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7

The Center Cannot Hold

In his farewell to office, Rudy Giuliani—standing in St. Paul’s Chapel, adjacent to the World Trade Center site—declared: “I really believe we shouldn’t think about this site out there, right behind us, right here, as a site for economic development. We should think about a soaring, monumental, beautiful memorial that draws millions of people here who just want to see it. We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever and that allows people to build on it and grow from it. And it’s not going to happen if we just think about it in a very narrow way.”

Giuliani’s speech reminded me of Eisenhower’s leave-taking from the presidency, in which he warned the nation against the growing anti-democratic power of the “military-industrial complex.” In both cases, the cautionary appeals resonated because of their sources, one a military man and architect of the Cold War, the other a mayor whose leadership favored planning by the “market.” Giuliani’s heartfelt call for restraint ran counter to the back-to-business approach that has dominated official thinking since the tragedy. This has included obscene job-grubbing on the part of the architectural community and robust talk about responding to the terror by rapid rebuilding, bigger than ever. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), empowered to decide the future of the site, is headed up by a patriarchal ex-director of Goldman Sachs whose credibility seems untainted by the spectacle of his own firm abandoning Manhattan for New Jersey. With the exception of a single community representative, the board is composed of the usual business crowd. Their initial consensus seems to favor the construction of a vast amount of office space on the cleared site of the fallen towers with the memorial simply a modest component. Meanwhile rumors grind on about the working drawings, apparently already on the computers at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Fortunately, the competition for authority over the site is both structural and complex. The Port Authority, Larry Silverstein (the ninety-nine-year leaseholder), the LMDC, the federal, state, and city governments, survivor groups, the local community, the business improvement district, the Battery Park City Authority, the Transit Authority, and myriad other civic and private interests are jostling to be heard and influential. If nothing else, this fog buys time for contention and for the serious consideration of alternatives.

What is clear is that, despite the currently soft market, some of the 15 million square feet of lost space needs to be replaced sooner rather than later, and downtown’s dysfunctions repaired to allow the city’s economy to re-establish jobs and networks lost in the attack. The eventual need is not simply for replacement space: The “Group of 35”—a business-heavy organization chaired by Charles Schumer and Robert Rubin—predicts that an additional 60 million square feet of office space will be required by 2020.

The question is where to put it, and some will clearly go to lower Manhattan. Railroading the restoration of the status quo by looking at the site as no more than its footprint, however, guarantees that we learn nothing from the tragedy and let the opportunity for better thinking slip away.

My studio is not far from the Western Union building at 60 Hudson Street, known to architects as the home of the New York City Building Department. Since September 11, this building has been the subject of unusual security, surrounded by concrete barriers and half a dozen police cars. It appears to be the only site outside the confines of Ground Zero to enjoy this level of fresh protection, and the reason seems to be the building’s longstanding role as the nexus both for telecommunications cables coming into New York City and trunk lines to the nation and the world, a logical next target for terror according to some scenarios. Ironically, a system at the core of urban disaggregation depends on joining huge dispersed networks on a single site.

Today, our dominant urban pattern—enabled by the instantaneous, artificial proximity created by phones, faxes, emails, and other global electronic networks—is the rapid growth of the suburban “edge city,” a sprawling realm, that has become the antithesis of a traditional sense of place. But this “non-place urban realm,” the location to which security-conscious firms are now retreating, is the result of more than just new communications technology. The suburbs were fertilized by massive government intervention in highway construction, by radical tax policy, by changes in the national culture of desire, by racism, by cheap, unencumbered land, and by an earlier fear of terror. The prospect of nuclear annihilation that made urban concentrations particularly vulnerable was on the minds of many planners during the Cold War, both in the USA and abroad. The massive de-urbanization in Maoist China was also the direct result of nuclear anxiety. This dispersal, from center to suburb, facilitated by the Interstates—our erstwhile “National Defense Highway”—was likewise more than simply good for General Motors: both the auto-maker and the USA were playing the same stratego-urban games.

The effects of this pattern of urbanization were in many ways antithetical to the presumptions behind the space of lower Manhattan. Here, concentration has long been considered crucially advantageous. The possibility of conducting economic affairs face to face, the collective housing of related bureaucracies and businesses (the famous FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) that makes up the majority of business downtown), the dense life of the streets, the convenience of having everything at hand, are the foundation for the viability of the main financial district for the planet. Its characteristic form—the superimpostion of skyscrapers on the medieval street pattern left by the Dutch—has given downtown its indelible shape.

Any changes reconstruction brings must deepen this formal singularity, expand the possibilities of exchange, and broaden the mix of uses supported. While it’s a bromide to apologize before suggesting that the tragedy can be turned to advantage, the enormous disruption in the life of the city has already had a number of constructive effects. Here in Tribeca—ten blocks from Ground Zero—traffic is dramatically reduced on local streets, the polluted sewer of Canal Street is suddenly tractable, and deep civility abides many months later. The emergency car-pooling and limited access instituted as the result of the disaster are equally positive.

The radical act of the terrorists opens a space for us to think radically as well, to examine alternatives for the future of all of New York City. It is no coincidence that we have constructed a skyline in the image of a bar graph. This is not simply an abstraction but an extrusion, an utterly simple means of multiplying wealth. Where land is scarce, make more. Lots more. There is a fantasy of Manhattan as driven simply by a pure and perpetual increase in density. But while our dynamism is surely a product of critical mass, all arguments for concentration are not the same. Viewed from the perspective of the city as a whole, the hyper-concentration of the Trade Center was not optimal by any standard other than profit, and even that proved elusive.

Density has a downside in over-crowding and strained services, but this is not necessarily the result of the hyper-scale of any particular building. More critical than specific effects on the ground are the consequences for densities elsewhere. While anxiety over corporate and population flight to the suburbs comes from a general fear of both economic and social losses, the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach slights other areas of the city themselves in need of jobs, construction, and greater concentration. Manhattan’s gain has been the boroughs’ loss: the rise of the island’s office towers historically marks the decline of industrial employment throughout the city, and has obliged the respiratory pattern of one-directional commuting. A new means of producing wealth with new spatial requirements has—over the century—completely supplanted its predecessor.

With thousands of jobs already relocated out of the city, a solution to the “practical” problems of reconstruction can and must engage possibilities well beyond the confines of the downtown site. While the billions that will be available for new building—from insurance, from federal aid, from city coffers, from developers—are certainly needed to restore health to the enterprises formerly in or servicing the Trade Center, it seems reasonable to question—given the probable level of this investment—whether such massive expenditure should be focused exclusively here rather than throughout the city at additional sites of need and opportunity, places development could transform.

The majority of New York City’s population and geography does not lie in Manhattan: the island comprises only 8 percent of the city’s land area and 19 percent of its inhabitants. Moreover, according to the 2000 census, the residential growth of the island since 1990—slightly over 3 percent—lags far behind the explosive growth of Staten Island (17 percent) and Queens (nearly 15 percent) and the dramatic increases in the Bronx (10.7 percent) and Brooklyn (7.2 percent). Manhattan, however, remains the city’s economic engine, producing 67 percent of its jobs and 46 percent of its retail sales.

These imbalances have fundamentally reshaped the city. The great infusions of capital and the artificial fortunes of the last decade have propelled the price of real estate in much of Manhattan to the stratosphere, accelerating the flight of the middle class and the poor and making Manhattan increasingly monochrome. We continue to revere our island as a place of thick, urbane interaction, and cling to the fantasy of the great mixing engine of difference, of a city with many quarters housing many kinds of people. Increasingly, however, the differences in Manhattan’s neighborhoods are merely physical. This uneven development and accelerated metamorphosis has had dramatic effects, distorting the character of our urbanity decisively.

Here in Tribeca, we are at the end of a familiar cycle in which a neighborhood moves from a mix of warehouses, manufacturing, offices, and housing, to an “artistic” neighborhood, and now to the climax form of gentrification, an extreme high-end residential quartier. The corollary is that the jobs and people formerly employed here have either been eliminated or moved elsewhere: to the Hunt’s Point Market in the Bronx, to low-wage environments offshore, to the suburbs, or to the new bohemias of Williamsburg or Long Island City. We have scrupulously preserved the architectural character of Tribeca, but at the expense of its human one.

With the exception of Chinatown, Manhattan south of 110th Street has become a faded mosaic of former ethnic enclaves and cultural variety. Increasingly, the city’s ethnic and cultural quarters are being solidified outside the borough, in Flushing, Greenpoint, Dumbo, or Atlantic Avenue. Although the city remains a beacon for immigrants—both from home and abroad—the sites of intake and expression are not what they were, having been preserved to death. Manhattan is ceasing to be a place to get a start and becoming inhospitable to striving, less and less like New York.

But big changes can also suggest big opportunities for burgeoning neighborhoods struggling to find form, or merely to keep up. Not all disaggregation leads to sprawl; better, perhaps, to call it reaggregation. But it is also a notion that can be useful in cultivating character and encouraging development within more traditional, compact cities like New York, itself the central place for an enormous region. The point is not to make New York more like Phoenix or Los Angeles, but to make the city as a whole more like New York.

Because of its dynamic population and superb movement infrastructure, New York City can become a model of a new kind of polycentric metropolis, with Manhattan remaining its centro di tutti centri, its concentrated vitality unsapped. In fact, Manhattan is itself already polycentric: the disaggregation represented by, for example, the easy movement of financial and legal services firms from downtown to midtown in recent years suggests that there is a certain fluidity to the idea of proximity within the city, that convenient movement and strong local character can substitute for immediate adjacency within an overall context of density.

Reinforcing New York’s special polycentricity would return the city to something of its pre-twentieth-century character by restoring a network of autonomous, comprehensible places. Such a “village” stucture—the origin of the great city of variegated neighborhoods—is again made possible by the technology behind the ephemeral and flexible nets and flows of the twenty-first century. Because it is aspatial, this malleability need not simply lead to generic sprawl but can fit within—and reinforce—any pre-existing infrastructure of neighborhood differences.

Cultivating this “natural” polycentricity would multiply opportunities for more self-sufficient neighborhoods where people walk to work, to school, to recreation and to culture. Such places would satisfy many of the needs that impel people to seek the densities and economies of the suburbs and edge cities. By regenerating local character, the energy of intra-city reaggregation could reinforce the expressive singularity of each of the neighborhoods to which its energies were applied—the Asian flavor of Flushing, the Latin American atmosphere of the Bronx Hub, the African cultures of Harlem.

This would be an advance on the wing-and-a-prayer style of current planning, in which good intentions are simultaneously frustrated by imprecise plans and the absence of economic drivers to set them in motion before changing times render them irrelevant. By joining physical planning to direct investment and to zoning and economic incentives, we can redistribute uses to a set of centers outside Manhattan where land and transit connections are available and economical—places like Flushing, Jamaica, Queens Plaza, Sunnyside, the Bronx Hub, St. George, and Downtown Brooklyn, among others. These sites—also identified in the report of the Group of 35—are not mysterious either in their needs or their suitability.

Planning comprehensively could help assure the mixed-use character of these places by including residential construction matched to the numbers of new workplaces, a pattern that has already begun downtown, where substantial office space has actually been eliminated by conversion to residential use. Indeed, in the last ten years forty office buildings have been converted to residential use downtown, part of an 18 percent population growth in the area below Canal Street. The sense of locality that grows from a well-finessed mix would be further reinforced by the decentralization of cultural growth (the City Opera, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Met, and the Jets are all seeking space) and by encouraging the development of new cultural, healthcare, educational, and commercial institutions to enhance the variety and life of these neighborhood centers.

It is critical, however, that these centers be envisioned and planned as semi-autonomous and not simply as ancillary. Downtown Brooklyn is already one of the largest “central places” in America but continues to be thought of as a back-office for Manhattan. The key is zoning for sustainability and difference, not simply for a series of mini-Manhattans. Although the skyscraper is a preeminent symbol of twentieth-century technology and of the culture of the corporation, other paradigms must now emerge as values change. The economic driver that has impelled these heights will be usefully moderated in smaller centers which foreground strong environmental values and in which land prices are restrainedly moderate.

Downtown Manhattan is the commercial district with the highest public transportation usage in the country. Eighty percent of those who come to work here—350,000 people a day—arrive on mass transit. A comprehensive re-examination and reinforcement of this pattern is crucial to sustaining the city, but must be approached non-centrifugally to facilitate movement not simply in and out of Manhattan but between the developing centers of lived life, reinforcing the repatterning. Our waterways, in particular, offer a tremendous opportunity for creating such links with great economy. In addition, the city’s large areas of public greenspace and municipally owned property can be used to begin to create a third transport net—for pedestrians, bikers, and nonaggressive zero-emissions vehicles—to supplement the street grid and the subway.

Business-as-usual in New York City is more than the compulsion to repeat patterns of the past: our talent is creating the new. In the case of downtown Manhattan, however, it is also important to recognize that this is an area of the city that is near completion, its project of build-out and of formal invention is almost done. The construction of the World Trade Center, the isolation of Battery Park City by an over-wide highway, the nasty scale of many newer high-rises, the abandonment of the piers, the elimination of manufacturing and small-scale commercial activity, and the elevation of the East Side Highway are all assaults on a satisfying paradigm of great scale contrasts, rich architectural textures, and pedestrian primacy that lies at the core of what’s best about downtown. Restoring this is the task at hand, and it cannot be accomplished in Lower Manhattan alone.

2001