City Set To Present Plan for Lower East Side

[Transic]

I think this is a HUGE deal, as I live in the area, not far from Delancey! What do you think?

http://www.nysun.com/pics/42702_main_large.jpg
The Blue Condominium on Norfolk Street near Delancey Street and The Hotel on Rivington, left, dwarf their Lower East side neighborhood. Groups are already lining up in support and opposition to a plan the city will float on Monday to guide future development of the area.

http://www.nysun.com/article/42702?page_no=1

City Set To Present Plan for Lower East Side

By DAVID LOMBINO (http://www.nysun.com/authors/David+Lombino)
Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 1, 2006

The renaissance of the East Village and Lower East Side during the past decade is one of the city's great success stories. But recently the area's growth has bumped head on into a lively spirit of community activism, and residents are fighting to preserve some local flavor.

On Monday, the city will present its plan to guide future development of the neighborhoods, a step toward finalizing the area's first rezoning since 1961. Groups are already lining up both in support and opposition of the nascent proposal.

The director of the city's Department of Planning, Amanda Burden (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Amanda+Burden), said the proposal is balanced between preserving the area's existing character with more restrictive zoning and creating corridors for increased housing density and incentives for affordable housing.

"There is nothing like the East Village: the scale of the buildings, the community gardens, its unique fabric," Ms. Burden said in a telephone interview. "It is a miracle that it hasn't been ruined, and that is why this is urgent."

The vast majority of the area, encompassing more than 100 city blocks, would be rezoned with a height cap of 80 feet. The zoning would end a height exemption available for most community facilities, like dorms or hospitals, and would require new developments to build flush to the street line, preventing "tower-in-park" buildings that soar high above the low-rise neighborhoods.

Ms. Burden said she expects community opposition about the streets that would be zoned for more housing, including areas along East Houston, Delancey, and Christie streets, and stretches of Second Avenue and Avenue D. In those areas, developers would be allowed to build with increased height and bulk if they include affordable housing.

"Where there is good transportation, we have the responsibility to push the envelope for more housing and affordable housing," she said, adding that more apartments would take pressure off the area's rising prices.

The drive to rezone the area began in the community as part of an active local resistance to neighborhood change. Some residents and members of Community Board 3 have declared a war on the area's raucous nightlife and put a virtual moratorium on new liquor licenses. On the area's western border, residents are battling New York University (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=New+York+University)'s growth, and a developer's plan to build on the former site of P.S. 64 has drawn intense opposition for years.

South of Houston Street, neighbors say they are particularly miffed about two contemporary structures that soar over the existing rooflines, the Blue Condominium on Norfolk (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Norfolk) Street near Delancey Street and The Hotel on Rivington. At Blue, a 16-story tower with blue floor-to-ceiling windows developed by the Corcoran Group (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=The+Corcoran+Group%2c+Inc .), one-bedroom apartments have sold for more than $800,000. About two blocks away at the 21-story steel and glass Hotel on Rivington, suites rent for $750 a night. Some rooms offer 360-degree views and Japanese-style soaking tubs.

One longtime East Village resident, Robert Arihood (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Robert+Arihood), a photographer, said neighbors feel under siege by development and an influx of transient residents, like college students and young professionals. While real estate developers have enjoyed bigger profits from the changeover, he says it has hurt the community.

"I don't feel like I belong here. It's my home, this is where my friends are. But the pressure on this community is overwhelming," Mr. Arihood said.

He said there is "a great deal of hysteria for and against this zoning change," and that some residents would oppose the measure because they see it as a gift to developers.

The chairman of the local Community Board 3, David McWater (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=David+McWater), said he would likely support the city's plan with a few tweaks, but he was not so sure about other board members, who he said would be more radically opposed to more development. He said that setting a cap on the height of buildings outweighed the addition of some corridors with increased density.

"If you stand on corner of Houston and First Avenue, and look south, all you see are cranes and big buildings now," Mr. McWater said. "Growth needs to be measured. If you have it in excess, its not good for anybody, and that is what we are perilously close to."

He said the increased development has raised a host of problems, including the transforming the neighborhood's character, ensnarling traffic, and unleashing scores of rats.

A founder of the East Village Community Coalition, a civic group that first advocated for a rezoning, Michael Rosen (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Michael+Rosen), stopped short of supporting the city's current plan. He said that the proposal would eliminate some eyesores, but it would also bring a lot more development in the area, sparking demolitions and redevelopment and causing displacements. He said his group would also encourage increased downzoning of certain low-rise blocks where the city's plan would not afford enough protection.

"There is a feeling that the people who stayed in the East Village and came in those bad years now deserve some protection," Mr. Rosen said. "Now that the area is developing, it is not fair that it be wiped out by its own success."

The director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Andrew+Berman), said the rezoning should include areas on Third and Fourth Avenues, where NYU could conceivably expand.

"The community approached City Planning and said we want a rezoning and these are the changes what we want. What they came back with was not exactly what we asked about," Mr. Berman said.

The proposal is also likely to be opposed as too restrictive of development. The president of the Real Estate Board of New York (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=New+York), a lobbying group representing the city's powerful real estate industry, Steven Spinola (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Steven+Spinola), said he has objections to a draft rezoning that was presented to him.

The marketing director of the Blue Condominium, Barrie Mandel (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Barrie+Mandel) of the Corcoran Group, said she supports the rezoning. "I'm a New Yorker and I live downtown and I'm interested in the preservation and historical authenticity and the integrity of individual neighborhoods," Mr. Mandel said. "At the same time, I am very, very proud to be associated with Blue. Progress marches on and neighborhoods regenerate themselves."

The city will present the plan Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Cooper Union (http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Cooper+Union) in a meeting that is open to the public. After more discussions with the community and an environmental review, the city hopes to push a finalized plan through the city's land use review process next year. It would require approval of the City Council.

[ablarc]

He said that setting a cap on the height of buildings outweighed the addition of some corridors with increased density.
But of course. They know their priorities.

[Derek2k3]

"100 city blocks, would be rezoned with a height cap of 80 feet"

Ridiculous. The best new buildings built on the LES are the taller ones. Why is character solely judged by height, shouldn't it be by design? All that "contextual" dung sprinkled around the neighborhood is what's really horrible.
Is it that much nicer to have a character-less 8 story building than an out of character 20 story one?

[antinimby]

They don't care about the design just as long as the buildings are not tall.
A 3-story O'Hara POS is always preferred over a 30-story Foster gem.

[Strattonport]

Why isn't anything done to reform these community boards?

As for that proposal to cap heights, that's just incredibly shortsighted. It's only going to be more difficult to build the housing necessary to accommodate NYC's growing population.

[ablarc]

Anyone care to speculate where this abhorrence of height originates?

Is it in our animal nature? Is it in our reptilian brain? Is it in our grade school teachers? Is it in our learned aestheticians?




A corollary question: Why is it seemingly common among the public and rare on this board? Or is that an illusion?

[Derek2k3]

Anyone care to speculate where this abhorrence of height originates?



Kondylis, SLCE, & O Hara. They're also responsible for world hunger and bird flu.

But seriously, my guess would be developers and architects. Quality hi-rise buildings in NY are so rare that the whole genre of the skyscraper has been declared evil. For the past few decades almost everything big just happened to be ugly. Height and ugly now go hand in hand. People don't like ugly and neither does God. So Nimby's have the divine right to protest anything taller than the floor they reside on.

Soon to be an addendum to the commandments..."Thou shalt not blocketh the almighty's light and air from ones overpriced studio apartment. "

[ramvid01]

A corollary question: Why is it seemingly common among the public and rare on this board? Or is that an illusion?

Cause we like skyscrapers? and this forum is dedicated to their construction process. Not like you'll see many non skyscraper lovers on this forum.

But of course it should be no surprise that this was coming, just about every community board wants shorter buildings. At this point i just expect it :/.

[lofter1]

How many people can afford to live in the upper floors of these new buildings?

Damn few, when you consider the general population.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the LES it stems from a concern that within 5 years a bunch of the folks who now live in 4-story walk-ups might very well be boxed in by 12-story luxury condos.

And, yeah, I know ... many here will say "Tough, they should get over it".

In that case it is suggested that you go to the meeting at Cooper Union this Monday -- and then start going to your Community Board meetings.

Or make bigger donations to the politicians who hold sway over this issue.

[ablarc]

Cause we like skyscrapers? and this forum is dedicated to their construction process. Not like you'll see many non skyscraper lovers on this forum.
Yeah, but that's like saying we like skyscrapers because we like skyscrapers.

So let me restate the question: what's the real, the deep-down reason many folks profess to dislike tall buildings --especially in New York?

I've heard all the phony-baloney reasons like shadows and "oppressiveness," but the former is often untrue and arguably unimportant and the latter is simply an aesthetic assertion that I can respond to by making the opposite assertion.

What causes people to whip themselves into such a frenzy over what is ultimately an aesthetic opinion, and a highly arguable one at that? People actually get more worked up about that than about say, the situation in the Middle East --something that really is worth getting upset about.

Anyway, I don't even believe that at heart they truly hate tall buildings; I think they just feel obligated to hate them out of vague allegiance to some half-baked aesthetic theory that keeps making the rounds in the collective unconscious but is too wraith-like to be explainable.

Or maybe it's socio-political: a residue of sixties flower-power, small-is-beautiful socialistic anarchism and its attendant hatred of big business. That was the case when massive opposition developed in early seventies Boston to Pei's breathtakingly beautiful Hancock Building.

I can see hating this or that skyscraper for its blank walls or its forbidding ground floor or its banal detailing or bad workmanship. But those traits aren't unique to skyscrapers and they're not consequences of height.

So why would anyone categorically single out a building type to hate? --particularly one that has long defined the city these people have chosen to live in. I bet the Empire State Building is a source of pride to every one of these mindless luddites, and they take out-of-towners to see it.

If it's so important for them to be free of tall buildings, I can recommend several small towns in North Carolina where they would presumably be happier.

As if.

[lofter1]

I, for one, when walking around the Village (whether East or West) enjoy the sight of the sky looming over the 4 & 5 story rooftops -- all that blue is wonderful (it is called the Village, after all).

I'm all for tall buildings in certain districts -- just as I'm all for the retention of large expanses of smaller buildings. (On the other hand I detest what's going up in certain cities I've been in -- Dallas pops to mind, as does LA -- where block after block of deadly dull 6 story apartment buildings have been constructed.)

I don't see anyone screaming that the new B of A tower is too tall. However if you were to build the same building in the vicinity of 34th / 5th I'd probably be the first to throw a fit.

As far as the LES goes, it seems that corridors of increased height makes sense -- particularly along thoroughfares such as Allen St. / Houston St. / Delancey St. But I wouldn't want to see a wall of 20 story buildings, one after another, along any of those streets.

Give me the old NYC sawtooth pattern of tall mixed with short -- just no blank walls rising 20+ stories, please. But to achieve that would probably require zoning text / regulations that would be difficult, if not impossible, to write -- let alone enforce.

[ablarc]

No one could possibly be happy about skyscrapers in the West Village; that's the exception, along with numerous blocks in the Seventies just west of CPW. That's so obvious it doesn't need saying. Add most of Park Slope to that list (though Brooklyn Heights survived the St. George Hotel rather well). Second Avenue south of 14th Street could definitely use some taller buildings, as could the Bowery.

[antinimby]

City presents draft of Lower East Side rezoning plan


http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1162933589_lesdrft.jpg


07-NOV-06

The Department of City Planning held a community meeting last night in the Engineering Building of Cooper Union at 51 Astor Place on a draft of a rezoning proposal for a large part of the Lower East Side and the East Village.

An environmental impact statement for the proposed rezoning will begin next year and the department hopes to certify the rezoning proposal into the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process in the fall of 2007.

The area affected by the proposed zoning is bounded by the north side of East 13th Street, the west side of Avenue D, the north side of Houston Street, the west side of Pitt Street, the north side of Delancey Street, the east side of Essex Street, the north side of Grand Street and 100 feet in from the east side of the Bowery and 100 feet in from the west side of Third Avenue. Approximately 100 blocks are included in the area.

Last year, the community board proposed a contextual rezoning for the area between East 13th and Houston Streets, east of Third Avenue and the Bowery in the East Village area and between East Houston and Grand Streets from Essex to Allen Streets and from Houston Street to the north side of Delancey Street east of Essex Street.

The city presentation was for the same East Village area but its mapping for the Lower East Side area was the blocks bounded by Houston St. Pitt Street, Delancey Street and Ludlow Street and Grand Street and the west side of Christie Street.

The city’s presentation indicated that the area in the proposed zoning that would be eligible for the inclusionary zoning problem would be along Houston and Delancey Streets, the west side of Christie Street and the west side of Avenue D.

Under the new zoning the maxium bulk of a building in the area north of Houston Street would be limited to a F.A.R. (floor-to-area ratio) of 4 whereas existing zoning permits a F.A.R. of 3.44 for residential projects and 6.5 for community facility projects. The new zoning would also impose a building height limit of 80 feet whereas the existing zoning had no building height limit as long as a project complied with sky exposure plane regulations.

Along Delancey and parts of Houston Street in the area to be rezoned, the proposed zoning would permit buildings to be up to 120 feet high with a F.A.R. of 7.2 if the projects have inclusionary affordable housing.

David McWater, chairman of Community Board 3, told the standing-room only gathering that the city’s proposed rezoning does not include anti-harrassment and anti-demolition provisions that the community board has requested and that the proposed rezoning also does not include Third and Fourth Avenues as the community board has requested. A spokesperson for the Department of City Planning reiterated the department’s position that Third and Fourth Avenue should not be included in this rezoning as they have a different character, but she noted that the community board was separately studying those areas for rezoning.

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and a member of the 197-A Task Force Committee of Community Board 3, said that the exclusion of Third and Fourth Avenue’s from the city’s proposed rezoning was “a terrible mistake” because the current zoning “not only allows but encouorages monstrously out-of-scale developments (like the currently planned 26-story NYU dormitory-on-a-plaza at 120 East 12th Street) which are destructive to the scale and character of the neighborhood.”

Several speakers at the hearing expressed concerns that the timetable for implementing a rezoning is too long and that a moratorium on new development should be included and others noted that many area residents have incomes too low to qualify for the proposed “affordable” housing.


Copyright © 1994-2006 CITY REALTY.COM INC.

[MikeW]

The LES isn't the West Village. I can understand, and even live with, the concept fo the WV being a theme park for quaint.

But lets be a little real about the LES. For nearly all of it's existance, the LES was a fetid slum. As a slum, it served it's designated purpose of being the entry point for multiple generations of poor immigrates coming to this country, the Irish, the Italians, the Easter European Jews, the Puerto Ricans ( and, yes, I know Puerto Ricans are not technically immigrants, but they tended to function as such).

But that era is over. The LES has now pretty well gentrified. There is no way a poor immigrant is going to afford to rent anything there any more. It's now basically yuppies with piercings and tattoos.

So why do we just admit reality, and let the place go upscale and just up. We could use the housing, and there's no real reason to preserve the old crappy tenements. And even if most of the housing is upscale, because of the variousl 80/20 programs, you'll probably end up with more 'affordable' housing if the area is redeveloped than if it's left as it is, keeping in mind that as time goes on, less and less of the existing housing is anything like affordable.

No one could possibly be happy about skyscrapers in the West Village; that's the exception, along with numerous blocks in the Seventies just west of CPW. That's so obvious it doesn't need saying. Add most of Park Slope to that list (though Brooklyn Heights survived the St. George Hotel rather well). Second Avenue south of 14th Street could definitely use some taller buildings, as could the Bowery.

[ablarc]

I can understand, and even live with, the concept fo the WV being a theme park for quaint.
A Williamsburg-style inhabited theme park: The Museum of Gentrified Tenements? ;)

Egg creams at the Dean and Deluca?

[lofter1]

D & D don't got no egg creams ...

These guys got 'em:

Classic Coffee Shop
56 Hester St., nr. Ludlow St. 917-685-3306

“Classic” is right—with Rocky Marciano photos on the wall and post-bebop jazz on the stereo, Carmine Morales’s tidy hole-in-the-wall is just the place for a tuna melt and an egg cream.

[ablarc]

D & D don't got no egg creams ...
They do in the theme park branch.

On special, they're just $2.50.

.

[beatricethecat]

The LES isn't the West Village. I can understand, and even live with, the concept fo the WV being a theme park for quaint.

So why do we just admit reality, and let the place go upscale and just up. We could use the housing, and there's no real reason to preserve the old crappy tenements. And even if most of the housing is upscale, because of the variousl 80/20 programs, you'll probably end up with more 'affordable' housing if the area is redeveloped than if it's left as it is, keeping in mind that as time goes on, less and less of the existing housing is anything like affordable.

who could use the housing? the kind of people who have been living in the LES for a long time. plenty of people in that income range are needed to work in the city, but this new housing is not being made for them. the housing that is being put up is for some section of people who make way more money than your average person, as far as i can tell.

as for "crappy tenements", i can only speak for myself here but i like living in a walk up. my building is 2 tenements which were put together in the 80's, we have plenty of space. I used to be a mover in the early 90's and i remember moving this lady into a brand new building on the west side in the 60's....sure it was nice but the whole thing felt so devoid of character, so cold. not everyone wants a doorman and an elevator and 220 units in their building. if i wanted that i'd already be living on the upper west side.

so maybe yeah the neighborhood is already upscale and sure it can/wiil/has to change but does it have to be made into a replica of the rest of manhattan? i think thats pretty boring. it can retain some of its identity. there's plenty of interesting lo rise architecture happening in other cities, well i'm thinking of europe but anyway, why not here?

[MikeW]

who could use the housing? the kind of people who have been living in the LES for a long time. plenty of people in that income range are needed to work in the city, but this new housing is not being made for them. the housing that is being put up is for some section of people who make way more money than your average person, as far as i can tell.


Let's be a little honest here. The reason why housing is so expensive in NYC is that there is just not enough of it. You can screw around as much as you want with rent regulation, subisized housing, inclusionary zoning, and any other buercratic nonsense you like, and it won't deal with that basic immutable fact. There are too many people, with too much money, chasing too few apts. There is only one solution that will bring down housing costs, build more housing, and lots of it.

So why don't we do this (any yes, I know it will never happen, but it's worth talking about). Let's declare a few underutilized neighborhoods as developement free fire zones. For conversation stake, I'm going to pick two, the LES, and Hell's Kitchen. Radically upzone them. Make the floor area ratios so that you can go up 10-15 stories on the side streets and 50 on the avenues. Get rid of any landmarking. I wouldn't get rid of rent regulation for existing buildings, but if the owner wants to demolish to expand, he can refuse to renew leases without much red tape.

I'd get rid of any tax abatements, but I'd put in supplimental taxes on underutilized properties empty lots, taxpayer/lowrise commercial, and residential four stories or less. This would achieve two things, it would push development, and it would provide funds to expand the infrastructure to accomodate the development.

this would probably result in 10's of thousends of new units. That would would put a dent in housing costs. Yes, the LL would like to get tippy top dollar, but now they'd have to compete in a non-tight market.


as for "crappy tenements", i can only speak for myself here but i like living in a walk up. my building is 2 tenements which were put together in the 80's, we have plenty of space. I used to be a mover in the early 90's and i remember moving this lady into a brand new building on the west side in the 60's....sure it was nice but the whole thing felt so devoid of character, so cold. not everyone wants a doorman and an elevator and 220 units in their building. if i wanted that i'd already be living on the upper west side.


If character is saleable, it will be designed in. One of the reasons that the developers get away building with generic shoebox apts, is that there is such an imbalance between supply and demand, that renter/buyers will take practically anything. If the market equilibrium changes, so will that.


so maybe yeah the neighborhood is already upscale and sure it can/wiil/has to change but does it have to be made into a replica of the rest of manhattan? i think thats pretty boring. it can retain some of its identity. there's plenty of interesting lo rise architecture happening in other cities, well i'm thinking of europe but anyway, why not here?

We're growing, they're really not.

[debris]

There is such a free-fire zone. Its called Jersey City. Newark, too, in twenty years or so. That's where the safety valve is for this region, and I think construction there will take some pressure off NYC prices. The market always finds a way. Its a tidy solution, since Northern NJ has no charm to begin with (Hoboken aside), so it might as well become a high-rise bedroom community.

[JCMAN320]

I think they should look into a different plan for the LES and try and leave it the way it is and perserve its charater. I don't see why everything has to look the same. The shouldn'y be afarid to let LES have a character all it's own.

As for the comment Debris, that is too broad and kind of a ignorant comment. Northern New Jersey has alot of charming small towns with great big nice homes. Englewood Cliffs, Oakland, Montclair, South Orange, Alpine, Roselle, Rutherford, Clinton, Pompton Lakes, Wykoff, Hoboken, etc... and even yes the big city Jersey City has many charming beautiful neighborhoods. So too paint such a broad brush across the entire Northern part of the state is pretty harsh. Northern New Jersey has beautiful state parks and vistas.

[debris]

Yes, sorry JCMan, that was a shameless comment. Full disclosure: I'm originally from Central NJ. The areas I have in mind are along the PATH, ie: the Exchange Place, Newport, Grove St., Journal Sq, and Newark PATH stops, where all the development is currently taking place. The high-rises going up now are far superior to what was there before. Perhaps Fort Lee, Weehawken, these sorts of places. I'm aware there are several charming neighborhoods in JC that are further away from rail transportation. I wouldn't want to see highrises go up in Hoboken or similar type places.

Anyway, seems like we're a bit off-topic....

[MikeW]

To some extent you're correct. But you miss a big point. NY should want those people over here, not in NJ. If they're over here, they're paying (more) taxes over here, the effects of their economic activity is over here, and it reduces the pressure to move jobs over to Jersey.

There is such a free-fire zone. Its called Jersey City. Newark, too, in twenty years or so. That's where the safety valve is for this region, and I think construction there will take some pressure off NYC prices. The market always finds a way. Its a tidy solution, since Northern NJ has no charm to begin with (Hoboken aside), so it might as well become a high-rise bedroom community.

[debris]

I suppose it all depends on how much you care about NJ. Do I love NYC, and prefer living here? You bet. Do I care about the health of NYC's economy and real estate market? Absolutely. Do I wish NYC could steal back all of the back-office jobs and PATH train commuters, turning Jersey City into a ghost town? No way. There's plenty of prosperity to go around. And if there was a recession, Jersey City would be the first to suffer. Their office vacancy rate is at least twice as high as Manhattan's.

[MikeW]

I suppose it all depends on how much you care about NJ. Do I love NYC, and prefer living here? You bet. Do I care about the health of NYC's economy and real estate market? Absolutely. Do I wish NYC could steal back all of the back-office jobs and PATH train commuters, turning Jersey City into a ghost town? No way. There's plenty of prosperity to go around.

Don't pretend that NYC is not in a competition with NJ for jobs and tax revenues. NJ has been very aggressive in this regard and had been pretty successful.


And if there was a recession, Jersey City would be the first to suffer. Their office vacancy rate is at least twice as high as Manhattan's.

Really? The first things companied do when business is bad is look to cut costs. Comparable rents in NJ are cheaper, taxes are lower, and to some extent, they can get away with paying employees less over there. So where are they going to cut first?

[antinimby]

A very insightful but lengthy take on this whole issue from blogger horizonr (http://www.johnlumea.com/2007/02/nimbyopolis.html)...


NIMBYopolis


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/city_block_1.jpg


What would happen if city planning departments everywhere decided, willy-nilly, that the building practices of two, three, four generations ago would now become law? No new building would be allowed to punch through the 6-story ceiling of the old neighborhood. And, well, if the city needed to grow, it would just have to find other ways to do it.

This was never an issue in the Ohio Valley river town where I grew up. Not that Owensboro, Kentucky, was an architectural backwater. I've always had a soft spot for this little ode to Mies, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1962.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/texas_gas_1.jpg

But as Louisville gets ready for its Rem-tacular close-up, Owensboro, the economically flatlined "capitol of western Kentucky," has never been under imminent threat from a rogue invasion of tall buildings. And yet, in the 1960s and 70s, Owensboro, Kentucky, did put a couple of intrepid toes — literally, two — in the shallow end of the Pool of High-Rise.

Given the results, the low-rise people of Owensboro probably wish planners had just capped their "skyline" early and called it a day.

It all started when Gabe's Shopping Center opened at the southwest corner of 18th and Triplett Streets in 1959. Built a generation before the strip mall, with parasitic ubiquity, began to chew up ever-larger swaths of the urban fabric in places like Owensboro, making such developments the paradigmatic trope of a suburbanized America — Owensboro's population within the city limits is the same 55,000 today that it was in 1959 — Gabe's Shopping Center was nonetheless and, for all intents and purposes remains, a strip mall.

Originally anchored by a W.T. Grant's dime store on one end and the Bi-Lo drugstore on the other, Gabe's Shopping Center today looks out across its parking lot to the antiseptic glare of the new-ish BP station and convenience store on the corner.

The BP, a model of spotless corporate efficiency, seems to look back with a mix of pity, shame, and reproach. For unlike so many other older shopping centers that have long since been retooled into slick little cash registers with cupolas on top (often with shiny gas stations out front), Gabe's somehow never caught up with the times. Always a little shambly and forlorn, it stands like Moses looking over into the Promised Land, a ghostly reminder of a vision that did get fulfilled, just not here.

Indeed, the BP station serves as a "dis-intimation" — a "putting the dogs off the scent" — of the largeness of vision that once held forth on this site. For a shopping center wasn't the only thing Gabe Fiorella opened at 18th and Triplett in 1959. Where the BP now stands was a restaurant — yes, he called it Gabe's — that for 20 years was fine dining in Owensboro, Kentucky.

On the point of the corner was a bigger-than-life-size statue of Gabe himself. With his trademark red jacket, black trousers, white shirt, and black colonel string tie, Gabe — tonsured, smiley-toothed, black-horn-rimmed Gabe — stood atop a 6-foot pedestal on a revolving platform, his right arm raised, forearm right-angled from the elbow, hand straight, and palm forward in a perpetual hello. Really more of a stereotypical "Indian" "How!" Round and round and round, 24 hours a day. "Welcome to Gabe's!"

And in late 1963, Gabe Fiorella completed construction of Owensboro's first tall building. There, on the southern edge of the little world Gabe was building at 18th and Triplett Streets, Gabe's Tower Inn — a 13-story cylinder of a hotel, clad in a rainbow of pastel-painted panels — was a slice of Miami in western Kentucky. By the time I was a kid in the early 1970s, Gabe's Tower — swimming pool at the top; restaurant-in-the-round just below; and still rising alone from a field of one- and two-story houses — was the undisputed marvel of Owensboro, Kentucky.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/gabes_tower_2.jpg
Gabe's Tower, post-pastel


IT was at about this time that Owensboro built its second — and last — tall building. "Designed" to "house" the elderly, Roosevelt House — now Roosevelt I, to distinguish it from the much smaller Roosevelt II, which went up next door in the early 1980s — put 18 stories of federally subsidized concrete right on the small city's main thoroughfare. It's a real HUD* special.

Like Gabe's Tower, Roosevelt I was, and remains, a "tower in the field." Except for a handful of 6-story bank buildings downtown and a few buildings of similar height scattered elsewhere, Owensboro is at heart the same 1- and 2-story town it was in 1963.

The difference is that the charmless Roosevelt I hasn't a trace of the earlier tower's whimsy or optimism. At the very least, the town's tallest building could have offered the town's eldest residents — who live here, after all, only because they have to — the town's best views, opening north to Owensboro's beautiful old residential neighborhoods and parks and to all of its old-growth trees, with the Ohio River and Indiana farmland in the distance.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/roosevelt_house_atlanta_gif.gif

Instead, every apartment window looks east and west, to the placeless borderlands of strip malls and storage sheds, where wall-to-wall privilege comes with a brass chandelier and a double-height atrium on a quarter-acre lot. One after the other.

Presumably there will continue to be a waiting list for Roosevelt I, so long as enough people need the kind of social welfare that the building provides. But in every other way that matters, Roosevelt I is a building with no character and no future. Ask anyone in low-rise Owensboro to name the worst building in town, and you will hear the same quick and fatal judgment as when Roosevelt 1 was completed in the mid 1970s.

Owensboro's business and municipal leaders had welcomed the previous decade's construction of Gabe's Tower as a sign that Kentucky's stepchild city — then and now, the state's third largest — was finally ready to join Louisville and Lexington at the ball. (It never did.)

But in a town small enough to make everyone's "backyard" the same, the decision to build Gabe's was a Not-In-My-Back-Yard initiation rite — and, as it turned out, Roosevelt I practice run — for Owensboro's rank and file, who sought vigorously, albeit without power or money or voice, to keep a tower that tall (!) from being built.

Four decades later, Gabe's is an endearing folly, a bit like New York's long-embattled 2 Columbus Circle (which, coincidentally, was completed the year after Gabe's, in 1964). The tower has been an economic disaster for most of its peripatetic life; has long since traded in its period pastels for a tellingly conservative pale gray with black stripes; and, by right, should have been demolished years ago.

And yet, Owensboro can't quite seem to let go of its quirky landmark. Last month, Gabe's Tower was sold for $280,000 to a developer who promises to make it, once again, a hotel.

NONE of this would be worth mentioning if the New York City Department of City Planning wasn't pushing a reactionary rezoning of the East Village and Lower East Side that, if successful, will set these Manhattan neighborhoods back a hundred years.

First and last stop of generations of the families who arrived at Ellis Island between 1890 and 1924 and, later, home to outsiders of all sorts, the traditionally low-rise (and low-rent) East Village and Lower East Side have been gentrifying for the better part of two decades. In response to this growth, these neighborhoods have recently seen some of the more creative and exciting building projects in a city where a good building can be hard to find. Now, the City wants to put an end to all that with a "contextual" rezoning that has these New York neighborhoods headed back to the future — of Owensboro, Kentucky.

Here are three of the recently or nearly completed buildings that have prompted this move:


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/195_bowery_1.jpg
195 Bowery (condominium on the Bowery at Spring Street); the location,
at the eastern terminus of Spring Street, is an especially appropriate
place for this tall building, which provides west-to-east orientation along
much of the length of the street


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/blue_from_essex_1.jpg
BLUE (condominium on Norfolk Street above Delancey Street)
Photograph: Brian Rose, November 2006


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/thor.jpg
Hotel on Rivington (between Ludlow and Essex Streets)


The City is vetting its plan with neighborhood political and community organizations now, with formal public review expected to begin sometime this fall. If the plan becomes law, buildings like 195 Bowery, BLUE, and the Hotel on Rivington (aka THOR), will no longer be permitted within the rezoned precinct, an enormous swath of about 114 blocks that constitutes the substantial core of the East Village and Lower East Side.

It's doubtful that even a building like the New Museum of Contemporary Art, now going up at 235 Bowery, would pass muster.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/new_museum_of_contemporary_art.jpg
Rendering: Sejima + Nishizawa / SANAA

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Here's what City Planning has in mind instead. In each example, the top two images represent the "problem," with the bottom image as the "solution":

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/ev_les_rezoning_1_1.jpg

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/ev_les_rezoning_2_1.jpg

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/ev_les_rezoning_3.jpg

The City proposes that most buildings put 6 stories to the street line, with setbacks continuing up to 8 stories; and that in targeted micro-precincts some buildings be allowed to start at 8 stories and max out at 12.

Although neighborhood representatives — from Community Board 3 (which has political oversight of both neighborhoods) to grassroots groups like the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and Good Old Lower East Side — agree on the plan's basic direction, they want even more aggressive downzoning: an absolute 6-story cap plus additional protections to prohibit owners of existing lower buildings from building additions up to the cap.

But all of these constituencies — including the City — have this in common: They believe that the problem in the East Village and Lower East Side is overdevelopment. They believe that the solution — the best way to enable these neighborhoods to manage growth pressures while guarding against the long-term negative impacts associated with overdevelopment in traditionally low-rise areas — is to preserve these neighborhoods, more or less as they are, in perpetuity. To embalm them, if you will. And they believe that implementing severe height caps is the shortest distance from point A to point B.

In short — forgive the pun — tall buildings are the enemy. Tempted to agree? Don't be fooled.

For while building heights are indeed squashed in the City's plan, that floor area has to go somewhere. Look at the graphics. The plan calls for every square inch of every parcel in the rezoned area to be built on and out and up until every city block is literally solid — a squat, flat-topped money-making machine in three dimensions. The taller buildings that make it out alive — 195 Bowery, BLUE, THOR, to keep with our examples — are left as lonely "towers in the field." Just like Gabe's and Roosevelt I.

So while the City's plan for the East Village and Lower East Side is decidedly anti-height, it is hardly anti-overdevelopment. Still dubious? Meet Avalon Chrystie Place:

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/avalon_chrystie_2.gif

Completed in June 2005, this behemoth is the product of a real estate deal between the City, who owned the land, and AvalonBay Communities, a publicly traded luxury apartment building developer based in Washington, DC.
The building stretches its enormous, anonymous, corporatized face along an entire block of Houston Street, the gateway between the East Village to the north and the Lower East Side to the south.

Rezoning advocates argue that restricting building heights to 6 or 8 or 12 stories will preserve "neighborhood character." But this characterless building — along with its smaller AvalonBay cousin across the street — has nothing to do with the neighborhood. Nor would even a 6-story rezoning have anything to say about the spread of Avalon Juniors in half-block-long installations across the East Village and Lower East Side.

The fact is, the plan now being brokered by neighborhood groups and the City is the AvalonBay Welcome Wagon. It is made by people who do not understand what taller buildings can do and what they are for. And it is death to the very neighborhood spirit that community activists say they are trying to keep alive.

AMONG residents of the East Village and Lower East Side, antipathy toward taller buildings can be rooted in everything from jealousy over property values (aka greed) to an almost desperate nostalgia for a pre-Starbucks downtown.

The City appears to be using these fears to serve its own development interests in the area, which may themselves be calculated to mask other failures, as we shall soon see.

(And if you think the City's proposed height caps are about creating a more sensitive urban environment, ask yourself why City Planning has lifted not a finger against the proposed plan for the World Trade Center site, although the plan itself produces buildings that are 2 – 4 times larger and bulkier — with all the attendant negative impacts on sky views; sunlighting and daylighting; congestion; shadows; and wind effects — than its own zoning laws allow. Come to think of it, ask Amanda Burden** that question.)

Whatever the specific agendas, both neighborhood groups and the City say that making the heart of the East Village and Lower East Side a Tall-Building-Free Zone is the best way to achieve a healthy urban environment, stimulate economic diversity, and regulate people flows in these neighborhoods.

They are mistaken on all three counts, and this inability to think clearly about taller buildings hints at a blind spot on "tall" with worrying consequences for New York's future.

To see this, one need look no further than the City's PlaNYC2030 sustainability process, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced to great fanfare in December. (The City promises more details in the next few months.)

The City's plan to take taller buildings out of the East Village and Lower East Side mix flies in the face of both the premises and the stated goals of its 2030 plan — a plan which, in other ways too, leaves these neighborhoods conspicuously out of New York’s sustainability future.

According to City Planning, New York's population is projected to grow from 8.2 million in 2005 to 9.1 million in 2030. Nearly a quarter of these extra 900,000 people will settle in Manhattan, which will grow from 1.61 million in 2005 to 1.83 million in 2030. That 220,000-person top-up is about a quarter of the projected population of San Francisco in 2030.



Announcing these numbers in a press release the day after Bloomberg's 2030 speech, City Planning director Amanda Burden said:This population analysis is vital for us as planners to create the conditions for growth and to meet the challenges that it brings. Through an unprecedented number of rezonings we have sought to channel new housing and economic development opportunities near the City's extensive transit system while limiting growth in auto-dependent neighborhoods. emphasis addedTranslation: The East Village and Lower East Side aren't getting the Second Avenue subway*** for at least another 25 years, although "adding transit capacity" is one of PlaNYC2030's top ten goals.

Memo to downtown: More transit, yes, just not here.

The truth is, Burden's statement reveals the City's proposed rezoning of the area to be a cynical effort to stifle current growth so that the Second Avenue subway doesn't become (any more) necessary for these neighborhoods (than it already is). This may be politics. But it's no way to build a city.

Easing congestion and creating open space are also among the 2030 plan's goals, but here too there is a disconnect. "We cannot allow crowding on our subways, streets and sidewalks to grind our economy to a halt," reads an item introducing this issue. But none of the suggested congestion measures mentions streets. And planning for the "public realm" is limited to putting a park within a 10-minute walk of every New Yorker and adding trees.

Why not make these goals more effective by linking them to the practical efficiencies of building tall?

Incentivize developers of taller buildings in the East Village and Lower East Side to (1) buy the larger amount of land that would be required to build a shorter and wider building of the same size; (2) build a taller, narrower building on less land instead; and (3) deed the difference to the City for a public park.

Use a similar strategy to induce tall building developers to build near street corners and deed the corner itself back to the City, to be developed as passive public open space. Apart from syncopating the pedestrian rhythm of these neighborhoods with serendipitous "sidewalk clearings," these "open corners" would function as pressure valves, preventing the pedestrian bottlenecks that tend to occur at street corners.

It's been a truism for some time now that, as we settle into the long-term trend of ever-greater shares of the world's populations moving to cities that are already pressed for space, tall buildings are a necessary part of any urban sustainability toolkit. Nowhere is space at more of a premium than in New York. And yet, the City's 2030 plan never even mentions the size and shape of buildings as a sustainability issue. In New York of all places, this is both shocking and unconscionable.

The only way for New York to be sustainable is for it to be efficient. That means every neighborhood growing and every neighborhood pulling its weight.
It means the City must nurture the East Village and Lower East Side renaissance by making these neighborhoods the sorts of places that many
of Manhattan's New 220,000 will want — and be able — to move to.

That includes completing the long-overdue Second Avenue subway (failing which, the State-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority should re-program Second Avenue itself as a dedicated light rail corridor — which it could do in much less time and at a fraction of the cost).

And it includes providing for taller buildings that will enable more people to visit, live, and work in these neighborhoods.

It's bad enough that the City's rezoning and 2030 plans assume that the East Village and Lower East Side won't be the kind of magnet that will require them to make such provisions. Taken together, the plans will starve these neighborhoods to the point that they won't be able to.

The real danger here is not overdevelopment — it's underdevelopment.

FOR the most part, those who don't want tall buildings in low-rise neighborhoods like the East Village and Lower East Side will not be swayed by arguments like this. They just don’t want them. Period. For these people — let's call them NIMBYs, shall we? — tall buildings are out of scale, out of context, out of character, and out of luck.

And so we wade, at last, into the foggy, furry deep of preservation society politics. New York City enacted its landmarks law and established its Landmarks Preservation Commission in the immediate wake of the demolition of Penn Station in 1963. But ever since Landmarks Preservation was created and Brooklyn Heights named the City's first historic district in 1965, preservation in New York has been conducted on two fronts: individual buildings and discrete neighborhoods of buildings.

And with development pressures mounting, especially in Manhattan, more and more of the City's preservation battle lines are being drawn around neighborhoods. Preservation is less about keeping good buildings in than about keeping all buildings of a certain kind out. Put bluntly, preservation has become the stalking horse for a development agenda pegged to anti-tall, anti-modern taste.

It's not surprising that development pressures are most sharply felt in Manhattan, which includes 44 of the City's 78 historic districts; indeed, the existence of these historic districts contributes to the pressures.

What is worrying is that the preservation culture that these districts represent has, over the last decade or so, prompted residents of large neighborhoods like the East Village and Lower East Side — neighborhoods that are older but not architecturally significant at a level that would qualify more than a few blocks or so for historic district designation — to demand that their neighborhoods nonetheless get similar protections.

Residents of these neighborhoods are asking City Planning to do for them what the Preservation Commission cannot.

In the process, downzonings like the one proposed for the East Village and Lower East Side are making City Planning the most powerful preservation agency in the City.

ALL of these actors seek to justify the quarantining of taller buildings in low-rise neighborhoods with appeals to Aesthetics and History. But their efforts — which are looking less like preservationism and more like isolationism — often have little to do with how we in cities like New York actually see and experience buildings over time.

None of us wants to have her or his urban comfort zone challenged. We like our familiar buildings and streetscapes and corners and views. But the two tall buildings of Owensboro remain jarring and out of place after 30 and
40 years only because nothing grew up around them — because they are "towers in the field."

How did this happen? Substitute "no federal highway" for "no Second Avenue subway" and you'll start to get the picture. Although Owensboro is strategically nestled in a spot that is 200 miles or less from St. Louis to the north; Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati to the east; and Nashville to the South, it has no direct interstate access to these places, and it shows in the economy. For decades, Owensboro has sought federal funding for an interstate highway that would enable it to attract both the people and the business — and the construction of new buildings to support them — that only that kind of transportation access can secure.

Instead, federal highway appropriations for Kentucky have invariably been channeled toward the "golden triangle" of Louisville, Lexington and Cincinnati; the closest interstates are 40 and 60 miles away; and Owensboro has Gabe's Tower and Roosevelt I.

Together with the political surrender and indefinite postponement of the Second Avenue subway's downtown legs, onerous height restrictions will do essentially the same thing to the East Village and the Lower East Side. They call it "contextual" zoning.

To be contextual, of course, one needs a context, and for downzoning advocates The Context of these neighborhoods is an ontological truth set down ages ago and never to be changed: Tenements it was and, by god, tenements it shall ever be (with a wink and a nudge to AvalonBay).

It's hard to imagine a more un-New York sentiment.



Indeed, when Alain de Botton, in his recent book The Architecture of Happiness, critiques the notion of a "national architecture," he might just as well have been writing about neighborhoods. Here, I take the liberty:...no [neighborhood] ever either owns astyle or is locked into it through precedent. [Neighborhood] architectural identity, like [neighborhood] identity overall, is created rather than dictated by the soil. History, culture...and geography will offer up a great range of possible themes for architects to respond to...At issue...is not so much what a [neighborhood] style is as what it could be made to be. It is the privilegeof architects to be selective about which aspects of the local spirit they want to throw into relief...An adequately contextual building might thus be defined as one which embodies someof the most desirable values and the highest ambitions of its era and place — a building which serves as a repository for a workable ideal.This appeal for a more generous, open, evocative attitude to contextuality carries with it an implicit recognition of the basic physical reality that every new building formally recreates the context. The most dramatic New York example of this may be the Twin Towers. Completed in 1972, the towers never came into their own as part of an urban composition until construction
was completed in 1987 on the four adjacent towers of Cesar Pelli's World Financial Center.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/twin_towers_postwfc.jpg http://www.johnlumea.com/images/twin_towers_prewfc_1.jpg


The fearmongering obsession with taller buildings in low-rise settings — "Can you even imagine what the Lower East Side would be like with six or seven or eight times the number of BLUEs, THORs, and 195 Bowerys?" — derives its power from aestheticizing these buildings; from treating each one as if it would have the power to administer its "shock of the new" at the same voltage 10 or 20 or 50 years from now as it did on ribbon-cutting day.

But that's not how buildings "work" on us in New York. Here, where new buildings are coming at us all the time, every new tower mutes the shock we felt on first seeing the one that preceded it down the street. The new tower itself is muted once the next one comes along, and it is in this perpetual reinvention that buildings are forever being absorbed deeper and deeper into a new urban scenography.

We are conditioned to detest the archetypal developer of big buildings who, having been through it before and before and before with nervous neighbors, dismissively sighs, "They’ll get used to it." But the fact is that in dynamic New York, this is profoundly true: We do get used to it.

This cuts both ways, of course, since we get used to certifiable schlock (AvalonBay) as well as to the aesthetically adventurous. In both cases, the best way to rid ourselves of the shock of the new is to build more new. But it is for this same reason that we would do better to spend our time working for the latter, so that the original shock will give way to endless delight rather than to endless despair.


De Botton observes that the wary trepidation that typically greets the announcement of a new building today is an historically recent phenomenon:When bands of workmen arrived [in the eighteenth century] to sketch out the crescents of Bath or Edinburgh’s New Town, as they cut their way through brambles and hammered measuring ropes into the earth, few tears would have been shed at the impending destruction. Although there were no doubt some old and noble trees standing on what would become residential streets, though there must have been burrows for foxes and nests for robins, these succumbed to the saw and the shovel with only passing sorrow from their previous denizens, for what was planned in their place was expected to provide more than adequate compensation.http://www.johnlumea.com/images/bath_1.jpeg
Bath, England: The Circus, with the Royal Crescent

Citizen confidence, de Botton notes, would have been fueled by the confidence of the architects. John Wood the Elder at Bath and James Craig in Edinburgh each
were fired by the prospect of bringing a legendary city into being, a new Athens or Jerusalem, and in this ambition found the confidence to overcome innumerable practical challenges involved in turning green fields into attractive streets. Having a belief in a special destiny, a sense of standing at a privileged moment in history, may well be misguided, but it also provides an indispensable and therefore not unprofitable means of ensuring that beauty will have an opportunity to prevail.http://www.johnlumea.com/images/edinburgh_new_town_1.jpg
Edinburgh, Scotland: New Town



Not so today:We are prone to falling into a series of illogical assumptions which hold us back from being more demanding of architects: we presume that manmade beauty has been preordained to exist in certain parts of the world but not in others; that urban masterpieces are the work of people fundamentally different from, and greater than, ourselves....Given the low quality of so much of what is built in New York, one could almost forgive NIMBYs their overzealous oversight of the urban environment — almost — except that among the great variety of taller contemporary buildings out there, there are some good — and even a few great — ones.
The existence of such buildings makes us responsible to create the conditions for more good and great examples to be built in New York, including in the East Village and Lower East Side.

But architects can't design in a vacuum. They need opportunities. The downzoning of these neighborhoods would remove 114 blocks of opportunity in the very type of neighborhood where the City most needs to learn how
to build taller.

Perhaps de Botton is right that NIMBYs are motivated, ultimately, by a deep sadness over the diminished quality of the taller buildings that they see about them. But the proposed 6- to 12-story "leveling" of the entire core of the East Village and Lower East Side — a leveling that preempts every possibility of anything better — reads more like vindictive spite. Given the projected needs of the City over the next few decades, it borders on cruelty.

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For this leveling is based on a leveling of another sort: the willful refusal, against all evidence to the contrary, to make any architectural distinction between buildings above a certain height. Those who make this self-absolving refusal pretend to vacate themselves from any responsibility to even consider such buildings.

But is BLUE (right) really no better than the 26-story New York University dormitory now going up on in the East Village (below)?


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/blue_detail_6.jpg

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/nyu_dorm_east_village_1.jpg
Rendering of NYU dorm under construction on East 12th Street
(between Third and Fourth Avenues)



Is that dorm really any worse than this one?


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/avalon_chrystie_1.gif
Avalon Chrystie Place



Is a whole neighborhood of Avalon Chrysties really preferable to one with a variety of building sizes and styles and uses?

JANE Jacobs wrote that "[m]ost city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop — insofar as public policy and action can do so — cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish...."

Jacobs understood that cultivating a neighborhood's variety — not turning it into a museum — is the key to healthy growth. She called it messiness. It's hard to think of a more apt way to describe the defining New York-ish, Walt Whitman-esque quality that has coursed through the East Village and Lower East Side for generations.

What's more, every new generation has redefined what messiness means for these neighborhoods, and it's a New Messiness of urban form — more exuberant, more rhythmically syncopated — that is trying to cut through
with buildings like 195 Bowery, BLUE, and THOR.

Neighborhood NIMBYs are convinced that tall buildings represent a threat to their urban environment. In fact, taller, thinner buildings tend to make better neighbors than do short, squat buildings with the same floor area. They create better opportunities to preserve land. And for people on the streets, sidewalks, and surroundings — including adjacent buildings — they provide more and larger views of the sky; more sunlight and daylight; and smaller shadows with shorter duration. These are just the laws of physics.

But the reality also is that the wealth that the East Village and Lower East side need to keep them going demands that these neighborhoods provide, in the mix, the privacy, quietude, and the views that only taller buildings afford.

Let's assume for a moment, though, that the downtown rezoning does pass.
Gentrification in the East Village and Lower East Side slows down for a time, as wealth looks for more hospitable places to build tall. Eventually, all of
the rezoned area is built out and filled in as a patchwork layer of solid 6-story blocks with no space on the ground but block-sized plazas on top. Visible from here, 6 stories in the air, are the top 10 stories of 195 Bowery and BLUE and the top 15 THOR, presiding over the bleak plazascape like the Standing Stones of Downtown New York.

AvalonBay owns so much of these neighborhoods now that the City has actually given the company naming rights — it's Avalon Village and Lower East Avalon now, with plans to rename Houston Street as Avalon Way.

Still, for whatever inconceivable reason, people still want — have to? — live here, and it is at about this time that wealth comes calling again.

What does the City propose to do with its "contextual" neighborhood then?
Chip out a piece of a block every time a taller building is needed? Or perhaps we’ll just leave the 6-story building blocks as they are and build towers on top — a kind of Corbusian Radiant City on a grid of 6-story platforms. (Talk about New Yorbanism!)

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/radiant_city.jpg
"Radiant City" by Colin Lee


THIS is a ridiculous conceit, of course, but it highlights the ridiculous logic of the prevailing all-or-nothing to approach to height in the East Village, Lower East Side, and other traditionally low-rise neighborhoods. Here's an idea:

Create a new class of tall buildings for these neighborhoods, starting at 15 stories and
capped at 25.
To minimize the bulk of these taller buildings,
require that the ratio of street-facing width to
height be no greater than, say, 1:5.
Regulate the frequency of these buildings by
requiring a minimum distance between them —
similar to what Rudy Giuliani, when he was Mayor,
did with sex shops and strip clubs across the City.
Incentivize developers to build such buildings nearest where there are opportunities to create more public open space with a public park or an open corner.Simple planning and design standards like these would calibrate people flows while enabling taller buildings to do what only taller buildings can to invigorate low-rise neighborhoods.


Norman Foster made a pertinent observation recently in the course of advocating for his (apparently ill-fated) design (right) for 980 Madison Avenue to Landmarks Preservation. Foster's design calls for a clustered pair of oval towers — the tallest, 30 stories — to be placed atop the five-story Parke-Bernet Gallery building (1949). The building, whose limestone façade stretches the length of the Madison Avenue block between 76th and 77th Streets, is situated within the Upper East Side Historic District, and this was the occasion for the Landmarks hearing.


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/980_madison_foster_1.jpg

Foster argued that a tall, slender addition to the original building is especially appropriate as a preservation strategy, since the new tower's slender height in contrast with the low horizontality of the existing structure would actually strengthen the older image (while recreating the context).

For the same reason, the low-rise texture of the East Village and Lower East Side makes these neighborhoods an ideal canvas for taller buildings — and this is true at least in part because "tall" buildings need not be especially tall here to register as tall and thus to excite the fabric of the neighborhood.

New York will need tall buildings of all sorts to accommodate the projected growth of the next several decades. So why not make the East Village and Lower East Side an Architectural Enterprise Zone — a laboratory for how to build tall on a smaller scale?

This would enable the East Village and Lower East Side to engage New York's sustainable future with a degree of common sense that builds on the growth that is already happening there. Whatever else the blanket rezoning of these neighborhoods as a 6- to 12-story preserve is, it's not common sense and it's not engaged leadership.

The fact is, both the City and the neighborhoods are in deep denial about the inexorability of growth in New York. Growth is an ongoing, multi-generational project, and the groundwork for good growth has to be laid now. By fighting every building that seems to them too tall, too large, or too modern, and now trying to get these selfish impulses written into law, all collaborators on the City's downzoning agenda are sabotaging New York's future by refusing to prepare for a time when all neighborhoods will have to include taller buildings.

ONE needn't spend much time in the Upper East Side Historic District to see that surrounding neighborhoods pay a high price for the City's determination to preserve an entire low-rise enclave, especially one this large. It is impossible to take a neighborhood like this one out of the City's development mix without putting extraordinary growth pressures on surrounding neighborhoods. Indeed, much of the area is zoned as a "limited height district" — maximum height, 60 feet — but walk just a block or two in about
any direction from the district perimeter, and this is what you'll start to find:


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/30_e_85_1.jpg
30 East 85th Street (Madison Avenue)



http://www.johnlumea.com/images/45_e_89.jpg
45 East 89th Street (Madison Avenue)



http://www.johnlumea.com/images/trump_palace.jpg
200 East 69th Street (Third Avenue); aka Trump Palace



No doubt, all three were marketed much like the "modern classic" and "stunning new landmark" that are on deck just a few blocks further afield.

Introducing buildings like this to the Upper East Side Historic District would be the height of absurdity. But opening up the district's Madison Avenue commercial corridor to distinguished taller buildings on the scale of Foster's proposal (or even a little smaller) would relieve growth pressures on adjacent neighborhoods, making less necessary such monsters as have been going up just outside the District for a while now.

The fact is, New York's preservation culture has become a luxury the City can no longer afford. The example of the Upper East Side Historic District points to a set of questions that should — sooner rather than later — prompt a wholesale reassessment of the City's preservation / downzoning agenda:

Why should City Planning and Landmarks
Preservation continue to protect select neighborhoods from development and increase protections for others, when these neighborhoods can accommodate additional growth and while surrounding areas get buried in a thicket of oversized buildings?
Why shouldn't every neighborhood have to
participate in sustainability?
Why wouldn't they want to?OF course, that last question is the kicker. Last week's meeting of Manhattan Community Board 4 exposed the continuing rift over plans to build a small condominium tower on the 19th-century campus of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, which lies in the heart
of the Chelsea Historic District.

The campus, a Collegiate Gothic double quadrangle in brick and brownstone, was built on what came to be known as Chelsea Square, a full city block given to the seminary in 1818 by Clement Clark Moore (author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas"); the land had been part of his estate. The oldest surviving building dates from 1836; several others are more than a century old.

With many of these buildings in sad disrepair, General briefly considered abandoning its campus, before deciding in 1988 to embark on a decade-long, $68 million restoration campaign. Still more than $20 million shy of its goal, the financially strapped seminary realized a few years ago that the most practical way to complete the restoration — and keep itself in New York — was to sell most of its unused development rights. After deciding to raze a decrepit, nondescript 1960-ish office building on the campus and selecting the Brodsky Organization to develop the vacated site, General partnered with Brodsky to commission the Polshek Partnership to design a building.

The first proposal, in fall 2005, was for a 17-story, nearly all-glass structure that would house the seminary's library and administrative offices on the lower floors, with Brodsky's luxury apartments above.


http://www.johnlumea.com/images/gen_theol_seminary_1.jpg
Rendering: Polshek Partnership



A coalition of community groups calling itself Save Chelsea Historic District (SCHD) — whose president, Robert Trentlyon, also sits on Community Board 4 — worked to mobilize the neighborhood against the building, and last fall Polshek presented a second try.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/gen_theol_seminary_2_2.jpg
Rendering: Polshek Partnership



The new design is a two-building strategy. The library and apartment tower is now 15 stories (down from 17). There is more brick, less glass. And it is slightly less bulky, the result of housing the administrative space — 30,000 square feet — in a small second building designed by Beyer Blinder Belle.

The neighbors still don't like it. In a July 2006 letter to the Villager community newspaper, Trentlyon wrote that SCDH's "one issue" is "preserving the integrity of the Chelsea Historic District and the 75-foot height limit" emphasis added — a reference to the height cap put in place for the area by the Chelsea rezoning of 1999, known as the Chelsea Plan — and, indeed, as The New York Sun reported of last week's meeting, "...some opponents wore stickers that read, '75 Feet Is The Limit,' and clapped their hands and yelled 'bravo' when community members took the stage to criticize the project."

Some residents have gone so far as to suggest the seminary should sell off its student housing to avoid building tall. Sell off the student digs? This is a seminary — hello? And where, pray, are the seminarians going to afford to live then? Chelsea?

Trentlyon goes even further. Repeating an "alternative" he has mentioned on previous occasions, Trentlyon told the Sun that "there are other nonprofit organizations that would be interested in purchasing and restoring the property without building a highrise. 'I know for a fact that affordable housing developers would love to take over the whole block, developers who would preserve the buildings…It’s not like if they left, they’d put an amusement park in there.' "

For the sake of scuttling one 15-story building, Trentlyon is saying, we should throw out an institution that has a nearly 190-year vested stewardship over this land and its buildings.

(continue next post below)

[antinimby]

(continued...)

Residents of low-rise neighborhoods behave — often badly — as if they are somehow entitled to live in a neighborhood free of taller buildings. One is reminded of the insatiably snotty little princess in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the brilliant 1971 film adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1964 children's story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/veruca_salt.jpg

The Veruca Salts of Preservation are saying, "I want my property values, my unobstructed views, and my cute little neighborhood — and I want them now!!!" And to hell with everyone else.

This may be the way to preserve select neighborhoods, but it's not the way to preserve the whole city. Long-range sustainability planning for New York can succeed only if it is a whole city process — if it requires all of us to take responsibility for all of it, by more equitably distributing the demands of growth across every neighborhood.

Decisively turning back the proposed downzoning of the East Village and Lower East Side thus represents an important opportunity that may not return for some time. For should this downzoning become law, it will consolidate New York's move away from a whole city approach.

Together with the Chelsea Plan of 1999, it will signal the ascendancy of those "New Yorkers" whose selfish, dogged fixation against tall buildings of any kind has nothing whatsoever to do with the real-world growth demands that will be placed on New York's doorstep over the next few decades. And if history is any guide, NIMBYs are not inclined to loosen their grip on the law, once they get it in their teeth.

Will NIMBYs be persuaded against the East Village and Lower East Side downzoning before public review of the proposed zoning law begins this fall? Why should they, when they are the ones who now have City Hall's ear and its sympathy? They are winning.

That hardens the obligation on the rest of us to make the public and the media and City Hall understand — and understand today — that downzoning these neighborhoods is against the best interests not only of the neighborhoods but of the City as a whole.

Because one way or another, a whole city future for New York has to mean taller buildings for everyone.


MAKE no mistake, though. Charting a taller future for the East Village, the Lower East Side, and other low-rise neighborhoods will require profound courage and sensitive leadership — especially given that there are so few examples from which to imagine what such a future might look like. In architecture, as in so much else, most people like what they know, and this drives the cultural and economic prejudice against the new. This is a fact of life, but it is also, as de Botton rightly observes, a reactionary fallacy:The property developer's [and, I would add, preservationist's—JL] reflexive defense of existing tastes constitutes, at base, a denial that human beings can ever come to love anything they have not yet noticed. But even as it plays with the language of freedom, this assertion suppresses the truth that in order to choose properly, one must know what there is to choose from.

...We should be free to imagine how much tastes could evolve if only new styles were placed before our eyes and new words in our vocabulary. An array of hitherto ignored materials and forms could reveal their qualities while the status quo would be prevented from coercively suggesting itself to be the natural

and eternal order of things.
Idealistic? Yes. True? Yes! For who knows what kind of tall buildings might be possible in 50, 20, 10, or 5 years — or even tomorrow?

Rising 23 stories at a svelte 60 feet wide, one of the most surprising and elegant buildings to go up in New York in recent years is Christian de Potzamparc's tall and slender LVMH Tower on 57th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/lvmh_tower.jpg
Photograph by Frederic Steiner

Can next-generation tall buildings like this, along with others at a slightly smaller (lower, thinner) scale find a place in the more dynamic and sustainable urban form aborning — literally, trying to break out — in the East Village and Lower East Side? We should all hope so. But in their simpleminded and shortsighted determination take taller buildings off the table in these areas, neighborhood NIMBYs and their pacifiers at City Planning are stifling the spirit and practice of innovation New York will need to find out how.

Which circles us back to a question that has been hovering in and around much of this exploration: What is the unique spirit of "tall" that can produce the tall buildings that are culturally fitted to the East Village and Lower East Side?

Obviously, one has to start by asking: What is the unique spirit of these neighborhoods themselves? The Greek god Dionysus is associated with all forms of the carnal, sensual, erotic, ecstatic, rapturous, and sublime, i.e., with the earthy and worldly as the means of accessing the divine (more Jesus, less Christ); with fluidity, porosity, blending, and plurality; with intoxication, excess, and wild, fearless experimentation; with the naked, raw, and elemental; with liberation from self; and with a raging at the fetters of convention — so I'm not the first to opine that the East Village and Lower East Side has been the most Dionysian precinct of the City. For its promiscuity of the flesh, yes, but mainly for its promiscuity of art and ideas, resulting in every kind of embodied critique of cultural and political norms.

One can argue that it was Allen Ginsberg who decisively made it so, having gotten his from Walt Whitman. Which is fitting, since Whitman, the prototype of the modern New Yorker, was the original American Dionysius. "I am large," wrote Whitman, "I contain multitudes."


In his recent book, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics, McGill University architectural historian Alberto Perez-Gomez (drawing on a 1986 essay on Platonic theories of love by Canadian poet Anne Carson) crystallizes the Dionysian impulse in architecture in a way that suggests how the spirit of this precinct might animate the spirit of its buildings:Falling in love, according to Socrates, is both madness and a revelation of the world as it really is. The Greeks associated love with Dionysus, god of madness, the feast, and transgression. The divine essence of madness is the origin of Greek tragedy and the Western work of art. For Socrates, the initial mania is the most important moment to grasp…Unlike earlier poets, who were distressed by the force of Eros, Socrates vindicates mania because one can keep one’s mind only at the cost of shutting out the gods. The incursions of Eros instruct and enrich our lives: prophets, healers, and poets conduct their art by losing their mind. Erotic mania is the instrument of this intelligence: it puts

wings on the soul of the demiourgos. The architect/creator (always a craftsman of materials, never a creator ex nihilo) may share this experience by making works that have a similar effect on society.
The taller buildings I'm proposing for the East Village and Lower East Side are especially well suited to play this Dionysian role. To understand why, it helps to be reminded of the primal reason that the best tall buildings appeal to us.

For that, more Greek: In his Theogony, the Greek poet Hesiod, thought to have been a contemporary of Homer, tells the story of how the Greek gods came to be. Perez-Gomez explains:

'First there came into being Khaos,' wrote Hesiod, 'and afterwards Gaia [deep-breasted Earth] and Eros [the love that softens hearts], the most beautiful of the immortal gods.' Khaos, [Plato's] humid 'primordial space/substance'...is a neuter name; it cannot produce children. Instead, it causes other divinities to 'come into being.' Gaia, on the other hand, is feminine and does bear children, but her offspring are her two future male partners, Ouranos (Sky, crowned with stars) and Pontos (Sea). Both are 'brought forth,' not sexually conceived....This is where Eros comes in. In the absence of a male sex, primordial Eros 'softens' the first creative entities and causes them to bring to light what was hidden within them.

After drawing the night sky out of herself in a moment prior to human time, Gaia copulates permanently with Ouranos. Ouranos covers Gaia and discharges into her without stopping. Before the cycles of day and night that mark human temporality, before the birth of Olympian light, the earth and sky were compulsively united — but not from prior sexual attraction since the two divinities had never been separated....

Hiding in Gaia’s bosom, Kronos (Time) grabs the genitals of Ouranos and castrates him with a sickle. The blood of Ouranos falls onto the earth and his genitals fall into the sea. This violent act separates the earth from the sky, the feminine from the masculine, and thus marks the beginning of human space-time. In daylight, the division between earth and sky is now visible

to all….At night, however, when the horizon disappears and the sky again unites with the earth, their earlier primordial state seems to return, reminding humanity of a potential wholeness pregnant with creative force....
WE are flaneurs in New York — always out there on the streets, cheek by jowl with our buildings. And the tall buildings we find the most endearing are those whose forms find a way to draw us, from our places on the street, closer to the sky.

So how would a Dionysian tall building — a tall building for the East Village and Lower East Side — do that?

By earthly means. The Dionysian progression from the carnal to the sublime, from earth to sky, is always firmly rooted in the body. Our "achieving" the sublime depends on our ability to continually see the body, continually touch the body, continually engage the body, whatever form that body takes.

When the body is a very tall and wide-from-the-street building, this narrative experience is always disrupted in one way or another. Viewed from the street, the great width of such a building makes it difficult — except vaguely, through peripheral vision — to visually access the whole body as a vertical line from street to sky. And when tracing the view from bottom to top, great height makes it impossible to see the top once you get there.

It's not necessarily in a good way that buildings like this seem "not of this world." Much as we adore the Chrysler Building, it resolves its height as a spire because it has to: For a very tall and wide-from-the-street building, that's the only way to make the earth-sky connection — and it's a connection that gets made only at the top.

A relatively narrow 15- to 25-story building is tall enough to show us the sky while being small enough to allow us to "take it all in" — to see the body, touch the body, and engage the whole body as an earthly object pointing us
to the heavens.

In "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,"
Louis Sullivan in 1896 asked:

How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions? How shall we proclaim from the dizzy height of this strange, weird, modern housetop the peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of a higher life?
Sullivan answered with his famous invocation that a skyscraper "must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing."

This can be just as true of a building that rises 20 stories as of one that rises 80. Which is why the 22-story Flatiron Building is one of the best-loved tall buildings in the City.

http://www.johnlumea.com/images/flatiron_building_3.jpg


By critiquing the architectural status quo. Just as the Dionysian promiscuity of art and ideas in the East Village and Lower East Side has produced countless embodied critiques of cultural and political norms — from anarchist politics of Emma Goldman; to the bebop of Charlie Parker; to the poetry and activism of Allen Ginsberg; to Jack Smith's transvestite film fantasias; to the rock experimentalism of John Cale and Lou Reed; to the underground journalism of the East Village Other; to Richard Foreman's experimental theater; to the graphic art of Keith Haring; to the glam-soul melancholy of Antony and the Johnsons — a Dionysian tall building here must forge a connection to the sky in a way that embodies a critique of architectural norms.

The reason Gwathmey Siegel's new condo tower — the so-called Sculpture for Living — doesn't work at Astor Place in the East Village is not that it's too tall but that it doesn't express its height in an unambiguously and unapologetically Dionysian way.

Of course, Perez-Gomez writes that Dionysus is the "god of madness, the feast, and transgression," and one might ask whether transgression is still possible in a neighborhood with buildings where apartments start at $1 million.

The truth is, the geography of transgression is always shifting in New York — SoHo to Chelsea; the East Village and Lower East Side to Williamsburg (and back) — so it's a mistake to aestheticize the geography itself, as if transgression can happen only in this or that neighborhood. And it's a mistake to assume that transgression and wealth must be mutually exclusive, even if they often are.

But this much is certain: Whatever of its Dionysian self the East Village and Lower East Side may seem to have misplaced for now, more Sculptures for Living and more cookie-cutter assemblages from AvalonBay is not the way to bring it back.

Ultimately, though, we are building for the long term. Just as yesterday's Class B and C office buildings are being retrofitted as today's luxury condominiums, we are building an environment that will last for generations.

We must leverage the economic opportunities that are now before us to build the taller buildings in lower-rise neighborhoods that resonate with the particular energies of those neighborhoods and that could be put to any number of uses, if need be, in the next and the next and the next generation.

The persistence of Gabe's Tower suggests that a building with character can always be redeemed. What New York needs is not more restrictive zoning: Fortifying high-rise walls around low-rise neighborhoods only fans the New York flames of fast money and slow politics that are already burning on both sides of the fence. Nor is preservation best served by cutting buildings — and, in the process, New York's sustainability future — off at the knees.

What New York needs is more intelligent zoning and more compassionate preservation that nurtures the design and construction of better buildings everywhere in the City.

In the East Village and Lower East Side, that means buildings of many shapes, sizes, heights and colors. Including BLUE.

* U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
** Director of the New York City Department of City Planning
*** One of New York’s great urban myths. Initially floated as a concept in 1929, construction on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) project — which calls for a new east side subway stretching from 125th Street down to the Financial District in Lower Manhattan — finally began in 1972, only to be abandoned a couple of years later during the City’s fiscal crisis. The project began to build momentum again in the mid 1990s, and funding is now in place for Phase 1, which would run from 96th to 63rd Streets. Phase 1 construction is expected to begin this year and “completed in a little over seven years,” according to the MTA. Beyond that, no timetable is forthcoming.

[ablarc]

What New York needs is more intelligent zoning and more compassionate preservation that nurtures the design and construction of better buildings everywhere in the City.

In the East Village and Lower East Side, that means buildings of many shapes, sizes, heights and colors. Including BLUE.
Absolutely.

He's right on the money. The new zoning will encourage low, sprawling, out-of-scale buildings, because developers --once deprived of height-- will have to develop large increments to get a profitable floor-area of building. No one will like the outcome, and no one will recognize the cause. Instead of blaming the zoning, folks will make developers take the rap.

Cognitive dissonance: the theories will survive all controverting data that will come from observation of the real world. The theories are: "tall is bad in a charming neighborhood" and "developers are scum and zoning protects neighborhoods from such scum."

"Zoning **(swoon)**: My Hero!!"




No one will have learned anything.

[pianoman11686]

This essay is eye-opening in a profound but subtle way, not much unlike Death and Life. It should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in a thread discussing a new building in a low-rise and/or historic area, because it addresses the same points and counterpoints that we see over and over again. What's more is, it's tough to find fault in the basic arguments.

[lofter1]

New York's preservation culture has become a luxury the City can no longer afford. The example of the Upper East Side Historic District points to a set of questions that should — sooner rather than later — prompt a wholesale reassessment of the City's preservation / downzoning agenda:

Why should City Planning and Landmarks
Preservation continue to protect select neighborhoods from development and increase protections for others, when these neighborhoods can accommodate additional growth and while surrounding areas get buried in a thicket of oversized buildings?
Why shouldn't every neighborhood have to
participate in sustainability?
Why wouldn't they want to?OF course, that last question is the kicker. Last week's meeting of Manhattan Community Board 4 exposed the continuing rift over plans to build a small condominium tower on the 19th-century campus of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, which lies in the heart of the Chelsea Historic District.


This article is really beyond the pale. The author is using these few examples (of not very good design) to push his own agenda to dump landmark protections.

He uses lots of words -- but when it comes down to it all he has is a bad idea: more growth everywhere.

Pa-tooey http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon13.gif

It seems that the author is also playing with the term "neighborhood", which is a much broader term in NYC than what is delineated by Historic District lines. He also seems to be saying that each and every BLOCK throughout the city should have to take its share of bigger buildings. How horrid would that be? And for him to state that the neighborhood of Chelsea -- which is much larger than the blocks of the Chelsea Historic District -- is not accomodating to new growth or participating "in sustainability" and does not "want to" absorb new larger buildings & population means that this author has not taken either the time or the effort to walk a few blocks to the east or the west, where new big buildings are going up in wide areas of Chelsea along both 6th & 10th Avenues.

I don't want to live in a NYC where each and every block has 30+ story buildings. Our city is better for having the variation afforded by Historic Districts and Landmark regulations. And full blocks with open sky above. That is what you will lose if you toss out those protections.

Luckily I'll be dead and gone in another generation, so I won't have to see what happens if short-sighted fellows like this take charge.

But all you youngsters out there better get your heads cleared out -- and on straight. Don't be fooled.

Otherwise you'll allow all these words to become the new mantra. And by the time you're my age NYC will be like some bad version of Sao Paolo or Hong Kong (my apologies to both cities, neither of which I've visited -- but I understand that both are nearly an endless sea of mid-range apartment blocks and neither is the better for it).

[lofter1]

The blogger also skirts around the fact that the proposed zoning for the LES does include areas long Delancey, Houston, Allen and other main thoroughfares where tall buildings will be allowed -- but the inner blocks with smaller & narrower streets will have zoning for lower buildings / less dense population. Far from what he writes the zoning proposed is not the same area-wide.

And take a walk along the Bowery from Grand Street north -- in the last two years a number of tall buildings (20+ stories) have gone up -- and at least four more are in the pipeline. Some are good buildings. Some are horrid. Zoning won't govern the sstyle or design of what is built.

Some developers care what the city looks like. Others don't. We have ample examples of that already.

[ablarc]

Some are good buildings. Some are horrid. Zoning won't govern the style or design of what is built.
And yet it seems a matter of some importance to nearly everyone...

Surely someone can come up with a mechanism (NOT a formula!!) to accomplish this.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Pa-tooey http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/images/icons/icon13.gif
LOL!

I get the sense when I read articles like this that the common perception is that a significant percentage of Manhattan is zoned as historic.

I haven't been able to find one map that shows them all, but it's a lot less than most would think.

[ablarc]

^ Now don't y'all seize on a small component of this man's well-reasoned screed and magnify it into distortion. Here's his principal point, and it's a hard one to argue with:

"I want my property values, my unobstructed views, and my cute little neighborhood — and I want them now!!!" And to hell with everyone else.

This may be the way to preserve select neighborhoods, but it's not the way to preserve the whole city. Long-range sustainability planning for New York can succeed only if it is a whole city process — if it requires all of us to take responsibility for all of it, by more equitably distributing the demands of growth across every neighborhood.

Decisively turning back the proposed downzoning of the East Village and Lower East Side thus represents an important opportunity that may not return for some time. For should this downzoning become law, it will consolidate New York's move away from a whole city approach.

Together with the Chelsea Plan of 1999, it will signal the ascendancy of those "New Yorkers" whose selfish, dogged fixation against tall buildings of any kind has nothing whatsoever to do with the real-world growth demands that will be placed on New York's doorstep over the next few decades. And if history is any guide, NIMBYs are not inclined to loosen their grip on the law, once they get it in their teeth.
I don't think he's arguing for a free-for-all in historic districts, just a modicum of reasonableness. As it is, we actually do have a free-for-all, and it's entirely the NIMBYs' game.

[ZippyTheChimp]

^
I don't disagree with much of what he states, but if you're going to present a coherent argument, you should avoid statements such as:

And so we wade, at last, into the foggy, furry deep of preservation society politics. New York City enacted its landmarks law and established its Landmarks Preservation Commission in the immediate wake of the demolition of Penn Station in 1963. But ever since Landmarks Preservation was created and Brooklyn Heights named the City's first historic district in 1965, preservation in New York has been conducted on two fronts: individual buildings and discrete neighborhoods of buildings.

And with development pressures mounting, especially in Manhattan, more and more of the City's preservation battle lines are being drawn around neighborhoods. Preservation is less about keeping good buildings in than about keeping all buildings of a certain kind out. Put bluntly, preservation has become the stalking horse for a development agenda pegged to anti-tall, anti-modern taste.

It's not surprising that development pressures are most sharply felt in Manhattan, which includes 44 of the City's 78 historic districts; indeed, the existence of these historic districts contributes to the pressures.
This is a ridiculous distortion. Most of those 44 historic districts are not not neighborhoods at all. And development pressure existed in the pre-preservation Manhattan of 100 years ago, the driving force which led to consolidation into the present NYC.

The very wording - and so we wade at last...

[pianoman11686]

This article is really beyond the pale. The author is using these few examples (of not very good design) to push his own agenda to dump landmark protections.

On the contrary, it seems he's in favor of preservation, where it makes sense. Asking to reevaluate the way we designate historic districts and set broad zoning guidelines for entire neighborhoods is not at all the equivalent of "dumping landmark protections." Similarly...

He uses lots of words -- but when it comes down to it all he has is a bad idea: more growth everywhere.

If he were in favor of more growth everywhere, he'd just ask to do away with zoning entirely. ;) Instead, he takes on an issue that is oft-overlooked in these debates: certain neighborhoods, on account of being located adjacent to historic/low-rise districts, unfairly take up the burden of massive developments. Logic indicates that if you take away unequal distribution of height/bulk, you'll be able to increase overall density to the point where it can accommodate the population growth, without producing the undesirable result of concentrated nodes of height/bulk (a la 6th Avenue in Chelsea).

It seems that the author is also playing with the term "neighborhood", which is a much broader term in NYC than what is delineated by Historic District lines. He also seems to be saying that each and every BLOCK throughout the city should have to take its share of bigger buildings. How horrid would that be? And for him to state that the neighborhood of Chelsea -- which is much larger than the blocks of the Chelsea Historic District -- is not accomodating to new growth or participating "in sustainability" and does not "want to" absorb new larger buildings & population means that this author has not taken either the time or the effort to walk a few blocks to the east or the west, where new big buildings are going up in wide areas of Chelsea along both 6th & 10th Avenues.

He's only questioning the misappropriation of the "neighborhood" concept that leads to ludicrous debates (such as concerning 980 Madison) devolving into "it's not appropriate for this area." What is meant by "area" is, technically, the boundaries of a historic district. But, step one block outside it, and technically, it's allowed. Logical? Hardly. A function of special interest and power-wielding by important neighborhood residents? Too often the case.

I don't want to live in a NYC where each and every block has 30+ story buildings. Our city is better for having the variation afforded by Historic Districts and Landmark regulations. And full blocks with open sky above. That is what you will lose if you toss out those protections.

And yet he agrees with you once again: variation is good. But when you limit the height of buildings in an entire district, you get a proliferation of Avalon Chrysties. Do you want to live in that kind of NYC?

[pianoman11686]

Back to the future of L.E.S.; District plan revives

Volume 19 Issue 53 | May 18 -24, 2007
By Alyssa Giachino
Downtown Express (http://downtownexpress.com/de_210/backtothefuture.html)

Neighborhood preservationists are revving their engines again on the Lower East Side, this time with a broader coalition of support, reviving a proposal to designate a historic district that ran into determined opposition last year.

A new group calling itself the Lower East Side Preservation Coalition is interested in designating a 20-block area as a historic district through the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The proposed district would run from E. Houston St. to just below Canal St. and encompass the commercial and residential strip along Allen, Orchard, Ludlow and Essex Sts.

Longtime residents are alarmed by the area’s rapid development, and fear that the legacy of generations of immigrant families may be wiped away by new projects.

“There have been concerns by neighbors that the neighborhood is losing its historical fabric,” said Margaret Hughes, director of the Immigrant Heritage Project at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Hughes said the neighborhood’s immigrant, labor and social service history should be protected.

“Through the buildings, those stories can be told,” she said.

The preservation coalition has sent out letters in English and Chinese to more than 400 property owners in the area, offering to meet with them to discuss suitable design guidelines that would protect the building facades, most of which date from the late 19th century.

“We’re more than willing to sit down with people and see what their concerns are,” Hughes said. “We can give additional support and have additional conversations.”

The coalition made a brief presentation at the May 10 Community Board 3 Parks, Recreation and Landmarks Committee meeting, and plans to return in July to make a full presentation and ask for formal support for the project.

A year ago, the Tenement Museum introduced the proposal and was met with fierce opposition from property owners.

To bolster support for its proposal, the museum has formed the new coalition. Other coalition members include the Historic Districts Council, Eldridge Street Project, East Village Community Coalition, Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association, Artists Alliance, City Lore, Jewish Museum and the Central Labor Council.

Meanwhile, over the past year, development has continued on the Lower East Side. New hotels and condominiums are sprouting throughout the area, many looming large over the older five-or-six-story buildings.

“There is terrifying development going on in the area,” said Simeon Bankoff, director of the Historic Districts Council. “We usually talk about development eroding an area. This is not eroding. It is eradicating it, it is smashing it down flat.

“There is surprising architectural detail that shows how successive waves of immigrants arrived, lived and went to school in this area,” he said.

The district is already honored by its inclusion in the National Historic Register, under the National Park Service. The national registry, however, does not include regulations limiting development, and the coalition members feel the best way to ensure preservation is through city designation as a landmark area.

“If it’s not landmarked, we will continue to see the types of development we see now that are out of scale and out of character with the existing neighborhood, as long as the market will bear it,” Bankoff said.

Few property owners have joined the coalition.

Sion Misrahi, a Lower East Side real estate developer, believes that landmarking will do more harm than good. He said historic district status would drive up costs for small property owners who can ill afford the delays often associated with bureaucracy involved for minimal changes like replacing broken windows.

“The Lower East Side is about the little guy, always has been, always will be,” Misrahi said. “It’s going to really harm the individual entrepreneur dramatically.”

Misrahi predicts landmarking would attract outside developers who would “swallow up” small property owners, putting rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartment dwellers at risk of displacement, as well as discouraging new merchants from moving in.

“We have plenty of other areas that can be zoned landmark. It doesn’t have to be the commercial strip,” Misrahi said. “The city needs growth and the growth has to come in areas that are supported by public transportation.”

Coalition members dispute claims that historic district designation would drive up costs. Bankoff said the historic district would encourage investors with long-term interests, as opposed to speculators interested in fixing a building up for a quick sell.

“It will not raise costs perceptibly more than being a good steward of your building will,” he said. “If you have let your building deteriorate and you want just a quick fix, then yes, it will raise costs.”

Bankoff pointed to other historic districts in the city that have benefited from landmarking, which advocates say improves property values over time.

“There have been some very successful commercial and residential areas that survived being landmarked and prospered,” he said.

The Blue Moon Hotel has been touted as the kind of development that is sensitive to the neighborhood’s historical value while transforming a tenement for new use. Owner Randy Settenbrino added three new floors to the five-story building, but preserved the original exterior architecture and incorporated many historic elements into the rooms.

“Everything that’s of genuine value costs more. That’s just the way the world works,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that what’s here should be disregarded. The workmanship that’s here from 100 years ago is more valuable that a glass structure.”

The coalition has won the support of Councilmember Alan Gerson, who wrote a letter to the Landmarks Commission endorsing the project.

“The Lower East Side community is reeling from the destruction of precious examples of its cultural heritage,” Gerson wrote. Noting that his own family lived in the neighborhood, he added, “Should the Lower East Side tenement streetscape be lost, New Yorkers and national and international visitors will lose an important link to the rich cultural history of immigrants and migrants to New York City.”

State Senator Martin Connor sent a letter last week to the Landmarks Commission also expressing support for the plan.

© 2007 Community Media, LLC

[pianoman11686]

May 23, 2007

http://www.missrepresentation.com/archives/2007/05/whenever_anyone.html

Whenever anyone says 'Historic Preservation' I reach for my hoary cliches. I have immigrant creds. A kind of middling, inconstant cred (did I make that obvious enough?), leaving me at the short end of the stick, regardless of which I grab: on one hand, you have those who draw the line at Mayflower passengers; at the other, you have the expectation of speaking the native language at home and every meal is a Miramax -- sorry, Weinstein Company -- Lives piece/book/film package waiting to happen.

I now live in the 'richest' immigrant neighborhood left in lower Manhattan. You know, the one with Pianos and Clinton Street Baking, those bastions of immigrant experience. Our standard bearer is the Tenement Museum -- the Lil' Museum that Could -- could, you know, drop $7 mil on two tenements, and then try to foist on the neighborhood a historic district designation that portends endless committee meetings about the best way to 'preserve' low quality construction in the name of authenticity and federal tax breaks. Joy.

I don't know that a generalized history of immigrants can, or should, be written. The breadth and depth is a fascinating truth to the history of this city. And, like it or not, it is migrating east to places like Jackson Heights. Immigrant tales are nomadic by definition, and immigrants, if my direct experience is accurate in any way, are in a hurry to jettison large swaths of their distant and recent past. Until of course, they can send their kids to good schools, who then grow up wanting to be film students, historic preservationists, and dilettante bloggers.

Though some neighborhoods resist the process, the is path entrenched, if the cultures aren't: move in, move up, move out. The cycle of alienation and poverty drives aggressive assimilation, and then something I'll leave to faceless CNN pundits to argue about. The physical remnants are rather arbitrary (marginal, cheap, crowded), and in constant flux: if the population is fixed, improvements follow, if they are transient, then they are displaced by new waves of economic aspirants. The apartments in these 'authentic' buildings are unexceptional in every way possible. The only aspect that might truly be informative culturally would be trying to inhabit one with 6 or 10 roommates, and that isn't an option, no matter how much you are a winsome NYU student with a daddy who has some leftover office space.

I never understood the urge that impelled historic preservationists. They always struck me as less capable archivists (I used to live in one of the preservation capitals). Busybodies, mostly. People who professed a Caleb Carr sensibility. And a good generation or two removed from the economic and social struggles of any immigrant. Even though my maturation -- design, academic, life -- happened under the guise of a preservation instinct inherited a decidedly more sinister social order, I don't find the ideological bases to be all that significant. It really is the urge to tell the neighbors how tall their grass should be, or what color to paint the windows that drives all this action, and you can find those folks across the political spectrum.

So the Tenement Museum, spreading like the plague that is any museum, wants to lock down all of of CB3. The local property owners, a considerable number of whom are immigrants and their descendants, raised a collective middle finger. The counter-argument of 'sensitive redevelopment' is the Blue Moon Hotel, which, like the other nearby nasty blue project, is a piece of shit standing proudly over Delancy, a series of hopelessly bad design decisions. Which, to some degree, is historically accurate. As true as it is that do gooder preservation regulations will inevitably inhibit what you can do to your hard-won property, it is likewise certain than any immigrant-rich neighborhood will feature truly abominable architectural experiments. That's irony, I guess.

It's tiresome to see regional planning wedged under the guise of preservation. Because those preservationists often don't know or care about the utility -- nay, the necessity -- of good city planning, they really do end up worried about window detailing. In neighborhoods where some semblance of quality was evident at it's genesis, this isn't a bad thing (and, really, anything to stop the profusion of cables that dangle from the front of every apartment building thanks to lazy phone and cable installers is a good idea), but since the only thing worth preserving in the entirety of this neighborhood is the quality of the brick work, the one effect a preservation code is quick to ensure is accelerated gentrification, since no one wants to have to hire a lawyer every time they need to fix a window.

Then again, as long as the Tenement Museum keeps buying up buildings, at least those last few immigrant who get pushed out can at least come back and see the place their landlord didn't fix the heat for six months while charging usurious rents, all of it carefully shellaced and plaqued.

IT'S NOT ALL wrong to have this conversation because it does underscore the importance to assert that a city government has the duty to establish order and regulation for growth. The canard that undermining the market in the form of regulation is bad for overall economic growth is usually proffered at this point in the argument, though anyone who still falls for it has never been to SoHo. As attractive a template as SoHo is to some, especially now that the decline of the dollar has pretty much affixed a 'Kick Me' sign on our collectives backs for every tinpot Euronaire you can find, it is not a template that can be stamped out willy-nilly. Yet, if you look at the map of Manhattan, you will find that mostly this is the plan. And looking both local and further afield, you will see the ancillary effects: Atlantic Yards, waterfront development in LIC and Williamsburg, all if it engineered to benefit most acutely those with the least civic interest: developers and their amoral lackeys: Scarano and Kondylis. Though Scarano, being a clever sot, has evolved (if such a term can be fairly used) himself into the source vector.

Back in the hood, the effects can be readily summarized by the action on the corner of Ludlow and Houston. Head of the nightlife snake no one likes, home to the most storied food establishment in the LES, and now inextricably soiled by an intervention that makes the cheeky irony of Red Square look inspired instead of just craven. 'The Ludlow' promises to be the 'oughts Christodora House, and its presence and success leads inevitably to more dire discussions: last week, it was rumored that the owners of Katz's are considering cashing in.

And what do you say to them? That their success and commitment to the neighborhood, which extends decades, should justify penalizing them while carpetbaggers are carpet bombing our neighborhood with residential carbuncles of every stripe? There is no way that promises to retain the character of the original, one of the most pleasant dining rooms in the city, of any scale, can be effectively carried out. The only way to truly do this would be to prop up what ever payout mechanism the Katz's folk pursue (but you can bet it will be shilled as 'luxury') on top of jacks while the original Katz's squats underneath like the Little House. It would be both effective and an honest representation, so you can be sure there's no chance.

Posted on May 23, 2007 05:12 PM

Miss Representation. Observations on the physical life of New York City, presented by a roman face name.

[antinimby]

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