All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
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
8
Six Months
Last week—the six-month anniversary of the World Trade Center attack—I walked down to see the towers of light on a foggy evening. The clouds lay low and the effect was startling and dramatic, occluding and revealing the powerful skyward beams shrouding downtown in an otherworldly glow. It was completely beautiful and a little frightening, a genuine sublimity that could be taken for what it was, inspiring a feeling quite different from the embarrassed awe that shamed earlier fascinations with the twisted, mesmerizing rubble at Ground Zero.
The site is now nearly clear, testament to the selfless energy of those laboring there round the clock. As workers reach the bottom of the pile, they are discovering the remains of comrades trapped on lower floors and in the lobby when the towers collapsed, an awful closure. The two shafts of light seemed completely right during the time of transition from removal and recovery to the consideration of what is to come. They were a memorial of both power and presence, and set a high standard for future projects. That this commemoration had come about at all demonstrates the power of the informal consensus that has, for better and worse, begun to determine what can and cannot happen at this place.
For the moment, we find ourselves in a curious interregnum downtown. While no plans have been finalized, there has been intense jockeying for position, both publicly and, especially, behind the scenes. While the newly formed LMDC will have planning responsibility, the actual power to build remains dispersed and uncertain. The site is owned by the Port Authority (controlled by the governors of New York and New Jersey). It sits within the City of New York, is laced with transport and utility infrastructure controlled by various agencies, and has been leased to Larry Silverstein—a New York real estate mogul with particularly dreary architectural sensibilities—and Westfield, an Australian shopping-mall-management company that was to have run the huge retail complex beneath the towers.
In addition to these legal stakeholders, the public has made its sentiments known through a welter of self-organized alliances that have been meeting regularly and working hard to promulgate ideas for reconstruction. One of the most broad-based of these coalitions is New York New Visions, which recently released a preliminary report that includes a variety of sensible findings, most crucially a call to look beyond the immediate site of the towers and consider the planning of downtown Manhattan as a whole. The report recognizes a historic opportunity to reattach Battery Park City to the island from which it has long been isolated, to increase pedestrian links, to unify and augment a series of transit lines that converge but don’t quite meet at the site, to intensify the mix of uses in the area, and a number of other unassailable ideas. And they are not alone; the outpouring of proposals and opinions has been bracing. At no time in my memory can I recall so many people discussing questions of planning so fervently.
As I write this, the LMDC has just released its first statement of principles for the “Future of Lower Manhattan,” and its board—appointed during the Giuliani administration—has been expanded to include four directors chosen by Mayor Bloomberg. The mayor has sent out a clear message about diversity through these appointments, by placing Asian-, African-, and Hispanic-Americans (among them two women) on a board hitherto dominated by white, male plutocrats.
The new principles have been whipped into shape by Alex Garvin, recently appointed