I’m looking forward to this. The dark brooding city has always been a character in its own right in the Batman comics, and deserves its own story. I read a description once that I thought was right on target: Superman’s city Metropolis is midtown Manhattan, while Gotham is the rest of NYC.
It’s been done before. In Destroyer, Batman concludes that assigning spiritual meaning to an architectural style is insane.
To start with, the East River isn’t a river. It’s a tidal straight connecting the Long Island Sound and the upper bay; when the tide changes, the entire Atlantic tries to pour through. The current gets up to about 7 mph and changes direction at each slack tide. Fun times if you’re in a sailboat.
The straight stretch of the East River north of Corlears Hook is divided into two channels by a long narrow island. It was originally called Blackwell’s Island after the damned soul who thought that putting a farm on an island surrounded by salt water and with limited spring water was a good idea. It became the municipal dumping ground in the nineteenth century, starting with a poorhouse, an insane asylum, a jail, and a smallpox hospital, and eventually was renamed Welfare Island as a result.
When urban renewal came along, the island was renamed Roosevelt after FDR, although given what it was in his lifetime, I don’t know that he would have appreciated the gesture. It’s now a pleasant if excruciatingly boring place to live, with its own subway stop and an elevated tram to Manhattan. The reality of it was pegged nicely in the opening scene of Dark Water: as a mother and daughter take the tram to go look at an apartment on the island, the little girl says, in an accusing tone of voice, “This isn’t Manhattan.”
Mayor Mike’s latest grand project, a new engineering school, will be located on the south end of the island, where presumably the ghosts of the dead lunatics will serve as teaching assistants.
Island Hospital – the hospital for indigents – after twenty years of abandonment in 1989:
Mrs__B has a bad cold, Mini__B still stumbles over the rules of poker, and I’m too tired to read, so I’ve got the tube on. They’re showing both parts of a two-part Criminal Minds back to back and, as usual, the plot ranges from ridiculous to laughable. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
The episode supposedly takes place in downtown Washington and was obviously filmed on a back lot in L.A. The set looks nothing like any american city I know – and I know what a fair number of them look like – and certainly nothing like DC. The streets are too narrow, there are too many T intersections, there are too many romanesque commercial buildings, and it’s overall too dense. It does’t look like any part of New York either: the streets are too too narrow for midtown or uptown and too straight and parallel for downtown, and the buildings are too low for the downtown commercial district and really anywhere in Manhattan but western Greenwich Village. Why do I bring up New York? Because the camera passes over street signs that say Barclay, Murray, and Dey Streets, all of which are in the downtown financial district, within half a mile of my office. They actually show Barclay and Murray intersecting, when in real life they’re parallel.
Of course sets get reused. They represent a huge sunk cost and this set filled in for lower Manhattan on some other TV show, or in some movie. But would it have been so hard to remove the fake street signs that have nothing to do with the show at hand? Has no one told them that being barely competent is in the details?
We so badly need the X line added to the subway system, I don’t know where to start. It connects the Bronx to something other than Manhattan. It provides a north-south line reasonably far east of the East River. It links all of the Brooklyn lines out in the branches. It provides the first service to several BK and Q neighborhoods. It won’t break the budget.
Who knows if it could ever happen. But it’s nice to dream.
And it would be really cool to have aKline called the X.
The new nabe is strange, strange place. We live on landfill younger than me, closer to the WTC site than to a subway, and with demographics consisting entirely of families with kids and overgrown-fratboy Wall streeters
Much more to follow. Back in the day: vacant land.
If you have have any interest in urban design, urban affairs, or transportation, read The Urbanophile. Consistantly great stuff…
On a different note, the Times just ran a piece on a guy intent on walking every street in NYC. My carefully-thought-out response: who cares? If he has interesting experiences, sees fascinating sights, has life-changing epiphanies, who other than him will benefit? There are plenty of ways to experience the city, not all of which are self-centered.
Also, that’s a lot of streets that are similar enough to become very, very boring.
I have a meeting tomorrow morning in South Hackensack, in the New Jersey “meadowlands.”
Notice how the suburban street pattern sort of peters out? You know why? The “meadowlands” are a fucking swamp, which is why no one built much there until the late 20th century.
Google has let me down, but I believe George Washington made all sorts of disparaging comments about north Jersey after having to march through the mud of the meadowlands while fleeing his disastrous battles of Brooklyn and New York.
The other picture of my office building was taken from the south, showing the exposed flank of the building above Trinity Church’s graveyard. The north side of the building is Thames Street, which is roughly 30 feet wide and bounded by two near-twin, 240-foot high buildings constructed in 1904 and 1905.
There’s a reason that people used to use the phrase “canyons” to describe the streets of lower Manhattan.
The High Line was an unlikely success. A large part of it runs through an as-yet-ungentrified fringe of Chelsea, it’s a park that by its nature cannot have active play fields, and urban/landscape theory says big changes in grade tend to isolate people. In this case it worked. So, of course, we have the imitation ideas. There’s talk in Philly of doing something similar with an abandoned Reading Railroad viaduct, there’s talk of a Low Line in a trolley yard under the Williamsburg Bridge, and there’s talk of using an abandoned Long Island Railroad viaduct in southern Queens.
I’ve got nothing against the idea, but I think it’s doomed to failure if it’s built, and getting built is unlikely. Chelsea is a densely-populated tourist destination with or without the High Line, while the neighborhoods in Queens with the abandoned half of the Rockaway line are semi-suburban and frankly boring. The idea is to create a destination, but it’s going to have the reverse of bang for the buck. Of course, it’s also possible to run north-south railroad (LIRR or subway) tracks on that viaduct, which is something Queens desperately needs, but that lacks coolness.
Last March was the 200th anniversary of the Commissioners’ Plan that created the Manhattan street grid. I wrote about it at the time but, hey, there’s more to say.
First, the explanatory notes that accompanied the original map said that since right-angled and straight-sided houses are the cheapest to build and the easiest to live in, a cartesian grid was the logical choice. Freeman Dyson isn’t even dead and he’s rolling over in his grave. Whether or not that statement is true, it has forced a certain conformity on NYC architects, the occasional lipstick rebellion not withstanding. Some have responded by giving up – creating a nice street facade and ignoring the rest of the exterior – some have responded creatively.
Second, another picture from the NYT:
The street running right-left at the bottom is Tenth Avenue, with Ninth Avenue cutting across the middle. Basically, we’re over Hell’s Kitchen looking east at midtown. Times Square is the area with glowing streets ahead and to the right. In case you’re wondering, Hell’s Kitchen is protected by zoning as low-rise housing.
Every so often, maybe once per month on average, I’ll have a dream so realistic and so mundane that I confuse it with waking life. This morning I realized that it had happened again, and something I’ve been chuckling over for a few days didn’t happen.
I was sitting in a conference room while a man was giving a presentation on urban renewal. The presenter had three slides using illustrations from The Little House to make a point about the effect of elevated railroads on property values. The only reason I’m certain this didn’t happen is that I haven’t sat through a PowerPoint presentation in months.
Either this some deep meaning that is escaping me or my subconscious is extraordinarily boring. Both are depressing possibilities.
Courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, NYC from spaaaaaaaace (click to engorge enormously):
I could go on about everything you can see, but I won’t. There’s one fascinating detail: the streets in the financial district and in midtown are much easier to pick out than elsewhere because the tall buildings create dark shadows and therefore skyscraper chiaroscuro.
Also, the railroad cuts in Brooklyn and Queens (and to a lesser extent, the Bronx) are as prominent as the highways. Who’d have thought?
One last picture from Paris: a small park right behind all the crowded touristy parts of Ile de la Cite. A friend was in Paris for six months on a fellowship and says this park is always peaceful.
Somehow it has been unimproved by commercialism or urban planners or well-meaning neighbors. It is what it’s apparently always been, a small oasis in the center of the city.
I had an appointment at a project this morning in the northern reaches of the Bronx, not far from B^4′s mysterious City of Y. The train was underground in Manhattan, under the Harlem River, and as far as The Hub – the station at Third Avenue and 149th Street – and then it’s elevated. The southern half of the elevated trip – below 180th Street – takes you through the heart of the South Bronx. My father grew up here, my mother spent her first ten years here, and in the early ’90s I spent a lot of time here doing housing rehab work. In my father’s memory, it’s a dense neighborhood of overcrowded tenements, in mine it’s largely prairie from the effect of the fires of the ’70s.
It’s now largely rebuilt and is again home to hundreds of thousands of people. This is if course a very good thing but I’m suffering, in reverse, the same dislocation my father did when he saw the ruins if his youth thirty years ago.
We’re probably moving to Manhattan to make Mrs__B’s new commute shorter. 80 to 90 minutes she can take, but right now it’s more like 120 to 140. The shortest route (since there’s no fucking way we’re moving to New Jersey) is to live in Battery Park City, a short subway ride from the commercial garages of Jersey City and an against-the-rush drive from there. If NJ had a decent rail system, this would not be necessary.
There are pluses, with two of the best elementary schools in the NYC system and a very large car-free area chief among them. If only our choices at that location weren’t so heavily dominated by yuppie boxes.
*For those wondering: my imitation of Robin Williams’s impersonation of Elmer Fudd as Col. Kurtz.
Still putting off FLW, until I have some time.
Meanwhile, the 1916 NYC Zoning Law, which was the first comprehensive zoning in the US, effectively mandated setbacks. Any building built under that law had to remain within an envelope defined by sloping planes, until the floor size was down to 25% of the lot size, and then it could go up forever. The combination of that law and the prevalence in NYC of steel framing meant that developers built out to the owning envelope with a lot of little setbacks.
This photo from 1932 is looking NE from the Empire State…notably, looking down on the Chrysler Building. The view is nice, the Queensboro Bridge is nice, but look at all those goddamned little setbacks all over the place.
Click to engorge hugely. Also, the Library of Congress screwed up the digitization, so the large version is reversed left to right.
Either the cops were driving on laps around my hotel or there is a lot of overnight crime.
The physical environment of the center city is in better shape than a lot of other small cities.
There is nothing more destructive to the pedestrian experience than right turn on red.
Either everything damned thing in this city – including the building I’m working on – is named after some guy named Strong or there is some serious overcompensation going on.
In the popular imagination, NYC is a center of Italian influence in the US. This is probably true, but it’s a more recent and less direct phenomenon than I think people understand. As late as World War II, Italians were “white” only when paler whites wanted to count them and rely on them against the scary brown people. The wave of Italian immigration that led to Italian-Americans didn’t start until the 1880s and really peaked around 1910.
Shortly after 1900, the NYC Italian community decided that what was really needed was a statue of Columbus. As the Upper West Side was starting to get built up – a process that really took off with the 1904 opening of the IRT subway up Broadway – and the intersection of Central park South (59th Street), Central Park West (8th Avenue) and Broadway was the obvious gateway to the neighborhood, this site was selected and renamed Columbus Circle. (Click to engorge greatly.)
The monument itself is a relatively traditional stele, with Chris standing on a column with barbs in the shape of his ships. The problem is that the circle – never very big to begin with – was whittled away over the years to improve traffic, leaving him looking like he was trying to hitch a ride away from the cars. And then the construction of the IRT subway left him listing to starboard for the next 90-odd years.
He recently got a bigger circle with a bunch of fountains apparently meant to make him feel like he’s back at sea.
NYC more or less invented modern zoning with the 1916 zoning law, and the city still has an incredibly intricate land use and zoning process. One aspect of it has always struck me as insane: new developments are required to provide a certain number of parking spaces based on the occupancy, despite the fact that the city has the lowest percentage of car ownership and the highest percentage of mass-transit ridership in the country.
It turns out this is insane: people aren’t using the garages. At least the City Planning Commission intends to reduce the required number of spaces, although they apparently can’t see that eliminating the requirement would be even better. Just maybe, the planning laws should match the reality of the city…
New York is basically an archipelago. Two major islands, a piece of a third major island, a chunk of mainland, dozens of small islands, and countless rocks. There are fewer rocks than their used to be, as many were removed in the 1800s as hazards to navigation.
Until recently, my island-empire fantasies centered on South Brother Island, but realistically it’s now a wildlife sanctuary and is going to stay one. I’ve got a new object of desire: Rat Island.
What’s not to like? Barely above high tide, no water or sewers or electric. The names needs work…maybe “Radioactive Rat Island”?
