Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In our quest to bring you a wide range of urban thought and action, Urban Omnibus has, over the past two years, shared perspectives on the social and environmental promise of vertical density, on the rich diversity of New York’s housing typologies, and on the specific social and cultural conditions of certain New York neighborhoods, from Jackson Heights to the East Village to East New York. This week, Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro brings those three themes together in a historical snapshot of Starrett City, a major housing development built between 1972 and 1976 in Southeastern Brooklyn.

Starrett City’s history is singular, formed in the urban crosscurrents of race, class, housing policy and the ever-evolving idea of community. As Genevro delved deeper into this story, speaking with long-time residents and some of the people who helped create and manage the development, she found much more than an account of how a fascinating New York neighborhood got to be that way. She found a thought-provoking counter-example to trends in housing and urban policy that prioritize individualized kinds of built form and ownership over shared resources and collective aspiration. 

The need to rethink shared resources is a recurring theme in innovative thinking about housing current and future urban populations. Just last week, the Architectural League joined with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council to unveil some provocative schemes for residential units and buildings that address New York’s shortage of housing for single adults and other “unconventional” households — households that form the large majority in the city these days. The schemes are part of the Making Room project, and were produced by four teams of architects whom CHPC and the League commissioned to test what kinds of housing could be produced for New Yorkers if certain housing regulations and standards were reconsidered. The architects’ proposals and the proceedings of the Making Room symposium will be available very soon on the Making Room website and the Architectural League’s website. One of the threads connecting the proposals was an emphasis on shared facilities and common spaces, which poses some interesting questions about the very idea of “home.”

In thinking about these questions, New Yorkers have a number of rich traditions to draw on. The cooperative housing model is much more ingrained here than in other cities. The diversity of our multifamily housing stock already relies inherently on sharing — boiler systems, lobbies, hallways — and on the intensive use of our streets and other public places. Looking a little deeper into the social story that inhabits the built environment — in this case, the story behind one of the last New York City developments built on the tower-in-the-park model — can only help illuminate new thinking about the relationship between people and buildings, and just might challenge us to question some of our basic assumptions about house, home and the American landscape. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user C-Monster

Some months ago I was asked to take part in a series of lectures on the reverberations of the idea of “house” in American culture. Being a New Yorker, I immediately moved away from “house” and towards “home” and “apartment.” To my mind, American mythmaking has given far too much weight to “house.” What interests me more is the idea of home and the many, many different ways Americans construct that. If the idea of “house” didn’t wield so much influence, what might that mean for public policy?

I have been intrigued by Starrett City for quite a while, since spending time in the neighboring district of East New York working on Architectural League projects on housing, park and community design. Starrett — renamed Spring Creek Towers in 2002 — is a community that works. It is one of the most racially integrated areas of the city; it is safe; and if the buildings themselves seem uninspired on the exterior, they nevertheless provide accommodating, affordable housing for moderate income New Yorkers in a well-tended landscape. There is a large group of residents who feel deeply connected to Starrett/Spring Creek Towers and who feel that it provides all they are looking for in a place to live. So the question is: How did a group of high-rise, unlovely brick buildings designed on the much-maligned tower-in-the-park model and built on a former landfill on the very edge of Brooklyn ever manage to become “home”?

THE SITE
The 46 residential towers of Starrett City, along with parking garages, a power plant, sports center and shopping center, were built from 1972 to 1976 on a large, marshy, city-owned site in southeast Brooklyn. Since the late 1960s, efforts had been made to develop the site, which offered the possibility of creating a very large number of new housing units without having to relocate current residents. The project site, between Flatlands Avenue and the Shore Parkway on the edge of Jamaica Bay near the Brooklyn/Queens border, had been used as a landfill. It was located across a small inlet from the Italian and Jewish neighborhood of Canarsie, and on its north side abutted East New York, which had changed during the 1950s and ‘60s from working-class Italian and Jewish to largely low-income black and Hispanic residents.

THE POLITICAL CLIMATE
New York City in 1972 was a city under stress. Crime was high and increasing; racial tensions were inflamed, the city’s manufacturing job base was disappearing, and its fiscal situation was deteriorating. Liberal Republican John Lindsay was mayor. He had attempted to introduce new approaches to planning, experimented with decentralization of control of the schools, and made an effort to integrate residential neighborhoods through introducing scatter-site public housing. But the ambitious 1969 plan for the city, developed by the City Planning Department, was never enacted; the effort at school decentralization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville eventually resulted in an enormously destructive teachers’ strike; and attempts to integrate New York neighborhoods produced an tense situation surrounding the Housing Authority’s proposal to build a project in the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills. In general, there was widespread skepticism about the motives and capabilities of liberal-led government.

THE PROJECT
Work to develop the landfill site had been begun by the United Housing Foundation (UHF), a union coalition that had developed a large number of cooperative apartments in New York over the years. UHF and its leader, Abraham Kazan, were pioneers in the development of workers’ cooperatives in New York City, and had created a substantial body of well-built, carefully managed, desirable and long-lasting housing that continues to this day to account for a very significant portion of New York City’s middle-income housing stock. For this and other projects, Kazan and the UHF worked with the architect Herman Jessor, who devoted his entire 60+ year career to the design of housing for workers, including the more than 40,000 units built by the United Housing Foundation in such projects as Penn South, Hillman Houses, and Co-op City. Jessor was known for his mastery of construction technology and building and zoning codes, and a superbly honed capacity to deliver the greatest possible amount and most practically usable space in his apartments.

Penn South

Hillman Houses

Co-op City and Baychester

In keeping with its other projects, the United Housing Foundation envisioned the Twin Pines development — as Starrett City was initially called — as a cooperative. But rising construction, financing and energy costs, and the fact that UHF was simultaneously developing Co-op City in the Bronx, forced the organization to sell the unfinished development. It found a willing buyer in the Starrett Company. Starrett saw potential in taking over the project because of a recent change in the tax laws, making it possible to sell tax shelters for low and moderate income rental (but not co-op) housing and thereby providing a very lucrative benefit to investors.

In the volatile racial climate of early-’70s New York, the change from a cooperative project to a rental project generated a great deal of controversy, because many residents of nearby Jamaica Bay neighborhoods equated rentals with low income black tenants and feared that the new project would “tip” the Brooklyn shore to all minority tenancy. To get the project approved, Starrett Housing Corporation promised the city’s Board of Estimate that it would create and sustain an integrated development with a 70 percent white population, which was the figure the developers believed would prevent the project from “tipping.”

Starrett City under construction

AN INTEGRATED COMMUNITY
Starrett hired a Lindsay administration housing official named Robert Rosenberg to create the integrated project that Starrett had promised the Board of Estimate — but which the company had no idea how to deliver. Realizing his task was first of all a marketing challenge, Rosenberg made a number of moves to make the development more attractive and to reinforce the sense that this was a fresh new community. He insisted on completing the buildings near the Shore Parkway first, rather than on the north near Flatlands. Prospective tenants would come into the development from the water side, rather than passing through the deteriorated blocks of East New York. He invested more in the landscaping than had originally been budgeted, and built an on-site sports club. He added canopies to the buildings, built a shopping center, and successfully lobbied to have an elementary school built on the site, with lots of parking that proved to be a significant attraction for teachers. He created a private security force for the project.

Making the apartments themselves appealing required less effort: the fact that the original architectural program was for cooperative units meant that they were larger than typical New York City rental apartments. Jessor designed apartment buildings from the inside out, with cross-ventilation in the bedrooms, entry foyers and windowed kitchens. Rosenberg skillfully used all these features in his marketing. He organized the first focus groups ever employed in multifamily rental housing, and he made the first television ads for a rental development.

He also managed the tenant selection process to make every building and every floor integrated. In 1988, 12 years after the development opened, an article in The New York Times called Starrett City perhaps the most integrated area of New York City: 62% white, 23% black, 9% Hispanic and 6% Asian or people of mixed race. Twenty years later, in 2007, the Starrett City census tract was 32% white, 41% black and 19% Hispanic. How these levels of integration were initially achieved — through the use of separate waiting lists for white and minority tenants — was the subject of a suit brought by the NAACP, which was settled in 1987 with an agreement that Starrett City would increase the number of apartments made available to minority applicants and that 20 other New York State housing projects built under the Mitchell-Lama program would set integration goals. This settlement was challenged by the Reagan Justice Department, which argued that the waiting lists constituted illegal use of quotas. This argument prevailed and the use of multiple waiting lists was ended.

Notwithstanding the controversy and attention that surrounded the suits, something significant — a community — had been established at Starrett City. Whether because of Rosenberg’s skillful marketing, or the fact that he and his tenant relations staff had an ample budget to fund tenant clubs and activities, or something about the self-selection of the tenants, or whether it was the aspiration to integration itself, Starrett residents seem, from the start, to have perceived their development as something particular and appealing.

Ellie Mandell, the white president of the local school board, told a newspaper reporter in 1988: “We want to live in an integrated community, that’s what we’re all about. Maybe we didn’t do so well in our generation, but we hope the kids who are growing up here together will do better.” Spencer Holden, a black resident and president of the Onyx Society, a benevolent association, told the same reporter: “I have lived all over New York and this is 1,000 percent better than any other neighborhood. I’m not saying everyone’s just nice, nice, nice. But when you’ve got blacks, Jews, Italians, all living together on the same floor, you’re not going to be yelling crazy things. I’m not saying everybody loves everybody else, but everybody lives with everybody else in a comfortable civilized manner.”

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

In over 20 years as the executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

Frank Duffy is a British architect, noted for his research and design work on the changing nature of the modern office. He is the author of Work and the City, one of five books in Black Dog’s Edge Futures series that explores the impact of global climate change on various aspects of social life, including education, transportation, community and Duffy’s own realm of expertise: the nature – and spaces – of work. Duffy’s command of this topic is rare, honed in the thirty-six years since he co-founded DEGW, an architectural firm whose emphasis on social-scientifically informed space-planning practices, organizational consultancy and post-occupancy evaluation makes it singular in the field.

In the book, Duffy argues against contemporary cities’ irrationally low use of their existing office space. In so doing, he echoes in unexpected ways Robin Chase’s call to maximize our use of excess capacity in transportation. And he foreshadows Laura Forlano’s future-facing analysis of new intentional communities springing up in self-organized work environments.

On a recent visit to New York, Duffy took Rosalie Genevro, executive director of the Architectural League, on a walk around Lower Manhattan, to reflect on our office stock and what it means in the context of our changing city.

Read an excerpt of their conversation below, followed by an audio-slideshow of their walk. -C.S.

Rosalie Genevro: Do you see any glimmer of hope in our recent and current financial meltdown?

Frank Duffy: I think the crisis might stimulate a beneficial thought process, in two principal ways. The first is related to the question of sustainability, which I think is going to work its way through the whole system. And the second of course is information technology, which is changing the nature of organizations. The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore, because organizations are always bigger or smaller and constantly changing. At least half of them operate in a virtual world, in a placeless world. The crisis is going to demonstrate that there’s too much space. And a lot of people are going to be frightened by that. Hopefully that fright will lead to some beneficial realizations.

RG: It may be a very painful transition – it seems to me that we already have a lot of empty space that won’t be absorbed because it won’t be needed.

You also make the argument in Work and the City that even in terms of existing space that is occupied, we use it at an irrationally low level – it is just not inhabited much of the time.  Even for people whose interest is in making money from the built environment, that argument doesn’t seem to have penetrated.

Buildings aren’t made out of glass, concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.FD: Actually, I think it will penetrate eventually.  I thought, twenty years ago when I spend a lot of time encouraging development, that facilities managers would bring some intelligence into the system; but instead of thinking about the supply chain, they were much more interested in their own deliverables rather than longer-term use value. The vertical silos that exist within these very large corporations pose another very important problem. We need to weave together, keeping the end-user’s point of view in mind, the organizational silos within which, say, human resources departments look after human resources departments and information technology staff interact only with information technology staff. In that context, it is very difficult to create organizations that are agile.

That being said, there are many things about the American office that are extremely intelligent that Europeans didn’t necessarily pick up on until much later. Americans were less interested in the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and supported the skills of people like interior designers, space planners, decorators and others whose scope – within the building – was to meet the short-term needs of five- or ten-year tenants. That system was invented here. It’s a wonderful system. And it’s a perfect example of not getting everything “right in a night” but leaving scope for change and adaptation. That’s the principle that I’m trying to articulate in this conversation. Not all design decisions have the same longevity. Buildings aren’t made out of glass and concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.

One of the things I like about New York is the juxtaposition of the old and new in the way that the blocks have been developed. That is a component of the recipe for success of long-term urban fabric: it is capable of being modified internally and externally as social and technological change develops. Older stock has been moved out of exclusive office use into other purposes, older buildings turned into apartments for example.

RG: If we are to build fewer new buildings, how do we decide what’s worth building?

FD: Well, I think you can test that. You can think through the process of working on a floor plate or building section, thinking about what its use-potential is.  If I were a building owner these days, that’s something I’d be interested in: the future potential of existing structures, whether they’ll have to be extensively modified to cope with change or not.

I am very much involved with the Olympics at the moment in London.  The so-called “legacy” and “transitional” phases of the Olympic sites are very important.  We’re trying to do a think-over of a way of designing things that can mutate and develop into other things over time.  One of the curses of architecture is its instantaneity.  The definite statements of each individual building do not necessarily cumulatively add up to something that has got the idea of change built into it.  But urbanism should include that idea, and older cities have had that capacity to accommodate change. The mono-functionality that you see from here very clearly is vulnerable.

Another theme is that the design and use of interstitial spaces – made in the context of the knowledge economy – is becoming more important than the buildings themselves or what happens inside them. So, designing for the full spectrum of uses over a large area, having a mix of uses and then having the principle of change built into that so it can develop and mutate and move from one kind of use to another. These are the fundamental secrets of urbanism.

The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore.RG: How can you design for that? That has always seemed to be the accreted nature of cities. The most interesting places tend not to be the work of one hand, of one designer.

FD: Or one financier. It’s always been difficult, but I think we’ve made it worse by the way in which buildings are financed, procured and developed. Cumulatively, over the course of the twentieth century, this has made each building more and more specific and separate in itself rather than something that adds to a more complex urban fabric.

Certainly, from an architectural and user point of view, I’d think about what different building forms can accommodate, and how ambiguity, choice and potential can be built into design over a long period. Thinking about the buildings themselves in a much more sophisticated way. But also thinking about the nature of the interstitial spaces – who owns them, who manages them, who loves them, who takes advantage of them. That’s something that we have not given enough thought to.

RG: Thinking about the interstitial spaces as providing for serendipity or accommodating the unexpected is very hard to do as a designer.

FD: Well I don’t see why it needs to be so. It’s all about scenarios, thinking through what could happen, and what is fixed.

RG: What’s the appropriate role of the public and public decision-making bodies in all of this?

FD: The city and citizens are two levels.  The city should always fight for the long-term.  The individuals always try to find ways of penetrating the system to make sure that it meets their changing needs.  There are feedback channels that should be built into much more of the urban fabric.

The fascinating paradox of the power of technology and its ability to allow people to choose when and where to work, is that it actually makes more poignant and more important the city-like things that are good at bringing people together. The more we disperse, the more we need to congregate. I think the true nature of a city is discourse, especially in a knowledge economy. It’s about places – serendipitous encounters. That’s another design principle to be brought into urbanism. Places that are valuable because they are unprogrammed and open-ended and allow accidents to happen.

For a long time there was a correlation between the patterns of work and the shape of the building. What’s happening now is that patterns of work are changing faster than the shape of the buildings. And we have models of buildings that are inherently vulnerable because they are not good at accommodating groups, they are not permeable, they make assumptions about levels of occupancy that are untenable and easily refuted. They can’t be changed into anything else.

They’re brittle – they snap, they can only do one trick.

I became aware of this in the 60s and 70s in the regeneration of the decayed industrial cities of the UK – Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham. In order to bring great stretches of the Liverpool docks back into beneficial use, we had to realize that the older buildings – because they were robust and adaptable – could be used for a wide range of purposes apart from what was originally designed. They could be used as art galleries, workshops or hotels, for example.

What’s the lesson there? The lesson is about making a building tough enough to accommodate change, to have enough volume, to have columns in the right places, attractive ceiling heights, a relationship to the sky and the outside that is tolerable. These were considered to be obsolete and useless, but they were brought back to life. So I think the difference is that these newer office buildings are so flimsy – so value-engineered – that they have only a very limited range of utility.

The reinvention of place, the pleasure of place, the use of place for talk, commerce, etc. That’s terrific. To be freed from the “8-hour day.”  These are, in human terms, recent inventions, no older than 200 years. People thought of and used time in a very different way before that.  And we’ll invent something new ourselves. This discussion about the nature of buildings is only a subset of a much broader discourse about the nature of life in what I hope will be a much better world. I don’t think the twentieth century’s my favorite century actually. I think there were one or two things wrong with it.

Click ‘Play’ button below to start slideshow

Interview conducted by Rosalie Genevro. Edited and condensed.
Photos by Cassim Shepard.

We have so much possibility ahead of us.

We have just inaugurated a president who wants to renew every area of our national life – including our cities. President Obama has lived in the three biggest cities in the United States, and it seems clear that he understands and cares about cities and what they mean economically, environmentally and culturally. A true focus on cities, for the first time in a generation, could be a significant part of federal policy.

In New York City in January 2009, we live in an extraordinarily vibrant place that faces huge challenges. We are more aware than ever of how fragile the economic health of the city is, and of how many New Yorkers are already suffering, or on the edge of, economic hardship. Our neighborhoods are going to feel the economic straits of the city government and the city’s households in the year ahead. Beyond our economic vitality – but inextricably connected to it – are the many demands New York faces over the next few decades specifically related to the physical city: how to adapt to climate change and minimize our environmental footprint, rebuild our infrastructure, and provide enough housing and open space to make a comfortable, civilized, just city.

But for all the challenges we face, this is also a time for optimism about the future. From the creative initiatives of forward-looking city agencies, to the self-generated experimentation and investigations of architects and engineers and designers, to the inventive entrepreneurialism of community activists, there is a lot going on in New York that can make the city better. There is a ferment of ingenuity and invention at work that can lead to new ways of generating and distributing energy, of transporting people, of making more beautiful public spaces, of rethinking how we build schools or configure our workspaces or dispose of our garbage. Artists and designers and architects are creating visualizations of the processes and flows of the city that can radically enhance our understanding of how the city works, so that we can design it to work better.

Much of this activity remains just out of sight, and we think it needs to be better known. With Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League wants to cultivate and hybridize the thousand flowers of digital media to engage a large audience in learning and thinking about design and New York City’s physical environment. We want to provide a platform for the written word and for aural and visual information of all kinds; we want the immediacy of a blog and the carefully reasoned perspective of critical writing to stand side by side.

Most of all, we want to connect people with ideas they can use.

We have so much possibility ahead of us, and so much work to do. Please join us.

Rosalie Genevro
Executive Director,
The Architectural League of New York