According to Nicolai Ouroussoff, the design for the new East River Park in NYC “represents a clear and much-needed break from the quaint Jane Jacobs-inspired vision of New York that is threatening to transform Manhattan into a theme park version of itself.” Ouroussoff praises the design for the park, which will be located partially under the FDR Drive, for celebrating the gritty underbelly of NYC, but makes no mention of how the place will function, or the uses it will provide to the community.
June 29th, 2005
4 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
 |
 |
A jumble of misguided assertions…
Ouroussoff describes the East River esplanade plan through the lens of historicism versus novelty. But this tired perspective on the design world has little to do with how public spaces function for the people who use them. As PPS wrote in our newsletter last July, many critics fall into this trap and neglect to address how a new building or park serves (or fails to serve) its users.
The same shortsightedness leads Ourousoff to discredit the legacy of Jane Jacobs. Because Jacobs fought Moses’s road projects, he seems to say, her legacy is that of opposition, not innovation. But that assertion is way off the mark. Jacobs’ battles with Moses arose from a passionate belief in the dynamism and authenticity of urban neighborhoods — the same qualities that Ouroussoff seeks to celebrate in the East River plan.
If the new park indeed creates spaces where the spontaneity of urban life can flourish by the East River, I think it will owe a debt to the ideas of Jane Jacobs.
irrelevant to ourousoff
Ourousoff doesn’t care about users. He cares about promoting Starchitecture. I wrote about this here.
Under the overpass
It does seem that Ourousoff rather mischaracterizes Jacobs’ concerns which do not preclude modern approaches to design per se, only modern approaches which are insensitive to human beings. Looking at the designs on the NYT web site I see an image of a boardwalk that might work even if its airport aesthetic strikes me as a little cold, at least it has a surfeit of benches and commercial life to liven up the scene. It looks vaguely like a slick Coney Island without the rides. Greening up Allen St. is a good idea, so obvious in fact that it’s hard to understand why they didn’t do it sooner.
I’m less optimistic about the spaces under the FDR Drive which have always been dank and awful. Strips of stuck-on flourescent lighting scarcely seem like much of a solution. I’m not sure what it would take to redeem these places, but in Tokyo many of the urban waste spaces created by higway overpasses and rail viaducts have been occupied, often by squatters, and turned into tuck-under commercial shops and restaurants. Sometimes, where these roadways run on for some distance, these impromptu uses have even created districts with unique character. The area around Ueno Station, once Tokyo’s premier thieve’s market, is one such example. Some of the best of these improvised areas actually approach cozyness. Perhaps that would be a good NYC solution?
Or they could do what they did on the West Side and just tear the FDR down. In a city with so many transit alternatives, will anyone miss the FDR? Nobody seems to miss the West Side Highway.
Ouroussof on Jacobs, and Jacobs on Highways
Regarding the FDR Drive and Nicolai Ouroussof’s review of a new master plan for it (”Making the Brutal F.D.R. Unsentimentally Humane,” NYT, 6/28/05):
As I see the work of Jane Jacobs, it is primarily concerned with creating and maintaining economically, socially and environmentally successful human settlements. So if any vision of the city is likely to have a “gritty integrity” to it, this would seem to be it.
On the other hand, the Pasquarelli and Rogers “vision,” at least as described by Oursoussoff, seems to me to be little more than an aesthetic one and thus it seems to me to be the one more appropriately considered picturesque, precious and “quaint”:
“For architects like Mr. Pasquarelli [and Rogers], the suburban promise embodied in Moses’ freeway and park projects represent, for better or worse, a part of our collective memory. Their task, as they see it, is to salvage the corners of unexpected beauty from those childhood landscapes and give them new meaning.”
So, if any approach is likely to “drip with nostalgia for a city that never was” it would seem to me to be a Pasquarelli/Rogers approach rather than a Jane Jacobs-inspired one!
But to be fair to Pasquarelli and Rogers, it also really isn’t clear from the text of the Ouroussoff article what exactly their plan involves. And Ouroussof himself does mention that at this point their plans are, indeed, kind of general. So maybe their ideas may actually be closer to a true Jane Jacobs approach than the Ouroussof article makes it appear.
But Ourousoof’s understanding of Jacobs’ work, at least as expressed in this article (and another recent one on the Ratner/Gehry plan for downtown Brooklyn), seems to be way off. It would be interesting to hear him explain more fully what he thinks Jacobs is saying in her six or so major books and where, exactly, he believes that she is saying what he thinks she is saying.
- - - - - - - -
However, I do have to say that, whatever the Pasquarelli/Rogers plans are, I believe it would be a very big mistake to tear down the FDR Drive south of the Brooklyn Bridge (which is the portion that goes by the South St. Seaport) — and I’d like to offer what I believe to be Jane Jacobs-like arguments in favor of retaining this section of the FDR.
Yes, I know that Jane Jacobs is anti-highway and, generally speaking, very much in favor of tearing down expressways and making them into boulevards. And this is something that I very much agree with — in general.
But Jacobs is also very much against the mindless, mass-produced, “knee jerk” one-size-fits-all approach to things and, in this particular case, I think there are good reasons for retaining, pretty much as it exists today (i.e., non-prettified), at least this portion of the FDR Drive.
1) True urban diversity
Yes, waterfront elevated highways cut people off from the waterfront. But that doesn’t mean than each and every inch of the perimeter of Manhattan Island has to be totally free of elevated highways — that no elevated highway anywhere ever can serve an interesting and useful urban purpose. This is, in my opinion, mindless, mass-produced, knee-jerk urbanism.
It was, indeed, wonderful that the West Side Highway eventually became obsolete (although it wasn’t wonderful that a truck fell through the roadbed!) and was torn down, opening up a direct connection to the Hudson River for a vast stretch of the west side of Manhattan. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if most the FDR eventually came down also. But a mixed waterfront, with some areas open to the waterfront and some areas “cut off” (or, more accurately, bridged) by an elevated highway wouldn’t be so bad either — IF such portions of the elevated highway actually have some kind of genuine urban usefulness.
2) Usefulness
The original West Side Highway (and maybe to a lesser extent the FDR Drive, too) did indeed originally have a genuine urban usefulness when it was built (and an importance to the health of the NYC economy). When the West Side Highway was first built, West Street was more than just Manhattan’s westernmost north-south street. It was also a staging area of sorts, I believe, for the very busy docks — a very important part of NYC’s economy — that lined the Hudson. So it seems to me that this highway had a genuine urban usefulness — it in effect created a double-decked street where one was genuinely needed to create a high intensity functional urbanism.
(Plus in its primitiveness, the West Side highway was very “un-highway-like,” as it was built to basically conform to the existing city grid — which is why it quickly became such an outmoded highway, especially for high speed travel. The turns were tight, and the roller coaster-like off/on ramps didn’t take up additional space.)
I think the portion of the FDR Drive that goes past the South Street Seaport has a similar genuine urban usefulness:
a) it allows large numbers of pedestrians going to/from the South Street Seaport and Pier 17 to comfortably cross (and also congregate) beneath a busy traffic artery;
b) it provides a wonderful weather-protected canopy for these crowds — especially for the large number of people getting on, or getting off, the many tour buses that stop there;
c) it creates (at no cost to the city, really), an impromptu, convenient, open-air tour bus terminal for Lower Manhattan;
d) it provides (again at no real cost to the city, really) a nice tour bus layover area for tourbuses in Lower Manhattan.
And both reasons “c” and “d” help keep tour buses off other, less useful and less welcoming, Lower Manhattan streets.