The Andrew Freedman Home at 1125 Grand Concourse | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

A large, imposing and seemingly abandoned mansion occupies an entire block on the Grand Concourse between 166th and McClellan Streets in the Bronx. The building — a neo-Renaissance, limestone palazzo behind a black iron fence and a large, tree-shaded lawn — stands apart from the neighboring apartment buildings and the stately street wall of the boulevard. Across from the Bronx Museum and just a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium, the Andrew Freedman Home looks, at first glance, like an uninhabited relic forgotten during the decades of the Grand Concourse’s decline from grandeur. But closer inspection reveals a range of community-oriented activities that will be amplified this spring, when No Longer Empty, a young and nomadic cultural institution dedicated to bringing contemporary art to underutilized spaces throughout New York City, invites the public inside to experience a contemporary art exhibition of 30 new works that weave evocations of the building’s unique history into interpretations of contemporary realities in the Bronx.

Andrew Freedman, a self-made millionaire financier who died in 1915, left much of his fortune to build the place as a retirement home for formerly wealthy people who had lost their fortunes, so that these newly indigent could spend their final years in the manner to which they were accustomed: dinners served in banquet halls by servants with white gloves, readings in a wood-paneled library, entertainment in the billiard, card or ball rooms. The Home operated on this vision from 1924 until the 1970s, when mounting operational costs and a dwindling endowment forced it to charge for accommodations. In 1984, the facility was purchased by the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC), a non-profit formed by local residents in 1973 to provide direct services to the elderly and disabled that has since grown into a property developer of low- and moderate-income housing with a portfolio of 28 buildings throughout the Bronx and a suite of programs in economic development and children and family services. MBSCC attempted to re-start the retirement home under a more inclusive model in 1985, but the endeavor eventually proved unsustainable, and activity was restricted to the refurbished lower ground floor, where a Head Start program, a day care center and a job resource center operate at a remove from the vestiges of both luxury and penury upstairs. The function rooms on the main floor are recently refurbished. The bedrooms on the higher floors have been abandoned for almost 25 years, and amid the chipping paint and splintering furniture are the personal effects of former residents, from postcards to upright pianos, and the professional equipment of a nursing home, from medical cabinets to beehive hairdryers. It’s not hard to imagine how the combination of grand spaces and ghostly absences could inspire visual artists. And Manon Slome and Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, the founder / president and executive director of No Longer Empty respectively, have been hard at work since last September making that happen.

No Longer Empty’s mission, as Slome and Hersson-Ringskog explain in the interview below, is to use the presentation of contemporary art as a mechanism for community revitalization — through partnership with local institutions, increased activity and awareness from non-local visitors, and innovative live programming that engages both. This process corresponds well to MBSCC’s current plans for the site. According to Walter Puryear, who manages much of MBSCC’s real estate and is responsible for the development of several ambitious new programs, in order for the organization to realize its mission of comprehensive community development, the long-term employability of local residents is an urgent priority. The vision for the Andrew Freedman Home includes an array of ambitious workforce development initiatives, including training programs for culinary and hospitality services (in coordination with the opening of a bed and breakfast currently under construction in one wing of the building), a small business incubator, a media center and a green technology training institute. In the meantime, make plans to visit the building in its current state this April, when No Longer Empty’s new exhibition, This Side of Paradise, opens to the public.

- C.S.

The Library at the Andrew Freedman Home

Tell me about No Longer Empty. How did the organization come to be?
Manon Slome: As a curator, my interest has long been the intersection of art and social issues. I founded No Longer Empty in April 2009 and since then we’ve organized 12 exhibitions throughout the boroughs. Before that, I worked at the Guggenheim and at the Chelsea Art Museum, where I was chief curator. But when I started I wasn’t out to set up an organization, I was just thinking about an exhibition and a site for it. It was around the time of Lehman’s collapse and the broader economic crisis, and I was walking down Madison Avenue noticing how many storefronts were empty and how even the active businesses were empty of customers. I began to conceive of an exhibition called Empty, and when I thought about where to do it, an empty storefront seemed like a great space.

A friend offered us a storefront adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel, a former fishing tackle store. We put on a show of ten artists’ work in a very short amount of time, and given the store’s history and the fishing-related artifacts that were left in the space, we worked around a maritime theme. For example, the artist Michael Bevilacqua’s piece referenced the drowning of the economy in nautical terms. We found the notion of responding to the site to be very evocative.

Installation view of "No Longer Empty in Chelsea Hotel," June - July 2009 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

What was most interesting to me was the reaction of people wandering down 23rd Street who popped their heads in and asked questions. We found that people who might not normally go to a gallery or a museum were comfortable coming to see this, and were interested in the work and in engaging in conversation about it. As a curator, there’s very little interaction with visitors built into the traditional processes of an art exhibition. For me, being present and available for conversation with visitors was very interesting.

After that, we were offered a second space in the Meatpacking District. It was a brand new condominium building with a vacant retail space. So, contrary to the fishing tackle store with its rich history, here was a site with no history. So we decided to reference the idea of a community in transition. We called the exhibition Reflecting Transformation and a lot of the works explored the notion of a neighborhood turning over and what that meant.

At that exhibition, we had our first panel discussion with thought leaders in public art, to probe the nature of what we were doing. The notion of a storefront as a semi-private, semi-public space was interesting to us; and orienting the exhibitions towards a wide public was very important for us. This launched our programming, which has since expanded to include children’s programming, artist-led workshops, roundtable discussions with the artists, and more. The programming and the community engagement became as important to us as the exhibitions.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog: The art can have multiple purposes, and every time we go into a new neighborhood, we are actively figuring out how art is going to be used differently in a new context.

Slome: For example, when we held a show in the former Tower Records Store on Broadway and 4th Street, visitors’ nostalgia for the record store where they hung out in college informed their experience of an exhibition curated around themes of music and the changing nature of music distribution.

Hersson-Ringskog: Or when we did a show on Governors Island, at which a lot of visitors remarked on the magic of being brought into a house that was otherwise vacant to see art that referenced the history, the past, the people that lived there, or what the island might be without human inhabitants.

"The Island of Dr Mastrovito" by Andrea Mastrovito at "The Sixth Borough," Governors Island, June - October 2010 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

How does your community research process typically work?
Slome: I come from an arts background and Naomi comes from an urban planning background, so our working together is a fabulous marriage of disciplines for community-based work.

When we go into a neighborhood, the first thing we do is get to know the organizations with deep roots in the community and partner with them to provide programming, to bring new people and new ideas to the community. And often community organizations are strapped financially, so our collaborative process is quite valued.

Take the Andrew Freedman Home as an example, which has a very particular history. All of that influences our ideas of what we might do here. First, you can’t ignore the history. But you also don’t want simply to mirror that history. This enormous abandoned building is a white elephant as it is on the Grand Concourse, so you don’t want merely to accentuate that. Rather, we want the exhibition to merge the history of the Andrew Freedman Home with the current day realities of the Bronx.

A third floor bedroom at the Andrew Freedman Home

Any representations of the Bronx have to contend with the borough’s history of disinvestment and poverty and also the feeling that everything that’s not wanted in Manhattan is pushed onto the Bronx. This led to a good discussion about the title. Poor, in Style was our working title, but then we moved onto This Side of Paradise with all of its associations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, with 1920s ideas of class and the class loyalty that Andrew Freedman embodied, and with the ambiguous, ironic notion that we assume Manhattan is the paradise and the Bronx is something else, so let’s see how we can shift that.

We did a lot of research into the art that’s produced here. We didn’t want to create a show of exclusively Bronx-based artists; we didn’t want to make another kind of ghetto. But we learned about some phenomenal local work. And we learned about some fabulous organizations working in choreography and music. Obviously, the legacy of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop is incredibly important. All that will be reflected in the exhibition.

One of the things we’ve found in the Bronx is that it is a very fragmented borough. It is easier to get from here to Manhattan than it is to get to parts of the South Bronx. So it became very apparent that if we wanted people outside of the immediate vicinity to know about the show, we should partner with cultural organizations in other Bronx neighborhoods and work on transportation and cross-promotion. We’re going to be meeting with the Bronx Tourism Council to think about how we can realistically shuttle people around to various locations.

Beehive hair dryers on the fourth floor of the Andrew Freedman Home

Hersson-Ringskog: We’re exploring whether it’s possible to establish a pilot program that addresses the mobility issues here, like a bike-sharing program. Being able to move between different cultural organizations is an important aspect of having a vibrant arts scene.

An alliance is being formed called the Bronx Cultural Alliance, which will create a structure for collaborations between organizations like Wave Hill in Riverdale, the Point in the South Bronx, Lehman College in Bedford Park, Hostos College in the South Bronx, and others. The point is to create a tighter-knit cultural landscape in the borough.

Tell me about your curatorial process?
Slome: Most works we present, about 70%, are commissioned. The basis of our curatorial work is site-responsive or site-specific. In most cases, we already have interest in the artist to begin with: I’ve done a studio visit; I know the work. And because the sites we go into are non-traditional sites, there’s often phenomenal opportunities for the artists to create outside the box.

Community revitalization is also a part of your mission, how does that factor into your process?
Hersson-Ringskog: We take a potential liability to a neighborhood corridor – an empty building or inactive business can bring down a neighborhood’s quality of life by reducing foot traffic – and activate it with artwork, and with live programs that engage the community: panel discussions, children’s workshops, music or dance performances. In this way, we are advocating for interim use, for a more nimble, flexible and creative city. In addition to curating and producing the exhibition, we also research what’s unique about the area and create cultural maps that indicate to exhibition visitors all of the other cultural opportunities available in the vicinity – from parks to other art organizations to stores or restaurants.

A second floor corridor at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: We encourage our audience to discover the area. So we might arrange some sort of discount to a local restaurant for exhibition visitors, or try other kinds of things to keep foot traffic up and to keep people patronizing local businesses.

Hersson-Ringskog: And we track these effects through head counts, through measuring increased foot traffic and evaluating collaborations. Our research and analysis allows us a distinct and deep understanding of the site, the building details, and the area where it’s located. And we are able to relay some of that understanding back to the property owners. Further down the road, it would be interesting for No Longer Empty to have an arm that could advise on community conscious retailing or to provide other insights into community revitalization that emerge from our process.

In terms of the legacy of the projects we work on, the Bronx Cultural Alliance is a fantastic initiative that will continue forward. Art in Empty Spaces is another legacy project, where we work with Manhattan’s Community Board 3 to take No Longer Empty’s model and scale it up.

Postcards on a bedroom wall at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: The community board learned that storeowners and residents weren’t happy about the vacancy rates in the area. So they asked us to match arts groups up with these empty spaces and then to create a program that would get visitors to visit them. An organization we’ve talked to here in the Bronx is WHEDco, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, which is working on a new site on Southern Boulevard. WHEDco surveyed how many local dollars are going out of the community because of the lack of stores and services. They’ve asked for our advice on how to activate the storefronts under an elevated rail-line, to get the community to recognize the stores’ existence in order to increase foot traffic and eventually attract the kind of retail they need. If you can draw foot traffic for an exhibition, you can demonstrate the demand for the right kind of retail.

If you produce quality programming, people will come. I’m always very concerned with issue of legacy.

Hersson-Ringskog: And after we conjure up an exhibition and programming, in the long term we are also giving people an opportunity to dream. People come into an exhibition and see a space transformed. I think that’s where, perhaps, crowdsourcing could come in: we could create opportunities for visitors to share their vision for the site or the area.

We are a young organization with a clear mission of knitting a vibrant cultural landscape through art and interim use. We know how to take over empty spaces and turn them into professionally curated art exhibits with programming, but in terms of creating and supporting a cultural landscape that’s sustainable, we’re working towards that, testing and learning different tactics along the way.

An abandoned Christmas tree at the Andrew Freedman Home

Manon Slome (PhD), President and Founder of No Longer Empty, is an independent curator working in New York City. From 2002 to June 2008 she was the Chief Curator of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. During that time, she curated and oversaw a program of some forty exhibitions, symposia and museum publications as well as monographs and scholarly essays. Ms. Slome became highly involved with the Israeli art scene during her research for the exhibition, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on, (2005) and has followed and researched the Israeli scene for the last three years. Prior to the CAM, Ms. Slome worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum for seven years and was a holder of a Helena Rubinstein curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study program.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, Executive Director of No Longer Empty, has spearheaded community and real estate outreach strategies for No Longer Empty in order to study and measure the effects of art as a tool for re-activating corridors and making a local economic impact. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Masters Program in Urban Planning where she studied urban green sustainability, specifically green roofs. She is also recipient of the William Kinne Fellowship Award. Naomi has also worked for an information architecture firm in Washington DC. Currently serves on the Executive Board of the Columbia University’s Alumni Association.

In a deceptively modest-seeming exhibition hall on the first floor of the Museum of the City of New York is a show titled The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, a history of the 1811 plan for Manhattan’s grid, now celebrating its 200th anniversary. The size of the exhibit is cleverly misleading. Upon closer inspection its historic scale and range are immense and provide that rare feeling that one has discovered the secrets of the city.

One floor above the historical exhibit are, fittingly, projections for the future of Manhattan’s grid in the companion exhibit The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan – eight proposals chosen from over 120, in a call for ideas sponsored by the Architectural League in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer. [For more information about the two exhibitions, see this piece by Unfinished Grid curator Gregory Wessner. -Ed.]

At the Museum last Saturday afternoon, the Architectural League’s Gregory Wessner, the curator of The Unfinished Grid, moderated a panel discussion with Amale Andraos of WORKac, Ken Smith of Ken Smith Landscape Architect, and Mark Robbins, Dean of Syracuse University School of Architecture (Andraos and Robbins had served on the jury for the Unfinished Grid competition). The group discussed the living legacy of the 1811 plan and the new proposals imagining Manhattan’s infrastructural future.

L-R: Gregory Wessner, Ken Smith, Mark Robbins, Amale Andraos

The grand scale and defyingly disciplined solution that the 1811 Plan imposed on the map of Manhattan (in most instances keeping to the original plan within a hundredth of an inch) has had a humbling and inspiring effect on many architects and designers, including those on the panel. When asked to explain this enduring influence, Amale Andraos pointed out that, “Compared with the Roman grid, the Manhattan grid was created to create difference and expressiveness on its own. It’s funny that it seems so inevitable, so straightforward.  It’s also [a] very egalitarian ideology, not like the Continental grid. There’s no preferred access.” Indeed, as early as 1877, Frederick Law Olmsted made a similar observation, as provided in the exhibit along with quotes by other memorable observers: “Such distinctive advantage of position that Rome gives St. Peter’s, Paris the Madeleine, London St. Paul’s, New York, under her system, gives to nothing.”

While neutralizing and egalitarian in this respect, and in its use of a numbering system rather than the Continental preference for important names, the grid also presents to many as oppressive and constricting. Ken Smith noted that “it was criticized for its relentlessness at first; [but it also presented the] the genius of pure infrastructure – it frames and then individuates.” Mark Robbins then fondly recalled the tag line for The Naked City: “There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” The panelists pointed out this expressive effect of the grid, that most of the individual expression and innovation occur within the interstitial spaces in the city, the ones the grid gives rise to and organically encourages.

Of course, not everyone feels the grid’s oppressiveness as a catalyst to greater flourishing of city life. One member of the audience felt quite dismayed at the unanimous adulation the panel seemed to give the grid. He echoed a not unpopular sentiment when he said, “I’m a little disheartened that you are so cheerful about the grid. For example, every street is a through street — you can’t find respite, can’t get away from it.”

Andraos countered that what he perceives as problems natural to the grid may actually have more to do with how we conduct daily life in the 21st century — garbage collection, street cleaning and traffic issues. She pointed to Barcelona’s new pneumatic trash management system that helps reduce garbage truck traffic as an example of how creative solutions can address many of these issues. When prodded by another audience member, an Englishwoman who bemoaned the lack of green space, especially as compared with London, Andraos pointed out the immense environmentally adaptive qualities of the grid. Although it was created in the first half of the 19th century, when the city could only count a population of 100,000 on the island of Manhattan, the grid made possible an efficient future sewage system, subway system, and pedestrian traffic. Within its rigidity it provided a flexibility that could accommodate this ambitiously growing and densifying city.

One of the central questions of planning in New York did creep its way into the discussion when someone asked about he pros and cons of landmarking in New York City 200 years into the future. The panelists agreed that, as Andraos replied, “We can’t and shouldn’t turn the entire city into a museum.” It’s also a question of allowing for the life of the city to continue. Wessner added that “Preserving the spirit of New York as place of change and new ideas, and balancing that with the city’s past – it’s a big question. Also, there’s a difference between preservation for historic value versus preservation efforts that are meant to keep development from happening.” This tension between development and preservation seems to underlie almost every discussion about planning, those about grand scale projects especially. Mark Robbins acknowledged this “anxiety about fabric going away in New York,” but, he pointed out, “(it) seems to be remarkably resilient.”

The panel did appraise some of the eight projects on display that project the grid’s potential into the city’s future. However, the panelists and jury members seemed a bit surprised by what they saw as a common “back to the future” sensibility of many of the entries and a relatively timid approach to thinking 200 years ahead. For example, they noted that none of the environmentally-oriented submissions were chosen as winners, partly because they were not radical enough or because many of their plans for the future are already a contemporary reality. Green plans for rooftops in Manhattan and urban farms, for instance, have been sprouting for a while now.

Maintaining New York as a place that inspires big ideas and gives them traction seems a bit more difficult 200 years on. We may recognize that planning of such sweeping scope can’t or won’t happen today, but this show serves to kindle the desire to imagine on a grand scale — the resilience of the grid speaks well to the impact of ambitious spirit. Thinking big might be okay again.

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homey beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The following was originally published on WNET’s MetroFocus. 

New Yorkers take it for granted that we can say things like “meet me at 85th Street and Third Avenue” and know that regardless of whether someone has been to that intersection, they will easily be able to get there. It’s all thanks to Manhattan’s legendary street grid, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.

A little history of the grid
In 1807, frustrated by years of uncontrolled development and a decade of public health epidemics attributed to lower Manhattan’s cramped and irregular streets, New York City’s Common Council (the predecessor to today’s City Council) petitioned the State Legislature to develop a street plan for Manhattan above Houston Street, at that time a rural area of streams and hills populated by a patchwork of country estates, farms and small houses. The adoption four years later of the Commissioners’ Plan established the grid of 12 north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets that, though it would take most of the 19th century to build, continues to fundamentally shape life in New York.

But is something so infrastructural, something that’s taken for granted every day, really worth celebrating?
The grid is definitely worth celebrating — without it, New York might not be the great city it has become. That’s why the Museum of the City of New York and the Architectural League of New York have organized a pair of exhibitions about its past and future. The first of these exhibitions, The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, curated by architectural historian Hilary Ballon, traces the creation, implementation and evolution of the plan from 1811 through the 20th century. A tour de force of historical research that constitutes the first sustained examination of this subject, The Greatest Grid tells the story of a young New York that is full of optimism about its future and unafraid to take on bold challenges.

Jon Meacham takes a tour of “The Greatest Grid” at the Museum of the City of New York with curator Hilary Ballon.

Top image: an oil painting from 1885 that imagines what the junction of Bowery and Broadway, the area that became Union Square, looked like during colonial times. Bottom image: Union Square today. Photos courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York and Flickr/U2wanderer.

Among its many keen insights, The Greatest Grid reveals how remarkably flexible Manhattan’s street grid has been over two centuries. To wit, the following were all later city additions unanticipated by the grid’s creators in 1811: Central Park and the superblock housing developments of 1960s urban renewal; Madison and Lexington avenues; the automobile and the subway; skyscrapers; the water system and the electricity grid; zoning resolutions and preservation districts. That the grid was able to accommodate them all while sustaining its essential character is a true testament to its flexibility, which Ballon has described as a “living framework, which enabled the city to grow and evolve over time.”

How might designers, developers and city officials continue to modify the grid in response to the challenges and opportunities that New York faces now and into the future?
To answer this question, the Architectural League and the museum, along with media sponsor Architizer, issued an international call for ideas that invited architects and urban designers from around the world to use the grid as a springboard for thinking about the city’s future. More than 120 teams from 22 countries submitted proposals, from which a jury of architects and curators selected eight they believed offer the most insightful and provocative ideas for Manhattan’s grid.

Click the images below to see and read about the eight selected ideas:

These eight proposals are now on display in The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, a sister exhibition to The Greatest Grid. If the submissions are any indication, Manhattan’s enduring power as architectural and urban muse is undiminished. The proposals are bold, ambitious and full of energy. They address a range of issues, from extending Manhattan’s edge to create sites for new building; to reconfiguring city streets to increase pedestrian space; to amending preservation and zoning regulations to foster alternative possibilities for development.

A portrait of Simeon De Witt, ca. 1804, one of the commissioners behind the 1811 grid plan | via Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University

How do idea competitions like this one benefit the city?
Many of the proposals will strike viewers as far-fetched or impractical, with little chance of ever being realized. But that is not the point. The proposals on view are not necessarily intended as literal recommendations for future projects, although there are certainly many good ideas in them that could be implemented to great impact. Rather, I hope that these eight proposals challenge us to remember that, like the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan itself, New York is a city that has the capacity and willingness to think big.

As inevitable — or invisible — as Manhattan’s grid may seem to us today, there was a moment, as Hilary Ballon points out, “when a set of city leaders reached a firm decision to establish [the street grid] and steadfastly held to it over strong objections from influential people.

None of the proposals on view in The Unfinished Grid are more outlandish than the idea of imposing a grid of 2,028 blocks on land that was largely rural, for a city with a population at the time of 100,000 people. But that is exactly what makes New York such a glorious and thrilling place to live. The absurd and impractical and far-fetched take root here to offer new possibilities for how to live and work and play.

Our 19th century forebears, resident in the city during the decades it took to fully realize the street grid, had to live through the blasting of Manhattan rocks and the clearing of soil, the laying out of streets and the endless building required to fill these new blocks with their first houses, shops and schools. I would expect that in true New York fashion, they complained and resisted and protested. But they also persevered. And it is only through their perseverance and their shared sacrifice that we have the dynamic city that we have today.

In 1886, this pile of rocks sat at the corner of what is now 81st Street and Ninth Avenue | via Museum of the City of New York.

It’s the job of every New Yorker to embrace change
Make no mistake: big ideas like the ones here require a commensurate level of commitment and sacrifice. But we should not forget that we ourselves are the beneficiaries of centuries of commitment and sacrifice on the part of the millions of New Yorkers who preceded us here.

New York City is perhaps one of human history’s greatest works-in-progress. It is a city that is and should continue to be about the future, about possibility, about reinvention, both personal and architectural. It is our responsibility to have big ideas and the corresponding commitment to realize them, even in the face of the inconvenience of scaffolding and torn up streets and the sounds of construction. I hope that the projects on view in The Unfinished Grid challenge viewers to think of their own big ideas, so that we hand forward a greater New York to the people who follow us than the one in which we live now. It is a project not just for architects and developers and city officials, but one that should occupy all New Yorkers.

Gregory Wessner is an architectural historian and the special projects director at the Architectural League of New York. He is curator of “The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan.”

In 2009, NACTO launched its Cities for Cycling project, through which the organization studies and champions best practices in bikeway design, and began crafting an urban-oriented manual to guide cities who want to invest in bike-friendly roadway infrastructure and traffic engineering. The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide puts forth solutions for incorporating bicycle transportation options into the urban streetscape, based on a comprehensive understanding of the many bureaucratic restrictions and practical needs that dictate the design of our streets. In the face of design standards based on interstate highway travel, liability concerns, battles between State and City and competition between numerous stakeholders for use and right of way, this effort to overhaul our established ideas of how streets should work promises to be a struggle. And the folks at NACTO are dedicated to the challenge. In the following piece, Vega-Barachowitz looks at the example of the “cycle track” — a bikeway that is physically separated from motor traffic and is distinct from the sidewalk (such as the 9th Avenue bikeway here in New York) — to explain why our transportation networks are the way they are and how they should evolve. 

- V.S.

Photo by Harmony Blackwell, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

In the taxonomy of city streets, the cycle track is the platypus. Sandwiched between the sidewalk and the parking lane — neither a trail, a sidewalk, nor a travel lane — it defies the conventional spectra of classification and challenges where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

In spite of their curious and (as of now) sporadic cameos on American city streets, cycle tracks have long tradition in Northern Europe, and have more recently emerged on streets from Seoul to Seville. Since 2007, when New York City cut the ribbon on its inaugural Ninth Avenue cycle track, the movement for separated bikeways has accelerated in the United States; and culminated in 2011, with the publication of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a catalogue of innovative bikeway design concepts for US cities.

The NACTO Guide heralds a new era of thinking about our streets and public spaces, discovering in the asphalt tundra of the American metropolis an unlikely well of creative potential. Along with a growing cadre of city street design manuals, the guide beckons the twilight of the motor century and upholds the growing sentiment that the antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself. Today, as an emerging generation of designers and engineers rise to challenge the traditional rubric and protocol of traffic engineering, the first highly visible struggle will be that of the cycle track.

What follows contextualizes the cycle track in the lineage of transportation in the United States. Three persistent themes stand out: the tension between rural and urban transportation policy; the question of dedicating versus sharing road space; and the interpretation and limitations of conventional design standards and criteria.

This brief history will hopefully accelerate the launching of a new paradigm in urban transportation and street design, and thus engender more aggressive and creative streetscape interventions in the progress of design process and theory. This movement reinforces and reflects the recent cross-disciplinary shift from object to ground and from freestanding built form to landscape (set forth by architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton in 1990). It inverts the opportunity for design intervention from the built fabric of floors and facades to the dynamic spines and landscapes that weave around them and shape their context. City street design, though perhaps the least glamorous subfield in the dialogues surrounding landscape urbanism (or ecological urbanism), just might be its most highly contentious and politically volatile element — and therefore one of its most interesting.

Ocean Parkway bicycle path, c. 1894 | Courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

The Gospel of Good Roads
The first separated bikeway in the United States was constructed along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn during the bicycle fad of the 1890s. The bicycle craze produced many follies, including a short-lived, elevated, bicycle toll road between Pasadena and Los Angeles named the California Cycleway. Though the impact of the bicycle at the turn of the century was truncated by the emergence of the private automobile, an early group of bicycle advocates, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), successfully lobbied Congress for smooth, well-connected country roads at the height of the bicyclist era.

The California Cycleway | via bike.arroyoseco.org

Catering to the populist sentiments of the day, LAW published a series of tracts in Good Roads Magazine, including one called The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer. The gospel, along with other materials issued by the League, called upon Congress to build a system of well-paved roads connecting towns and villages. Their literature appealed to farmers whose livelihood was compromised by inadequate road conditions and sought to leverage more effectively the railroads upon which they relied to get their goods to market. Though the energy behind the movement came primarily from groups of cyclists in cities, their political appeal to the peasant farmer struck a sympathetic chord with congressmen distrustful of city bosses and railroad tycoons.

The agrarian sympathies of a federal government reeling from a financial crisis sparked by railroad speculation set in motion the inequitable balance in transportation policy and funding geared away from cities towards rural areas. This bias persists to this day. Beginning with the establishment of the Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) in the Department of Agriculture in 1893, the government set a precedent for road and highway construction as a rural program based on rural needs and rural access — a decade before the advent of the automobile. As a consequence, from the early 20th century onward, the Bureau of Public Roads and its successor agency the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) charted a course that would spell the dissolution of railroads and urban transportation systems in favor of federally funded toll-free highways dominated by state interests and agencies.¹

League of American Wheelmen rally, 1880 | via ocbike.org

The establishment of the landmark Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 carried with it a provision that enabled each state to establish a highway department to handle grants and funds allocated from the federal government. The highway departments, assembled from an already forceful and emergent group of regional highway lobbies (backed by national automobile associations), formed the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in 1914 — a group which, over the course of the 20th century, “developed into ‘one of the most important, least known political groups in the country…part lobby, part professional association, part quasi-political agency. No effective national highway policy could be enacted without its agreement.’”²

Evolving Guidelines and Standards for Roads and Bikeways
AASHO’s lead role in the federal highway program was underscored by their publication in the 1920s and 1930s of a series of road design standards, which eventually came to be known as the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets and the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The former, a set of guidelines commonly known as the AASHTO Green Book (AASHO was renamed AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, in 1973), is often referred to as the “bible” for traffic engineers. The MUTCD is a federally mandated set of codes intended to create standardized roadway signs and markings. The Green Book guides a road’s geometric proportions, such the minimum width of a travel lane (typically 10 feet, though engineers prefer 11-12 foot lanes), while the MUTCD mandates its signage and markings, such as the appropriate dimensions of a stop sign or a striped buffer.

The antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself.As cars became ever more prevalent on America’s roadways, the Green Book, guided by state highway engineers, continually added “safety” buffers to their street design standards to account for the growing frequency of accidents and driver errors. After 1966, based on the presumed inevitability of driver error,³ traffic engineers “became principally concerned with how to engineer [a] second line of defense, shifting the profession’s focus away from driver behavior and towards vehicles and roadside hardware.”⁴ Trees were routinely chopped down to improve sight distances on historic streets, sidewalks were narrowed to improve a car’s crumple zone, and intersection curb radii were altered to insure that trucks and other large vehicles could make smooth turns.

Ever more prohibitive traffic engineering standards regulated and regimented the city streetscape in the name of safety, even as these standards simultaneously eroded the urban realm and transformed ordinary commercial thoroughfares into high speed / high traffic urban arterials. Since only state-designated collector or arterial routes were eligible to receive federal funding, cities had an incentive to designate more of their city streets as state routes, and in doing so conform to AASHTO standards that compromised pedestrians, street life and commerce in favor of vehicle throughput.^5,6

Why AASHTO Excluded the Cycle Track
Among AASHTO’s supplemental publications released in the ensuing decades of the Interstate era was the 1975 AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bicycle Facilities. Demand for a better design policy for bicyclists emerged during the bike boom of the late 1960s and peaked in 1974, the year when, for the first time in decades, more bicycles were sold than cars.

Surging interest in the bicycle, then as now, sparked a reconsideration of the bicycle’s place in the roadway — specifically under what circumstances bicyclists ought to ride with or apart from traffic. At this juncture, despite a wealth of strategies being deployed in Europe, including the cycle track, the American standard fell curiously under the spell of John Forester, the champion of the vehicular cycling movement and author of Effective Cycling. Vehicular cyclists espouse the principle that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

In the early 1970s, Forester successfully fought (and continues to fight) against the inclusion of cycle tracks in the AASHTO Bike Guide. Though the vehicular cycling principle has many adamant advocates, the outright embrace of a behavioral approach to cycling coincided with a tacit rejection of the behavioral approach to traffic safety. In other words, as the engineering profession began to safeguard the built environment for terrible drivers and faster cars, a dominant group of bicyclists rejected the principle of separation in favor of “bicycle driving.”

At a point in history when the primary engineering solution was to segment users by grade and function, Forester may have seemed like a luminary. In practice, while cycling rates had a resurgence elsewhere, in the US, they stalled. 

9th Avenue, Manhattan | via NYC DOT's Street Design Manual

The Ninth Avenue Revolution
From the bike boom of the 1970s until today, efforts to make bicycling a mainstream form of transportation (rather than a child’s toy or an exercise regimen) have often focused on policy and education rather than engineering or roadway design. The few cycle track experiments that did take place were either situated outside of a large urban context, in left-leaning college towns like Madison, WI or Davis, CA; or quickly succumbed to political winds, such as New York Mayor Ed Koch’s infamous Midtown cycle tracks in the 1980s. A small but vocal group of engineers from the vehicular cycling community vehemently objected to changes to the AASHTO and MUTCD standards, propagating the philosophically sound but practically unrealistic “Share the Road” dogma that bicyclists should be accorded all of the rights and responsibilities of motorists.

Today’s call for cycle tracks differs, in part, because these interventions have been integrated into a bolder and more comprehensive reawakening and reconsideration of streets as public spaces for people. In 2007, when New York City constructed the city’s first protected bike lane pilot project on Ninth Avenue and transformed Times Square from a tumultuous interchange into a public commons, the city not only created a safe space for cyclists and pedestrians, they set a new precedent in the design of city streets. Cycle track projects, along with a host of bold engineering and communications strategies, have helped to revive the notion of the street as a place not solely for cars, but a front yard in which commercial and pedestrian activities may thrive.

In most cities, changes to city streets, beyond repaving or filling potholes, occur in geologic time. Transportation agencies and public works departments are (understandably) reluctant to attract bad press and political controversy by eliminating traffic lanes, and in much of the country, have little to gain from widening sidewalks or adding bike lanes. Moreover, innovation has often been discouraged by the threat of liability, as innovative cities and engineers fall back on prevailing standards (AASHTO guidance) rather than the immunity of good engineering judgment.⁷ In the 1970s, John Forester coerced the state of California and the federal government to withdraw proposals for cycle tracks by citing a lack of safety research and suing the city of Palo Alto for having mandatory sidepath⁸ laws — injecting a sword into the tender belly of the system.⁹ A steadfast reliance on research and the threat of liability created an untenable cycle, which New York City, by building the cycle track as a pilot project in 2007, may have finally broken.

The current movement to build cycle tracks and other innovative designs reflects a paradigm shift in the urban political-engineering-planning framework under which cities typically operate. City transportation agencies and public works departments are transforming themselves into public space departments to cater to a new generation, and are in turn finding that the dialogue of controversial new steps — such as an ambitious bike network expansion —helps them to transcend the business-as-usual approach to city streets and to forge new partnerships with community groups, businesses and advocates. When New York City built its first cycle tracks (as part of its larger complete street design initiative), it made the cycle track into an object of political capital, setting off a domino effect that now involves cities from Memphis to San Jose.

Excerpt from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

The quiet revolution of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide
The story of the cycle track does not end with the trials and successes of New York. In fact, despite the turmoil of the Prospect Park West Bike Lane in the winter of 2011, the imperative for cycle tracks has garnered even more momentum nationwide, with cities all around the United States prepared to lay their first miles of protected bikeways in 2012 and 2013. While controversy has a way of heightening interest and visibility, the publication in March 2011 of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide set forth for the first time an accepted, long overdue national standard off of which cities could base their designs.

While the cycle track is what makes the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide pioneering, the manual actually includes guidance for bicycle signals, bike boxes, buffered bike lanes, and a host of other new traffic engineering strategies now being deployed across the country. The designs in the guide draw on the European experience as well as existing projects and precedents in the United States. Following the official release in March 2011, NACTO undertook an unprecedented endorsement campaign for the document, drawing the support of countless city transportation officials, as well as US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. These developments have set the stage for a thorough reconsideration of roadway design standards in cities across the country, and reflect the long-recognized fissure between the reality of urban design and the tenets of state highway design.

Whether or not federal transportation policy and state highway design evolve to achieve a more representative balance between state and local interests remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the recent emergence of the cycle track and the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a positive precedent for the future of urban streets and spaces. The modern solution to traffic congestion is no longer a multi-billion dollar highway or tunnel, but a recalibration of investment away from traffic and towards people, and away from highways and towards transit and public plazas. It is through the reinvention and re-imagination of this ubiquitous public asset, the street, that the American city may discover its latent potential. While cycle tracks may be an ephemeral protagonist in this evolving drama (as their late 19th century counterparts were for the Good Roads movement), this subtle traffic operation sets the stage for a more ambitious reconquest of the street — its place, purpose and future in the American city.

Bikebox at a signalized intersection, from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

David Vega-Barachowitz is the Sustainable Initiatives Program Manager at the National Association of City Transportation Officials and coordinator for NACTO’s Cities for Cycling project. Mr. Vega-Barachowitz joined NACTO in 2011 to develop and disseminate the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a national design guide which compiles innovative bikeway and street design in the United States. Prior to joining NACTO, he undertook a Henry Evans Travelling fellowship granted by Columbia University to study urban design, with a focus on bicycle and infrastructure planning and design, in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and France. His interest in bicycling as sustainable transportation was inspired by his time studying architecture and urban design in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008-2009, Mr. Vega-Barachowitz worked at the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked on a State of Good Repair initiative to improve system-wide asset management and systematic rehabilitation for stations. He is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Urban Studies with Architecture.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Orchard Beach (pavilion at left) | photo: emixpix.com

Deborah Wye is a seasoned curator of visual art, with over 30 years experience at the Museum of Modern Art, where she was most recently the senior curator of prints and illustrated books until her retirement late last year. Since then, she’s taken on a different kind of research project, one that marries her curatorial expertise with the passionate curiosity of a true urban enthusiast: the fascinating history and uncertain future of the Orchard Beach Pavilion at Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. For Wye, a keen interest in the pavilion itself — the Depression-era politics of its development, the social story of its decades of public use, the architectural choices for the building itself — transformed into a desire to advocate on behalf of its preservation, so that “layers of history [can] be visible for the collective memories of New Yorkers.” To that end, she has curated an exhibition that is currently on view at the City Island Nautical Museum and has been presenting a related lecture about the building at interested forums throughout the city. She’ll be reprising this presentation for the Department of Bridges and Tunnels in December, the East Bronx History Forum in January, at the Bartow-Pell Mansion and the Bronx County Historical Society in the spring. In May of next year, she’ll present at the Bronx Central Library, where an abbreviated version of the exhibition will be on display. 

For a deteriorating building whose history is most often overlooked, an advocate like Wye offers a fortuitous opportunity for a grass-roots approach to historic preservation to benefit from a professional command of art history and a passerby’s amazement at New York’s architectural treasures, some of which truly take us by surprise and capture our imagination. So we asked Wye to tell the story of how she discovered this building, how she went about researching it, and what her personal hopes are for its future. 

- C.S.

The Orchard Beach Pavilion in 1937 | Photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive, all rights reserved

A fenced-off landmark is languishing in the Northeast Bronx.

I can’t remember when the grand Orchard Beach Pavilion first grabbed my attention. It is a massive gray structure, hard to ignore, but it had an abandoned air about it — sitting there in the background of the beach experience, with no one seeming to notice it, even at the height of the season. But I began to look more closely, and as I started to notice its classical and Moderne details, I became curious about its function and its deteriorating condition. The Pavilion once served as the entry portal for changing rooms and lockers occupying areas behind each curving wing. And there were lots of shops and dining possibilities, for a quick snack or for lunch in a more formal setting with tablecloths. There was once a staffed medical station, and a police outpost that still functions today, as do Parks Department offices. But I believe that the way the Pavilion’s form responds to the curving beach was also meant to serve a dramatic, theatrical function, the focal point of a bold and ambitious public project.

When I discovered this monumental structure, it was a mess, and after a few years went by, even the concessions were closed up. Protective fencing was added to keep people away at a certain distance. Scaffolding appeared. I wondered if that was a good sign — that maybe some improvement was in store.

Although I live in Manhattan, I found out about this building when my husband and I bought a weekend house on City Island, which, to us native Bostonians, was like a funky Cape Cod. I began biking a lot and discovered nearby Orchard Beach — truly a wonder. It was off-season, before the Beach was teeming with people, some 1.4 million each year. I couldn’t believe the views I saw as I rode along the stone boardwalk that hugs the crescent-shaped shoreline. Somehow I knew — I can’t remember how — that Robert Moses was responsible for “inventing” this beach. Of course I had heard of Moses, having lived in New York briefly in the 1960s and then moving here permanently in 1979, but I wasn’t very knowledgeable about him. I only knew he was supposed to be bad. But with my good luck at finding Orchard Beach, as I looked out at the water, I could only say “thank you” to the much-maligned master builder.

Photo by Aurelija Cepulinskaite-Jara, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Once I retired from my position as Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art, in the fall of 2010, and finally had some free time, the first book I read was The Power Broker by Robert Caro, that riveting story of Robert Moses. But I also learned of a newer book, Robert Moses and the Modern City, from 2007, by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, that offers a different perspective on Moses and acknowledged a range of accomplishments. Most helpful for me was the catalogue of projects from the 1930s (the period of the so-called “good Moses”), each described in great detail, including Orchard Beach.

I began taking courses on the history of New York City and its architecture, taking walking tours and joining all sorts of organizations in the “preservation community.” I was thrilled with the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 2006 designation report on the Orchard Beach Pavilion, recognizing the beach project as “among the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.” I was inspired. I dove in and began studying the building in earnest, not only its architecture but its place in New York history. Moses became even clearer in my mind, and I also found out a lot about the remarkable Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and the impact of the Moses-LaGuardia team through FDR’s New Deal programs of the Great Depression.

Robert Moses and Fiorello Laguardia | photo via swimminginthecity.com

The style of the WPA-funded Orchard Beach Pavilion, with its imposing but sleek monumentality, is sometimes referred to as “Federal Moderne” and it shares characteristics with many public buildings built through the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. I realized by now that I was tackling my subject as if I were doing curatorial research for the kinds of exhibitions I have curated at MoMA. But this time, I had no real goal yet. I was just learning and amassing material. It was such a great subject!

From left: Pavilion Entry Balcony; Pavilion Collonade; and Pavilion Colonnade with Greek fret trim | Photos: Carl Foster, New York Landmarks and Preservation Commission, 2006

The project took me to places and parts of New York City I had never explored. My subway map was worn out and taped together. In the Bronx, I visited Marianne Anderson, the administrator for Pelham Bay Park, the park in which Orchard Beach is the star attraction. She very nicely gave me a tour of all the closed-off parts of the Pavilion, which are alarming in some cases. And I met Librarian Laura Tosi at the Bronx County Historical Society, in a neighborhood where I also saw the historic 1758 Valentine-Varian House and the Williamsbridge Oval Park, another Moses project of the 1930s. I walked the extraordinary Grand Concourse to learn more about Art Deco, since the Pavilion is often cited for its Deco details. I joined the Friends of Pelham Bay Park, an advocacy group, in hopes of finding others who might share my passion for the Pavilion, and then began to attend meetings of the East Bronx History Forum. But my research also brought me beyond the Bronx, to the Parks Department’s Olmsted Center in Queens, where a bonus was the nearby Queens Museum of Art (originally the New York City Building for the 1939 World’s Fair) by the architect Aymar Embury II, who is also credited with the design of the Orchard Beach Pavilion.

Other examples of Aymar Embury's civic architecture in New York. From left: the New York City Building at the 1932 Worlds' Fair (now the site of the Queens Museum of Art) photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive; the Prospect Park Zoo, photo: Deborah Wye; the pavilion at Jacob Riis Park, photo: Deborah Wye

There was more research and more travel — to the lovely Prospect Park Zoo, where the exterior is much the same as when Embury designed it in 1935 (which isn’t the case for Central Park’s Zoo, also designed by him at about the same time but now drastically altered). I made my way to Jacob Riis Park, where Moses and Embury worked together, and the buildings share the sleek classicizing aesthetic of the Orchard Beach Pavilion, something both men favored. In fact, Moses believed that structures for the public should be traditional rather than avant-garde in style. And he found the perfect collaborator in the rather conservative Embury, who served as the Parks Department Consulting Architect for hundreds of projects. Embury was also an architectural historian, a Princeton graduate, and an accomplished and well-educated man generally, exactly the kind of Ivy-Leaguer that Moses, a Yalie himself, always preferred for his top team.

I also discovered the places where New York history professionals and amateur “buffs” like myself spend lots of time, from the Municipal Archives to the Milstein Division of the New York Public Library. Photo archives were another story. One stand-out was the immense collection of 1930s photographs of New York City taken by Berenice Abbott for a WPA project and available on the Museum of the City of New York’s website. While Moses made sure Orchard Beach was carefully documented in photographs for the Parks Department, some great images were also taken at the time by the firm of Gottscho-Schleisner.

So, what happened with all this research? It turns out that last summer, July 25 to be exact, was the 75th anniversary of the dedication of Orchard Beach. I seemed to be the first one to realize that, even taking the Pelham Bay Park Administrator by surprise.

Orchard Beach opening day ceremony, 1936 | Photo courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

When talking about my project with Barbara Dolensek, Vice President of the City Island Historical Society and Nautical Museum, she suggested a 75th anniversary exhibition. That opened in July with about 55 photographs. The community is enjoying the show, which has had some good coverage in the local press, and my PowerPoint talk got a standing-room-only crowd. (Granted, it’s a small place!) Now, I’m taking this illustrated talk “on the road,” so to speak, in order to garner interest in the Pavilion.

I want people to know about it, to give it the recognition it deserves. I want these layers of history to be visible for the collective memories of New Yorkers. Today, the Parks Department is in the midst of a scoping process for a possible restoration of the Pavilion. They have received bids for a six- to nine-month study of the building that will result in proposals for various options: restoration, partial restoration, and also replacement buildings. Community meetings will be part of that process, and I’m gathering names at my talks so I can contact people about them.

The building might be beyond repair. It seems to have a concrete condition called alkali silica reaction, which is disfiguring the building and could be eating away at its foundations. If the Pavilion is actually in dangerous condition, of course measures will need to be taken. But hopefully, this process will mean at least partial restoration, as well as a re-vamping so it can serve as a modern recreation center that fulfills the needs of the community. The residents of the Bronx, as well as those from the rest of the city and beyond, deserve to have this extraordinary example of civic architecture accessible. Great buildings can make people feel great. Even the inimitable Robert Moses thought so. In a quote that might sound a bit corny now, I think he got it right: “I believe in bigger and better construction for public recreation because I am satisfied that it makes people better.”

Personally, I’m not averse to a solution for the building that would combine old elements with new ones. I just want restoration to ensure that visitors can remember the New York history embedded in this structure. It represents a time that is mostly forgotten — the depth of the Great Depression and the massive federal response engineered by FDR, the idealism that was once part and parcel of grand civic architecture, and the leaders with huge personalities who were somehow able to accomplish great feats for New Yorkers. The scale and ambition of the Orchard Beach project, embodied in the Pavilion, seems unthinkable today. But its evocative style is a tangible reminder of the period — this was the 1930s and this is what public buildings looked like. It has an unmistakable symbolic resonance.

All of this might seem like a rationale for letting the building just sit there, to serve as a kind of museum artifact. That’s not what I want. I want people to make use of the building and fully experience its architecture. I can think of so many ways for it to function, in addition to dining, relaxing, and overlooking the beach. How about holding a wedding there? The building could house exercise rooms with equipment, there could be yoga classes. What about interactive displays for children, installations by local artists, and presentations of Bronx history? There is room for a skate park, for a pool, and for so many other things. But such plans need active community involvement. I hope I can help make that happen.

So now, I continue to visit the Pavilion — like an old friend — to pay respects and stay inspired. And I also say a quick good-bye each week on the way back to Manhattan as we cross the City Island Bridge and see the huge, mysterious structure from a distance across the water.

Photo by Aurelija Cepulinskaite-Jara, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Deborah Wye was a curator at The Museum of Modern Art for 31 years, before retiring in 2010. She now works for the Museum on a part-time basis, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the prints of Louise Bourgeois.

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

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

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

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

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

Photo by Flickr user C-Monster

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

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

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

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

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

Penn South

Hillman Houses

Co-op City and Baychester

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

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

Starrett City under construction

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Ismaelly Pena

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

Ezra Stoller | TWA Terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, Eero Saarinen, New York, NY, 1962 | Gelatin Silver Print © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York. Click image to launch slideshow.

Ezra Stoller | Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, NY, 1959 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller | Manufacturers Trust Company, Fifth Avenue, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, New York, NY, 1954 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller | Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY, 1958 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller | House in MoMA Garden, Marcel Breuer, New York, NY, 1949 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Walking into an exhibition of Ezra Stoller photographs induces a specific kind of vertigo. Tightly grouped zones of square, white frames regiment the wall planes of the white-cubic gallery space; within the frames, monuments of 20th century modernism continue to reflect their mysterious light, vanguards of the era now as embedded in the collective mindframe as the temples of antiquity. Stoller’s articulation of the various species of heroic modernism — whether gridded (Seagram Building), biomorphic (TWA Terminal at Idlewild), or volumetrically motley (Fallingwater) — classifies and idealizes them in ways architecture itself would have been unable to achieve without the great architectural photographers of the era.

The 50 images now on view at Chelsea’s Yossi Milo Gallery do something that is still surprising: they liberate the architectural photograph from its original client/media context, allowing its technical precision to generate an aura of high artistry. This move is still relatively recent for the genre, which has hovered between its two constituent industries — architecture and photography — and their wildly divergent, yet inextricable, practices. Whether in the service of the architect, the developer, or the press, the priorities of the architectural photograph have almost always been to record in order to promote. Therefore, this mode of photography has had to shed its original context before it could be understood on its own merits. Like a lot of commercial work, the distance of time has seemed to deepen its perceived aesthetic value.

But unlike the photographers of shoes and perfume bottles during the rise of the product advertisement and the retail catalog, the architectural photographer of modernism had to convey a new supercategory of product quite unlike anything that had come before. Their toolkit included the inherent geometries of the buildings themselves, and the choices of perspective, depth, detail, staging, and lighting that would conspire to make these images as unforgettable as possible.

Stoller was canny at integrating the kinds of elements that in less careful hands are distracting (which is why architectural photography orthodoxy advises to avoid them or clean them up in post-production). Cars, foreground expanses of tarmac (complete with oil stains), roof guardrails, airplane wings: all of these demonstrated the kind of philosophical assimilation of the everyday that made modernism accessible to laypeople. And it was that very element — people — that Stoller was particularly unafraid to include in these machinelike environments, contrary to the bizarre fallacy that only the most recent generation of imagers such as Iwan Baan introduced the human figure into the architectural frame. Stoller deployed people to activate spaces and convey scale, demystifying spaces (as with spectators at the Guggenheim, or the deadpan businessman contemplating the street-visible vault of the Manufacturers Trust Company building). But he also used figures differently for other kinds of projects, for the opposite effect of conveying quotidian reality. One classic view of the Seagram Building, taken from a height at twilight, reveals a solitary figure at the edge of the otherwise empty front plaza, creating an ambiguity that alludes to the new sublime atmosphere of midcentury urbanity.

Stoller and other giants of his generation fixed a methodology and aesthetic approach that made sense for its era; or is that a truism that we can no longer really see past, due to the pervasive success of their work? It’s commonplace to think that seminal photographers have taught us to see their subjects. Currently, Stoller’s example is progressively being dismantled by photographers who started working in the wake of postmodernism and for whom the full digital arsenal of data-intensive image capturing and processing tools are the norm. For them, there are no more iconic views to create, because the built environment is now as volatile as the digital image. Stoller’s work had to contend with new monuments; today’s photographers have to contemplate a defaulting Dubai, non-place and junkspace. Their rejection of classical norms is gradually training us to unsee Stoller.

Today the architectural image seems to proliferate boundlessly. For this we confront Stoller with a predictable measure of nostalgia, but also as a marker for visual and design practices that were at their own crucial turning points. In the skeptical unseeing of the modernist legacy, today’s architectural photography primes our visual palate for a future where both architecture and photography are destabilized further. For now, when we resort to beholding the previous era, we can do so much like the solitary figure in the plaza of the Seagram Building: with a kind of awe, because awe is still permitted.

Ezra Stoller | Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY, 1958 | Gelatin Silver Print | © Ezra Stoller, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Stoller is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery at 525 West 25th Street until February 12th, 2011

Alan Rapp is the managing editor of the New City Reader, a temporary newspaper which recently completed its residency at New York’s New Museum. A graduate of School of Visual Arts’ Design Criticism MFA program, he edits, writes, and creates visual books in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

American Community Survey 2005-2009 | Household Income Distribution | screengrab from nytimes.com

CENSUS MAPS
This week, the Census Bureau released its first 5-year American Community Survey (ACS) estimates, based on data about economic and social trends collected from 2005-2009. The ACS is an annual survey that gathers information from a sampling of US citizens to evaluate of economic and social needs in between the comprehensive, population-wide census, conducted every ten years. (Speaking of which — the first round of 2010 Census stats will be released on December 21st.) The New York Times has done a stellar job, as usual, of visualizing this data in a collection of interactive maps that chart racial distribution, income, home value and education statistics on the level of the city block. The maps expose greater, and probably predictable, demographic patterns nationwide, and let you poke around to check out who your neighbors are (at least according to their numbers). Zooming in on New York, it is interesting to note how rent control and gentrification have likely lead to the fairly jumbled distribution of income in Manhattan and, as the Times highlights in a separate piece, the migration of ethnic populations from Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint to different pockets in the boroughs over the past decade.
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COMPETITIVE REDISTRICTING
“A fundamental part of democracy is ensuring that voters have viable choices, and that elected officials are accountable to their constituencies. High rates of uncontested elections and consistent, double digit margins of victory are anathema to these goals,” concludes a report on competitiveness of legislative elections available on the New York City government website (PDF). With redistricting in New York scheduled for 2011, after the results of this year’s census are released and before the 2012 elections, a cadre of local politicians calling themselves NY Uprising are pushing for redistricting reform. The group, led by former Mayor Ed Koch, cite the technological ease of mapping tools in drawing non-competitive districts and creating “safe” seats and recall a history of redistricting for political gain in America – perhaps explaining the 18th century federalist ring to their moniker. They suggest using an independent party to redraw district lines for the next election, implementing early voting and extending registration deadlines. Their report reminds us that competition is essential in stimulating democracy and that unseen political boundaries effect election results.
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The City Concealed: Park Slope Armory from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

THE CITY CONCEALED
New Yorkers love to discover the city’s hidden sites. When the urban core seems so jam-packed, there is a thrill in finding the unnoticed, especially when it’s in plain sight. With this in mind, THIRTEEN/New York Public Media created The City Concealed, an online video documentary series that explores the “unseen corners of New York.” Their latest installment looks at the history of the Park Slope Armory, from its inception as the home for National Guard’s 14th regiment to its conversion into a YMCA. Be sure to check out the rest of the series — part urban exploration, part architectural and city history, The City Concealed can take you to a Washington Heights theater described as “sort of Neo-Classical Cambodian, with influences of Hindu, Mayan, and Moorish architecture. Gilded and covered in red velvet.”; the 19th century Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville; and the protected heron habitat of North Brother Island. “Visit the places you don’t know exist, locations you can’t get into, or maybe don’t even want to.”
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Walki, 2010 | Swoon | three-layer screenprint on handmade Indian jute paper

WALKI
By now, regular readers of Urban Omnibus are quite familiar with the artist Swoon and, among other things, the work she’s been doing with the Konbit Shelter Project to build sustainable, durable and low-cost housing in post-earthquake Haiti. This week, we received word that Swoon has teamed up with Upper Playground to release a limited edition print, all proceeds from which will go to support the Konbit project. The portrait of Walki, a boy who spent time with the Konbit Shelter team at their building site last summer, will only be available until January 1st. At $125, the screenprint is a worthy addition to any last-minute holiday gift list.
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FILM SCREENING: PEOPLE AND BUILDINGS
Need something to do in that sluggish time between Christmas and New Years? On December 27th at 7pm the Center for Urban Pedagogy is hosting a People and Building’s film screening at Anthology Film Archives. The selected films relate to welfare and complement CUP’s recently completed project on Cash Assistance. RSVP to info@anothercupdevelopment.org to attend this free event.

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