Also this week in the Omnibus roundup: Kimmelman looks at towers in the park; New York goes convention center crazy; Verdant Power gets a green light for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project; President Obama forsakes infrastructure investment in “An America Built to Last”; the Asian American Writers’ Workshop calls for Creative Nonfiction Fellows; the South Street Seaport Museum reopens; Studio-X hosts a discussion on Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic trash tubes; the DOT calls for public art proposals; and Lead Pencil Studio exhibits in Boston.

“ARCHITECTURE IS NEVER DESTINY”
A viewing of the The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary by Chad Freidrichs, prompted Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, to question the limits of architecture’s role in determining the success of failure of a public housing project. The piece once again confirms the writer’s commitment to interrogating the social and urbanistic implications of the built environment. He contrasts the fates of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis — a complex whose rapid descent from model low-income housing community to a national symbol of urban deprivation and crime led to its demolition in 1972 — with Penn South — an example in Chelsea of the same towers-in-the-park building typology that has, according to the residents Kimmelman interviews, thrived. He notes that part of Penn South’s success has to do with the ways it serves the needs of older residents, which led to its official designation as a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, or NORC, in 1986 (the nation’s first). Using the phenomenon of NORCs as a lens through which to reconsider towers-in-the-park — a typology maligned in the popular imagination specifically because of examples like Pruitt-Igoe – is an argument that the urban design firm Interboro introduced to Omnibus readers in “NORCs in NYC.” Read that feature again, wander by Penn South or some of the other NORCs in the city, and then go see The Pruitt-Igoe Myth at the IFC Center.

WAIT, HOW MANY CONVENTION CENTERS DOES NEW YORK NEED AGAIN?
If the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe signalled an end to a particular philosophy of urban problem-solving, what would the demolition of the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center on 11th Avenue in Manhattan signify? Especially if Governor Cuomo gets his wish of a replacement venue — intended to be the nation’s largest — at the site of the Aqueduct racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens, a place whose vibrant flea market we visited just before redevelopment plans shut it down for good. Skepticism about the long-term financial viability of a convention center has not dimmed the governor’s enthusiasm for the project. Nor has the new plan changed Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s mind about the need for a second convention center in Willets Point. Critics of both projects cite evidence that this kind of megaproject is rarely the panacea it claims to be, an economic analysis explored in depth in this 2009 article in Next American City.

Power Grid Scenarios | Illustration: Michael Loverich for Urban Omnibus, "East River Power," February 9th, 2009

GREEN LIGHT FOR TIDAL POWER 
The kind of urban infrastructure investment that looks forward rather than looking back is one that capitalizes on New York’s unique assets and seeks to provide viable and affordable energy alternatives. In the hope that tidal power might be the energy source to make that possible, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission awarded Verdant Power Inc. the first license for a tidal energy project for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project, or RITE. Verdant will use the ten year pilot contract to test the commercial viability of the project as well as the environmental impact on fish and the river’s sediment. In an Urban Omnibus feature from way back in 2009, “East River Power,” we looked at some of the questions that the prospect of tidal power raised for New York City’s waterways, and for the framework of energy generation and distribution. As the first grid-tied system of tidal turbines, RITE will hopefully be a sign of things to come. Read more at Bloomberg and Inhabitat.

AN AMERICA BUILT TO LAST, SORT OF
Infrastructure investment was once a policy priority for President Obama, but was all but absent from his State of the Union Speech this week, entitled, “An America Built to Last.” Gone are the promises of high-speed rail included in his 2011 speech; gone was mention of an urban agenda. The President did cite America’s past endeavors to revitalize its economy during the Great Depression through large-scale building projects like the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or to knit the nation together through the interstate highway system after World War II. But the larger focus of the address, the point to which he returned again and again, was to try to bridge the chasm between the two parties and redress growing income inequality. Check out more of the coverage at The Atlantic Cities and The Transport Politic.

South Street Seaport Museum | Photo by Andrew Hinderaker via dnainfo.com

EVENTS and TO DOs

OPEN CITY CALL FOR NONFICTION FELLOWS
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is about to start a new year of its Open City project, profiled last year on the Omnibus, for which a competitively selected group of writers documents and reflects on urban change in the three New York Chinatowns. The call for Creative Nonfiction Fellows has just been announced, so if you’re an emerging creative nonfiction writer passionate about New York City neighborhoods, apply today. The application deadline is February 17. Check out the call here.

SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM REOPENS
The South Street Seaport Museum is reopening this week after an eight-month hiatus during which the museum was renovated to respond to its expanded scope under the creative direction and management of The Museum of the City of New York, which has thrown its full weight into the project. The re-opened space aims to connect more powerfully with its surrounding neighborhood, avail itself of the top two floors as exhibition space, and make the museum more easily navigable through signage and other measures. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

TRASH TUBES OF THE FUTURE
A couple of years ago we spoke to Juliette Spertus about her exhibition Fast Trash, about the Roosevelt Island AVAC (Automated Vacuum Collection System). Since then, she and Benjamin Miller have been studying the feasibility of upgrading Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system and also expanding the system to Manhattan using existing transportation infrastructure. Join them as they discuss their preliminary findings, followed by a discussion on the future of waste disposal in New York City featuring Vishaan Chakrabarti, Claire Weisz, Marcia Byrstryn, Juliette Spertus and Benjamin Miller. Tuesday, February 7, 6:30-8:30pm, at Studio-X. More information available here or here.

URBAN ART CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The New York City DOT has announced its open call for proposals for their pARTners and Barrier Beautification Projects. Both projects seek to create a more livable city with public art. The Barrier Beautification project asks artists to imagine how they would decorate the barriers that have become necessary in our bike friendly city, separating bikers, pedestrians and drivers from one another. For pARTners, the DOT commissions artists to produce site-responsive art in collaboration with community-based organizations for high priority sites owned by the agency. Check out the full call for proposals.

LEAD PENCIL STUDIO HITS BOSTON
Back in April we spoke to Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio about their firm’s work with LIDAR. For our Boston area readers, Lead Pencil Studio will be in Edifice Amiss: Constructing New Perspectives, an exhibition about the constructed world opening January 30th at the Stephen D. Paine Gallery of MassArt. The works in the exhibition reveal the secret lives of the architectural spaces in which we live and work. More information available here.

Lead Pencil Studio in Edifice Amiss

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Three weeks ago, Mayor Gilberto Kassab of São Paulo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York met in São Paulo as part of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and shared their particular strategies to meet the challenges of climate change. It’s clear that both mayors take sustainability seriously, and their administrations have adjusted their priorities accordingly.

São Paulo is similar to New York in many ways. Both cities are big and growing. They attract the best and brightest, the dreamers and the strivers, and as a result they have a rich cultural life and diversity. They also both face similar problems, from housing solutions to open space access to efficient transportation.

Everything I think I know about good urban design comes from what I know about New York, and working at the New York City Department of City Planning. But recently, I had an opportunity to work for three weeks with the São Paulo city government as part of a professional urban design exchange organized by SP Urbanismo, a public-private agency under the Secretary of Urban Development. And so, equipped with the principles I’ve learned here — and barely any Portuguese — I briefly stepped onto the front lines of the enormous challenges of rapid and unplanned urbanization.

TRAFFIC
One of São Paulo’s priorities is to mitigate its notorious traffic jams. A Paulistano can spend up to three hours each day waiting in traffic and most of their traffic planners believe that the only way to reduce congestion is by adding more road. However, the land-use planners I worked with see the importance of investing in mass transit, and that adding more road results in more cars and more traffic. We talked a lot about how easily São Paulo could become a walkable city. A walkable city needs to have complete neighborhoods: a concentration of density around mass transit, a mix of uses, innovative architecture and design standards for streets and public space. These are the principles on which São Paulo was originally built.

In São Paulo’s old city center, a mix of Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts buildings crowd together around spacious pedestrian streets and continuous networks of public parks. Trolleys once ran on the tree-lined streets and every apartment building or office building had ground floor shops. In 1940, it was a city of about 1.3 million people living in an area roughly similar to the size of Brooklyn. The city center today retains the idyllic pedestrian-friendly DNA apparent in the grainy photos from the 1930s, but now the retail is low-end, many of the great old buildings vacant and covered with graffiti, and many of the parks have been revised over the years by architects fixated on the texture and plasticity of concrete. Since the 1960s, density has been dispersed throughout the city with no apparent pattern, housing has been separated from other land uses, and traffic engineers have guided the major public infrastructure expenditures to serve the unchallenged primacy of car-based transport.

Currently the planners in São Paulo are proposing several urban redevelopment projects that would recreate this vibrant mix of uses and density around transit. But it’s an effort being met with resistance and fear of change. Packed auditoriums of angry residents denounce the projects in fiery oratory, worried that adding density will add more cars and more traffic, not alleviate them as planned. New York sees its own share of conflict and debate over issues in the public realm, but here the City is working hard to create a mutually-supportive alliance between advocates for a greener city, transit-oriented development and safe affordable housing. The planners in São Paulo need more allies to help them make their case.

OPEN SPACE
Flying over São Paulo, you can see a seemingly endless expanse of city, a wide variety of single family houses and pencil towers. You might notice patches of green around the towers, but you won’t see much public open space. Working with São Paulo’s planners, I began to understand that this pattern of prioritizing private open space over public open space is deeply embedded in their regulations. Setback rules push buildings off the street; parking requirements are uniformly high, roughly one space per inhabitant; most of the city is zoned at a low floor-to-area ratio, between two and four. And there is a growing middle class that wants to live in high rises — which demand substantial parking provisions, security fences and significant open space on the lot, which is offered as a private amenity to the residents. But anyone on the other side of those tall fences is left walking on narrow sidewalks, creeping along what feels like a prison wall.

Mayor Kassab is pushing back against these regulations. He has made open space a high priority, constructing 66 new parks and planting nearly 200,000 new trees in the last five years, a much needed greening. Here in New York, we’ve seen Mayor Bloomberg lead his strategy for New York’s open space with a directive to bring each New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a public park. To achieve that goal, we’ve discovered new opportunities for public space where we can find them: on abandoned rail lines, former roadbeds like Times Square and formerly inaccessible waterfront industrial sites; and have worked with developers to provide high quality, publicly accessible, privately-operated open space.

HOUSING
A third priority for São Paulo is how to provide safe and affordable housing for the estimated three million people who currently live in precarious settlements. These notorious favelas occupy land that is often on steep slopes or flood prone areas. The daily conditions in these homes are fraught with poverty, crime and disease. Seasonal floods frequently cause landslides and lead to dozens of deaths.

São Paulo’s housing agencies are employing two major strategies to address this housing crisis. The first is to bring roads and infrastructure through the existing favelas, a process that the housing ministry calls “urbanization.” This model avoids displacing existing communities as much as possible, yet it fails to provide housing at the necessary scale — the government has set their target at providing one million new units in the next fifteen years. The second strategy is to find a very dense model of housing that can be expediently planned and constructed, safely located, strongly built and easily connected to roads and to the municipal infrastructure. To meet this vast demand, they have adopted a familiar model: “towers in the park.”

In the mid-20th century, Robert Moses and the authors of the 1961 Zoning Resolution adopted the towers-in-the-park model with the stated goal of replacing New York’s slums. But over time we’ve seen the shortcomings of this model. Yes, towers in the park offer great advantages in terms of concentrating infrastructure, and being able to execute projects quickly and affordably. They can also provide individual dwelling units that enjoy a lot of light and air and standardized layouts which simplify the economic model, making them easy to scale and repeat. But these virtues have to be weighed against the vices that we’ve come to know. Building gated housing complexes, cut off from the neighborhood street life, reinforces isolation and creates an insecure environment. New York is now turning towards affordable housing projects that are designed to integrate with the surrounding community to create a stronger sense of public life in the neighborhood and transform the urban design of the area.

RESILIENCE
Public transportation is good for cities… right? That’s something that I thought needed no explanation. But I had a debate recently with my boss, Alex Washburn, about which form of transportation has done the most harm to cities. To me, it’s obvious that automobile-centric urban design wreaked a sudden and complete havoc on the American landscape. It only took one generation for much of the United States to go from towns, farms and railroads to suburbs, strip malls, and interstates. Today, other cities all over the world, especially those that are experiencing rapid economic growth, seem to be following this bad example. As I sat in the back of a cab for two hours on my way to a meeting in São Paulo, I noticed the narrowness of the sidewalks, the absence of pedestrians or bikes, the ubiquitous walls, the apparent single-use zoning all around me. All of this to serve the consumer demand for cars. And it’s happening all over the world. It may be years before these cities feel the full effects: the degradation of civic space, the expense of providing services and infrastructure over a widely sprawled area, and the increase in chronic diseases because people walk less.

Even so, Alex says that airplanes may be guiltier, because for many years precocious urban designers (like me) have flown all over the world and put forward their big ideas to politicians and builders. You could call this “flyover urbanism.” On one such mission, Robert Moses came to Brazil in the 1950s to help plan highways, helping to set the direction of its current urban design trajectory.

But planning and prodding can only do so much, and no city can “leapfrog” past the mistakes others have made, or copy their successes. Great cities will always be shaped by forces of economy, politics, nature and pure chance. There is not one course of history which all cities will follow, nor one destination we all seek to reach. Also, cities don’t leap.

Cities might not leap, but every city has its own flow. The forces that govern that flow — “why” we do things — might be similar between places, and we may even learn together the “how,” but we must be wary of copying the “what.”

São Paulo has an elevated highway called the Minhocão that runs through a neighborhood that has strong potential for redevelopment. There is some debate about the utility of this highway to the traffic network, and so it has been closed on Sundays to allow people to use it recreationally. I was asked by officials if I thought this could be São Paulo’s High Line. With this internationally-acclaimed example in mind, architects and engineers have begun to make plans for capping the elevated highway with a park, thus creating even more obstruction of light and air to the public realm below. Trying to recreate the High Line on the Minhocão is copying the “what.” Great urban design projects cannot be dropped from an airplane. But perhaps principles can parachute in to offer a little help. The principle of the High Line is that we can create an invaluable resource out of something that had been thought of as an unwanted remnant of another age.

I have wondered if what Tolstoy famously said about families is also true of cities: that they are unhappy in different ways but happy in similar ways. It would be a boring world if all cities were the same. But it is not our particular unhappinesses that make us different. In fact, our problems seem to be getting more and more universal. What makes us unique is the way in which we deal with these problems, using our own local ingenuity. I once heard a story about an artist who lived in a beautiful, but sparsely furnished, house for very little rent. The landlord gave him a deal because once a year the house is completely under water. The genius is in the adaptation.

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All photos by Thaddeus Pawlowski.

Thaddeus Pawlowski is Associate Urban Designer for the Office of the Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning. He works on large scale neighborhood and infrastructure projects including the redevelopment of Penn Station area and Hudson Yards. He has previously worked at the Office of Emergency Management where he developed “What if NYC…” a design competition for post disaster urban housing. He earned a Master in Architecture and certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Pittsburgh.

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.

“Towers in the Park” sounds like what they are: high-rise residential buildings sited on large lots of open space. This particular type of building configuration — popular in postwar American urban renewal schemes, often used in public housing as well as in limited equity cooperative housing societies — is visible all over New York City. In urban design and architecture circles these days, this building typology is more often maligned that celebrated. Here on Urban Omnibus, we’ve presented some alternative views: we’ve walked among the housing projects of Avenue D with a sociologist who grew up there and we’ve looked at how some of the elements that urbanists tend to criticize about these towers actually make them uniquely suited to serve the interests of some of the city’s senior citizens. Both of these perspectives dealt more directly with the tower than with the park. Today, in the second of our series of reports on student projects in architecture and design schools, we hear from a designer and educator about an urban design studio project at the University of Michigan that sought to reimagine towers in the park, and their potential for reintegration with the rest of the city, by keeping the tower and reworking the park.

The Michigan students’ ambitious scheme reflects the growing support among New York City officials to reconsider the development potential of underutilized open space on city-owned land. In December 2006, the city put out bids for 600 new housing units on the sites of public housing projects. Speaking to the New York Sun in April of 2007, Department of Housing Preservation and Development spokesperson Neill Coleman said that the inventory of vacant land for affordable housing “is pretty much exhausted, so we’re looking for new sources of land.” Since then, the Department of City Planning has been working with the New York City Housing Authority to do just that: to modify height and setback requirements and to reduce the amount of required parking in order to facilitate new construction. The new construction envisioned in the studio project described below is not exclusively concerned with making more housing units, it also imagines a new way of weaving towers-in-the-park into their surrounding, and rapidly changing, neighborhoods. Read more below. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user ShiftOperations.

Michigan in New York
As part of its sequence of studio courses with sites across the United States and the world, the Master of Urban Design Program at the University of Michigan recently re-envisioned Manhattan’s Lower East Side housing projects. The housing projects, located between the Brooklyn Bridge and 14th Street, comprise one of the country’s largest concentrations of towers-in-the-park, the high-rise buildings set on superblocks that New York and other American cities erected as part of urban renewal schemes in the aftermath of World War II.

Borders of the Lower East Side's towers-in-the-park. (Includes Stuyvesant Town above 14th Street that was not part of studio project described in this text.) Source: Sanborn/Digital Globe.

The Manhattan housing projects were selected for study for three reasons: 1) After a studio that designed a new city in Turkey outside of Istanbul, we wanted MUD students to shift their attention from the tabula rasa to an existing urban context; 2) For an international student cohort consisting of people from the United States, China, Egypt, India, Korea and Nigeria, the towers-in-the-park typology is universally familiar and the lessons learned from designing for it are applicable to cities worldwide; 3) The Lower East Side housing projects’ particular conditions – abutting rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods and owned by a cash-strapped New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) that is looking for opportunities to increase its revenue stream – made the topic timely.

The outcomes of the studio benefited from the students’ range of professional and academic backgrounds in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. Over the course of a single semester, the 12 students in the studio visited New York twice, documenting and analyzing the site. Thereafter, three teams of four students each developed three detailed concepts, complete with comprehensive programs of use, design guidelines and implementation strategies.

A figure-ground diagram illustrates the amount of open space available for development among the towers-in-the-park of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Towers-in-the-Park: Open Space as Opportunity
The studio combined urban development with urban preservation: all project dwelling units were to be conserved in the interest of maintaining one of Manhattan’s important supplies of low-income housing. It proposed capitalizing on the projects’ extensive open grounds – approximately 84% of the site area – for new housing, work spaces, institutions and community facilities that would help generate new revenue streams for NYCHA while integrating the projects with adjacent neighborhoods, improving their connection with East River Park, and enhancing the quality of life for existing residents and newcomers.

By looking at the housing projects’ open spaces as a development opportunity, the studio questioned one of the major principles in post-World War II American urban renewal, which was to reduce the amount of ground each housing project covers. Based on nearly a century of housing reform attempts to open low-income neighborhoods to light and air and reduce their population densities, the need for open space was often cited by architects and public housing authorities as justification for building ever-taller housing projects. From the 50% ground coverage of mid-19th-century “model” tenements to the 16% ground coverage of mid-20th-century Lower East Side public housing, the provision of open space helped drive the design of urban housing for low-income people.

But open space did little to integrate these towers with their surrounding neighborhoods, and many post-World War II public-housing residents — whose high-rise homes were built in undesirable or outlying parts of the city where land was cheap enough for city, state and federal agencies to buy — felt isolated from the rest of the city. The land use planning practices prevalent at the time segregated residential from commercial uses. Almost from the start, post-war towers-in-the-park were criticized by social observers and project residents. The decision to demolish the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and, more recently, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, serve as reminders of the perceived inflexibility of the towers-in-the-park housing typology. Part of the premise of this studio was to find a way to intervene in this typology without destroying the existing housing units.

Today, the revitalization of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens adjacent to housing projects has added pressure to reconsider superblock open space, where community renewal stops at the housing projects’ edges. For the Michigan studio, the questions became: Can the under-utilized open space within tower-in-the-park superblocks be repurposed to accommodate neighborhood redevelopment trends, to serve housing project residents better and to help preserve public housing by leveraging NYCHA’s existing assets?

Analysis reveals the Lower East Side’s potential connections to rest of Manhattan.

Studio Outcomes
For the Lower East Side’s towers-in-the-park — including the cooperatives built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and other subsidized housing projects clustered around the Williamsburg Bridge — the Michigan design teams identified space for between 4,400 and 8,000 new apartments (both market-rate and “affordable”); a range of 1.6 million to 5 million square feet of commercial development; and from 600,000 to 3 million square feet of institutional spaces (for libraries, community centers, schools and colleges). The potential exists for between 13.7 million and 22 million square feet of new buildings in and around the towers. And because Michigan students arranged these additions between existing buildings along new streets and pathways cut through superblocks, the scheme conserves all NYCHA apartments.

The results: a boulevard-like FDR Drive, where some of Manhattan’s most desirable apartments can be located; lively streets connecting East River Park to inland neighborhoods; mixed-uses along Avenue D and Madison Street serving residents and visitors (offering business and employment opportunities, too); and at key points, where space, views and new land and water transportation connections encourage them, residential, office and hotel towers that will embellish the lower Manhattan skyline. The studio found that all of these uses can be accommodated by new buildings that cover between 30 and 40% of the lot size. This amount of ground coverage is higher than the study area’s current average but lower than blocks in the most desirable parts of Manhattan, including the Upper East and Upper West Sides. Therefore, the proposal will not obstruct existing housing units’ light and views.

Top: View of new buildings among towers-in-the-park. Bottom: View of new library near Manhattan Bridge. Public buildings reinforce the East River as a public amenity. They are erected by developers whose projects are rewarded increased floor areas.

At ground level, the Michigan studio proposed changing the form and use of open space. The landscapes of tower-in-the-park open spaces are typically passive and homogeneous. The studio’s strategy was to integrate intimate open spaces with a variety of new buildings, including schools (from pre-schools to colleges), live/work lofts, market structures, places of business and community centers. Rejecting the reductive planning philosophies of the 1950s that segregated housing on superblocks, the design teams programmed both buildings and spaces to promote active use throughout the site and to support residents’ ability to participate in community life and a dynamic local economy.

To implement their concepts, the Michigan teams proposed the creation of a public development agency similar to the New York State Empire Development Corporation or Battery Park City Authority whose structure would support both substantial community representation and a clearly-articulated process for larger community input. Indeed, given the complexity of the project and its likely impact on tens of thousands of people, the teams advocated an additional year upfront for creating the agency and its processes of decision-making and communication.

Project funding was also considered. Design teams suggested that federal dollars be applied to East River Drive, transportation and waterfront improvements. They also proposed that the sale or lease of NYCHA-held land underwrite improvements to existing apartments while maintaining their affordability and contribute to the maintenance and construction of affordable housing at other NYCHA projects and in other sites around the city. (Sales and leases include the transfer of air rights from empty or under-developed parts of the site area to locations where high density is desirable.) Additional affordable housing was proposed through incentives such as the New York “80/20” program that permits larger buildings if 20% of their units are provided at below-market rents. And tax credits and/or building bonuses could be offered to developers erecting public amenities and services on a turnkey basis (e.g. schools, libraries and community centers). Although new to NYCHA, such programs have ample precedent in New York City.

Concept view. Buildings in light blue are inserted among towers-in-the-park. Concept includes improvements to East River Park and water and land transportation systems.

Lessons
The Michigan studio learned the following lessons:

• It is possible to redevelop tower-in-the-park public housing without demolition or displacement.
• Tower-in-the-park open spaces are readily adaptable to a variety of physical and programmatic interventions, leading to inventive urban design.
• Forms of development financing that have evolved since post-World War II urban renewal can help support tower-in-the-park redevelopment, including public/private partnerships, incentive zoning, development rights transfers, etc.
• Tower-in-the-park housing, familiar to cities around the world, can be part of urban revitalization strategies that are socially and environmentally more sustainable than demolition schemes that dislocate communities and waste their physical materials.

For New York, the Michigan studio identified the development potential of one corner of NYCHA’s 2,500 acres of property. As the city’s largest landlord, NYCHA, more than any other owner, is positioned to reshape New York’s skyline — while it improves the quality of life for its residents. At a time when financial difficulties encourage the authority to explore alternative methods of retaining and improving its housing stock, the opportunity that this studio investigated is rich with possibilities for both a large public landowner like NYCHA and for the city and citizens it serves.

Roy Strickland is Director of the Master of Urban Design Program at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and, with Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, is the designer of the new Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Manhattan. He led the MUD studio consisting of Komal Anand, Daren Crabill, Emek Erdolu, Yingying Guan, Seun-Hyun Kim, Rachan Ky, Jun-Yi Lin, Obiamaka Ofodile, Kwanseok Oh, Danna Reyes, Amal Shaaban and Xuan Zheng.

Unless otherwise noted, all images produced and provided by the University of Michigan MUD Studio.

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.

As it happens, there are 27 NORCS in New York City, located in 4 boroughs.

click image to enlarge

NORCs are a national – even international – phenomenon, but the NORC movement began right here in New York City, when a consortium of UJA-Federation agencies established the Penn South Program for Seniors in 1986.

If we zoom in, we see that almost all NORCS are “Towers in the Park,” that much maligned mid-century planning typology.

Moreover, 19 NORCS are in Limited Equity Housing Coops, built mostly in the first half of the twentieth century by unions to house their swelling ranks of workers.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let us say a few words about why we’re so interested in NORCS.

First of all, the “naturally occurring” part is intriguing. We’re interested in these sorts of bottom-up dynamics, and have explored them in previous projects.

But more importantly, we’re interested in NORCS because we like them, and like what they do for the city. Of course, one of the greatest things about New York City is its diversity. New York City is a city that is supposed to tolerate – and maybe even encourage and engender – difference. New York is supposed to be a city where people of different races, classes, and lifestyles coexist, right? Well let’s not forget that generational diversity is an important part of this ideal: just as NYC would be undermined by racial homogeneity, so too would it be undermined by age homogeneity.

Now in some ways, this threat of age homogeneity is a very real one: Manhattan, for example, is becoming whiter and younger.

In fact, In New York City, the percent of the population that was 60+ decreased from 17.5% in 1990 to 15.6% in 2000 – lower than both the NY State percentage (16.9) and the U.S. (16.3). We might criticize Florida for being a geriatric ghetto, but in some ways, Manhattan is in danger of becoming a youth ghetto. That’s not very New York City!

Of course, we also like what NORCS do for the elderly. People grow old, and instead of moving to a purpose-built retirement community in the suburbs or the sunbelt, they stay in the home and the community that they always lived in. “Aging in place,” as some people call it, poses some challenges, but to NORC advocates, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. As the UJC states, “by all accounts, the vast majority of older Americans want to, or by necessity, will remain living in their own home, even as they grow frail.”

So what we’re working on is an “Advocates Guide” to NORCs. We’re enthusiastic about NORCs, and we would like to see more of them, and so we thought it would be a good idea to develop a book that would make the case for NORCs very clearly, but also supply people with a few items – postcards, maps, advertisements for example – that could help “sell” the NORC.

Before we show you the book, we would like to give you some background on the project.

In 2006, we were invited to do an exhibition at common room 2, a space on the Lower East Side headed by Lars Fischer, Maria Ibanez De Sendadiano, and Todd Rouhe. The exhibition space was in the lobby of common room’s office, a commercial building in the Seward Park Cooperative complex. As we started planning the exhibition, we noticed that the lobby, which was used by all the people associated with common room – cool architects, designers, and artists – was also inhabited by elderly people with heavy New York accents and canes. It turns out that the building is the epicenter of Seward Park’s senior culture: a large-windowed second story office that houses the Seward Park NORC Supportive Services Program, or NORC-SSP. The NORC-SSP is a gathering place for Seward Park’s seniors: a place to organize transport to the doctor, sign up for meals on wheels, get a flu shot, play bingo, take a yoga class and so on.

We saw this ground floor lobby as a space of encounter among the building’s different constituents: the architects and designers who worked in the building, exhibition visitors who came to see common room 2 shows, and the NORC SSP seniors who used their community room to take care of their health needs and to socialize. We built our exhibition around trying to increase the interaction (positive friction?) among these groups, and in particular, between people who made use of NORC social services and people who visited the exhibition.

In many ways, this space embodied ideals of “the good city.” As an urban space in which people of difference have chance encounters, it is just the sort of space that the homogenization of Manhattan is endangering. Believing that there is a value to having different types of people rub shoulders in the same space, we started to investigate how this group of seniors – in the face of a meteoric rise in real estate values and increased living costs – managed to stay put among their friends on the Lower East side.

So we discovered that Seward Park is just one of many communities in New York that has NORC-SSPs. So this again was the impetus to advocate for the NORCs. Let us take you through some of the information in the book.

The first part of the book is informational: We begin by mapping out the NORCS.

We then look at the history of each, noting when they were built, and when they became NORCS.

We mentioned that Penn South was the first NORC: it was established in 1986. You’ll notice here that most NORCS in NYC were formed in 2000: this was because, in 1999, building on an earlier state effort, New York City allocated $4 million to strengthen the city’s 12 existing state-supported programs and to establish 16 new programs in moderate and low-income housing complexes. You’ll also notice that most buildings that have NORCS were built between 1950 and 1976. A lot of the buildings were in fact built with urban renewal funds. (This is probably clear by looking at this look at the area around Penn South in Chelsea.)

1898	1930	1951	1974	2009

We ranked the NORCS by population. . .

And by percent senior. You see that while Co-Op City in the Bronx is the biggest, in fact only 18% of its residents are senior, compared with, say, Queensview, which is about 55% senior.

The next part of the book consists of profiles of all 27 NORCs: here is a sample page. It consists of an axon, pictures, a site plan, a short blurb, and some fun facts.

Next comes a chapter that tells the story of the NORC: what it is, why it exists, etc. We mentioned earlier that most NORCs are Limited Equity Housing Coops built as “Towers in the Park.” This is not a coincidence. On the contrary, our research showed that the economic and social conditions that led to the creation of limited-equity cooperatives in New York City are perhaps the most significant influence in the emergence of NORCs.

Let us take a minute to explain: when you buy into a limited-equity cooperative, you spend less than you would on a market apartment, but you are also forbidden from selling your unit on the open market. Instead, you have to sell your unit back to the cooperative at a below-market rate. Selling low is a trade-off for buying low: this is what keeps housing prices in the coop affordable. One result is that when market prices of residential real estate rise, residents of limited equity cooperatives have little incentive to sell, since the sale price will not bring in enough money to buy a comparable apartment on the market.

As Tony Schuman describes in this article “Labor and Housing in New York City: Architect Herman Jessor and the Cooperative Housing Movement,” the limited-equity cooperative apartment projects that were developed from the 20s to the 70s by Jessor and others were inextricably linked to organized labor. The cooperatives were developed by unions – most notably the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACW) – and engaged non-profit organizations, and the cooperative residents were unionized workers.

This combination of residents having no economic incentive to leave, and this “lefty” tradition committed to cooperative living and working, created the ideal circumstances for NORCs to emerge.

But the fact that these limited-equity housing co-ops were all built as towers-in-the park is essential to the story too: We quickly discovered that the so-called “tower in the park” is the ideal architecture for a community of seniors: elevators, wide hallways, communal green spaces, shared facilities, shopping and services typically on the same block, and so on.

Funnily, in recent years, so many tower projects have been criticized or taken down because of the belief that such architecture creates estrangement and social problems. Here, we found just the opposite. Could it be that NORCs provide a new “calling” for this much-maligned modernist housing typology?

This leads us to the next part of the book, in which we begin the work of advocating. That is, now that we know what a NORC is, where they are, and how they evolved, we need to make the case that they are, in fact, desirable. So here are some diagrams demonstrating one benefit of the Towers in the Park: the fact that travel times are shorter.

But, of course, the best way we can make the case for NORCs is to give NORC residents a voice:

NORCs in NYC by Interboro: Coming soon to a website near you!

Project team: Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, Georgeen Theodore, Hilla Rudanko, Ondine Masson, Alec Schierenbeck

Thank you: New York State Council on the Arts, The Architectural League of New York, Penn South Houses, Nat Yalowitz, Common Room, Chase Stone

Interboro is an urban design, planning and architecture firm based in New York City that was founded in 2002 by four graduates of the Harvard Design School. The firm works at a variety of scales with a variety of public and private clients to deliver innovative, award-winning results. Interboro’s working process combines expertise in global development trends with sensitive and rigorous analyses of local dynamics.

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.

On Urban Omnibus, our very first Walk and Talk was with another urban sociologist. Richard Sennett took us on a stroll through the West Village – where he first moved in 1962 – and shared observations on everything from the difference between borders and boundaries to philosophies of craftsmanship. As it happens, Sennett also grew up in the projects, in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex that is currently undergoing demolition to make way for a “mixed-income neighborhood composed of a both high-rise and low-rise buildings.” And on his walk with us, Sennett mentioned that he is “a big believer in architectural determinism” and that the “details of urban design can make or break urban-scale propositions.” Dalton Conley has a different view. He believes that economics – specifically the economics of homeownership – determine opportunity. Planners and designers would do well to heed the advice of both scholars. -C.S.

Urban Omnibus: What do you do?

Dalton Conley: I’m a sociologist. You could say I’m an urban sociologist. Basically I study economic opportunity. Let me put it this way: my father is a horse player (and an artist) and he spends a lot of time handicapping the Racing Form, predicting which horse is going to win the race. So when I need to explain to my parents what I do, I say “Dad, I do what you do: I use statistics to try to figure out who’s going to win, except I’m doing it on humans instead of horses.” I predict socio-economic success based on the conditions of one’s childhood, birth, family background etc. And my work is definitely informed by my attempts to understand the experience of my neighbors growing up here vis a vis myself.

UO: Tell us about where we are right now.

Conley: We’re at the intersection of Delancey Street and Columbia Street [which becomes Avenue D north of Houston -Ed.]. Growing up here, the Williamsburg Bridge was an important structure: it really marked the edge of the neighborhood. I’ve always read about how the highway construction of 1950s urban renewal cut off certain neighborhoods from other places. In this case, the bridge was exactly that type of barrier. Below that bridge you still find remnants of the old Jewish Lower East Side. There’s a very real division between what was the Jewish Lower East Side and the Puerto Rican Lower East Side, which I would say extends from the Williamsburg Bridge up to the Con Edison building that you can see in the distance at 14^th Street. If you go east, of course you hit the river. And if you go west, it used to go all the way to Allen St – or 1^st Ave – but now, more and more, cultural elites and gentrifiers have pushed the neighborhood’s western edge further and further eastwards to the point where it’s in constant flux.

But I do understand that this is still a Million Dollar Block, meaning that the state spends a million dollars or more on incarcerating people just from this block. So, clearly the problems haven’t gone completely away. But it is quite different now. It’s very international, there’s been a lot more immigration from other countries. When I was here it was just a little bit after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 that opened up the gates, and so it really hadn’t yet changed the character of the population so much. 75% of the population in this census tract in 1970 was Puerto Rican and about 20% African American, and the rest was folks like me or Chinese people.

UO: Where did you grow up?

I would sell all public housing to its residents for a dollar… It would radically change the physical environment.Conley: I grew up in Masaryk Towers. When I was born we were living in that tower over there, #73 and then we moved to #81, the corner one back there. #81 borders on Hamilton Fish Park, which was a cement park filled with lots of broken glass, malt liquor bottles and the like. We would play our baseball there. Masaryk Towers is Mitchell-Lama. The Mitchell-Lama Housing Program is geared towards low-income families, but ones that were better off than the people across the street in NYCHA housing for extremely poor folks. Masaryk was sandwiched on the other side by more NYCHA housing. There are Mitchell-Lama projects all over the city, like Co-op City for example in the Bronx, which is pretty middle class now, I think. But by virtue of the fact that Masaryk Towers is sandwiched between NYCHA buildings, it shared much of the crime and other problems that were rampant in public housing in those days.

UO: Growing up, did the different housing complexes have distinct identities?

Conley: We definitely divided up the little league baseball teams based on which housing complex you came from. We were Los Piratas, and there was a baseball team for Baruch houses, for Lillian Wald Houses, etc. I think we won once, one year. We would all play on East River Park, which is of course being redeveloped right now. And despite what you see in the movies, we did not play stickball. We played baseball.

UO: I’m curious about your view of what role physical design plays in your analysis of inequalities of opportunity.

Conley: I’m really skeptical about the notion that physical design can be a tool for better or worse in aiding opportunity or affecting the lives of people who live in low income communities. We’ve seen the fads come and go. We’ve seen this kind of housing, the sort of high-rise Le Corbusier style, creating open plazas by stacking people in high-density vertical towers, now be blamed for all social ills. I think that’s ridiculous.

I think the issue is not design but economics and specifically ownership structure. When people don’t have a stake in the local community – an economic stake that is – based on their concern for their property values, then social ills follow. Banks know this. Banks – at least before the bubble –  would not lend to buildings where less than 50% of units were owner-occupied. Because they know that owners take care of and want to preserve the property values of the building.

I have a fantasy plan called “A Dollar and a Dream,” which used to be the New York State Lotto’s slogan. Basically I would sell all the public housing to the residents for a dollar and create this equity for the families, and you would see, all of a sudden, owners associations springing up. I think it would radically change the physical environment: change driven by economics affecting the physical environment rather than thinking of the physical environment as the driver.

UO: Since the subprime mortgage crisis, we’re hearing lots of voices arguing that we should shift our national priorities away from home ownership.

We’re focusing our racial inequality amelioration efforts on education and affirmative action when we should be working to build up asset ownership.Conley: Certainly, trumpeting home ownership these days is not very popular. But I think actually now is exactly the time to have low income home ownership strategies because the prices are low! It’s all about how you do it. If you’re doing it through sub-prime and exotic mortgages that have balloon payments and everything, of course you’re going to get high defaults and it’s going to create this crash. But if people don’t expect to be doubling their money every five years but maybe double their money every 40 years – which was the norm in the middle of the 20^th century with more responsible home ownership – then I think that’s a definitely viable strategy and a very effective one. Homes are both a basic consumption good that we need, shelter, but they also have an investment purpose, and as much as it doesn’t appear so now, ultimately given population pressures, real property and real estate is always going to have a long-term trend upward.

UO: Hearing this, I can’t help but be reminded of Margaret Thatcher privatizing affordable housing in the UK in the ’80s…

Conley: The difference is I’m trying to come at this from a position on the left actually, to argue that this is an empowerment strategy. At least for the post-civil rights generation – my generation – continued racial equality rests in the property dimension, the housing market and the securities dimension, rather than education or labor market primarily. It’s the property inequality that drives the other inequalities. We’re focusing most of our racial inequality amelioration efforts, through education and affirmative action in labor law, on the wrong side of the equation so to speak, when we really should be working to build up asset ownership among low-wealth minority communities.

UO: Getting back to your skepticism of spatial or environmental determinism for a second, what about the use of space? Is that something that urban sociologists are looking at these days? The layout here is so different from the rest of the Manhattan street grid, and I’m curious about how that enables or prohibits different kinds of uses on the part of, say, young people for example.

Conley: I’m not trying to say that space doesn’t matter or that architecture doesn’t matter – my mother moved to where we moved because she thought it was pretty and because of the Le Corbusier style layout that meant there were parks for us kids to play in, jungle gyms and open space and benches and so forth.

And also, the distribution of people geographically totally matters. Though I think it matters largely because of the tension between where we live and where we go to school. Given how segregated we are economically and racially, you basically end up with a Catch 22 if you’re growing up in a low income community. You either can go to your local school and have this integration between your school life and your home life. Or you can do what I did and commute across town – I did it illegally, but these days there are plenty of legal options through charter schools and so forth – wasting hours of the day getting to and from school.

Some people say we should pour money into the schools in low-income communities, but equalizing funding isn’t going to do it, because the dirty little secret is that the single most powerful of the effects of school is your peer group. And unless you mix folks up, kids tend to sort themselves back into class-based peer groups. So we constantly face this tension around how we socialize our kids, given the fact that we are spatially organized and spatially segregated.

UO: Where are we now?

Conley: We crossed Houston St. and we’re outside the Lillian Wald Houses where the friend to whom I dedicated Honky grew up. When we were 12 or 13, he was shot in the neck on 7^th Street and Avenue C by a stray bullet as he was standing, chatting with his friend, outside his friend’s apartment. He became paralyzed from the neck down and has since worked very hard to regain use of his arms. Just last summer he and I came back here, and he hadn’t been here – let’s see, he was shot in 1981, Jan 1^st, 1981 – so he hadn’t been here for 28 years or so. We took a tour, and he noticed how much the Lillian Wald Houses had changed as well. Of course all the playground structures are new and there’s been a lot of money put in here, but also there are even community gardens here that provide vegetables for the folks who work at them and such. He was kind of shocked at how much nicer even the NYCHA housing was than it was. A couple of generations before that, whether you’re coming from the South or Puerto Rico, or even just across the street, you were living in a walk-up tenement with no hot water half the time and no heat during the winter. These housing complexes were certainly a step up. But as to why it changed at some point and this type of public housing become housing of last resort – I really don’t know. I would argue that probably the ownership structure mattered a great deal, but one can never know, because unfortunately there haven’t been enough actual conscious experiments by social scientists or urban planners to test hypotheses to some of these questions.

UO: Which begs the question, what, in your opinion, can architects and planners learn from social scientists?

Conley: I think what social science can offer urban planning and design and so forth would be their methodology: experimental methods. The first step is to do small-scale, explicit experiments of different housing forms, and different community structures, and then following those up with ethnographies and with statistical analysis and so forth. I know that’s being done in urban planning to a certain extent. But not enough.

Watch a video excerpt of this conversation below:

Conley holds a B.A. from the University of California – Berkeley and an M.P.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, as well as an M.S. in Biology from NYU. He is currently pursing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying transgenerational phenotypic plasticity and socially regulated genes.

Interview and photos: Cassim Shepard

Diagrams: Sarah Avvedimento with Andrew Balmer