Policies and philosophies shaping modern day New York

Harland Bartholomew and Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs: philosophies and policies shaping modern day new york

shaping of modern day new york

Urban and Regional Planning | Ar. Khan Amadur Rahman

Hafsa Rafi |

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The city takes shape The Bronx | Brooklyn | Manhattan | Queens | Staten Island | The coastline

Development of transporation links The Street Grid Bridges and Subways The Gridlock : pedestrian circulation encouraged and incorporated The Waterways and the railways.

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Moses' quest for utopia Urban Renewal policies and their implementation in New York 1901 : New York State Tenement House Law 1930 : Zoning ordinances 1949 : Housing Act: the Urban Renewal Program 1956 : Highway Act (construction of interstate freeways) Urban renewal after 1973 : Intervention of journalists and activists

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Adaptive Reuse in present day Adaptive reuse of derelict buildings to reclaim vacant lands and regenerate public spaces : Case of the High Line

New York and its boroughs New York City was originally confined to Manhattan Island and the smaller surrounding islands that formed New York County. The city grew northward and it began annexing areas on the mainland All five boroughs came into existence with the creation of modern New York City in 1898. These Five Boroughs were 1. The Bronx 2. Brooklyn 3. Queens 4. Manhattan 5. Staten Island.

Later, it became an understanding that the sixth borough will be the coastline of New York.

Each of these provinces are known by their distinctive character which has developed over time either due to the influnce of colonisers, the migration of african americans and Irish or due to industrial and economic development.

The Bronx The Bronx – the only borough on the mainland – was a patchwork of farms in Westchester County until the arrival of steamships and railroads in the mid nineteenth century.

The West Bronx was the first area outside of Manhattan annexed by the city, in 1874, followed by the East Bronx in 1898.

Manhattan College, Fordham and other campuses in the eastern hills established the Bronx as a ‘borough of universities’.

The Bronx’s history has truly been determined by the cultural richness of its immigrants: Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, Eastern and Central European Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans and Dominicans. In 1891, the New York Botanical Garden opened, followed in 1899 by the Bronx Zoo. Begun in 1948, the Cross Bronx Expressway isolated the South Bronx at a time when industrial jobs began to dry up.

Pollution and fires gutted the neighbourhood, which in the 1970s became a symbol for urban decay.

New Yorkers know the Bronx for its vibrant neighbourhoods and the natural sanctuaries of its shining harbours, steep cliffs and rolling hills.

Despite being the third most densely populated county in the United States, nearly a quarter of the Bronx is open space – including the Botanical Garden and Bronx Zoo. The Bronx was a mostly rural area for many generations, with small farms supplying the city markets. In the late 19th century, however, it grew into a railroad suburb. Faster transportation enabled rapid population growth in the late 19th century, involving the move from horse-drawn street cars to elevated railways and the subway system, which linked to Manhattan in 1904.

The South Bronx was a manufacturing center for many years and was noted as a center of piano manufacturing in the early part of the 20th century. In 1919, the Bronx was the site of 63 piano factories employing more than 5,000 workers. However, after the construction of Cross bronx expressway, south bronx was seperated and it led to its decline.

Brooklyn Occupying the southwestern tip of Long Island, Brooklyn is adjacent to Queens and separated from Manhattan by the East River.

New York City’s most populous borough did not become one until 1898. Its earliest inhabitants – Munsee-speaking Lenape Indians – were displaced by violence, disease and disenfranchisement, meted out by a Dutch West India Company drawn to the area’s natural harbours and fertile landscape.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, proximity to Manhattan proved a mixed blessing for the city of Brooklyn – the name was anglicized under English governance. By the century’s end, they had bowed to the inevitable, and on 1 January 1898 a municipal charter decreed that the ‘City of New York’ be formed of five constituent boroughs: Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx and Manhattan. Still, a dearth of ‘development’ laid the groundwork for a stunning twenty first-century turn around that saw abandoned factories and handsome intact brownstones draw discerning gentrifiers.

Bursts in Brooklyn’s uneven progress followed advances in transportation. The Brooklyn Bridge physically linked the nation’s first- and third-largest cities in 1883; the elevated railroad opened in 1885. Automobiles initially helped fill in the borough’s outlying areas but eventually sped commuters on to greener, suburban pastures.

Brooklyn is known for its cultural, social, and ethnic diversity, an independent art scene, distinct neighborhoods, and a distinctive architectural heritage.

It has evolved into a thriving hub of entrepreneurship and high technology startup firms, and of postmodern art and design.

Manhattan Dutch colonists rechristened the ‘island of hills’, or the Lenape Mannahatta, New Amsterdam in 1625.

Built with slave labour, the port became the centre of New Netherland before the British renamed it New York in 1664.

By 1790, the city was the new United States’s largest, and briefly hosted the federal capitol.

In 1792, financiers met downtown to discuss the trade of United States. Treasury bonds, an agreement that evolved into the New York Stock Exchange.

As Manhattan grew into a cramped megalopolis of refugees and immigrants, city planners attempted to improve the dense, dirty cityscape with the construction of an extensive parks system, the centrepiece being the majestic Central Park, inaugurated in 1857.

In 1904, the first underground subway opened. 19th century Beaux Arts monuments gave way to a labyrinth of towers whose offices house the most powerful companies in the world – not to mention Broadway and ‘Museum Mile’.

During the Great Migration, millions of African Americans moved to Manhattan, transforming Harlem into the preeminent centre of Black politics, thought, literature and arts. In 1952, the United Nations established its headquarters in Midtown. Following a protracted economic crisis and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Manhattan is again thriving.

Manhattan, the second-smallest county in the United States, is home to some of the world’s most visited tourist attractions for its soaring skyscapers of the city highlighting its skyline.

Its features are discussed in detail in the coming pages.

Queens Built on the trails and villages of displaced Maspeth, Matinecock, Rockaway and Canarsie Native Americans, Queens was home to Dutch and English colonists as early as the 1620s. Queens consisted of mostly small towns and large farms until the nineteenth century.

The Steinway piano company built a factory in Astoria and industry crept up along the waterfront of Long Island City before the county was created a New York City borough with municipal consolidation in 1898.

Connections to the Long Island Railroad, the City subway and especially the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan led to an economic and demographic boom. The New York Municipal Airport (now LaGuardia) began operation of commercial flights, followed by the New York International Airport (now JFK) in 1948.

In 1939 and 1964, the World’s Fairs brought millions of visitors to Queens. Queens also hosts the Mets baseball team, as well as the United States Open in tennis. The most ethnically diverse of the five boroughs, with nearly half the population born outside the United States, residents speak well over 100 languages.

Home of both New York international airports, it is no suprise that nowhere looks more like the world’s ‘melting pot’ than in ethnically diverse Queens.

Historically a collection of small towns and villages founded by the Dutch, the borough has since developed both commercial and residential prominence. Downtown Flushing has become one of the busiest central core neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Queens is the site of Citi Field, the baseball stadium of the New York Mets, and hosts the annual U.S. Open tennis tournament at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Additionally, two of the three busiest airports serving the New York metropolitan area, John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport, are located in Queens.

Staten Island The borough’s densest and most diverse neighbourhoods can be found in its northwestern corner, from which the island’s sole passenger train – the Staten Island Rapid Transit – runs 23km (14 miles) southwards, serving suburban enclaves along the borough’s beach-lined eastern coast.

Down the centre of the island runs a steep ridge of preserved forests, scenic overlooks and large estates. To the west, a narrow industry-lined tidal channel (the Kill Van Kull) separates the borough from New Jersey. This was the last outpost of New York City to experience urbanization. The British, taking advantage of Staten Island’s undeveloped topography, built lookouts and lumber mills in the Revolutionary War; the nineteenth century saw its agricultural landscape transformed by small industrial operations and Victorian retreats. Following completion of the Verrazano Bridge in 1964, the borough’s economy and population exploded. Early waves of Irish and Italian migrants from Brooklyn were followed by Russians, Liberians and Sri Lankans. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, planners and politicians continue to debate how best to guide resilient development in the face of rising sea levels.

In the southernmost part of both the city and state of New York is Staten Island, the least populated of the five boroughs.

The NYC coastline

It may be called the concrete jungle, but New York is also a city of islands, a metropolis moored on the Atlantic. Its 865km (538-mile) coastline encircles the most densely populated city in the United States, one that’s also highly vulnerable to the changing climate. Since 1900, more than 90 per cent of New York’s wetlands have been backfilled and paved over, costing the city a crucial defence against flooding. So when Hurricane Sandy swept through on October 29, 2012, with its 130km/h (80mph) winds and record storm surges, the city was brought to its knees.

Millions of residents lost power for days, and thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed. Flood maps had last been updated in 1983 – since which time the number of residents living in flood-prone areas had increased more than 80 per cent, and the number of at-risk buildings by 90 per cent. The proposal called for adaptable floodwalls, storm-surge barriers and dune systems, and revising building codes throughout the city. It is considered the most comprehensive climate-resilience programme of any city worldwide, and although expenses were steep, so were the $19 billion in damages wrought by Sandy alone.

Any city will suffer when a hurricane strikes, but New York is especially prone. The New York Bight – a bend in the open waters of the Atlantic – forms a trap for storm surges. Housing developments, hospitals, schools and power plants ring the coast. A plethora of underground facilities, like the municipal water system and subway, and a skyline marked by tall buildings and suspension bridges make an aggressive approach to tackling rising sea levels essential.

"City cultures are defined by their plans. Los Angeles is subdivisions, Paris is broad boulevards, Vienna is the Ringstrasse, and New York is the grid,"

The Street Gird In 1811, the New York State legislature adopted what would become the definitive feature of Manhattan’s built environment: its street grid.

The Commissioners’ Plan provided for the entirety of the island to be laid out between 14th Street and Washington Heights in the pattern of avenues and streets that has defined the city ever since.

The plan was not only designed for the orderly layout of Manhattan, but also for the efficient speculation on and sale of its property, an early expression of New York’s boundless confidence in its own future.

Reasoning that ‘straight-sided and right-angled houses’ were easiest to build and live in, the Commissioners’ Plan imposed a straight rectilinear grid on the city’s diverse topography, rather than a more varied plan.

However, Broadway – which had been the main road through Manhattan since the days of the Dutch, following an older Native American path – was incorporated into the plan, crossing the grid diagonally below 78th Street. And although the original plan made little provision for parkland beyond the few small green squares already extant at the time, the creation of Central Park in the 1850s provided the open space that the Commissioners’ Plan had not originally envisaged.

“The Greatest Grid” reveals how remarkably flexible Manhattan’s street grid has been over two centuries. To wit, the following were all later city additions unanticipated by the grid’s creators in 1811: Central Park and the superblock housing developments of 1960s urban renewal; Madison and Lexington avenues; the automobile and the subway; skyscrapers; the water system and the electricity grid; zoning resolutions and preservation districts. That the grid was able to accommodate them all while sustaining its essential character is a true testament to its flexibility, which Ballon has described as a “living framework, which enabled the city to grow and evolve over time.”

One of the strengths of the grid has been its flexibility to accommodate irregular spaces over time. The image above is an oil painting from 1885 that imagines what the junction of Bowery and Broadway, the area that became Union Square, looked like during colonial times.

The bottom image shows Union Square today.

Manhattan Solstice Some pleasures of the grid could not have been anticipated by the commissioners.

Twice each year – usually around 28 May and 12 July – the setting sun aligns precisely with the east–west axis of Manhattan’s numbered streets. The sun’s descent on the horizon is framed by the city’s urban canyons, and the curtain walls of the many skyscrapers reflect and refract the light across town. The effect is popularly known as ‘the Manhattan solstice’ or ‘Manhattanhenge’.

Riding the rails : Streetcars connecting the boroughs When the New York and Harlem Railroad opened along the Bowery in 1832, passengers travelled what was the earliest streetcar line in the United States.

Twenty years later, that line had been extended 200km (125 miles) north and was joined by Cornelius Vanderbilt to his New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, carrying passengers and freight into the city.

In 1913, the Vanderbilts opened Grand Central Terminal. Three years earlier, the competing Pennsylvania Railroad had opened Pennsylvania Station, whose demolition in 1963 energized the historic preservation movement in New York. The city’s first subway opened in 1904 to relieve overcrowding on Manhattan’s surface transit routes; in the 21st century, the subway system covers more than 1,050km (650 miles), linking four of the five boroughs and operating 24 hours per day.

Gone, however, are New York’s elevated railroads, developed more than 25 years before the first subway, as are the city’s streetcars, the trolleys that began on the Bowery in 1832 and inspired the name of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In addition to the subway, New York’s modern rail passengers are served by Metro-North Railroad, PATH, New Jersey Transit, the Staten Island Railway, Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road, the oldest American railway to operate under its original name and charter.

These elevated railrodas had been derelict until 2010 when the project of high line commenced - reclaiming the public space and maintaining its heritage.

The Gridlock

Bridges and tunnels

Pedestrian circulation promoted

Subways become the new transit system for business districts

Add in the daily grind of delivery trucks and daily commuters traversing bridges and tunnels to drive into the business districts – short on both parking spaces and loading docks – and it makes for near-chronic gridlock. To help reduce traffic, the city is considering congestion pricing schemes that would add tolls to certain East River bridges that have long been free to drivers, and limit truck deliveries during rush hour.

Referring to the ‘Bridge and Tunnel’ crowd may be shorthand for separating suburbanites from proper New Yorkers, but the city’s famous bridges and tunnels have provided a vital link in knitting the five boroughs into a navigable modern city. The most famous of them all is the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883 as the ‘Great Bridge’, one of the marvels of the world.

Its construction was instigated following the winter of 1866– 67, which saw a frozen East River impede the vital ferry service between the then-independent cities of New York and Brooklyn. The use of steel in a suspension bridge was revolutionary, and provided unprecedented strength and durability

Meanwhile, under mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city worked to reshape its street life in part by repurposing 10.5 hectares (26 acres) of active car lanes into pedestrian zones and introducing the Citi Bike bicycle-sharing programme for commuters who prefer the bell to the horn.

Brooklyn Bridge was joined by the other East River crossings, each a monument in its own right: the Williamsburg Bridge (1903), the Manhattan Bridge (1909) and the Queensboro Bridge (1909). In 1927, the Holland Tunnel joined the bridges of New York, the first vehicular crossing of the Hudson River and at 2,608m (8,557ft) long an engineering masterpiece.

Its ventilation system was a revolution, one that became the model for ventilating other submarine tunnels, including its uptown neighbour, the Lincoln Tunnel, which opened in 1937.

While New York today boasts more car-free households than any other major American city, when the city built its highways in the early and mid 20th century it saw them as a means to progress. Many are part of the legacy of controversial urban planner Robert Moses. In 1934–68 his highway projects (including the Cross Bronx Expressway and Elevated West Side Highway, among others) often disrupted – even destroyed – entire neighbourhoods and increased residents’ car dependency.

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06 1. Brooklyn Bridge 2. Williamsburg Bridge 3. Queensboro Bridge 4. Manhattan Bridge 5. Holland Tunnel 6. Hellgate Bridge

Urban planning emerged in New York as a Progressive Era response to problems with market-driven development, with a focus on thinning out teeming slums and commercial districts.

The year 1916 saw the city’s first zoning law, limiting the height and bulk of skyscrapers and lofts to allow more light to reach the bottom of ‘concrete canyons’. A comprehensive regional plan, prepared by a private civic group and prioritizing new infrastructure, followed in 1929. Planning gained traction after the Second World War thanks to a new federal urban-renewal programme in 1949. Nowhere put the programme to more use than New York.

Guided by Robert Moses, the city replaced tenement neighbourhoods with Modernist ‘tower in the park’ public and middle-income housing complexes, as well as hospitals, colleges and arts venues.

Criticized by those displaced and by early gentrifiers such as Jane Jacobs who saw value in old buildings and streetscapes, planning entered a new phase in the 1970s, working with neighbourhoods towards more incremental, inclusive changes. With the return of prosperity and growth, planning today focuses on balancing economic development with neighbourhood preservation, while working to make space for a record-high population that is expected to climb to 9 million by 2040.

Urban Renewal Urban Renewal is a policy of urban revitalization that started in the mid-twentieth century as a response to the Great Depression and the decline of American citie.

At that time, cities were posing a great deal of their population due to the economic downturn. Weather and almost exclusively white residenta "fled to newly built suburos in great numbers, adding further to the dealing of cites by taking with them the city's tax base (this is referred to as white fight today) At the same time African American from the south and Puerto Ricana were migrating to Norren in large numbers en forced to live in substandard housing conditions due to explicit discrimination in the housing market.

Eminent Domain

Urban renewal plans were almost exclusively adopted in minority communities, often bulldozing functioning low-income neighborhoods and replacing them with wealthier ones.

Until the early 1970s, this policy displaced over 1 million Americans, most of which were African Americans Communities throughout the United States started to fight what came to be known as "Negro Removal". These activists forced the government to make important changes to the program, and in 1974 the widespread criticism paired with an economic downturn led to the end of the federal program altogether.

The map reveals a strong relationship between minority populations and still unused land within urban renewal areas, showing the ongoing public disinvestment in communities of color as well as the uneven distribution of negative effects of urban renewal along racialized and ethnic lines.

Eminent Domain is the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation. In the UK it is used chiefly of international law, whereas in the US it is used of federal and state governments.

The poor living conditions in American cities had long been a matter of public debate. In the late 19th century, a reform movement started documenting and bringing these slum conditions to public attention through photoography, books and journalism. In the following decades. more and more voices started to dcall for demolition of slums and replacement with healthier forms of housing. Early Slum clearance started in the 1930s but with housing Act 1949 large plots of lands was made available through eminent domain.

In the following two decades, 2,532 urban renewal projects were carried out in 992 American cities under this program.

While it set out to combat neighborhood decline also often referred to as "blight", in reality it destroyed more housing than it produced.

REINVESTMENT

DISINVESTMENT

RACIAL RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION

In 1952 the City started bulldozing "blighted" areas under the urban renewal program with federal money and handing them over to private developers for redevelopment. The conditions of "blight" that were actively produced by the disinvestment discussed below opened these areas up for redevelopment and made it profitable for developers to reinvest. Often this redevelopment spurs gentrification, pushing out existing populations to make way for higher income groups to maximize the possible profit. Reinvestment takes many different forms and the government plays an important role. Apart from urban renewal, the City encourages private investment in the built environment through rezonings that allow for denser development, and tax benefits that incentivice developers to construct new housing.

In the 1930s, the federal government adopted racist practices of the private housing market as public policy. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created in 1933 to help citizens finance their homes. It created "residential security" or redlining maps which demarcated areas with minority populations with red lines as "risky" and unfit for investment. People living in redlined areas were denied home loans as well as other private and public services, making it impossible to sell or renovate their homes and to build wealth. Redlining was not the only form of disinvestment though. In the 1970s, when hit with a severe fiscal crisis, the City adopted a practice called planned shrinkage. Public services such as police patrols and fire stations were removed from declining areas to concentrate them in "healthier" ones. These forms of disinvestment created the conditions for later reinvestments.

Explicit racism in society and the private housing market created limited housing options for African Americans and other minority populations, who were forced to live in separated neighborhoods. White neighborhoods would prevent the influx of minority populations through racial covenants deeds prohibiting home owners to rent or sell to non-whites—and even physical violence. The real estate industry used the existing racism to its advantage, charging higher rents for African Americans without maintaining their buildings. Realtors and speculators would also engage in "blockbusting" by encouraging people of color to move to certain white areas and buying properties at below-market rates from whites who feared the devaluation of their homes and "fled to the suburbs.

Urban renewal built on racist policies of disinvestment that produced conditions of "blight". This made it profitable to reinvest in these neighborhoods later on, causing waves of mass displacement.

Early urban renewal plans were almost exclusively adopted in communities of color. During the 1950s and following decades, the population of New York City, like many other U.S. cities in the north, changed considerably. From 1950 to 1960, the white population dropped by almost 500,000 people (or 7%), due to the decline of inner cities and the availability of federal support for whites-only homeownership in the newly built suburbs. In the same time period, the nonwhite population almost doubled, as African Americans from the rural South and Puerto Ricans were seeking better housing and employment opportunities in the North. However, explicit discrimination in society and the housing market created highly segregated neighborhoods for minority populations.

It were exactly these areas that urban renewal sought to "save" by attracting the white middle class back to the city. As shown by the four examples on this map, urban renewal plans overproportionally displaced non-white residents, changing the racial makeup of these areas back to mostly white neighborhoods. By 1959, urban renewal had forcefully displaced 100,000 New Yorkers. Early urban renewal thus reinforced the segregation of the city.

" You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. "

- Robert Moses

Robert Moses Visionisionary behind Modern day New York Somewhere, in their heart of hearts, all urban planners want to be Robert Moses, the master-builder of New York City. Moses built several bridges, an underwater tunnel, 416 miles of parkway, 2,567,256 acres of parkland, numerous public housing projects, 17 public swimming pools and 658 playgrounds. At the height of his power, few urban improvements in the city and its suburbs were built without his approval, whether hospitals, schools or sewerage systems.

Moses’s career was the fulfillment of a heroic mindset that sought to replace the clutter of the past with order and efficiency. His New York became the jewel of American cities, a glittering lab for modern design and infrastructure.

He became a household name, something no planner had managed since Baron Haussmann in Second Empire Paris. But his schemes came at a severe cost – the demolition of dozens of largely lower-income neighborhoods, sacrificed on the altar of progress. Whether Moses revived or ruined the city remains a point of contention today ‘rip it up and start again’ approach to urbanism had begun to come under attack. His plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would see neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and SoHo leveled, became a crisis point. Activists – including the journalist Jane Jacobs, who Moses never met but has come to be seen as his most eloquent nemesis – argued for a mixed use, street-scaled, community-conscious city, rather than one driven from above by all-powerful planners.

He began with the parkways, tree-lined roads connecting prosperous Long Island suburbs, and the swimming pools, some of which still stand as exemplars of modernist design. The Triborough Bridge, completed in 1936, fundamentally reshaped the map of New York City.

demolition done for eastbank freeway near broadway

He may have been responsible for many successful projects, his approach towards develoving these infrastructural processes involved discrimination against people of colour and hence he is considered as the most controversial urban planner of new york.

New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 The slums were hives of disease, poverty, vice, and drunkenness. The culmination of the reform efforts was the 1901 Tenement House Act. The law required that new buildings have large courtyards for light and air. And the structures needed to be set back if they rose greater than 1.5 times the width of the street.

Housing Condition before enforcement of tenement Act in 1901.

The demolition that took place to provide new housing for the European migrants.

Nineteenth-century slum housing in the United States consisted of buildings with warrens of tiny, poorly ventilated rooms that resulted in a high incidence of infant mortality and infectious diseases among the European immigrant population.

Reform movements began in 1901, with the New York State Tenement House Law. Bedrooms were often cut off from fresh air, ventilation, and light. Pair that with the fact that most apartments had coal burning stoves -- which choked residents with smoke and blackened the walls -- and the people living there were condemned to life inside of what were virtually caves.

The Tenement House Act of 1901 cracked down on lax regulations, and set up the Tenement House Department to inspect and enforce new building standards. Now, landlords were required to install at least one window per bedroom and private bathroom per apartment.

In 1936, New York City introduced its first public housing project, and the era of the tenement building officially ended. But the squalor that immigrants endured in an attempt to build new lives is immortalized in the haunting photographs that remain to this day.

A typical Lower East Side or East Village street will be lined with five-story, austerely unornamented pre-law (pre-1879) and six-story, fancifully decorated old law (pre 1901) tenements with the much bulkier grand-style New Law Tenements on the corners, always at least six stories tall

Zoning Ordinances of 1916 in the 1930s with zoning ordinances (intended to separate residential areas from the health-endangering waste products of industrial activities) and federal loans to build housing for workers who had fallen on hard times during the Great Depression.

New York, BZ (Before Zoning) From 1901, new tenement buildings were more regulated. But for the rest of the city, there were no restrictions on use or height. Factories could exist side-by-side single family homes, and skyscrapers could rise straight up to the moon. Lower Manhattan was a dense jumble of all kinds of buildings, from high-end offices to factories to warehouses to stores to forgotten 18th century townhouses. The new building technology allowed for structures to rise twenty, thirty, or even fifty stories.

The narrow streets were being turned into dark caverns, while throngs of workers poured in and out of the district like blood from a beating heart.

Brooklyn and Queens: The Wild West It was not just the congestion and shadows that worried planners, social reformers, and government officials, it was also the future growth of the city itself. About half of the City of Greater New York—comprised of the five boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—contained land that was either under- or undeveloped. The subway was being built out to all corners, and the automobile and truck were beginning to have their impacts. The outer boroughs were a Wild West of opportunity and, if not checked, could turn the rest of the city into the same unregulated mess as Manhattan.

Setbacks and height restrictions have made it possible for sunlight to reach ground

The commissioners felt that the best way forward would be to carve up the land into zones, which stipulated allowable use, height, and lot coverage. Factories would be separated from homes. Buildings would not have outright height caps but would have to setback from the street as they got higher. And courtyards and open space would be required, especially in residential areas.

Zoning Ordinances of 1916 Guidelines and the zones In addition to the anxieties about ominous shadow-casting skyscrapers, a drastically increasing population, due to mass immigration, created an urgent need for a larger housing supply. There was also uneasiness about the intermixing of the residential, commercial, and industrial, as warehouses and factories started popping up at an uncomfortable proximity to Ladies’ Mile, a posh shopping district at the time.

These concerns were legally assuaded through the thorough Zoning Ordinance in 1916. The resolution created height districts, ordering setbacks after certain heights, The second set of maps established three use zones: residential, commercial (offices, retail, light industrial), and unrestricted (for any type of property but were intended for large polluting factories, utilities, and port and transportation facilities). About two-fifths of Manhattan, and about two-thirds of the entire city was zoned as residential.

Lastly, the ordinance regulated the lot coverage, or the area of a building’s footprint relative to the size of the lot. In the most restricted “E” districts, for example, it was necessary that the first floor of buildings cover no more than 50% of the cite, and second floors had to cover no more than 30%. The least restricted “A” districts could have nearly 100% coverage.

It is thought by some that the zoning ordinace guidelines came into place as a result of construction of Equitable building. It might not be the case but the acceptance of zoning laws was more easily accepted when the citizens saw the ill effects of the bulky skyscraper casting a 7 acre shadow on the area surrounding it.

Rising 40-stories tall, the most conspicuous feature of the building is its lack of setbacks from the street. Upon completion, it was the largest office building in the world by floor area. While this was a remarkable feat, the building cast a 7-acre shadow on nearby streets, completely cutting out sunshine for a few shorter buildings. This directly affected the value of buildings now devoid of sunshine, and people feared it would propel a flurry of similar skyscrapers, forever plunging the city’s streets into darkness.

Tall buildings were permitted in Lower Manhattan and Midtown.

And the far flung reaches of the city were to be set aside for oneand two-family homes. Factories were allowed to remain along the shores; and apartment buildings were to hug the subway lines.

Height and use districts were based on largely preexisting patterns of development, and their implementation required neither the relocation of industries nor the removal of tall buildings. The ordinance stabilized those patterns, giving official sanction and legal protection to the status quo. At once sweeping and conservative, the zoning ordinance grew out years of failed attempts to unite private and public efforts to guide the growth of the city’s landscape, especially in lower Manhattan.

1949 Housing Act : the Urban Renewal Program During the 1940s and 1950s, as immigrants prospered and moved out of the tenements, much increasingly decrepit housing stock was still in place in Northeastern and Midwestern cities, which had become destinations for southern blacks seeking better-paid factory employment. Rampant housing discrimination created racially segregated neighborhoods.

Lacking an adequate tax base and political clout, these areas and populations lagged in the quality of schools, roads, police protection, and other city services. Nevertheless, even segregated neighborhoods of this period generally included solidly middle-class residents and thriving businesses.

After World War II, urban planners (then largely concerned with accommodating the increasing presence of automobiles) and social reformers (focused on providing adequate affordable housing).

The major period of urban renovation in the United States began with Title I of the 1949 Housing Act: the Urban Renewal Program, which provided for wholesale demolition of slums and the construction of some eight-hundred thousand housing units throughout the nation. The program's goals included eliminating substandard housing, constructing adequate housing, reducing de facto segregation, and revitalizing city economies. Participating local governments received federal subsidies totaling about $13 billion and were required to supply matching funds.

Bad News For The Inner City Roughly six hundred thousand housing units were demolished, compelling some two million inhabitants to move. Thousands of small businesses were forced to close. In New York City, more than one hundred thousand African Americans were uprooted, destroying the social and economic fabric of many neighborhoods.

After 1960, federally subsidized loans increasingly underwrote the rehabilitation, rather than wholesale demolition, of blighted neighborhoods. In 1964 Congress passed legislation to assist relocated persons who could not afford their new rents. Still, despite the good intentions that prompted urban renewal, most observers now agree that the process was deeply flawed.

Sites were acquired through eminent domain, the right of the government to take over privately owned real estate for public purposes, in exchange for "just compensation." After the land was cleared, local governments sold it to private real estate developers at below-market prices. Developers, however, had no incentives to supply housing for the poor. In return for the subsidy and certain tax abatements, they built commercial projects and housing for the upper-middle class. Title III of the Housing Act of 1954 promoted the building of civic centers, office buildings, and hotels on the cleared land. Land that remained vacant because it was too close for comfort to remaining slum areas often became municipal parking lots.

The overlap of NYCHA projects within urban renewal projects with redlining. It becomes obvious how only very little public housing was built through urban renewal

Public Housing Debacle The public housing built in the 1950s—ironically, based on the utopian architecture of European modernist Le Corbusier—was designed to squeeze as many families as possible onto expensive urban real estate. Slab-like high-rise complexes, poorly planned and constructed, housed as many as twelve thousand people. Known by residents as "the projects," these buildings were increasingly plagued by vandalism, drug use, assault, robbery, and murder.

The Manhattan Superblock

Allied to the failures of urban development as a means of alleviating housing shortages was and is owner abandonment of rental apartment housing; they stop making repairs and paying taxes, and accumulate so many building violations that legal occupation is no longer permitted. Destroyed by vandalism or arson, these buildings become city property, to be torn down or rehabilitated at public expense. Other apartment buildings are "warehoused," awaiting gentrification of the neighborhood, when they may be rehabilitated and sold at a profit.

Using the power of eminent domain, New York acquired large tracts of land, razing the tenements to the ground, closing the streets and merging multiple blocks into one.This 1952 bird’s eye view shows Stuyvesant Town is joined by a string of super blocs lining the East River. The United Nations building in the right hand corner and three other public housing projects (Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald, and the Baruch Houses) in the lower center of the picture To make Stuyvesant Town, “600 buildings once containing 3,100 families, 500 stores and small factories, three churches, three schools and two theaters, were razed” The super block completely alters the city landscape, as it removes the square one of the city: the street. In The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City, author David Kishik notes that keeping people off the street was “the supreme act of progressive benevolence.” The democratization of the grid plan allows each building the same potential for space. Super blocks undermine this equality A 1969 law that abolished minimum rents and stipulated that no family would have to pay more than 25 percent of its income to rent an apartment in public housing lacked federal subsidies to make up for the lost revenue. While public housing authorities went bankrupt, the projects increasingly filled with people who had no income at all. The 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act created priority categories for public housing that insured only the "truly needy" were served while ignoring poor working families who had spent years on waiting lists.

Map of Cincinati. Freeways shaping a city.

Highways Act 1956 Interstate highways funded by the Highway Act of 1956 not only hastened "white flight" (the departure of middle-class white residents to new suburban housing developments) but also physically divided cities. Little thought was given to the results of leveling inner-city neighborhoods to build the new interstates: the destruction of neighborhoods and displacement of low-income residents.

More than two thousand construction projects on one thousand square miles of urban land were undertaken between 1949 and 1973, when the urban renewal program officially ended. Roughly six hundred thousand housing units were demolished, compelling some two million inhabitants to move. Thousands of small businesses were forced to close. In New York City, more than one hundred thousand African Americans were uprooted, destroying the social and economic fabric of many neighborhoods.

New York city reshaped by freeways and bridges

Harland Bartholomew and Robert Moses Freeways Shaping New York City

The planning vision of the freeway, with its focus on integrating transportation and land use planning, taming the automobile, and using the freeway as a tool for building a better city, is exemplified in the work of Harland Bartholomew. For more than four decades, Bartholomew was one of the foremost planner-engineers in the country, and he was the principal partner at one of the most prestigious consulting firms.

St. Louis’s I-70 is a depressed freeway that isolates the city’s downtown from its iconic Gateway Arch. The park that houses that landmark will soon undergo a major renovation, and local advocates have seized the opportunity to present a vision for removing the barrier of I-70. Despite a good deal of political and community backing, however, pro-teardown group City-to-River has had trouble securing support for a full study of the proposal.

negative impact of the freeways Between the 1950s and the 1980s, cities across the country undertook massive freeway construction projects. In many cases they decided to run the freeways straight through downtown, bulldozing thousands of homes and businesses in the process.

At the time, this was seen as a sign of progress. Not only did planners hope to help people get downtown more quickly, they saw many of the neighborhoods being torn down as blighted and in need of "urban renewal."

But tearing down a struggling neighborhood rarely made problems like crime and overcrowding go away. To the contrary, displaced people would move to other neighborhoods, often exacerbating overcrowding problems. Crime rates rose, not fell, in the years after these projects.

By cutting urban neighborhoods in half, planners undermined the blocks on either side of the freeway. The freeways made nearby neighborhoods less walkable. Reduced foot traffic made them less attractive places for stores and restaurants. And that, in turn, made them even less walkable. Those with the means to do so moved to the suburbs, accelerating the neighborhoods' decline.

First, all streets are not the same. He developed a hierarchy of road types with each designed to serve its appropriate traffic function.

Second, highways must be designed to accommodate many different kinds of traffic movements, including radial, crosstown, and bypass traffic. He argued that traffic should not be funneled through already-congested areas unless those areas were its intended destination.

Third, and most importantly, streets and highways must be provided in relation to population density and land use density.

Bartholomew believed that the transportation system must be designed to best serve the needs of the city and its residents, and this was achieved by explicitly linking transportation planning with land use planning. Bartholomew's Early Urban Highway Plans The freeways were smaller facilities-three lanes maximum in each direction as opposed to five or sometimes more-designed for slower speeds of 45 miles per hour rather than today's 70 miles per hour, which allowed them to be more easily fit into the adjoining urban fabric.

Despite his calls for "society-first" freeway planning, Bartholomew's work of the mid-1950s and beyond reflects the victory of the traffic-service orientation of the state highway engineers in the struggle to design and build urban freeways.

negative impact of the freeways Cross Bronx and Lower Manhattan Expressways Freeways have had a tremendous influence not only on the urban transportation system, which they dominate, but also on the city itself. The freeway has helped extend the commuting radius of the city and made distant, lower cost land accessible to the urban core.

However, shortsightedness in planning freeways have led to disastrous consequences, effects of which are still being experienced.

Two examples where Freeways cost more damage than relief are stated below.

The construction of the cross bronx expressway led to the area's decline. While the Lower manhattan expressway if constructed would have led to loss of cultural heritage, not to mention the hundreds displaced due to razing of entire neighbourhoods.

Cross Bronx Expressway bifurcating South Bronx leading to abandonment of South Bronx and its decline.

The “Cross Bronx,” as it is known colloquially, was the brainchild of Robert Moses. But historically it has been blamed for bisecting the Bronx roughly in half causing a migration of middle and upper class residents to the north and leaving the south portion to become an underserved slum of low-income residents. It displaced as many as 5,000 families when an alternate proposed route along Crotona Park would have only affected 1-2% of that amount. Robert Moses is accused of favoring “car culture” placing an importance on building highways instead of subways in order to grow the city.

Proposal for the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX) that would connect the East and Hudson River crossings. via Library of Congress. LOMEX splits into the two roadways that lead to the East River crossings The project would raze fourteen blocks of what is currently SoHo and Little Italy and would have cost the city an estimated $72 million in total, including the displacement of just under 2,000 families and over 800 businesses. Entering the 1960s, support for LOMEX quashed and never saw the light.

Lower Manhattan Expressway project proposed through West Village

Failure of Urban Renewal Resistance to urban renewal policies incurred.

"It's the same old story. First the builder picks the property, then he gets t he Planning Commission to designate it, then the people get bulldozed out of their homes."

- Jane Jacobs Urban planners, she believed, were destroying America's cities. She blamed the influence of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose 1920s Utopian visions placed urban residents in skyscrapers surrounded by parkland. This "towers in the park" approach, Jacobs argued, resulted in dangerous housing projects and sterile downtown areas that were deserted at night.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway was an effort to tie up the loose ends of local roadways by extending Interstate 78 – all 10 lanes of it – from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. The obstacle was the streetscape of SoHo and Little Italy, and the great variety of uses within that the city found dispensable.

“The grand total for proposed demolition was 416 buildings that housed 2,200 families, 365 retail stores, and 480 other commercial establishments,” wrote Anthony Flint in Wrestling with Moses.

Urban renewal policies have had and are still having devastating effects on our city. Urban renewal plans are adopted under the assumption that by clearing so-called blighted neighborhoods and creating vacant, developable land, private redevelopment would occur on its own. And while this assumption proved correct in many cases, it did not in others.

Instead of transforming "blighted" areas into more healthy, liveable, and profitable new ones, urban renewal plans often created the blighted conditions they set out to eradicate. Some cleared areas did not attract the attention of developers and many sites lie vacant for years before any development takes place. The map to the right shows the extent to which land cleared through urban renewal is still vacant in 2017. The percentage of vacant land within urban renewal plans varies and some neighborhoods are affected more than others. In Arverne and Edgemere, Queens, for example, almost 40% of the two urban renewal areas adopted in 1968 and 1979 are still unused today. Throughout the city, more than 250 acres of urban renewal land are still vacant today equal to about half the size of Prospect Park and a third of Central Park.

Which neighborhoods are the most affected by the government-produced vacant land?

The map to the right compares the amount of vacant land within urban renewal areas to the racial, ethnic, and class composition of these same areas. After having bulldozed existing neighborhoods due to their designation as "blighted" the City simply had problems finding developers and investors for certain "unattractive" neighborhoods partly due to the racist disinvestment and neglect that preceded urban renewal. The large swathes of undeveloped urban renewal land reflect the ongoing public and private disinvestment that low-income communities of color are facing today. And institutionalized racism still plays an important role in the uneven development of the City. As with the overall history of the negative impacts and costs of urban renewal, vacant land, too. disproportionally affects minority populations. The three separated racial dot maps of whites blacks and African Americans, and Hispanics make this strikingly clear, with vacant land within urban renewal plans being concentrated in areas with high percentages of minority populations and wrapping around higher income neighborhoods

Urban Redevelopment after 1973 New thinking about the nature and function of American cities has led to public-private partnerships that frequently succeed in modest, yet measurable, ways where large-scale methods have failed.

The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 emphasized rehabilitation, preservation, and gradual change rather than demolition and displacement.

Under the Community Development Block Grant program, local agencies bear most of the responsibility for revitalizing decayed neighborhoods. Successful programs include urban homesteading, whereby properties seized by the city for unpaid taxes are given to new owners who promise to bring them "up to code" within a given period—either by "sweat equity" (doing the work themselves) or by employing contractors—in return for free title to the property.

Under the Community Reinvestment Act, lenders make low-interest loans to help the neighborhood revitalization process.

Two basic design directions have prevailed in urban redevelopment creating new pedestrian zones and reclaiming underused or deteriorating areas of a city by blending them into a city's historic fabric. Widening sidewalks, permitting mixed-use zoning (mingling residential and business uses), planting trees, adding lighting, and establishing a pleasing variety of building facades promote economic vitality by encouraging people to spend time downtown.

Concepts of placemaking and tactical urbanism have revolutionised the public spaces and urban renewal process in New York. Non Govenmental organisations and volunteers like Urban Jungle are reclaiming derelicct sites and converting them into interative, activating public spaces.

Utopian Robert Moses reshaped New York with ephemeral solutions but the relocation and demolition was met with extreme public disregard. But The New York of today won't be if it weren't for him.

The High Line Adaptive reuse to reclaim derelict spaces

Sustainability in NYC planning New York is among the most sustainble cities The last thing anyone thinks about when picturing New York is environmental sustainability. Loud, densely packed subway stations, piles of garbage that often line the streets, and almost constant urban congestion do little to add to a more sustainable image for New York. Yet a recent study from one of the leading consulting firms in sustainable design found New York to not only be the most sustainable city in the United States but rank 20th internationally.

The key to understanding “why” rests on a single word: density.While density might not look great due to how packed and congested New York seems to always be, its benefits are evident.

New York’s excellent public transportation system means fewer cars on the road and thus less greenhouse gases going into the air.

Dating back to the mid-19th century, the city of New York sanctioned the construction of rail lines through the city’s West Side district as a means of transporting freight due to its close proximity to the Hudson River.

This project saw the development of elevated train lines, eliminating the need for street level equivalents and subsequently reducing the number of deaths caused by rail transportation. A huge sigh of relief for locals of course, but unfortunately the rapid expansion of truck transportation over the next few decades led to the decline of train transportation in the city and in 1980 the final train passed over the High Line viaduct.

Throughout the years since that final train made its journey to the High Line in 1980, there have been numerous attempts to destroy and demolish this integral part of the city. However, just before the turn of the century in 1999, a nonprofit organization led by residents of the area advocated for the preservation of the High Line and ultimately develop the green space that we see today.

The success of New York’s High Line — a stretch of abandoned elevated railroad on New York’s West Side that has undergone a Phoenix-like resurrection to become one of the city’s most popular destinations. In fact, the “High Line effect” should be viewed more broadly as a holistic approach to urban design that suggests how to transform existing urban landscapes to meet contemporary needs.

The High Line proves that a site-specific, adaptive reuse approach is a viable holistic alternative that embraces both change and continuity

New York’s sustainable design also reaches far into the future to determine how the city can be renovated to accommodate a more sustainable way of living.

For example, New York has begun to tear down empty or near empty parking garages to replace them with affordable housing. In urban planning, space is a valuable commodity and efficient land use becomes extremely important. Removing parking garages both disincentives driving while encouraging more people to live in dense urban spaces, ensuring that future urban planning fits into a model of density

New York has a flexible street grid which allows for modification and also can accompany different building forms.

Citizen participation has helped the city to adopt for greener spaces. The New York of the 90s has truly evolved into a self satisfying urban planning community, where stakes are not only in the hands of the city ouncil or the urban pplanners, but citizens are playing and avid role in shaping thier city.

In mid century New York, two representatives of each idea influenced how they thought the metropolis should operate based on their perception of place. Master builder Robert Moses saw the city strictly through the lens of topos; concrete, mechanical, objective. Urban theorist Jane Jacobs viewed the city from the perspective of her sidewalk.

At around the same time, city planners were exchanging ideas about the best way to build a city. Jacobs details these different ideas and their intersections, which are further expanded upon in the info graphic on the right. The city needs a balance between both - the Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs of today to come up with a solution that satisfies all because “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

References 1.

New York City Atlas of Urban Renewal (issuu e-Document) Jacob Winkler https://issuu.com/jakobwinkler5/docs/nyc_atlas_of_urban_renewal

2.

Legacy of Urban Renwal In New York City (webpage) https://due-parsons.github.io/methods3-fall2016/projects/the-legacyof-urban-renewal-in-new-york-city-/ 3.

How Jane Jacobs fought 'urban renewal' in the West Village and won (Journal Article) https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/jane-jacobs-fought-urban-renewal-west-village-article-1.2962679 New York City: A Surprising Model for Urban Planning & Environmental Sustainability (wepage) https://sustainabilityx.co/new-york-city-a-surprising-model-for-urban-planning-environmental-sustainability-c68ef9a2ba22

11.

30 Second New York by Sarah Fenton (book source)

12.

Before-and-after maps show how freeways transformed America's cities (article by The VOX) https://www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7460557/urban-freeway-slider-maps

13.

A Tale of Two Visions: Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and the Development of the American Freeway (research paper) Authors: Brown, Jeffrey (2002)

14.

The "Public Menace" of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain (research paper in JSTOR journal) Author : Wendell E. Pritchett

15.

Map courtesy : snazzymaps @ https://snazzymaps.com/explore

4.

5.

HOW ZONING MADE NEW YORK CITY: THE 1916 RESOLUTION AND THE NEED FOR URBAN STRUCTURING (wepage) https://www.elegran.com/blog/2016/07/how-zoning-made-new-yorkcity-the-1916-resolution-and-the-need-for-urban-structuring 6.

Revisiting 1916 (Part I): The History of New York City’s First Zoning Resolution (Journal Article on web) https://buildingtheskyline.org/revisiting-1916-i/

7.

Story of cities #32: Jane Jacobs v Robert Moses, battle of New York's urban titans (Newspaper article on web from The Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-32-newyork-jane-jacobs-robert-moses 8.

5 THINGS IN NYC WE CAN BLAME ON ROBERT MOSES (wepage) https://untappedcities.com/2013/12/18/5-things-in-nyc-we-can-blameon-robert-moses/ 9.

The Real High Line Effect — A Transformational Triumph of Preservation and Design (wepage article) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-real-high-line-effect_b_1604217

10.

Urban Theory & the Superblock in Manhattan (wepage) https://deirdre.atavist.com/urban-theory-the-superblock-in-manhattan

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