Karrie Jacobs

David Byrne (yellow raincoat) in the Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building.

Who knew that this 99 year old building, formerly the terminal for the East River ferries, now the spot to catch a boat to Governors Island, housed such a magnificent space? On weekends from May 31 until August 10 this 9000 square foot room, with its long skylight and its ornate columns, will be the site of an audio installation by the multi-talented David Byrne (see picture below), presented by Creative Time. The opening of the installation coincides with the start of summer ferry service to Governor’s Island. The idea is that visitors will be able to work the keyboard of an antique organ and generate sounds using the structure of the room — beams, pipes, and ducts — as instruments.

I went to the press conference this morning because it was David Byrne. But I walked away amazed that a building that I routinely pass on my weekend run harbored this amazing secret. While I look forward to visiting Byrne’s installation, I’m already wondering what will happen afterward to the Great Hall, open to the public for the first time in decades. Once people see this space, I think they’ll be unwilling to let it go back into hiding.

A developer called the Dermot Company has won the right to build a 140 room luxury hotel atop the Battery Maritime Building, but is struggling to come up with an appropriate public use for the Great Hall. A February New York Times article about this building concluded:

For the Battery Maritime Building, the main issue is ensuring that the Great Hall remains public, said Julie Menin, the chairwoman of the local community board.

“Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more true landmarks not available for public use,” she said, citing 55 Wall Street, a McKim, Mead & White building that became the private Cipriani Club Residence after its short life as the Regent Hotel.

“We want to see full round-the-clock public use,” she said.

All I can add to Julie Menin’s comments is amen.

David Byrne. (Check out his web radio station.)

A rendering of the installation. (Click on photo for a complete description and a conversation between curator Anne Pasternak and Byrne.)

Parking garage, downtown Syracuse.

The Itinerant Urbanist loves cities. It is my job in life to wander cities big and small, drinking in the architecture and the streetscapes, appreciating them as a naturalist might appreciate the forest and the trees, or an oenophile the flavor and the nose. Syracuse, however, represented a challenge.

I was spending a long weekend in Ithaca where my nephew the surrealist had mounted his senior thesis show in one of Cornell’s galleries and I decided to drive north to check out Syracuse. I went online and found the Downtown Living Tour of 2007, a walking tour of loft and condo conversions of some of the city’s historic buildings. Although I missed the tour by a year, I figured that the route map would lead me to downtown’s most vital spots.

Indeed, it took me right to Armory Square, where intensive redevelopment has created a credible urban neighborhood full of restaurants and shops. I stopped to admire the interior of Sakana-ya (see below), a conveyor-belt sushi bar done in post-industrial chic, according to the waiter, by a Korean architect, name unknown. It also took me to the Hotel Syracuse, currently in the midst of a condo conversion, where I got booted out by a belligerent man when I tried to peek at the lobby. And it led me to the corner of Franklin and Willow where the Dinosaur Barbeque was buzzing with bikers.

Sakana-ya
But mostly what I observed and felt as I walked around was the native sadness of New York state’s old industrial cities. Salina St. which, pre-WWII was a the heart of a bustling shopping district appeared to be neglected and semi-abandoned. In between the few hotspots, there was very little to make a pedestrian happy. Yes, there are some beautiful old buildings, like the glorious art deco Niagara Mohawk headquarters, but the urban fabric is awfully threadbare. I found myself appreciating parking garages, just for the little splashes of color they provide.

Parking garage, Syracuse.

And I devoted more time to reading signs and historical markers than I would in a more vibrant place. In Clinton Square, ostensibly the heart of the city, there was a sign explaining how ice skating had been restored to its rightful place. Syracuse became an industrial powerhouse in part because the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, ran right through downtown. The canal wasn’t just a shipping artery, it was the city’s commercial and social hub. In the winter, when it froze, people ice skated on it. By the 1920s, the canal was outmoded and the portion that ran through Syracuse was paved over, converted into Erie Boulevard. So now there’s this desolate square where the canal used to be with a little concrete skating rink, a ghost of the amazing piece of infrastructure that had once made the city (and the rest of New York’s cities) great.

Oh, and there was also a marker noting that Alexis de Tocqueville had “visited this area” in the 1830s while researching Democracy in America (and that a cable channel had, in the 1990s, retraced his route). Hard to say which is more poignant, the image of Syracuse as the 19th century boomtown that de Tocqueville must have found, or the idea that a city would turn to “C-Span and the cable television industry” for its historical markers.

Two unrelated notes:

1) From the Department of Self-Promotion, my recent Metropolis column, Like Urban Renewal, Only Backward seems to be a favorite of policy wonks everywhere. You might enjoy it, too.

2)As some sort of viral marketing effort I was sent a link to a Current TV mini-documentary, City on Steroids, about the booming Chinese city of Chongqing. I think it’s worth watching.

The view from Stillwell Avenue.

Yesterday, seduced by the warm, sunny weather, I got on my bicycle and pedaled out to Coney Island, and after riding all the way down to the end of Surf Avenue, where I was sent packing by the guard at the entrance of Sea Gate, I cruised slowly back up along the Boardwalk, soaking up the splendor of the day.

I rolled off the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue and began looking at what developer Joe Sitt has done with the property that he bought up and bulldozed, property that the city has been trying to wrest away so it can build a bigger, better amusement district. What has Sitt done, besides putting up a lot of chain link fence? He’s done the Orwellian thing; he’s hung bright banners inside the no-man’s-land he’s created heralding “The Future of Coney Island.” Some of the banners just feature the slogan, and others show Coney Island’s iconic skyline — the Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone — in silhouette with giant, stylized waves in the foreground.

The future of Coney Island? Apparently it involves a tsunami. Maybe this is Sitt’s idea of a metaphor.

Meanwhile, City Planning has backed off a bit on its plan. Originally, the city was going to rezone 15 acres as parkland, to be developed by a company such as Tivoli Gardens. The revised plan, announced this week has shrunk that area to nine acres. Sitt seems to be holding fast to a portion of his acreage, but some of the families who’ve been running the amusements at Coney Island for decades will also be included in the redevelopment team. On the surface, this sounds like decent compromise because it suggests that Coney Island will remain a neighborhood zoned for amusement, with a patchwork of owners and a motley aesthetic, instead of being overtaken by a single, seamless, corporate theme park.  However, I’ve been hearing from my Coney Island connections that this is not a good deal at all, because the city is backpedaling on its commitment to reserving a core area of the neighborhood for amusements.  More details to come.
For more analysis and a helpful graphic treatment of the changes in the city’s plan, visit The Gowanus Lounge. And for background, you might want to read the Metropolis column I wrote about Coney Island around this time last year, End of the Line.

The Muji Almond House is Gary Panter’s answer to…

…the Glass House by Philip Johnson

I have posted about artist Gary Panter’s little houses before. But that was back on the now defunct House & Garden version* of the Itinerant Urbanist. (If you try to go to that URL what you get is a page welcoming former H&G readers to Domino Magazine which, in my opinion,  only adds insult to injury.) Anyway, I’m posting my favorite Panter house (and its conceptual cousin, my favorite Philip Johnson house) because, for the first time ever, all of Gary’s little houses are on public display. If you go to the Clementine Gallery right now you’ll find a big room full of Gary’s screamingly vivid paintings, hung on walls that the artist has generously drawn all over. If you keep going, you’ll find a backroom where several shelves are stocked with Gary’s outsider architecture.

And, yes, the big, new Gary Panter book is also available. And it features roughly a zillion paintings and drawings and a number of authoritative essays on art, plus an essay by yours truly about the little houses.

*I found a ghost version of the H&G Itinerant Urbanist, at least the posts from the final month or two. And someday I’ll turn the files I saved into a nice, online bootleg archive.

Panterville, USA.

The Ledner House, New Orleans, December 2006

Sounding suspiciously like an “acolyte of urbanist Jane Jacobs,” New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff today argues against a plan by St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village to demolish several of its buildings and replace them with luxury highrise apartments and a new hospital.

You know, it would be difficult for St. Vincent’s to build a more hideous set of buildings than those it currently owns. The Seventh Avenue intersection dominated by the hospital is perhaps the least appealing spot in the Greenwich Village. But there’s one exception: the O’Toole building, an example of oddball 1960s modernism by New Orleans architect Albert Ledner, also responsible for the much maligned dormitory tower that re-emerged a few years ago as the stylish Maritime Hotel.

I visited Ledner, now in his 80s, and his wife Judy, in late 2006, as they were finishing up the restoration of their idiosyncratic New Orleans home that had been, after Katrina, largely under water. And what I discovered was one of those quirky modernist architects who, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, has a passion for design that transforms structure into ornament. Ledner’s buildings, including his own house and backyard studio, are repositories of his ideas and inventions.

The Maritime Hotel and the building that St. Vincent’s wishes to demolish are the legacy of Ledner’s long tenure as the in-house architect of the National Maritime Union, and his attempts to find a modernist language that would somehow forge a connection between landlocked urban buildings and the sea. I haven’t been inside the O’Toole building, so I don’t know how much of Ledner’s unique style has survived the hospital’s renovations, but judging by what I’ve seen of Ledner’s work, I suspect we’re on the verge of losing an unsung treasure. It would be nice if St. Vincent’s could somehow rejigger its plans — using the O’Toole’s air rights while preserving the building — so that the building could find a new owner who would cherish and reuse it as Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson did the disused maritime dormitory.

For more on Albert Ledner, read Christopher Gray’s Streetscapes column from last November, or my article on Ledner’s house (the Times did a nice slideshow). Or just take a look at the photos below:

Albert Ledner by the portion of the 17th St. Canal that runs behind his house. (The levee breach occurred a mile or two further north.)

Ledner’s backyard studio. (Its big windows were blown out by Katrina’s winds and, at the time of my visit, hadn’t been replaced.)

The studio’s innovative poured concrete ceiling.

The unusual spoke-and-hub structure supporting the Ledners’ roof.

It’s been a turbulent week in the life of New York’s major development schemes. Last night, I was sitting at a long table at the Strand with Phillip Lopate and Ben Katchor, waiting for a panel discussion on the legacy of Jane Jacobs* to begin. However, our moderator, Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, was running late. When he arrived, he explained that he was delayed because the Dolans, the family that controls Madison Square Garden, which sits atop Pennsylvania Station, had just pulled out of the complex deal to build a new Moynihan Station.

For the details on this saga, I’ll refer you to the New York Times‘ ace reporter, Charles Bagli.

For my own point of view, I’ll refer you to a column I wrote for the December 2007 issue of Metropolis, “Madison Square Station?”

Here’s the salient paragraph from my December column:

Long ago, Senator Moynihan secured funding to pay for a $900 million project. It is now projected to cost upward of $14 billion. And the development rights have been awarded to a pair of large private developers, a joint venture between Steven Roth’s Vornado Realty Trust, owner of much of the property surrounding the project site, and Stephen M. Ross’s Related Companies, developer of the Time Warner Center. The entity is known formally as the Venture and informally as the “Two Steves.” The fact that a civic project has become a vehicle for commercial interests is clearly a sign of the times. Or as Maura Moynihan put it, “The public sector can’t do it anymore: this is America.”

“The public sector can’t do it anymore: this is America.” Right.

I’m not angry at the Dolans for deciding not to move Madison Square Garden, thus upending a $14 billion dollar mega-development. I’m angry at the city, the state, and the country for turning an elegant civic project into an overstuffed commercial scheme, a nice roast chicken into a grotesque turducken. Unlike Moynihan’s original vision, the plan that apparently collapsed yesterday was at the mercy, not just of the Dolans, but of Wall Street, the credit markets, and shaky projections for economic growth. It collapsed under its own weight.

Maybe after the ‘08 elections we’ll have a public sector again. If so, can we please just build a train station?

*I have heard it said — even by my fellow panelists last night — that Jane Jacobs is to blame our inability to plan and execute major developments, that her anti-planning philosophy has somehow rendered us impotent. I don’t buy it. Surely one dead public intellectual can’t be to blame for the Moynihan Station imbroglio. And I don’t see any sign of impotence here, just a surfeit of BSDs.

Actually, I’m not singing the blues. Yes, the Murphy/Jahn buildings shown in the renderings that developer Tishman Speyer is circulating, representing the winning bid for the air rights above Manhattan’s westside railyards, are bombastic in that special 1970s way. But they’re not really buildings. They’re conceptual place holders. Another firm might have drawn up more pleasing, stylishly twisty, au courant place holders, but it wouldn’t matter.

It’s hard to know, given the current economic picture, when and if the big office towers would get built. How they wind up looking will surely be determined by economic conditions and architectural fashion at some later date.

The thing that’s worth examining right now is the landscaping. Specifically the way the new neighborhood that sits atop the deck over the railyards connects to the rest of Manhattan. The problem with many plans for this site, going back to the 1990s, is that the whole development is, like the old World Trade Center (to which the Tishman Speyer scheme bears an unfortunate resemblance), jacked up above street level, isolating it from the surrounding city. So I think it’s encouraging that landscape architect Peter Walker (or maybe master planner Cooper Robertson, of Battery Park City fame) has thought to include the “New York Steps (shown above):”

Descending down from the Forum, the New York Steps, a contemporary reinterpretation of the Spanish Steps in Rome, provide landscaped seating terraces with views of the gardens, parks, and the river beyond.

At least the development will be properly connected to the Hudson River waterfront,* an obvious linkage that was totally overlooked in the design of the nearby Javits Center. However, I can’t tell from the renderings on the Tishman Speyer website whether the connections to the north, south, and east are as well thought out, and honestly, I think that those are the sort of design elements that it makes sense to critique at this juncture. How friendly the railyards district is to the pedestrian and the mass transit rider will do more to make or break it as a viable urban place than how the big towers will eventually look on the skyline.

*You know, the rendering shows the steps leading to a southbound avenue. So Hudson River Park access might be my own overly optimistic addition to the plan.

Back in 2005, I wrote a Metropolis column called, “Oh, Brooklyn, My Brooklyn” in which I outlined the difficulties of being a advocate of innovative architecture when there were developers like Bruce Ratner and projects like Atlantic Yards. In that piece I concluded:

First thing in the morning I am not an architecture critic—I am a Brooklynite. And I wake up with the local’s mantra running through my head: “May the bubble burst before they get a chance to build.”

And, wouldn’t you know it? It has. This is not exactly news. The intrepid little Brooklyn Paper has been reporting for weeks that the wheels are falling off Ratner’s wagon. (Check out this story!) But now that Charles Bagli has said it in The Paper of Record, it must be true.

Once again, I say what I’ve been saying all along, that the biggest problem with the scheme is not the scale (too big!) or the urban plan (superblocks!), but the way the deal was conceived and done. New York City neighborhoods are not supposed to emerge from backroom deals between guys like Marty and Bruce. The city (in conjunction with the state, which owns the railyards) should have, with community involvement, drawn up a master plan for the area and chosen a group of developers by issuing an official Request for Proposals. Once the railyards were decked over (and, yeah, they would have had to come up with a funding mechanism), the individual developers could have come in and built their pieces of the neighborhood over time as the market and their resources allowed. (Even Dan Doctoroff finally acknowledged that the process was flawed as he departed his job as Deputy Mayor in December.)

Instead, we’re stuck with the ruins of one developer’s unrealistically immense vision. All because Marty and Bruce took a shortcut.

Meanwhile, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is mourning the demise of Gehry’s “gesamtkunstwerk.” Now that Gehry can’t build all his buildings at once, now that Miss Brooklyn, the office tower without a tenant, will take a back seat to the basketball arena, Ouroussoff is suggesting that Gehry pack up his napkin sketches, his cardboard boxes and his computer modeling software and go home. Well, Ouroussoff isn’t exactly the first to argue that it would be better for Gehry’s reputation if he extracts himself from a bad situation. Author Jonathan Lethem made a more convincing case for an exit strategy back in ‘06.

But the thing that really gets me is the naive hero-worship embedded in Ouroussoff worldview (or should I say weltanshauung?):

If large-scale development is unavoidable, why not enlist serious talents like Mr. Gehry to come up with an alternative to the bottom-line proposals that have been the accepted norm for decades? Finally a big developer had turned to a legitimate architectural hero for help, rather than the usual corporate hacks.

Finally? Has he not noticed that architectural heroes have become the new corporate hacks? That’s what happened here post-9-11. That’s what developers learned during the whole “public” process in which a plan for Ground Zero was chosen. Flashy architectural renderings made people happy. Starchitecture was the new way to package big development schemes, to sell bad plans to good people. Gehry was not Ratner’s architect. He was Ratner’s marketing tool.* Gehry should have recognized that long ago. And Ouroussoff should have, too.

That said, come to the Strand on Thursday night, March 27, from 7-8:30, where Ben Katchor, Phillip Lopate and I will be discussing Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York. Will Atlantic Yards come up? I don’t know. It just might.

(And read my latest Metropolis column in which modern architecture comes to Santa Fe.)

Also, for more thorough analysis of the Bagli and Ouroussoff articles, check out Develop Don’t Destroy, and Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report.

*If you don’t believe me, just read Bagli:

In another indication of the problems facing the project, Forest City recently sent a letter signed by the project’s celebrity architect, Frank Gehry, to chief executives of many of the city’s biggest corporations, inviting them to become a tenant in the “centerpiece of the project,” Miss Brooklyn. It was originally scheduled to be completed in July 2009.

A sample of the Sheikh Zayed skyline.

You know what Dubai looks like, right? It’s one big construction site, with a zillion Manhattan-sized skyscrapers going up at once. The photo above, a stretch of the main drag, Sheikh Zayed Road, as seen from the pool deck of my hotel, is a fair sample. Multiply the newly constructed towers in the photo by, oh, a thousand and you might begin to imagine the scale of development there.

After five days of running around the city (well, actually, riding in taxis), interviewing architects and developers who would speak casually about their plans for new sections of town that will someday be home to a million or more, I came to a new appreciation of the term “mind-boggling.” By my last evening in Dubai, I was convinced that no project as ambitious as Dubai had ever been undertaken in human history, but for all the intensive planning and all the bold architectural gestures, I wasn’t at all sure that the end result would be recognizable as a city.

And I began to wonder, what would Jane (no relation) Jacobs think of all this? What would Jane Jacobs do if she were here?

That first question is harder to answer than it might seem. Clearly she would hate much of the heedless tower-mania. But real the answer would depend on whether she regarded the contemporary, relatively sophisticated approach to mixed-use place-making as an improvement over the sterile environments churned out by the urban planners of the 1960s. And whether she thought that systematic place-making could ever result in authentic places being made. I’m not sure what J.J. would think because, to be quite honest, I’m not even sure what I think.

The answer to the second question, however, is obvious: What would Jane Jacobs do in Dubai? She would go for a walk.

And so I did. Looking out my hotel window, I’d noticed lots of people trekking to work in the morning, streaming out of the low rise neighborhood that was situated between the traffic-clogged swath of Sheikh Zayed Rd. and the Arabian Gulf. So, a bit before sunset on my last evening in town, I followed the homeward bound pedestrians into what turned out to be a vibrant, very real working class neighborhood, like one that you might find in any city (see below) and wondered if this rare enclave of ordinary life could weather the massive real estate boom going on all around it.

A street scene in a neighborhood called Al Satwa.

A view of Sheikh Zayed’s towers from lowrise Al Satwa.

Dubai vernacular.

Speaking of J.J.,  a Metropolis column I wrote in 2006 about The Death and Life of Great American Cities was included in a little compendium called Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York published by the Municipal Art Society and Princeton Architectural Press in conjunction with a Jane Jacobs exhibition.
The exhibition closed a month or so ago, but there’s an event coming up on March 27 at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan in which cartoonist and playwright Ben Katchor, essayist Philip Lopate and I discuss Jane Jacobs, New York, the future, and maybe even Dubai.

That’s Thursday March 27, 7-8:30 at the Strand (12th St. and Broadway).

Oh, and while I’m plugging, here are a few articles I’ve published recently:

May the Best Logo Win, in Salon.

The Thrill is Gone, in Metropolis.

San Francisco’s Eco-Evolution, in Travel + Leisure

Education City

I am spending my afternoon in the business class lounge at the Doha airport. It’s my own fault. I was supposed to be on a 9:45 flight to Dubai but I somehow imagined it was the 11:45 flight. My brain is clearly not at its best. And, so, here I am, making myself at home. Next flight: 17:45.

I’ve been in Doha since late Sunday night (or maybe very early Monday morning), mostly attending and speaking at a conference called Tasmeem (design in Arabic) Doha staged by a far flung branch of Virginia Commonwealth University. The event was held in a part of town known as Education City, a cluster of US university outposts (complete with a Starbucks) on a vast, campus — like the rest of Doha, it’s very much a work in progress — that’s being master-planned by architect Arata Isozaki.
I am too tired to blog coherently. I’m just going to attach a few photos and captions, and say more when I have the energy.

Isozaki building at Education City. Perhaps the nicest building in Doha.

Isozaki on the inside.

The wiggly towers of Doha.

A few of the 800 new towers, mostly non-wiggly, that are either under construction or planned for the near future. Why? Don’t know. This seems to be the “if we build it, they will come” school of planning.