In 1982, the MTA launched a multi-billion-dollar capital improvement program to rehabilitate the transit system. During that campaign, in 1985, a program was created to introduce original and integrated artworks into MTA stations and spaces and to promote design excellence as part of the rebuilding effort: Arts for Transit. Today, Arts for Transit oversees a number of programs that bring visual art and performance to the MTA network. They are most well-known for the Permanent Art program, which incorporates commissioned works of art into capital construction or renovation projects throughout NYC Transit, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road and NYC Bridges & Tunnels. But their work isn’t limited to the permanent, or even the visual. They showcase the work of photographers in rotating temporary exhibitions, fill unused advertising space with posters by illustrators and other visual artists, and present thousands of musical performances annually at 25 subway and train stations.

Last week, we had a chance to speak with Arts for Transit Director Sandra Bloodworth, an artist herself, who first joined Arts for Transit in 1988 as a manager, before becoming deputy director in 1992 and then director in 1996. While sitting in front of the newly-installed Sol LeWitt in the 59th Street-Columbus Circle station, we talked about the power of art to help turn a failing system around, activate spaces of infrastructure, and improve rider experience and quality of life.

- V.S.

Times Square Mural (2002) © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Times Square–42nd Street Station, A, C, E, N, Q, R, S, 1, 2, 3, 7 lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

Tell us about Arts for Transit and your role there.
I am the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The role of Arts for Transit is really two-fold. One part is arts — visual and performing, the temporary poster program, the Art Cards, Lightbox, and the larger mission of commissioning permanent art for stations being rehabilitated under a capital program. We have over 230 works of art installed in MTA NYC Transit, Long Island Rail Road, Metro North, and MTA Bridges and Tunnels’ facilities.

The other hat we wear is that of urban design and promoting design excellence in the agency. We advocate that good design does not have to cost more money. In fact, really excellent design can save you money. The best example of how we work in that role is what happened when the MTA decided to implement vending machines for MetroCard sales. The MTA wanted to make sure riders not only accepted the new system, but saw it as a good option, a better option. In conjunction with NYC Transit, Arts for Transit worked with the designers, Antenna Design, to ensure the machines were user friendly, appealing, and not incongruous with the station environment. The machines were installed in 1999 and they have served us quite well. People like them and use them. And they showed that a government agency can change how it does business in a positive way.

Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel Clock (1992) © R. M. Fischer, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, MTA Bridges and Tunnels. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Paul Warchol.

In a way, the same thing is true with the art installations, though that’s a less definable topic. We started introducing art into the subway environment at a time when the system was on the brink of collapse, in the mid-1980s. The concept of putting art into that environment was a novel idea.

Around that time, New York City’s Percent for Art legislation was passed, which requires that one percent of the budget of capital projects is allocated for art. Even before that was passed into law, the MTA knew it was pending and used that momentum to advance the idea of dramatically changing the underground environment. Ronay Menschel, an MTA board member at the time, was the one who realized this would need to be managed internally and played a key role in establishing Arts for Transit. Wendy Feuer was hired as the founding director. Arts for Transit immediately engaged with the role of aesthetics within the architecture and industrial design of the MTA, and advanced the idea that if we’re going to spend real money on improving the system, let’s be sure to design it well.

What was the intent in installing quality artwork in the transit system? Did you want to enrich the community experience? Did you want to interrupt the routine commute and make people engage with the space?
It engages the public, yes, but it also sends a huge message that someone truly cares about this space and, accordingly, about the riders. People see the MTA as this big, anonymous agency. They might recognize some of the leadership from the press, but they don’t often think about the people that are behind the scenes, the architects, the engineers, the Arts for Transit folks, the designers, the rapid transit guys, all of these people that get up every day to make this all happen, or, in the mid-‘80s and ‘90s, were driven to turn this place around. Introducing quality art tells the public that there are all these people invested in the space.

Blooming (1996) © Elizabeth Murray, Lexington Avenue–59th Street Station, 4, 5, 6, F, N, R lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

These are works by the same artists you see in museums — Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Murray — but now you can see them on your way to the museums. Elizabeth was one of the first major recognized artists that did a project with us. She waived her fee and gave the public a phenomenal project at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. When developing the collection, if you will, we don’t only look to the art world. We also look to who is riding the trains and using these spaces — and those worlds very often overlap. The real challenge is to select works that speak to the ridership, that have a relevance to the place where they are installed. And I mean that in a more conceptual way, I’m not talking about only pictoral images referencing the site, like Heins & LaFarge’s depictions of Columbus’ caravel over on the Columbus Circle IRT platform — it’s a myth, by the way, that the caravels were meant to provide station information to people who couldn’t read the name tablet. They were purely ornamental.

We’re sitting in front of the perfect example of how the art can be about the people and the place, Sol LeWitt’s “Whirls and twirls (MTA)” at 59th Street-Columbus Circle. LeWitt captured the movement of the subway, the flow of people through the station. When you look at this artwork, you feel the motion around you, the energy — and the riders get it, it’s intuitive, we don’t have to explain it.

We’ve always felt that it’s not our role to be a gallery. We are creating work that becomes a daily part of people’s lives, as they travel their same route every day — or, when they take a different route, we want them to be excited about seeing something new.

Whirls and twirls (MTA) (2009) © Sol LeWitt, 59th Street-Columbus Circle Station, A, B, C, D, 1 lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

How do you identify the artists you want to work with? The commissions range from the renowned, like LeWitt, to the lesser known. What’s the selection process?
At 59th Street-Columbus Circle, we had the opportunity to invite Sol LeWitt to create one of his wall drawings for this station. However, the vast majority of our projects are the result of an extensive selection process defined by MTA policy, with the understanding that we’re procuring artwork.

Every time we do a project we invite artists to submit through an open call on our website. Now, because everything is digital, we keep a bank of entries and review all artists for every project, though we ask artists to notify us if they are particularly interested in any specific commission.

We then have two meetings with a selection panel, which changes each time and is comprised of arts and cultural professionals and community advisors. In conjunction with our government and community relations staff, we work closely with the local community boards, to help us understand what the community wants, and to help us communicate how our work relates to them.

We narrow down the field of artists to about four finalists, who then come in for an orientation on the project. We ground them in the space, the architects provide an overview of the design of the station, and we visit the site. Then, they come back to us with a formal proposal. The voting panel selects the proposed artwork they think is right for that location, work that speaks to the community and is of the highest quality.

The process has served us well. We have an amazing collection from a diverse group of artists, both emerging and established.

Given the quality of the artwork, which you talk about as a true collection, what is your approach to maintenance or conservation, especially considering the pieces are installed in highly-trafficked sites that are difficult to keep clean?
We have always known that there would be limited resources to maintain this collection. So we have been rigid in what we allow to be installed into the system, with some exceptions to allow us to reach beyond what we know. Mosaics, ceramics, glass mosaics, those are durable materials. We’ve seen examples where pieces have lasted for over 100 years. So that was a logical direction to take. Many of our works, certainly our underground works, are ceramics or mosaics.

We also work closely with our Stations Department on how they maintain the pieces, and if there’s ever any question, they call us and we work as a consultant. Arts for Transit maintains and repairs things that we can do ourselves. Beyond that, we just want to make sure that we’re keeping our eyes on everything we’ve installed. Staff members are responsible for visiting a portion of the collection bi-annually to do condition reports. We want to be sure that the art is always in the best shape it can be.

You mentioned that you make some exceptions in the type of work you commission, to learn new things and experiment with different materials and media. What are some examples of that? I know that Leo Villareal will be installing his LED light sculpture “Hive” in the renovated Bleecker Street station…
Leo’s piece is a very good example of the kind of exception I was talking about. We worked with our Chief Electrical Engineer Stan Karoly to make sure that the work is durable and can be maintained routinely. The engineers were very excited about his piece, because it really celebrates their field. So yes, we are trying it out as a pilot, to see what our limits are. We probably can’t have twenty projects like Leo’s, but we can have one!

Union Square in Motion (2011) © Anezka Sebek and Joshua Spodek, with Jeanne Kelly, Hilal Koyuncu, Rose Maison, Umut Ozover, Josefina Santos, and Jaqi Vigil. Lightbox project commissioned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

Tell me about some of the temporary projects that fall under the purview of Arts for Transit.
We have a few special projects. For example, we just installed a zoetrope underneath Union Square that was designed by a group of Parsons students. In some ways it is a pilot for us to activate unused advertising space and illustrate how dynamic it can be, and to experiment with new media.

We also have a number of temporary projects that we do on a more routine basis. We have our Transit Poster program and our Art Cards that you see in the trains, which are often created by illustrators and graphic designers. Then we have our Lightbox photography project, which showcases the work of photographers that either relates to transportation, the system or to the local community. Those are on view on the lower level of Grand Central, at the 42nd Street and 6th Avenue station, at Atlantic/Pacific and Bowling Green.

Traveling Dinosaur Chicks (2010) © Takayo Noda. Art Card commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit.

How do you view the interface between the Arts for Transit works and station advertising? Especially as some ads, through technology or design, hover in a more ambiguous creative space — I’m thinking of things like the new 60-foot digital video wall on the other side of this station, currently being used by an Asics ad, or the large MoMA poster installation in the Atlantic/Pacific subway station in 2009.
Yes, advertising is blurring the lines. Those are both 100% advertising campaigns. Some of it is very exciting, but it can be a double-edged sword. We hope that we can capture some of that technology and energy and bring more interactive, video-based works to the public on a limited basis. And it’s no secret that the MTA needs to capture every dollar in order to provide the best service we can. And if any institution has the budget, the funds, to do a campaign, then we support the MTA capturing those dollars.

Also, the visual interface is more than just the advertising and the art. The MTA’s signage is so present in the world’s perception of New York City. If you ask people to visualize words of New York, they’re probably going to see them in Helvetica. We’re an icon of New York now, and it’s important that we keep that in mind when we think about how people interact with these spaces.

Music Under New York performance at 42nd Street-Grand Central

Tell me about the Arts for Transit music program Music Under New York.
There are a lot of myths about Music Under New York. We are not giving licenses or permits to people to play in the subway. Any musician — anyone, really — can go into a subway station and play music or do what they want, as long as they respect the rules of conduct. We are presenting a roster of musicians daily, over 7,000 performances annually, in 25 locations throughout our system, which we identified with our station personnel to make sure we don’t interfere with transit needs. We simply want to present quality music on a regular basis.

We hold auditions every May in Grand Central, and we hold a roster of about 100 acts at any given time. Once you’re in the program, you’re in. For many different reasons musicians move on, so every year we lose about 25 and add about 25.

What are some of the other projects in the works?
We have a number of projects coming up on the Pelham line in the Bronx, and in the Rockaways, either just installed or in the middle of installation. Jason Rohlf will be installing a piece at the Mott Avenue A station. Barbara Grygutis recently did the Whitlock Avenue 6 stop in the Bronx, which received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society’s MASterworks this year — it’s a remarkable project. Barbara designed sculptural furniture that exists within the windscreen. And, of course, the mega-projects: Jean Shin and Sarah Sze are both doing projects in stations along the new 2nd Avenue line, and Xenobia Bailey is doing a piece for the new 7 station at 34th Street. And James Carpenter collaborated with Grimshaw Architects to create a cable net to bring light into the Fulton Transit Center.

Bronx River View (2010) © Barbara Grygutis, Whitlock Avenue Station, 6 line, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Peter Peirce.

You are an artist yourself and you’ve worked with Arts for Transit for 23 years now. How do you define public art? What does it mean to you?
I started working, and still work, in public art because of the engagement between the built environment and the people who are in that environment — myself included. I’m an artist, so I was engaged with this environment before I worked for the MTA, but I felt it would be an incredible opportunity to be part of a team that affects the way your space looks.

People love to beat up on the MTA. But I’m still amazed to be part of an organization that has accomplished this type of change in the public environment. I believe public art changes the quality of life for everyone that walks through here. Maybe they are not aware of how or why, but ultimately it makes people feel good that someone makes this space a place where they might want to be.

And I think it has changed the perception of the New York subway. Plenty of people who ride the subway now don’t remember it when it was in really bad shape. But I remember when it was a sign of hope that if you could turn around the subway, you could change what was happening aboveground too. I believe that those went hand in hand. A lot of credit is given to a lot of different things for how New York turned around. But I believe there was no way it would have happened without the changes underground.

Sandra Bloodworth is the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. As director, she is responsible for the Arts for Transit programs, whose mission it is to commission public art that enhances the transportation environment. In addition to the Arts for Transit award-winning permanent art program, she is responsible for Music Under New York, the Transit Poster program and the Lightbox Project. She represents the MTA on station aesthetics and urban design issues, with a focus on promoting design excellence. She joined Arts for Transit in 1988 as a manager and became deputy director in 1992 and director in 1996. She is the co-author of Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit. Her previous experience includes working as a development associate for the Studio in a School Association. Sandra has taught Visual Art and Urban Design in the Department of Art and Arts Professions graduate program at New York University and studio classes in the fine arts departments at Florida State University and the University of Mississippi. Bloodworth is an artist and holds a B.S. from Mississippi College, an M.A. from the University of Mississippi and an M.F.A. from Florida State University. Bloodworth received the Fund for the City of New York’s 2005 Sloan Public Service Award in recognition of her work in the field of public art.

For all the griping about tourist crowds, corporate control or inauthentic sanitization, no one can doubt Times Square’s status as iconic, legendary and spectacular. In an excerpt from his 2006 book On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, Marshall Berman, a scholar whose Marxist readings of urban history might lead one to expect a dismissal of the area’s redevelopment in the 1990s, writes, “it isn’t as bad, as antiseptic, as suburban, as many of us feared. It’s nice to see that Rudolph Giuliani’s project of turning the keys to the city over to Disney hasn’t turned the city into Disneyland. The thrill’s not gone.”

Of course, much of that thrill comes from the dazzling electric signs, the teeming crowds, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place. But the group responsible for its upkeep, the Times Square Alliance – which was originally formed as a Business Improvement District in 1992 to provide additional security and to clean the streets, and subsequently grew to produce New Year’s Eve, Broadway on Broadway and other large events – also sees Times Square as a fertile canvas for contemporary artists, a unique opportunity to bring individual, creative visions to bear on a popular landscape that we think we know. So Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins hired Glenn Weiss, a veteran arts administrator and curator with a diverse body of work that has ranged from putting on shows at Storefront for Art and Architecture and PS1 in the 1980s to implementing local government public art programs in Seattle and south Florida, to bring public art to Times Square.

Business Improvement Districts are more commonly known for putting on events (alongside traditional maintenance activities) than they are for robust public art programs. Weiss cites other examples, like the Downtown Alliance, the Madison Park Conservancy or the Chicago Loop, as examples of local or community-based groups committed to public art. But few places can claim the sheer number of visitors or the indescribable energy of Times Square. With those unique characteristics in mind, we took Weiss on a walk through Times Square to talk about the place, the role of public art in civic life and some of the art works he has facilitated over the past three and a half years. It was one of his last days on the job, as he prepares to move to Houston to take on yet another exciting challenge at the intersection of community engagement, urban placemaking and contemporary art practice.

– C.S.

What do you do?
For the past three and a half years, I’ve been the manager of public art and design for Times Square. We look for the very best in contemporary arts in all mediums and all forms, and we invite artists to come in and diversify the activities and reputation of Times Square as it is today. We want Times Square to be seen as part of New York as a whole. And since the best in contemporary art and design is part of that whole, we want that to be in Times Square.

I see myself primarily as an arts administrator who also does curatorial work rather than the other way around. The difference is that my goal is to facilitate creative people to do their best work. I’m less concerned with evaluating whether the work is excellent to present or whether it advances the field, I’m evaluating whether or not I can help an artist do something special in a particular place with a particular community. And in Times Square, that community is the 300,000 people who pass through here every day.

Times Square is the most amazing document of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

How did this job come about for you?
When I first heard about this opportunity in Times Square, I was living in Florida, where I managed a public art program and worked in urban design and planning for a suburban, planned community called Coral Springs. I think part of what qualified me for this position – in addition to my experience as a curator in alternative art spaces and as an arts administrator in local government – was a blog about public art I’d been writing for the previous two years or so for ArtsJournal. There were not many people writing consistently on public art at that time.

So you’ve worked with public art in a wide variety of contexts.
When I moved here for this job in 2008, it wasn’t my first time in New York. In the ‘80s, I studied architecture at Columbia, and during that time I became friends with a lot of great artists in the East Village, one of whom is Kyong Park, who founded Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1982. We worked together for two years running Storefront, and we became very engaged in how artists and architects are able to make an impact with their work. We did several major public projects: one dealt with homelessness and how to build shelters, another was our attempt to save Adam Purple’s Garden in the Lower East Side. We didn’t think to label these projects as “public art,” we just thought of ourselves as doing stuff out in the world. To be here, doing that, during those early years was an exceptional experience in my life.

After that, I moved to Seattle, but I simultaneously became the architecture curator at PS1, so I would return to New York to manage the exhibitions I organized up until 1990. When I first moved to Seattle, I curated a series of outdoor exhibitions on people’s front yards. Then I was hired to be the manager of the public art program for King County, which surrounds and includes Seattle. So that’s where I “learned” public art in an official sense.

I’ve heard your early work described as political in nature. Do you think about your work in public art as political?
I don’t. In the ‘80s, in Seattle as well as at PS1 or at Storefront, my work was very clearly political: I wanted to change the world, I wanted to find artists and architects that were interested in changing the world and I wanted to work with them.

In Seattle, after running the public art program for King County, I decided I wanted to be a community activist in my neighborhood, which was a very low income and very diverse community. And what happens when you dedicate yourself to the community is that all those abstract ideas about who is to blame for various kinds of social injustice suddenly seem not to function very well. Not only do you have to work with real people who have wonderfully different ways of doing things, but you also have to start making compromises in order to effect change within your community. When you start to do that, the strategy of being aggressive toward the powerful doesn’t function as well any more.

Given the trajectory of your career — moving from being a curator in the vanguard of art and culture to a role in municipal government instituting public art policy — what does “public art” mean to you? How would you define it?
Public art, as I see it, began as an idea that architecture had failed to humanize its environment, that the bad modernism and strip-down economics of government buildings had left public architecture bereft of any human intimacy. Public art as we think of it today emerged from a passionate urge to bring back that sense of human intimacy.

But these days, architects are finding ways to bring that intimacy into our built environment. So public art, when it works well, becomes about finding ways for artists, administrators and curators to work together – in  collaboration with communities of people who use or visit a particular place – to create the conditions for some new thing to be born.

What does Times Square mean to you?
From 1990 until I moved back here in 2008, I hardly ever visited New York. And in 1990, Times Square was a very different place than it is today! Even when I did live in New York in the ‘80s, I would rarely ever come to Times Square. 42nd Street was very active, whether it was with movies or porn or drugs, but Times Square itself was very quiet. There weren’t even very many electric signs at that time. Other than when people came to see Broadway shows, there was a sense of emptiness.

When I came back for the first time in 2008, it was completely surprising to see the number of people, the number of stores, the kind of transformation to a place that seemed more normal in a way but also not normal at all. Times Square is the most amazing document of 21st century entertainment, of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

There is no other place like it, maybe in the world. Times Square is a place of visceral experience; it is not a place of thought. And making that connection in an artwork – to experience, rather than to thought – can be extremely difficult.

So what was the process for presenting public art in that context?
We started by identifying the public space throughout Times Square, both the plazas and the privately-owned public spaces. We did two open calls for ideas, one in 2009 and one in 2010. Basically we just said “give us your ideas about what you would like to do and we will evaluate the quality of the proposal and the feasibility of actually making it happen within that space.” Our criteria for selection, beyond making sure every proposal considered was functional and safe, prioritized projects that somehow spoke to Times Square and the people who would be here.

When I first came, we started out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with Tattfoo Tan’s giant mural on the front of the bus terminal and then a smaller mural on a fence on 8th Avenue by Kai McBride. Our idea was to go from all these corners because, here in Times Square itself, there is very little space. When the Mayor closed Broadway to traffic, then everything changed.

"Nature Matching System" mural at the Port Authority Bus Terminal | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

How has the public art program interfaced with the urban design changes that happened over the past few years, if at all?
Tim Tompkins is very concerned, and rightly so, that Times Square be a great public space with valuable civic events and people on the ground. The Times Square Alliance did not want Times Square to be just left as an empty plaza or open only to corporate events. The public art program became a kind of demonstration project to show how these plazas could be a benefit to the general public. Remember: on an average day, 300,000 people pass through Times Square.

One thing about Times Square is that an audience is always here, in a way that does not exist when you are in, say, Madison Square Park or in front of the County Court House. So one of the main objectives for artists or designers is to figure out what to do with that audience. How do you engage them, where do they physically place themselves? How do they as a group go in and out?

One of the great projects from Performa in 2009 was Arto Lindsay’s dance performance where a line of fifty dancers slowly made their way through Times Square. I loved the way the crowd dealt with how to keep up with the performance. They had to keep running around ahead of the dancers. So you have the dancers in a line, but the people move in blobs and waves as they try to keep up with the the dancers — and the strange phenomenon is that the crowd didn’t give the dancers any space. They would keep crowding around them again and again, so the crowds become part of the interactive potential for the artist.

Here is another type of interactive project, a piece called Performer by Adam Frank, installed in Anita’s Way, which is the name for the pedestrian passageway of the Bank of America Tower. Adam calls this a “self-affirmation piece.” If you stand in this spotlight on the ground, your presence triggers the sound of beautiful applause for you and only you.

Passersby triggering applause at "Performer" by Adam Frank

Tell me about some other artists and artworks that you brought to Times Square, and how they responded the context they found here.
One of the major ways that visitors to Times Square engage with the place comes from photography and the public’s desire to make a visual record of themselves experiencing something new. As an artist, how do you take advantage of that?

"Valentine Heart" by Gage / Clemenceau | Photos courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

In 2009, Gage / Clemenceau Architects attempted to do just that with Valentine Heart. They made a sculpture of a heart and also designed a little stage in front of the sculpture with up-lights. People waited in line to have their picture taken on the stage with the heart. Gage / Clemenceau understood what people wanted to do and how to create a setting for it in Times Square.

The first and only time we tried using the three billboards at the southern end of Times Square — the NASDAQ, the Reuters, and what was then Panasonic News, which is now the Sony News — was two years ago during Performa ’09. For a piece called Snorks, the artist Loris Greaud had all three screens playing images of fireworks for 20 minutes that relate to a complicated project of underwater animals and fireworks in Abu Dhabi.

We did a piece with the Cuban artist Alexander Arrechea on the NASDAQ Board right after the economic crisis, which was a giant animation of a wrecking ball smashing against the NASDAQ sign. Not only did the public not really recognize what was happening, but even NASDAQ did not necessarily recognize the relationship between the piece and what was going on in the world.

What we found is that for the artists as well as the people who come to Times Square on a daily basis, the memory of being in Times Square and the projection of being in Times Square is almost as important as actually doing the work in Times Square.

"Black Sun" by Alexander Arrechea | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

That seems to reflect what you were saying about people’s primary point of engagement being photos of themselves in this place, the desire to create a memory of having been in a place seems a primary reason that a lot of people come.
People come here to experience the center of New York. For example, my wife’s relatives are from Argentina. When they come to New York, they don’t think about whether or not they might come to Times Square. They have to come to Times Square on a visit to New York.

Another thing that interests me about Times Square is that a lot of the social services remain. Right in front of us is the Woodstock Hotel, which provides services for very low-income seniors, and there are facilities for the homeless nearby. These types of uses may no longer be considered to be part of the character of the place in the way they might have been in the ‘80s or early ‘90s, but the living legacy of the senior center in the Woodstock Hotel is just as much a part of Times Square as the history of the Paramount Theatre, the site of the first youth fan craze for a musician, for Benny Goodman in the ’30s. Years later there was an actual riot for Frank Sinatra, with teen girls fainting as he arrived to perform. These historical moments become part of the density of the experience.

Do you consider the billboards and signs themselves to be a form of public art?
No, I don’t. They are very infrequently used to engage or empower an individual community or to bring the artist and the community together. But I do think what makes Times Square unique is the way that it fills up your whole cone of vision and your peripheral vision: everywhere you look, there’s this lighting and this crazy energy that you don’t experience in physical space anywhere else in the world. When you’re here, you feel the space of it as opposed to a combination of the particular buildings or other individual components.

But, speaking of billboards, a little known fact is that 1 Times Square on the southern end has no occupants, aside from a Walgreens on the ground floor. It is completely economically supported by the advertising from the billboards.

Public art by the Red Stairs | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

You’ve worked at the county level in Seattle, at the town level in south Florida, and in Times Square you are working at the relatively small scale of a district, albeit one of the most iconic districts in the world. In terms of having a coherent, influential or successful public art program, do you like working at the district level?
I think the great public art administrators and curators in the country are those that have a single place of operation where they continue to work over and over again. Of course there are groups like Creative Time that do great work pretty much everywhere. But, for me, a sustained effort will produce better results than what’s possible in a county or a large city or a state, where you would have to come into a community one time, learn once, listen once, and then leave. I think it’s far more difficult at larger scales to do work that’s the same level of quality, unless you are very lucky or have the benefit of an artist’s sheer determination to do a great job.

What’s next for you?
I’m going to run the Art League Houston, which is an art center near downtown Houston. My goal is to expand its capabilities in serving the artist community and those people who want to make art – fusing adult education with community engagement. I have this idea in my head, after being here in the land of the virtual, to get back to something my parents dreamed of in the ’50′s and ’60s, which was for people to make art together. In their generation they called it a hobby; in ours we call it Do-It-Yourself; but whatever we call it, there’s a desire for physical and collaborative activities, for people to come together and make art together. I’d like to try to help create space for that in Houston.

…

Glenn Weiss has maintained a diverse professional practice assisting governments and civic organizations with physical transformations of cities and neighborhoods through urban planning, architecture, landscape and public art. Since May 2008, Glenn Weiss has developed and managed the new public art program for the NYC Business Improvement District responsible for Times Square and the Broadway Theater District. He is currently the executive director the Art League Houston. 

Cotner’s methods connect an inheritance of classical poetic forms and oral tradition with the audio- and image-based communication of the contemporary urban milieu. Plato took to the agora as the stage for his dialogues. Today’s agoras are more fluid. Commerce, politics and social activity play out in public and private realms, tangible and intangible spaces. Cotner’s work seeks out the democratic domain of traditional social space while inhabiting and embracing modern day agoras, from shops to sidewalks to the websites where his captioned slideshows are published (most recently down Brooklyn’s beloved Bedford Avenue).

Fleeting conversations are a human infrastructure that, according to Cotner, “build automatic bridges among people amid the city’s ceaseless flow.” His deliberate interventions are intended to give rise to organic and unpredictable results. Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to take my own walk with Cotner, and to reaffirm Urban Omnibus‘ commitment to introducing readers to creative urbanists whose work falls outside traditional urban practice. As with our other artist interviews, Cotner offers a new way of looking at and interacting with the physical and social fabric of New York. Read on to hear his musings on poetry, neighborliness and waking up to the city around us as we stroll through Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park.

— Caitlin Blanchfield

Jon Cotner

In many ways writing is like a city; there is a structure and there are rules, but often the beauty comes from improvisation within this framework.
Should we take this dirt path?

Sure. Do you think your literary sensibility has changed the way you interact with the city or that living in a city has shaped the way that you write?
I would say that New York City presents ceaseless surprises whenever we step outside. Perhaps all places on earth do, but I’m always surprised, always dazzled by what I see in New York. The sheer unpredictability of the sidewalks means that whatever form I develop to convey New York must accommodate spontaneity. So my friend Andy Fitch and I came up with this dialogic form that allows us to drift through streets and various venues here in the city, locations such as the Union Square Whole Foods — which we call “WF,” just to play it safe — MoMA, Central Park, Prospect Park, a Tribeca parking garage and so on.

I’m interested in forms that capture the motion, the momentum of New York. Of course we didn’t invent the dialogic form. That goes back at least as far as Plato, and I’m sure people before him were composing dialogues. But what that form allows me and Andy to do is to constantly alternate between our own thoughts, our memories and our concrete interactions with the city. In other words, it allows us to reach the state of the walker. Whenever you walk, you might be considering something from your afternoon or thinking about something you’ve read. Then, all of a sudden, something else arises: somebody walks by with a dog, somebody pushes a carriage, you name it, and you are pulled out of yourself and confronted with what might be called the external world.

My fiancée Claire Hamilton and I have developed another form — and when I say “develop” I mean “breathe new life into.” Just as Andy and I attempt to breathe new life into dialogue, Claire and I are attempting to breathe new life into the slideshow. We’ve made a variety of slideshows that, again, feature this oscillation between ourselves and the world.

Let me put it this way: I’m particularly interested in forms that capture the motion, the momentum of New York. I don’t want an excessively ponderous form. The nice thing about dialogue is that it always moves; slideshows move too, from one image and caption to the next.

A chat in Fort Greene Park

Both Ten Walks / Two Talks and your slideshows are observational in format. They present a picture of the city that allows other people to take what they will and form their own connections. I guess everyone sees the city differently, but do you think poetry has made you observe the city differently than the average New Yorker would? 
I believe poetry, more than a technique or genre, is a way of life. I’m reminded of this Korean proverb: “Knows his way, stops seeing.” The practice of poetry allows me to tune into the city on a daily basis. There’s a Spanish poet I like very much named Antonio Machado. In one of his longer poems, he presents a series of imaginary dialogues between himself and a younger poet seeking guidance. Machado advises the young poet, “Wake up as much as possible.” He suggests we needn’t bother reading every single book from beginning to end. Sure, we should read a careful selection, so that we get some sense of what other people have done. But the secret for poetry is wakefulness in this physical world. Poetry encourages us all to stay as awake as possible.

Poetry heightens our sense of time — the fleetingness of seconds — because poetry descends to the level of the microsecond. Look, for example, at the haiku poets who attune themselves to the tiniest realities. I think the point of what I’m doing is to encourage people to do their own work, to inhabit their own lives and, using Machado’s expression, to wake up as much as possible.

Click the play button above to listen to an audio clip of Cotner’s Spontaneous Society walks. (Running time: 2:13) 

It seems to be the same thing with the Spontaneous Society walks, where participants are encouraged to reach out to passersby with pre-selected phrases and small gestures of friendliness and conversation. And by bringing attention to obvious but unacknowledged routines, these walks are also funny. How did you conceive of the idea and what fueled your desire not only to make these connections, but also to lead groups in the walks?
Spontaneous Society developed incrementally over the years, line by line, across multiple cities. About 20 lines form the project’s core, though I’ll often improvise new ones as I’m walking. The point is to build automatic bridges among people amid the city’s ceaseless flow. These lines are short — “That’s a good-looking dog.” “That’s a nice spot for a picnic.” “It’s a good day to have the feet out.” — and extremely basic. They’re 99% effective in terms of replacing urban anonymity with something bordering on affection.

Poetry encourages us all to stay as awake as possible. It allows me to tune into the city on a daily basis.We’re in a tough spot right now – environmentally, economically, the list goes on. Politicians can’t speak with one another and, as a consequence, economies are crumbling. Citizens are bitter about this destructiveness. Uncertainty and fear are pervasive. Spontaneous Society comes out of my desire to reach as many beings as possible. I’ve grown tired of art that has limited audiences or limited capacities to affect this world.

One way to address widespread social problems is by addressing each other with kindness in the mundane world. At least this much is up to us. Sadly, the other problems seem out of our hands. Spontaneous Society has the humble social aim of producing laughter and smiles among people who might otherwise walk dogs, push carriages, pull suitcases, or go about general daily business with unconscious gravity. Both the speaker and recipient come away with renewed awareness of their physical circumstances. And, because death is inescapable, it’s important to lose as few moments as possible in this life.

Each line depends largely on timing and tone. That’s another poetic feature of the project. Mechanical recitation is insufficient; one must put his or her desire for dialogue into each utterance. I look at Spontaneous Society as a primer for social communication in this era of antisocial corruption and strife.

A "good-looking dog" in the park

What do you think creates neighborliness in different parts of New York? Where do you encounter neighborliness most and least often and what do you think contributes to this? Do you think there are ways to foster friendly connections in different New York neighborhoods? Your walk down Bedford Avenue with Claire, for example, seems to be an exploration of neighborhoods.
Total neighborliness is, of course, unattainable. It would demand consciousness of each person we pass as an absolutely singular being. We’re in a crowded city, and that means paying attention to some people while ignoring others. Everyone has tastes, habits, patterns of movement that outline their own equivalent of “social circles.” The more neighborly somebody is, the broader their circle of acquaintances and friends becomes. Frequent acquaintance leads to friendship. Affection, or what we’re calling neighborliness, originates via shared experience, and much of this experience is linguistic, either spoken language (“How are you?” “Great to see you!”) or the language of gestures (waving hello or goodbye, nodding).

Neighborhoods with less density, less noise and a rooted residential population tend to have greater neighborliness than those that are packed, loud or filled with tenants who move in one year and leave the next. Clinton Hill comes to mind as an example of a neighborly neighborhood. It is a quiet area with gorgeous architecture and good air. People seem calmer, more open than in other neighborhoods around town. There’s tremendous diversity, too. On a single block I’ll talk with people whose heritages span the globe — Bhutanese, Sudanese, Mexican, Caribbean, among others.

Jon Cotner leads a Spontaneous Society walk | via Elastic City

Each neighborhood in New York is so “New York.” When Claire and I were walking down Bedford Avenue, we went into this garage in Bedford-Stuyvesant that was so “New York,” and if you look around here, Fort Greene Park is so “New York” as well. New York exists everywhere but is also more than the sum of its parts. New York City is a giant classroom. Every time you walk around you have an opportunity for learning.

I believe neighborliness occurs at the level of individuals. Those who want to acknowledge people in their immediate vicinity can do so wherever they find themselves. You may not get a response. Depending on the situation, you may even arouse anger. It’s always helpful to keep in mind that we’re incomplete as isolated beings and that, for the most part, we encounter people once-and-one-time-only in this fleeting existence. If we’re going to reach out, even with the simplest greetings, this must happen now or never.

In “Local Worlds: A Bedford Avenue Slideshow,” which we did for the BMW Guggenheim Mobile Lab, as well as in the Art Basel and Armory slideshows we made for Paper Monument, Claire and I put these principles into practice, initiating an array of momentary, mindful encounters, none of which we could have predetermined. The words that come out of others’ mouths are always surprising, even in banal situations.

That’s true, New York is so many things. It’s the brownstones, it’s the things you find at every deli…
Exactly, you don’t have to be wasted in a Union Square night club to experience New York. In fact, I think that would probably get in the way of experiencing New York.

Writing and observation, as well as one-on-one dialogue, are, in many ways, introspective rituals. In the highly social context of the city and given the outgoing nature of your work, how do you balance moments of self-reflection that walking can provide with forging connections?
For me, self-reflection is grounded in the Socratic idea that we can only understand ourselves through dialogue. Which is to say, my self-reflection urges me to risk solitude and to regard myself as a site for improvisatory encounters. Whether it’s Andy in Ten Walks / Two Talks, or Claire in the slideshows, or passersby in Spontaneous Society, I’m always seeking human contact, without which none of this work would happen. So I experience no conflict between introspection and city life. If anything, introspection hurls me beyond its limits, prompting perception, friendship, love.

Update: A video that appeared in the original version of this article was removed on 9/29/11.

Jon Cotner is the author, with Andy Fitch, of Ten Walks/Two Talks. It was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by The Week, The Millions, Time Out Chicago, and Bookslut. Their new collaboration is called Conversations over Stolen Food. With Claire Hamilton, Cotner has made slideshows for The Believer, Paper Monument, and the BMW Guggenheim Lab. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and teaches in Pratt Institute’s Creative Writing Program.  

Caitlin Blanchfield is an assistant editor at Urban Omnibus. She is also a freelance editor for Actar and a freelance writer for Architizer.

Gorton’s involvement with urban issues began in 1999, when he founded OpenPlans, a non-profit devoted to the pursuit of smart planning and civic engagement through media and digital tools. Since then, he has helped launch the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, which advocates for a more dynamic use of public space, and the online media outlets Streetsblog, Streetfilms and Gotham Schools.

Last week, Gorton took me on a walk through the Flatiron District to talk about cars, people and the future of New York City. He painted a picture of a New York free from car dependency, in which both policy and the design of our streets give priority to people, social vitality and safety. (Look back at this 2009 Omnibus feature on Ulrich Franzen’s 1969 short film “Street” to see another bold vision of how to reclaim our congested streets.) Read on to hear Gorton’s thoughts about the largely car-free city he has envisioned and how it can come to be. —Alicia Rouault

Mark Gorton | photo by Alicia Rouault

In 1999, you founded OpenPlans, a non-profit organization that uses technology to improve the way that cities and citizens interact. How and when did you start moving towards transportation reform specifically?
Five years ago, nobody was talking about transportation in NYC. It was a non-issue. There was this sense that New York is a big city, it has a lot of traffic, so what?

We consciously launched an agenda to raise awareness of different policy options. We started Streetsblog and Streetfilms. We formed something called the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign and talked a lot about the potential of Bus Rapid Transit, programs like Summer Streets and bike lanes. We initially focused on leaders at the Department of Transportation (DOT), the mayor and other transportation policymakers, and we were very effective within that circle.

Now, thanks to the work of the DOT, people have seen change on the ground. It’s no longer theoretical. So all the people who couldn’t be bothered for years are taking notice. Whether it’s in The New York Times, The New York Post, on CBS News or amongst people in neighborhoods, there is a citywide debate about what we should do with our streets and people understand that there are policy alternatives.

So now that the current administration is supportive of your work and many of your initiatives have been enacted, how do you engage with transportation reform today?
The main point that I’m trying to make now is that cars are bad for New York and that the incorporation of the automobile into the fabric of the city was a big mistake. I want people to question, at the most fundamental level, the role of the car in the city.

Through both street design and policies, our city is programmed for driving and for maximum automobile throughput. But the needs of people and the needs of the automobile are completely different. The automobile asks for very simple, straight, distraction-free — people-free — places. Activity in a human context, at a human speed, won’t work with cars flying by.

Streets used to be safe places for kids to play, places where neighbors would gather. Now we have this definition of the street that was essentially promulgated by the automobile industry and the oil industry, in which cars dominate and people are considered only when absolutely necessary. It’s been incredibly pathological and as a result we have a much worse city than we could have otherwise. The automobile industry has been happy to tell people that the car is about freedom. It’s not about freedom for me. It’s an oppressive burden on my kids and my family.

Broadway and Houston, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

Why do you think people are so protective of cars?
There are a number of reasons. First of all, I think there’s just an inherent bias towards the status quo. Most people are inherently resistant to change. Also, our society has been indoctrinated to see cars as exciting, fun and sexy, not dangerous, selfish, rude and annoying. Most people think that if they drive around and don’t crash into somebody, they haven’t done any harm. But much of the damage done by the automobile is social harm, invisible harm that degrades our neighborhoods and makes the city unpleasant and dangerous.

Donald Appleyard, a professor at UC Berkeley, did a series of studies on the societal impact of traffic. He looked at three streets in San Francisco, similar in every way possible except for how much traffic passed through. He found that people who lived on the lightly-trafficked street had more friends than those who lived on the heavily-trafficked street. 3.0 friends per person versus .09. The same went for acquaintances, people in heavily-trafficked areas had fewer. He also tracked where people congregated and how they engaged with their surroundings. He then asked the residents to draw their “home territory.” On the heavily-trafficked street, people drew their apartment building or maybe a piece of the sidewalk in front of their building. On the lightly-trafficked one, people included their entire street. At a certain level, Appleyard showed that traffic destroys people’s social connections with their neighbors and friends. [Watch a Streetfilm on Appleyard's study below. -Ed.]

Streetfilm: Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets

So is the primary challenge to change the discourse? What comes after that?
This is going to be a decades-long process. There are a number of things we have to do. A lot of people assume that the car is important, essential and properly used. Therefore, if there’s not enough space to park, you need to create more parking. If there’s not enough road space, you should create more road space. That’s essentially what the story of the 20th century was. Sidewalks were narrowed, parking was added, the city became more friendly to cars and more hostile to people. But all of those efforts still failed to make the car work in New York City. The automobile does a bad job as a transportation technology in the city because it’s so spatially inefficient.

We want to communicate an alternative vision. We’re talking about changes that will get people out of their cars, that will make it difficult and expensive to drive. Of course, some drivers just don’t want to get out of their cars. And some people don’t want to consider alternatives, because it forces them to question their own behavior, to accept that every time they get in their car, they somehow, in some small way, harm their neighbors and use an unfair share of the scarce public space of the city. They don’t see how change can give us healthier children, improved social activity and a better economy.

What is your alternative vision? Do you want to completely eradicate cars?
I don’t want to eradicate cars, but I think we could reduce them by 90%. The automobile is one of the most significant technologies in this country, but it is fundamentally misused. Capable, healthy people should not be driving within the city at all. Any trip that you make on a regular basis, whether it’s going to school, work or the grocery store, should be possible without driving a car. Automobile trips should be limited to those where people are leaving the city or the occasional trip that requires a vehicle, such as carrying cargo.

The remaining traffic, whether it be automobile or truck, could be concentrated in space and time. Some streets could be fully pedestrianized and some could be auto-oriented. Maybe a street allows traffic from 6am until 10am, but then from 2pm until 5pm, when kids get out of school, auto access is radically reduced. You can concentrate the harm onto the auto-oriented streets and free up more space to be beautiful, peaceful and safe.

I think 20% of the streets in Manhattan alone could be fully pedestrianized, with no cars, buses or bikes. We should have a comprehensive network of pedestrian streets. Broadway, for the whole length of Manhattan, could be fully pedestrianized. On the east side, maybe Lexington Avenue. We could do that.

This is also good for business. Kalverstraat, a fully-pedestrianized street in Amsterdam, has the highest retail rents in all of Holland. Here in New York, the street with the highest retail rents outside of Manhattan is Brooklyn’s Fulton Street on Fulton Mall — which has no cars. No one wants to live on a street that’s choked with a lot of nasty traffic. No one wants to work, shop or eat dinner on a street that’s polluted, loud, dangerous and unpleasant. Automobiles are bad for business.

Property owners are one of the constituencies we want to reach. The easiest way to increase property value in the city is to get rid of cars on the street. When the real estate industry realizes that, we’ll start to see more change.

Of course, the transportation dynamics in Manhattan are different from those in eastern Queens or parts of the Bronx. There are neighborhoods in which getting rid of cars simply doesn’t work. But things can be done in every neighborhood. It’s just a question of engaging the residents and finding how they want their streets to be.

Fulton Mall, Brooklyn | photo by Varick Shute

You say that automobiles are bad for business, but what about car-dependent businesses, necessary truck traffic or the taxi industry?
Yes, I want to be sure to distinguish between truck traffic and automobile traffic, because you certainly need freight delivery, garbage trucks, things like that – though I think with conscious effort we can probably improve efficiency and reduce truck trips by 30-50%.

But there are very few auto-dependent businesses, particularly in Manhattan. Restaurant and store owners worry that their patrons won’t be able to show up without their cars. They will, they’ll just be using different means to get there. The idea that people need to drive to go shopping is simply not true. Only 6% of shopping trips in the central business district of Manhattan are done by car.

That’s not to say there aren’t losers if there are fewer cars – parking garages, auto-parts supply stores, there are businesses directly related to vehicles. But in New York there is always a process of creative destruction in the economy. And the alternative is endangering our children and having an obesity epidemic because people can’t live an active lifestyle.

The taxi industry is more of a grey area. Cabs produce noisy, dangerous traffic. But in some ways taxis complement the public transit system. They make cars available for people who need to use them without relying on private ownership. There are also options like car sharing. We’re not talking about banning cars, we’re talking about making them available for the rare trips where people really need them.

What else needs to be done in order to make your vision a reality?
We need to improve our buses and expand Bus Rapid Transit. Buses are much more spatially efficient than cars. And the surface route infrastructure is mostly there. The select bus service routes that New York City has already put into place have increased bus speeds by 20% and that number can definitely increase. But it takes funding, innovation and willingness to dedicate road space to bus-only lanes.

We also need to take the bicycle seriously as a transportation technology. Other big cities do: in Tokyo, 20% of all trips are carried by bicycle; Osaka 25%; Berlin 13%; Amsterdam 40%; Copenhagen, 37%. Without much difficulty, we could see 20-25% of all trips in New York being taken by bicycle, which would reduce congestion, increase mobility and make the city safer and more livable. But right now, our street network is implicitly hostile to the bicycle. And it’s unreasonable to expect people to take their lives in their hands just to get around, so they’re going to resort to other alternatives. The city has begun to take steps to make our streets safer but we still have a long, long, long way to go.

In some ways this is a generational issue. The automobile used to be a symbol of progress and economic might. But it doesn’t represent the future anymore. Now it’s part of this nasty, mechanized, dystopian world that we have to deal with.

Madison Square, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

How does your work with participatory planning come in to all of this?
In order to achieve significant change in how the city behaves, you have to engage the public as deeply as possible. People have to understand why this in their own self-interest. I’m talking about creating a process where people come together and decide how they really want their streets to function. Do we want them to be thoroughfares for people outside the neighborhood or places for our children to play?

Do you see a role for the recent crop of web-based, interactive, democratic tools, like ChangeByUs or SeeClickFix, in doing what you’re talking about?
Software and internet tools definitely have a role to play in this participatory democracy, because they can help disseminate information and create a forum in which to build social consensus for change. Each of the tools you mentioned is good for what they do. But to really see change, I think we need more government agencies deploying them. Because the government controls the streets. It doesn’t matter how many people join a group or “like” something on Facebook, that doesn’t change government policy.

But if we can integrate these tools into a public input process and get the DOT to adopt them, there’s significant potential to galvanize communities. A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. New York is a huge city, and the only mechanism the DOT has to gather input from communities — Do you want a bench here? Do you want to put in a loading zone? Do you want that intersection daylighted? — is to have its staff facilitate tens of thousands of local dialogues, which is impossible. As a result, that happens only in a rare handful of circumstances.

What’s your strategy moving forward? Are you still focusing your advocacy efforts on policymakers?
The strategy now is to try and engage with and talk to the media and the thought leaders in the city. We’ve been faced with a lot of knee-jerk reactions against change. It amazes me how thoughtless a lot of coverage in the media is on this topic. Many reporters who don’t know anything about transportation show up to cover these issues — and much of the media drives around the city as they cover it, which gives them a very windshield-oriented perspective. The Post has been particularly awful. CBS news too. So what I’m trying to do now is to speak more publicly about these things, to reach both the media and a broader audience.

Will you continue to work with smaller groups or do you want to focus on changing the way the big outlets cover the topic?
It’s a combination. We’ve been working through the more niche-oriented media channels for the last five years, and we’ve made great progress. But to take it to the next level and get people all over the city who are now seeing the changes on their street to understand what these changes are for, why they should want them, and why they should ask for more, then we have to talk to them through the media that they’re used to consuming.

A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. I want people to understand that the automobile is a flawed technology for our city and that we need change. I want them to see the positive things that can happen if they embrace that change. I want my street to be safe for my kids so they can play. And I’m not content to wait for that. I want it to happen now.

Interview conducted by Alicia Rouault.

.

Mark Gorton, the founder of a series of innovative financial and technology companies, is a leading advocate for alternative transportation and livable streets. He is the founder of Tower Research Capital LLC, a money management firm specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies, as well as the founder of Lime Brokerage LLC, Lime Wire LLC, Lime Labs LLC, and OpenPlans. In 2005, Mark founded the New York City Streets Renaissance campaign in partnership with the Project for Public Spaces and Transportation Alternatives. Through his philanthropy, his leadership at OpenPlans, and his public and media appearances, Mark Gorton continues to advocate for alternative transportation, livable streets, and open government.

Mark holds a B.A. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a MBA from Harvard University. He lives on the Upper West Side and bikes regularly to his offices in Lower Manhattan.

Growth by Design | Center for an Urban Future

First off, what is the mission of the Center for an Urban Future?
CUF is a public policy think tank specializing in economic development and workforce development issues. We focus primarily on the five boroughs of New York but have done comparison studies of other big US cities. One thing we’ve been studying for years is the need for New York to diversify its economy. The city has traditionally been so focused on financial services and real estate and, to a lesser extent, media and advertising that it has failed to notice its other economic assets. So every year we try to profile a sector in New York that shows potential for growth with the hope that city economic development officials will take note and develop supportive policies. We’ve done studies on biotech (before that was big), food manufacturing, video game development and health information technology. Our report on design is in the same vein, though going into it we already knew the sector was strong. In our 2006 Creative New York report, which was an attempt to define and quantify core creative sectors in New York, we saw that the applied design fields had more firms than advertising, performing arts and publishing combined.

For those who haven’t read the report in full, please summarize your key findings.
We established beyond all doubt that New York City’s design industries, including architecture, are not only an important part of the city’s economy but one that has been growing rapidly over the last decade and will likely continue to grow. Despite the 2008 crash and the depressed economy that followed, the number of design firms in the city rose 15 percent since 2001, which is a much faster rate of growth than most other industries. New York has 3,969 firms in architecture, landscape architecture, fashion, graphic design, industrial design and interior design. That’s 33 percent more design firms than Los Angeles, the next largest city. The New York metro area has 40,470 designers, a majority of whom don’t work at design firms, and that’s 75 percent more than the next largest city which, again, is Los Angeles (with 23,160 designers).

When you look at the proportion of employed people in New York who work as designers, you’ll see the city has a much higher concentration of designers than any other major US city with the exception of San Francisco, which has an equivalent concentration but a smaller number. Economists measure an industry’s geographic concentration in order to get a sense of how much it is exporting to other places; if the concentration is much above the national average, then it is likely serving more than just local needs. New York’s design cluster is well above the national average. That’s a good sign.

US Metro Areas With the Highest Concentration of Designers | US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Did you (personally) have any assumptions about the design industry going into this project?
It’s hard to live in New York City and not have a few preconceived notions about design. Design is everywhere here, fashion is everywhere — it’s all over the people on the street, in most stores in Manhattan, and on subway advertisements.  But recently, I think, the whole city has become much more conscious of design, with Brooklyn Bridge Park and the East River Waterfront esplanade going up at the same time this last year, and the World Trade Center memorial slowly being realized and Governors Island opening up to the public. A lot of smart design and quality architecture has happened in the city over the last five years, and I think it has raised awareness of design’s importance and value.

Landscape Architects Designing | via Green Mission

How did you come to define “design” in your study? Does your definition differ from a standard used by the government in labor research?
One thing we uncovered was the difference in the design field between industry employment and what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls occupational employment. Typically, economic development analysts and economists will use industry employment (categorizing companies by sector) as their basic metric for judging the size and growth of a particular field. This doesn’t work very well with designers. For example, in New York, there are about 1,100 graphic design firms and something like 4,500 people who work at those firms, but that represents a small fraction of the graphic design industry, since, it turns out, most graphic designers work for companies in other industry categories like finance, media and publishing. According to another survey that asks employers to categorize their employees by field, there are 16,000 graphic designers in the New York metro area, and, since the Occupational Employment Survey won’t capture freelancers if they’re not counted as employees, there are likely many more.

Our on-the-ground reporting does much to explain this gap. From talking to designers and people from other sectors, we know that more and more companies, whether they’re banks, museums, universities or retail businesses, are deepening their internet presence. Banks are offering online banking, museums are developing online catalogs, universities are offering online courses and so on. And their design departments are expanding as a result. In 2000, the Occupational Employment Survey found just 6,700 graphic designers in the New York metro area. Nine years later, it turned up 16,000. That growth would have been completely invisible to someone looking at industry employment data. If anything they would have found a slight drop in employment and wondered to themselves why graphic design was doing so poorly.

Growth of Design Firms in Brooklyn: 2001-2009 | US Bureau of Labor Statistics

What were the biggest surprises that emerged from your research?
I’m not sure surprise is the right word, but the field I knew least about was industrial design. New York has a larger industrial design sector than I expected. It has more firms and people than any other US city. But in terms of influence, it trails the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, where the tech boom has led to a lot of work designing consumer electronics and software interfaces. A lot of cutting-edge industrial design work in New York revolves around consumer experience research and consulting on innovation strategies for large manufacturers. One designer told me that if industrial designers would get more involved in New York’s tech scene it could lead to a lot of growth. Designers are more willing now to forgo upfront consulting costs and instead take investment positions or royalty positions in these young start-ups, and since they’re really good at developing and sharpening prototypes they could bring a lot to the table. That’s actually an area city officials could focus on.

What have you identified as some of the key drivers of growth for
 the design industry, both globally and for NYC?
Design will continue to grow in large part because it is so exportable. Fashion designers, industrial designers and architects, in particular, are offering a service that, first of all, is difficult: it requires skill and research and practice, and all of those things benefit from proximity. Second, it’s a service that is experiencing a rapid rise in demand in other parts of the world. The fastest growing consumer markets in the world right now are China, India, Singapore and Brazil. Those countries are investing heavily in their cities and their middle classes are growing faster than we’ve ever seen. What they don’t have is a lot of home grown design talent. Chinese developers are tapping American and European architects for their biggest developments and in a lot of cases giving them carte blanch to do whatever they want. Asian manufacturers are similarly looking to American and European fashion designers and industrial designers for consumer products. One major Korean textile company recently opened up a big design studio in Chelsea in order to develop fashion brands for Chinese consumers. They didn’t go to Chinese designers for that. This is a built-in advantage for New York as well as for the country, but the city, state and federal governments need to do more to facilitate our dealings with these countries.

In the spring of 2010, President Obama outlined a National Export Initiative that hopes to create jobs by doubling US exports over the next five years. But at the state and local level, very little is being done to achieve that goal. New York State has repeatedly cut its export budget, and the State now spends $1.5 million per year on export assistance. $1.5 million doesn’t go very far, as I’m sure you can imagine. Other places spend many times that. I’ve been told that Ontario spends $70 million per year on export assistance. Meanwhile, most federal and state programs focus overwhelmingly on manufactured goods and agricultural products rather than services, and they look primarily to Canada, the UK and Israel — those are our biggest trading partners, but their consumer markets are also not growing anywhere near the rate of China or Brazil. I think this would be a great opportunity for New York City to step in and begin an export strategy of its own. Right now, as far as I know, the City doesn’t have an export strategy at all. Design would be a good place to start. Designers are already dealing with clients in China and other fast growing markets, and there’s good reason to believe that will increase over the next decade. According to the financial services firm Credit Suisse, China is poised to become the world’s largest consumer market by the year 2020.

Top US Metro Areas by Number of Practicing Designers: 2009 | US Bureau of Labor Statistics

How do design clusterings and productive adjacencies influence the
 design industry?
Designers depend on communication and visual information sharing, which, despite technological advances, still happens most efficiently in person. In his book Triumph of the City, the economist Edward Glaeser cites studies that show steep rises in long distance air travel as advances in telecommunications increase, and telephone calls appear to take place most often between people who are geographically close. A little contact, a little information sharing, apparently begets the need for even more. Many of the designers I interviewed said, even between competing firms, there was a lot of idea sharing, enabling a person or firm that did not originate an idea to carry it to the next level. In New York, designers have definitely carved out geographic communities. There’s the Garment District of course, but also DUMBO, Bushwick, the Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Old American Can Factory. In those places you have designers working with other designers but also a panoply of service providers like iPhone application people, product photographers or pattern makers. Those kinds of adjacencies lead to all kinds of productive exchanges that, collectively, push ideas and new methods forward.

Graphic Design Office | via The Office Stylist

What challenges are emerging to the future viability of New York’s design sector and its prominence on the global stage? The report makes clear that economic development agencies haven’t
historically paid attention to the design industry. What kinds of
 economic development strategies do you think would benefit this
sector?
I think the biggest challenge in maintaining New York’s prominence in design will be making sure that the venues and organizations that make information exchange possible are allowed to continue and grow. Unlike most other industries, even knowledge industries like software development, designers depend heavily on cultural non-profits, industry groups, publications and galleries. These organizations provide context and space for the meaningful exchange of information, they get people excited and inspired, but they rarely capture that value monetarily. A vast majority of designers don’t make a lot of money either, and they have to spend years apprenticing at firms for next to nothing, so making sure that New York is a place where both underpaid organizations and underpaid individuals can physically survive is incredibly important. It’s definitely a hard thing for the city to address. It encompasses so many different things including land-use policy, transportation, student visa and H1-B visa processes, and on and on, but its importance can’t be stressed enough.

There are a lot of other, more targeted things the city could do to support growth in the design industries. In the report, for example, we recommend that the city look to London’s Design Festival as a model for capitalizing on and connecting the city’s various design-oriented trade shows in the spring and fall. London’s festival is really neighborhood-centric in that local groups are encouraged to create hubs with their own idiosyncratic styles. Some neighborhoods put on street events and parties, and others build site-specific installations like toothpick cathedrals. That could galvanize other institutions like the big design schools and museums to collaborate more, but it probably needs a big initiative from the city to get it going, and perhaps some continued coordination and marketing later on.

Etsy offices in DUMBO | via mashable.com

David Giles is the Center for an Urban Future’s Research Associate. In his two years at the Center, he has written about the need for New York to diversify its economy by looking to sectors like health information technology and the problems many of the city’s small businesses have had in accessing energy efficiency incentives.

Among the major initiatives spearheaded by the Urban Design Group was a rethinking of density bonuses for the provision of public space, the so-called plaza bonuses. As a result, in New York, privately owned public space has become a category of place unto itself, so much so that Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design worked with the Municipal Art Society and DCP to to catalogue the sites in his book Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience (Wiley, 2000). Kayden profiled 503 POPS — outdoor seating areas, through-block arcades, interior plazas and other pedestrian spaces across Manhattan. His findings revealed the inconsistent quality of execution and maintenance of these public spaces, and DCP used his analysis to develop new design standards adopted in 2007, with further amendments added in 2009.

Next week, Urban Omnibus and the Design Trust for Public Space are offering an opportunity for you to come check out one of these privately-owned public spaces for yourself, and continue this conversation. For more information about our April 7th Public Space Potluck at the IBM Atrium, click here.

40 West 57th Street through-block arcade

What do you do?
My company, Raquel Ramati Associates, works on urban design, planning, development and consulting projects. Much of our work concerns site feasibility, primarily in New York. And the rest of the work is master planning projects around the world. Most of my consulting work deals with partnerships between the public and private sectors. I also teach in the real estate programs at NYU and Columbia.

In both of these roles, consulting and teaching, I am a great believer that we have to bridge the interests of those of us who are concerned with urbanism and architecture with the interests of real estate developers. Because too often there is a tension between architecture and real estate development. I think it’s crucial to understand and to respect the needs of the client. The best projects that we see are those with good clients who understand what makes architecture, what makes urban design.

How did your thoughts on the relationship between the public sector, the private sector and design form?
I started my career at the Urban Design Group. When I started, I was very junior on the staff, doing the Zip-a-Tone and Xeroxing. At that point in time, I’d say real estate developers were vastly uninterested in architectural quality. And as architects, we felt that real estate developers were “the bad guys” and that we had to educate them. At the time, architecture and developers working together effectively was a rare occurrence. Even today, it still amazes me to see an article in the Times that mentions who the architect of a project is. Of course, these days architecture is branding, and the architect is one of the most important marketing tools real estate developers have. But when it came to urban design, our interest at the Urban Design Group was in how we could affect the city, not necessarily by dictating architecture or attracting a brand-name architect, but by creating rules and objectives with a cohesive vision. The Urban Design Group started with the approach that unless you involve the real estate developers, the city will continue to be built without any thought towards urban design whatsoever. As a result, there were two or three major interventions that I think were very important.

General Motors Building Plaza, 5th Avenue at 59th Street

One was special districts. Lincoln Center, the Theater District and Fifth Avenue are some early examples of how the Urban Design Group was able to create master plans of these distinctive areas. On Fifth Avenue, the goal was to push back against the fact that the avenue was starting to be a street only of banks and travel agencies by mandating the inclusion of other kinds of stores that bring life into the city. In the Theater District, there was a danger of the theaters themselves disappearing, so the master plan included the transfer of air rights to ensure that certain kinds of buildings, certain kinds of uses, were retained.

Another significant initiative was plaza bonuses. Previously, density bonuses for public space had been mostly unsuccessful. We sought to translate the idea into a more organized, comprehensive urban design plan.

Of course, incentive zoning really started earlier on, when the influence of the International School and Le Corbusier influenced the city to develop “towers-in-the-park.” The term “Towers-in-the-park” refers to the inclusion of open space around a high-rise building to create access to air and light. In order to accomplish that, you allow the developer to increase the density of the high-rise by 20%. The idea was that these open spaces would be provided for public use and enjoyment, with landscaped areas and so forth.

Citigroup Center sunken plaza, Lexington Avenue at 53rd Street

But the language was written in a way — “you create the open space, and we will give you the 20% density bonus” – that never really defined what this open space should be or how it should work. Developers, of course, will want to build 20% more because, since the buildings already have foundations, it’s much less expensive to build more, and the units you build at the top of the building become the most valuable space.

But ultimately, developers didn’t really want to provide amenities for the general public. Instead, those mandated open spaces often became dead areas, sometimes consciously designed to discourage anyone sitting on anything. And sometimes the plazas were sunken, which were even less attractive. A lot of these plazas had blank walls with no retail, because the idea of having retail in a corporate or residential building was not what the developer was looking for. Even when well-designed public space was promised, there was no way to enforce its implementation. Developers would bring plans for beautiful plazas, filled with trees and flowers, to the Department of City Planning, but once approved they were never built that way. The way the plaza bonuses were implemented turned a good initial idea into spaces that were quite anti-city, actually.

William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner from MAS on Vimeo.

When the plaza legislation was changed in the early ‘70s, the rules became very strict. William H. Whyte had been analyzing pedestrian activity in the plazas and his results greatly influenced these revised mandates [see video excerpt above]. The plaza’s location relative to the sun was specified, as was the maximum amount (3 feet) it could be above or below street level, and the need for retail and for easy access (it could not be fenced). In every plaza there was a plaque that said exactly how many trees, how many seating areas, and what kind of amenities must be provided. And if the public space was not being maintained the way it was supposed to be, there was a bond that said that if, let’s say, trees die, then the developer has to replace them.

General Motors Building Plaza, 5th Avenue at 59th Street

The City also introduced other pedestrian amenities. Legislation was implemented for covered pedestrian space, which you see in the old IBM building on Madison Avenue; through-block arcades, which you see in the Sony building; and sidewalk cafes, to increase street life in the city – today sidewalk cafes are all over the city, but when we started, I think there was only one, on Central Park South, and it completely changed the life of the surrounding area. Then we also legislated subway easements, which required certain developments to incorporate transit access into the building, so that the entrance is in sight and not just a hole in the sidewalk.

Advancing interest in the street — in the continuity of street walls and in creating public spaces that are usable — is a major part of what the Urban Design Group accomplished. Looking back on this period, I think it was really the approach of public-private partnerships that was key to the creation and refining of these spaces so that they work.

590 Madison (IBM Building) atrium, Madison Avenue at 57th Street

For example, I think the covered pedestrian space and through-block in the IBM building (now owned by E.J. Minskoff) are extraordinary. If you go to that space, you will see that it’s a very big accomplishment and it works very nicely. Most cities don’t have the financial resources to purchase that kind of central real estate to use for public space. There’s no way. It would cost them millions of dollars. Public-private partnerships are the only way to do it and I think it has worked well.

But I have mixed feelings about it today. On one hand, I think that having green, open space in the city is a very important thing. But on the other hand, I see the problem of having plazas that don’t really work. Contextual zoning has changed a lot over the years. It’s difficult to legislate how often public spaces should occur along a particular street because the city is not owned by one person. It is a living thing, and it grows organically, and not necessarily the way that you want it to grow.

Have your thoughts on what makes for “good” urban space evolved over the years?
Now more than ever, I believe in opening up the waterfront – I always have, but I see now, on the Upper West Side for example, the influx of young people moving there because of the public space improvements on the West side, the pedestrian pier and so forth.

I still like interventions of open space and public spaces. Of course, everybody talks about the High Line, which is one way of intervening to create a public space. But there are many strategies. I hear people say things like ”Oh, I love Manhattan! I just walked 20 blocks and it was so great!” as if the excitement of walking through Manhattan was the result of ad hoc activities rather than the result of coordinated plans and policies.

For me, urban space is like an urban room. It needs to have some borders or some enclosures in order to work. And it needs to have some life! Whether that life comes exclusively from retail or not, I don’t know. But I do think that when it is all open, without borders of any kind, then it doesn’t work as effectively.

It seems like a big principle that you’ve been trying to enact in a number of ways has been street life and pedestrian life. So how do you feel about some of the more recent interventions, like the pedestrianization of Broadway?
I like the idea, but I’m not sure I like the execution. Instead of closing the middle of the street, I would have liked to see widening the sidewalks while creating lanes for buses. Which they did very, very well in Barcelona. There is something very strange about having Times Square a little closed and a little open. It looks temporary. I like the idea of people having the space – the pedestrian as king — but I’m not sure I love the way it’s done. I’m not a great believer in closing streets to cars altogether. I can see the benefits of how it has been done in Europe, like in Rome, where the city center is closed to private cars, but buses, taxis and people who live in the area are still allowed.

What other things have you seen from your work abroad? How are other countries and cities thinking about some of the issues we’ve been talking about: public-private partnership, street life, ways to use public policy as an instrument of good design principles?  Have you seen any lessons? Or cautionary tales?
New York is a pioneer, in a way. A lot of cities have copied us. Not design-wise, not architecture-wise, but urban-design-wise, in the sense of getting developers to engage in certain ways. The problem in other places that I’ve found, like in Israel for example, is that urban design is done on a lot-by-lot basis. And that doesn’t work. That’s how it was in New York before we started thinking about urban design systematically, through policy.

Rockefeller Plaza

One thing that worries me is the branding of architecture, in the interest of getting all these great architects to work here. For some of them — I won’t say all of them, but some of them — urban design is secondary in their thinking, and the architectural form is predominant. And that’s not limited to New York City, it’s all over the world, because developers want an icon, a signature building. Therefore, if the city doesn’t create linkages between the buildings, or pay attention to the linkages between the buildings, then the city is going to be like a cocktail party full of women wearing different hats.

How would you characterize what urban design is?
Urban design, to me, is the connectivity between buildings and places. It could be the subway or a building, but it’s those places that connect, whether vertically or horizontally. And it’s not just in urban centers. If you look at villages around the world, I think what makes a good rural or suburban public place is the relationship between the village and the natural environment. In cities, I think the relationships between open spaces and buildings is what makes more “urban-ness.” It’s like a necklace — if you don’t have the string that threads in between, the necklace falls apart.

.

Raquel Ramati, architect and urban designer, is president of Raquel Ramati Associates Inc. She has earned an international reputation as an urban designer and planner, first in New York City’s government, and later as a private consultant working with developers, government agencies, not-for-profit organizations and community groups. The author of a signature planning book How to Save Your Own Street, she is presently teaching at the Real Estate Graduate Program at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

All photos by Jessica Cronstein.

“Wherever there are immigrants, there are stories.” This broad observation characterizes and motivates the urbanism of Suketu Mehta, a writer who has dedicated his career to understanding the human experience of large cities around the world. He is perhaps best known for his exploration of Mumbai, the city where he spent his childhood, in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. These days, however, his research is focused on New York, the city he moved to as a teenager in the late 1970s and currently makes his home. His forthcoming book on the most recent immigrants to the city is certain to make many readers aware of a New York they only thought they knew, but Mehta’s singular sensitivity to how the immigrant experience is inscribed in the physical details of the urban landscape — from storefront displays to phone booths to courtyards — is what makes his writing of particular relevance to designers, policy-makers and urban enthusiasts. I recently had the chance to wander with Mehta around Jackson Heights and listen to his observations, insights and anecdotes. We started our walk at Raja Sweet House on 73rd Street and strolled among the garden apartments of the Jackson Heights Historic District, the single-family homes of Corona and along the commercial corridors of 37th and Roosevelt Avenues. Learn more about Mehta’s unique perspective on immigration, density and neighborhood change below. -C.S.

When did you first encounter Jackson Heights?
I first came here in 1977, at the age of fourteen. My father has been a diamond merchant for all of his life, and he came to New York to expand the family business. He had already been here, in a studio apartment on 73rd Street on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue, for about nine months. Then he went back to India and brought the rest of the family. So there were five of us in a studio. Our welcome to America was the super of the building turning off our electricity because there were too many people in the apartment. We were only in that studio for a couple of weeks before we got an apartment on 83rd Street, where we lived for another seven years. On the first night that we moved in, my brand new bike got stolen. It was a much dodgier neighborhood back then.

How else would you describe the neighborhood at that time?
When we came here, we found a dangerous city, a bankrupt city, a city from which the white middle class was fleeing. It was far from the Promised Land. I got mugged twice in these streets; our car got stolen regularly. Jackson Heights was not glamorous or welcoming. My parents put me in Catholic School near here, which was the most brutal experience of my life. I was one of the first minorities in the school. The teachers called me a pagan. I remember during the Iranian hostage crisis, I was a senior in high school, I was with an Indian friend of mine — the only other Indian in school — and this Irish kid yells at us, “Fucking Ayatollahs!” and I said, “Hey, we ain’t Iranians, we’re Indians.” And without missing a beat he says, “Fucking Gandhis!”

Wherever there are immigrants there are stories. Immigrants, because of their dislocation, have a need for recollection. At the time that we came here, most of the South Asians in this neighborhood were Indians, and most of them Gujarati. Now, it’s a much more diverse mix of South Asians: Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Tibetans, Bhutanese. The Indians started coming here in large numbers after the 1965 Immigration Act. Before ’65, Asians were actively excluded. When they started letting in Indians, at first, there were a lot of professionals: engineers, doctors. In the ’70s, because of the Family Reunification Act, entrepreneurs, small business owners, shop owners, they started coming in. And now, taxi drivers, garment factory workers, laborers — it’s constantly shifting. Very few of the Gujaratis that I knew when I was growing up here in the ’70s are still in this neighborhood. With one exception: Some of the children of those families, many friends of mine, who are artists, writers and journalists, who would live in the East Village in the ’80s and in Park Slope in the late ’90s, are increasingly moving to Jackson Heights.

There’s something about the diversity of these streets that is attractive to people from all over, like a piano player or a software engineer raised in Kansas, for example. Increasingly, creative people will want to live in the kind of city where they have a choice between pupusas and parathas. Diversity isn’t just a nice thing to have, it is actively essential to attract the kind of people that create wealth.

Much of Jackson Heights was created by the Queensboro Corporation in the 1920s. When the elevated subway came out here, it allowed the middle classes from Manhattan to escape the city and come to a nicer environment: these quite beautiful apartment blocks with long central courtyards or gardens. From the back, the bedrooms face onto a pastoral scene where children can play and the elderly can sit on benches. This is pretty unique in New York.

We’re now coming up onto an interesting block here. The Community United Methodist Church. Now this truly is an ecumenical church. There’s a sign in Spanish, “Iglesia Metodista Unida,” then there’s a sign in Korean, then one in English. It must also be an Indonesian church because it says Community Church welcomes “Gareja Protestan Indonesia.” And, I guess, an evangelical fellowship, the Jesus Our Foundation Fellowship — “Mahal ka ng Dios.”

And besides all of this, there’s a little plaque about Alfred M. Butts, “the architect and artist who… invented scrabble.” Scrabble was invented here!

Now here’s the building I grew up in. Look at the name plate: we have from Abbasi to Winfred, passing Balyuk, Bruschtein, Basu… For anyone going to Jackson Heights, I recommend having a look at the directories in the buildings, which really show why it is such a marvelous area. Here are people – Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Russians, Greeks, Poles, Turks, Irish – many of whom were killing each other just before they got on the plane. And here they are living next to each other. It’s not that we love each other. Indians and Pakistanis will still say horrible things about each other around the dinner table. But there was this agreement that we were in a new country, making a new life. And we could live side by side and interact in certain demarcated ways. We could exchange food; our kids could play together; they could go to school together. It’s the great story of New York. It’s pretty remarkable how little strife there is.

This kind of density, living in the same space, having to share courtyards and groceries, forces you to interact more than you otherwise would. It forces you to go outside of your comfort zone. The most wonderful thing about Jackson Heights is its diversity. Jackson Heights and Elmhurst together are the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City in terms of country of origin. I think that’s the biggest difference between immigrants of today and immigrants of maybe one hundred years ago. These immigrants feel much less inclined to melt into any sort of pot.

In what other specific ways do you see the particular dynamics of immigration today playing out in a neighborhood such as this one?
Here’s one example: every fifth store is a place where you can send money back. The remittance economy is tremendous — there are barber shops where you can get a haircut and send money back home. I’ve read many studies that show that best way to help the poor is to reduce the fees on money transfers. The money migrants sent back from the US, I think it was 300 billion dollars last year. Money orders and phone cards. You‘ll often see rates for these two things in these store windows.

There are all manner of transactions happening. People are selling food out of shopping carts, there are people offering services, day laborers… The City seems to have agreed to suspend many of the laws that it might enforce in Manhattan in places like Jackson Heights. That’s also part of the vibrancy and part of the accessibility for immigrants. Because you don’t need a permit, really, to sell food here. You can just stand on a street corner and sell it. Occasionally, a cop might come along and tell you to move. So you wait for the cop to pass and then resume selling what you sell. In neighborhoods like this, the line between formal and informal is thin to the point of invisibility.

Another effect of the informal economy is that economic value in immigrant neighborhoods is generally underestimated. Much of the money that these people make and spend doesn’t show up in official records. Some friends of mine in the Department of City Planning were telling me about how Costco came to them with a plan to set up a store in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, but they didn’t think it would be a viable economic proposition, because the official income tax records showed that it wasn’t a high income neighborhood. City Planning said, “Go in there, trust us, you’ll make money.” And now, I think it has one of the highest revenues of any Costco in the country.

So City officials are aware of some of these dynamics?
The population division of City Planning, in particular, are people who really have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the city. They are an extraordinary group of demographers. They know about alternative housing arrangements, what kind of money transfers happen — they know about the hidden city of New York.

This administration in particular, the Bloomberg administration, has been absolutely exemplary in its treatment of immigrants. Mayor Bloomberg actually went up to Capitol Hill and said if it weren’t for illegal immigration, the economy of New York City would have collapsed after 9/11. I think this city has learned that immigration of all kinds — documented, undocumented, semi-documented — is vital to the economy of the city.

And I love walking along these streets because the visual juxtaposition of these disparate objects is so casual and always surprising. Every time I walk by, I always find something new to look at. Here, you have giant bags of pork rinds next to fresh flowers. One of the great pleasures of living in Jackson Heights is this feast of seeing. And I’m a person who gets bored easily — that’s why I am a writer. And walking around these streets, I never get bored.

Which raises the question: how do some of the things we have talked about — immigration, streetscape, the informal economy — relate to your work as a writer?
Primarily, I am a storyteller. I tell stories in screenplays and prose and just about every other medium. I like to walk around the streets of large cities and gather stories and tell them. Lately, I’ve also become a teacher to students who want to learn how to tell stories. So I often bring them around here to Jackson Heights to show them this feast of stories. Because, where most of them are in Manhattan, it seems enervated, it often seems that every story has been told a hundred times. And then they take the train out here and are dazzled.

Wherever there are immigrants there are stories. I find that immigrants, because of their dislocation, have a need for recollection. And, many of the stories around here you find in phone booths. There used to be more of these phone booths, before everyone started getting cell phones, where people would go to call their families. Often you’d see these migrants weeping as they spoke to their children who, if they were undocumented, they would not see for ten years, twenty years, while they were sending money back home. Many of these migrants are desperately lonely, they’ve left their families and, in a sense, can never go back home unless they are ready to give up their residence here. Those are some of the saddest cases. Especially the mothers — I’ve met Cameroonian babysitters who have broken down weeping while telling me about how they spend their lives caring for somebody else’s child, while their own children are strangers to them. It’s heroic. These people are heroines and martyrs. There ought to be some sort of sanctuary spot on Earth where these mothers and their children could be allowed to see each other for half an hour and hug each other without the immigration agents and the lawyers and the governments intervening.

So, I’m writing a book-length essay on this subject: What happens to the human being in the city? You know, many of these people have come not from Tegucigalpa or Delhi, they’ve come from small villages direct to this big city. And how do they deal with it? How do they deal with subways, the social security system, women in short skirts, a sense of time that is completely different from the village? It’s worth looking at novelistically. So I’m looking at space in the city, time in the city and velocity in the city. And what connects it all is storytelling.

.
Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mehta’s work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Conde Nast Traveler, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air.’ Mehta is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written an original screenplay for ‘The Goddess,’ a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner, and ‘Mission Kashmir,’ a Bollywood movie. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Swoon, a Brooklyn-based artist, has worked in a variety of media to engage constructed environments. She has used the city as canvas for her cut-paper woodblock prints, often seen wheatpasted on city streets. Since 2006, she has used cityscapes as inspiration as she designed, built and sailed on raft flotillas created as intentional communities of artists and musicians. Now she can be found in Haiti co-running the Konbit Shelter Project, a group of artists, builders, architects and engineers who are using their skills and resources to build homes and community spaces in post-earthquake Haiti. Read our conversation with Swoon below. To inquire about availability of Swoon’s work, contact Christina Ray.

Photo by Flickr user niznoz.

Let’s start with the city street and the relationship between the conditions of inspiration, production and display. What is the difference to you between creating for a canvas versus for a city wall? Does the distinction change the audience, the message, or both?
Almost the only difference for me in creating for a protected indoor setting versus creating for outside is a practical one. Things have to be smaller and faster to put up outside, more streamlined in their design. If I am cutting paper to create a portrait, and I find myself making really large cuts, I know it’s going to be a lot harder to paste up quickly. Or, if I am making something huge, I know that it will have trouble finding itself within the small architectural niches of a more dense urban area. Because my way of working and creating portraits evolved entirely in dialogue with city walls, these practical considerations, as well as thoughts about how people relate to the portraits when they see them on the street, are a big part of forming what you see, whether I am making a gallery installation, or working on the street. The creative process is very quiet compared to the execution and the life of the piece. And the conditions of inspiration? That’s just day to day.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. Photo © Tod Seelie/todseelie.com.

Since 2006, you have designed, built and traveled on fleets of rafts and vessels manned by a community of artists. Your initial motivations were threefold: to create, to interact with others, and to explore. What is the role of place or site in these intentional communities? How does the social element relate to the spatial?

I wanted to understand the city more and more — from how people live within it and interact with it, to how it is created, built, broken and rebuilt.Over the first two years, the rafts were intentional communities. The Miss Rockaway Armada was a collectively built and run, floating, intentional community. We made all of our decisions together. We were an experiment for ourselves as well as a public facing one — traveling down the river and talking to everyone we saw.

The Switchback and the Serenissima projects were a blurrier line between art and life. I measured the bridges on the Grand Canal in Venice to the inch at low tide before building the three boats that traveled there. They were made as a kind of an homage to that place — little, monstrous, fantastical, floating bits of city. I envisioned them like seeds, blown far from the mother tree, having evolved in their own way, somehow finding their outgrowths back in their land of origin. The first time I saw Venice rising up out of the sea like it does, I was so affected that I knew one day I would make something that let me understand that place better, and that was a response to it. There was also a whole undercurrent of thought about rising tides, and being refugees from a society that is no longer functioning with relation to the planet’s ability to sustain it. The very fluid community that formed around these projects is a part of a larger community of artists that already exists, and are the only thing that made such a project possible.

What do you see as the role of the artist in the kind of recovery work you are undertaking in Haiti? How does this project relate to other aspects of your work — or do you see it as something entirely distinct from your artistic oeuvre?
I guess I view the role of artists like myself and the Konbit group who are here in Haiti right now in two ways. First, we hope to acknowledge that beauty and soulfulness are important in the rebuilding effort, as well as the nitty gritty work of getting roofs over people’s heads. We also are in the unusual position of operating independently. As a small, self-directed group, we have a fluidity that many large NGOs don’t have. There are so many levels to this process, I think a plethora of responses are welcome and needed.

How this relates to the rest of my life and work I think is yet to be seen.

Konbit shelter prototype build, Braddock, PA. Via konbitshelter.org.

From your wheatpaste street art to Swimming Cities to your current work in Haiti, your work has flowed between the use of the built form and cities as canvas or inspiration to the actual construction of livable spaces. How has each body of work influenced or informed the others?
Snowball effect? I started by drawing it, and found that I wanted to understand the city more and more — from how people live within it and interact with it, to how it is created, built, broken, and rebuilt. The question of how so many people will survive on a planet that clearly cannot support them all is very central in my mind, as well as the role that cities, architecture and living systems have in that. Right now I am trying to understand more intimately how it is that we might all live and survive here — and to try and help in very small but concretely tangible ways while I am learning.

Regarding the Konbit shelters: Why did you choose this particular method of construction and design? What climate, community or resource considerations led you to decide on superadobe structures?
After the earthquake, I became really obsessed with the dome. I think this is a common condition that sometimes strikes people. It’s one of the most perfect structures. It handles forces so beautifully, both within the structure, and without — from distributing a force evenly throughout the whole structure to deflecting wind and water via the curvature of its walls. Researching further into variations on domes as living structures, I found the work of Nader Khalili. Khalili dedicated the later part of his life to developing earthquake, hurricane, fire, and flood resistant housing for the world’s poor using a minimum of materials — mainly dirt. He developed workable systems and left the use of them free of patents for humanitarian aid. Ben Wolf and I knew we wanted to work on a building project to help out after the quake, and it made a lot of sense to learn about an existing developed system, rather than try to reinvent the wheel, and to share it with people who could find it useful.

We’re here building now — and so far so good. We are using the dirt that we dug out of the foundation to build with and, though building materials are pretty horribly expensive here, it’s working. We are building first a community center/hurricane shelter, and hope to return in late fall/early winter to create some houses.

.

Interview conducted by Varick Shute. Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who creates life-sized portraits of people she meets, using woodcut block prints and paper cutouts. Swoon’s galleries are city walls, often in the environments that inspired the prints. With influences ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of street environments.
 Since 2006, she has also designed, built, and organized fleets of rafts including those of the Miss Rockaway Armada and most recently the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, a large scale installation at Deitch Projects in New York City. Swoon’s boats are inspired by dense urban cityscapes and thickly intertwined mangrove swamps from her Florida youth. She is an international artist with major pieces in the Museum of Modern Art, PS1’s groundbreaking exhibition GREATER NEW YORK, and Brooklyn Museum of Art. Swoon has been traveling for the past several years creating exhibitions and workshops in the United States and Europe.