Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

OK, former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff  deserves it (almost) as much as Mayor Mike Bloomberg, but the latter got to pose, for The Atlantic  (a too-gentle interview ), as standing on/over the city. Photo by Jake Chessum/The Atlantic. apparently Panorama of the City of New York , Queens Museum of Art I haven't seen it discussed publicly, but surely one antecedent of that shot is Arnold Newman's classic 1959 portrayal of Robert Moses. Photo : Arnold Newman/Getty Images; also see  color version   From UT/Austin  web site : Often called the "Master Builder," Robert Moses planned many of the most important public works and buildings in New York City. He was arguably the most powerful figure in New York City government in the mid-20th century and was responsible for numerous bridges, including the Triborough Bridge, as well as parkways, tunnels, two World Fairs and Shea Stadium. Newman wanted to portray Moses as the builder of New York, so he placed him o...

The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs , by Roberta Brandes Gratz, is the subject of a thoughtful 2900-word review in the Boston Review, Clear and Hold , by Brooklyn resident and Princeton grad student Casey Walker. Atlantic Yards gets a significant cameo in the book's Conclusion (its tenth chapter), but it is the focus of Walker's review, which states: Atlantic Yards is a familiar urban story: surrounding neighborhoods are braced for upheaval; architects have come and gone; redesigns have been announced, lambasted, tweaked, disowned; lawsuits multiply like kudzu; millions of dollars are all but blowing through the air; and the likely date of actual completion is anyone’s guess (Forest City Ratner, the developer, contends the Barclays Center will be finished by 2011, but the Web site does not give a timetable for the rest of the project). Actually, they're saying 2012, now. Questions that never got answered Walker, who wisely recogni...

There are two kinds of people in the world of urbanism, apparently: those who think you can meld or navigate the difference between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, and those who think you can't. Former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff is among the former groups. Asked July 8 if there was a simplistic either/or divide or a continuum, he replied, "“I don't think it is true any more, and I certainly think that the way we went about things, which was by no means perfect but we learned a lot along the way, is evidence that you can have it both ways." CPC Chair Burden Last night, at the third of the Architectural League's Conversations on New York , City Planning Commission Chairperson Amanda Burden sounded a similar note. Discussing the legacy of the Bloomberg administration, she observed, "I would say we've been able to have the city grow in place," able to accommodate new New Yorkers and access the waterfront. She said it was her personal emphasis to "foc...

Updated July 19 with link to video and additional verbatim comments. The AY discussion comes about two-thirds of the way through. Former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff has to be feeling pretty good. He didn't bring the Olympics to New York, and that smarts, and he couldn't get the West Side Stadium passed. But he got most of the Bloomberg administration's ambitious land use agenda passed during his six-year tenure, which ended in 2007 . Now, in his genial, confident way, Doctoroff can look back and contend, as he has before , that he managed to thread the needle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, to get projects passed with sufficient public input and without much displacement, to make omelets (in Moses's famous formulation) but without breaking eggs. And if he's not challenged--as he was back in 2007 by Majora Carter , then of Sustainable South Bronx--he just might get away with it. Doctoroff had said, as he's said since, that he and th...

I wrote yesterday how the 2003 book Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment , authored by Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, implicitly criticized Atlantic Yards in advising that overrides of local decision making are "very rarely justified" for sports facilities, since they don't serve "urgent regional needs." There's much more in the book to generate skepticism about Atlantic Yards, as I describe below, including how project proponents have subtly shifted costs to the public sector; why the AY footprint poses a tighter fit than nearly all other sports facility siting efforts; and how mega-projects invariably involve cost escalation. The book offers some important and critical context missing, for example, in the New York Times's shallow 6/9/05 article Unlike Stadium on West Side, an Arena in Brooklyn Is Still a Go . In other words, when it comes to such large projects--highways, rail, convention centers, festival markets, airpo...

Anthony Flint ’s new book, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City , is well worth reading, as it fills in (and goes beyond) the missing chapter of Robert Caro’s epic biography of Moses, The Power Broker . It contains two lively mini-biographies, coupled with accounts of major fights over a road through Washington Square Park. urban renewal in Greenwich Village, and the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway (aka LoMex). The first fight helped shape Jacobs's thinking about urban renewal, published before her landmark 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ; the latter two she led, the second after she’d become a national figure. My main quibble is simply with the scope of the book. Anyone wrestling with the legacies of Moses and Jacobs, especially after major retrospectives on both at museums in New York in 2007, must tackle the latter-day conflicts between their legacies: could Jacobs’s un-slumming...

One of the enduring (and simplified) debates regarding the legacies of urbanist Jane Jacobs and master builder/power broker Robert Moses is the balance between results and process. You can't make an omelet, Moses liked to say, without breaking eggs, and Moses was notably callous about the impact of his major projects on the people living in the way. On the other hand, neighborhood activists invoking Jacobs have used process to gum up any change, even when it might be wise and even though Jacobs did believe in certain big projects, like public transit. The Levin endorsement The issue re-emerges in a Brooklyn Paper article regarding Borough President Marty Markowitz's endorsement of machine candidate Steve Levin, chief of staff to Assemblyman (and Brooklyn Democratic Party head) Vito Lopez in the crowded 33rd District Council race .  Levin is the only candidate to support the Lopez-backed Broadway Triangle rezoning, which Markowitz supports: “I know Steve’s opponents think proce...

Last night, I and a host of others attended an hour-long, $18 session (lecture + Q&A) at the New-York Historical Society titled The Mark of Robert Moses , one of three events on the shapers of New York featuring author Robert Caro. I'd heard most of Caro's anecdotes about writing The Power Broker, so what struck me was his basic premises: he began his investigation into Moses by tracing the influence of an unelected official who most saw as above politics, and he reminded us--after discussing the displacement caused by Moses's Cross-Bronx Expressway--that "it's important to understand political power because it shapes all our lives." The Power Broker, 2009 OK, so, if Caro--who's essentially immersed in his Lyndon Johnson saga--isn't going to talk about contemporary New York, let's go to Wayne Barrett, who connects the dots in this week's Village Voice, contending that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has promoted Caroline Kennedy's anointment as Se...

The Director of Urban Design for the Department of City Planning, Alexandros Washburn, only joined the administration in January 2007 , so he's presumably had little contact with the Atlantic Yards project, which got its final state approval a month earlier. (The City Planning Commission in September 2006 had endorsed the project, with minor changes.) Still, it was remarkable how, in a recent discussion of the city's planning practices, he saluted the High Line project, which began with public infrastructure, not a private developer, involved multiple developers, and emphasized streets rather than demapped them. The contrast with Atlantic Yards is stark. Washburn, who's had a distinguished career that included serving as the only staff architect ever working for a U.S. Senator (Daniel Patrick Moynihan), spoke October 18 at the Vertical Density Symposium sponsored by the Skyscraper Museum in conjunction with its Vertical Cities: Hong Kong | New York exhibition. (I'l...