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August 19, 2007
Superblocks, a massacre in Newark, and Jane Jacobs
Atlantic Yards Report
I haven't read of anyone blaming the superblock design of some housing towers in Newark for the August 4 massacre of three young people and the severe injuries to another, but a New York Times article on Wednesday hinted that an outmoded modernist design contributed, at least, to an atmosphere of lawlessness.The Times article was headlined In Newark Murder, a Mixed Band of Men and Boys. While it focused on the perpetrators and their drift into crime, it explained the setting: the Ivy Hill Park Apartments were built in 1952, the superblock supremacy era, and include ten 15-story buildings over a wide plain with no intervening streets. (Graphic from New York Times)
While the area has improved, some crime persists, and in places it apparently flourishes:
And they lurked in a place known as “the bushes,” a garbage-strewn thicket of high weeds behind two of the buildings where they could set upon anyone who used a dirt path as a shortcut to a nearby shopping center, according to residents and several of those who said they had been victimized.There are no streets between the buildings, obviously, and a photo in the Times shows no retail or community facilities at the bases of the buildings. So there's little reason for there to be "eyes on the street," in the phrase of the late urbanist Jane Jacobs.
Posted by amy at August 19, 2007 9:43 AM