its near loss. Few today who complain SoHo is overcommercialized are aware of the ruinous fate planned for it decades ago. And, perhaps, even fewer who celebrate its enduring uniqueness know what a hard-won victory it was to get it designated a landmark district after the defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Furthermore, the enormous impact of SoHo's success on the rest of the country is hardly recognized. SoHo marked a turning point on many urban fronts that were not apparent to me when I first covered its changing fate.

4.1 SoHo actually has quite a variety of buildings in scale and style. Jared Knowles Jared Knowles.

In February 1973 I wrote a story noting that almost three years after a public hearing, the Landmarks Preservation Commission still seemed to be a long way from designating SoHo a historic district and formally recognizing the unique character of its mid-nineteenth-century Cast Iron architecture.

SoHo takes its name from its location south of Houston Street and has the largest concentration in the country of Cast Iron architecture, one of the few original American contributions to architectural history. Few people even knew about Cast Iron buildings until the effort to save this substantial collection of them was initiated by a determined local resident, Margot Gayle. Gayle, a longtime Village resident, formed the Friends of Cast Iron to advocate for designation of the twenty-six-block area, circulated pet.i.tions, and educated the public unaware of the district's value.

Cast Iron refers as much to a method of construction as an actual architectural style. It was an early form of modular construction and a product of the Industrial Revolution. The facades of buildings-including the Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian columns and all the intricate ornamental details-were cast in off-site New York foundries and a.s.sembled on the building sites, in much the same way prefabricated building is done today.

It was then both economical and efficient for commercial buildings because the extra strength of iron allowed larger window and interior s.p.a.ces. In the nineteenth century, SoHo was New York's wholesale textile center, with display areas dominating ground floors and storage s.p.a.ce above. Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, and a host of other cities followed New York's lead and built Cast Iron buildings in the nineteenth century, but most of these areas outside of New York have been substantially destroyed. Remnants of such districts in cities across the country have since seen a renaissance following SoHo's. Where they survive, their preservation and reuse reflect a national phenomenon.

THE DEATH-THREAT SYNDROME.

Robert Moses, the Lower Manhattan Expressway's primary planner and advocate, had the area declared ”blighted” in the 1950s. That designation was essential to condemn private property for the highway. Blight Blight is as subjective a term as is as subjective a term as slum slum, as described in the previous chapter. And clearly, one can recognize how hollow was the term as applied to this area when one recognizes the solidity of the buildings since renovated. All of the upgrades now making SoHo so expensive could occur only after the expressway and blight designation were defeated.

The expressway would have wiped out what is now SoHo, even though scores of thriving businesses still filled the buildings that were so functionally flexible. But the designation of blight was the death knell for the neighborhood, a guarantee of accelerated decay. As Jacobs observed in our conversation about the expressway fight: Sure, a scheme like that either causes or accelerates deterioration. Businesses leave when they see the handwriting on the wall or don't even try to establish themselves in such a location. Property owners hold out for the lucrative buyout. It's a miracle when a place like the North End in Boston or the West Village keeps on improving and people keep putting money in when a death sentence hangs over it. They can only do it with the courage of knowing that they aren't going to allow that death sentence. Or being totally ignorant that it exists.But the bankers are never ignorant about it and stop giving loans. When there's a death sentence like that on an area, you always have to work around it and get odd bits of money and so forth, which can make a very good area in the end, if it's done.

4.2 Cast-iron facades distinguish most SoHo buildings and did in the demolished areas as well. Jared Knowles. Jared Knowles.

”Odd bits of money” traditionally meant drawing on family and friends.

To make way for the planned ten-lane expressway and housing projects, forty-five acres of five- to six-story factory buildings (no higher than a hook-and-ladder fire truck could reach) were marked for extinction. ”h.e.l.l's 100 Acres,” the area was called by the fire department. Fires were common in the warehouses and small factories, and fire officials labeled the buildings firetraps. However, the activity in those buildings, not the buildings themselves, caused the fires. Code enforcement, not demolition, was called for. Factory floors were often piled with rags, garment sc.r.a.ps, bales of paper, open cans of chemicals, and other flammable objects. But the fire officials' a.s.sessments fed right into the general public impression of the area as filled with derelict and discardable buildings.

In the 1960s the area became known as ”the Valley” because its vast stock of low-rise industrial buildings lay between the skysc.r.a.pers of Wall Street and midtown. From the distance, the Manhattan skyline gives the impression of two separate cities, with a vast empty s.p.a.ce between them.

Once the ma.s.sive clearance projects were unveiled, this until then economically and socially viable district was doomed. This is the death-threat syndrome death-threat syndrome, also known as planners' blight planners' blight. Any residential, commercial, or industrial area begins to die once a new destiny is planned for it. Property owners cease maintenance, antic.i.p.ating condemnation and demolition. Banks won't lend money, even if property owners are inclined to invest. Businesses move out, not waiting for the battle to play out. In this case, few expected the plans to be canceled. Defeating highway and urban renewal plans was almost unthinkable at the time. Even if an announced plan eventually fails, the announcement alone has already killed a district or catalyzed its decline.