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April 2, 2010
Bookshelf: The Battle for Gotham
Metropolis Magazine
by George Beane
At first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything exemplary in the layout of Willets Point, Queens, with its jumble of auto repair shops, junkyards, and the cars, broken down and not, that litter the spaces between buildings. The city hasn’t built sidewalks there—neither has it installed sewers—so the main drag is both street and sidewalk, and the neighborhood looks more like Mumbai than Queens. When Roberta Brandes Gratz makes that observation in her new book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, she means the comparison as a kind of praise, a compliment to the neighborhood’s industriousness and gritty entrepreneurship. Willets Point, like the infamous Dharavi slum outside Mumbai, might be messy, but it’s also, in the best sense of the word, urban.
...For the past two decades or so, and particularly since 2001, the city has pursued two alternative and somewhat contradictory paths in its efforts to grow the municipal economy and increase available housing. On the one hand, megaprojects like the new Yankee Stadium, Atlantic Yards, and Columbia University’s proposed Manhattanville campus expansion recall an old-fashioned top-down planning approach, development subsidized by the government and pushed through over local opposition. These projects’ economic gains are conjectured, and almost never examined after their completion. On the other, initiatives like the DOT’s recent expansion of bike lanes and the creation of Hudson River Park, which reclaimed fallow city land and unused piers, invest in the adaptive reuse of existing infrastructure and allow local neighborhoods to flourish. Gratz lauds those projects, condemns the ones she sees as out-of-scale, and suggests an approach to future development that hews closely to her interpretation of Jacobs’s work. In that spirit, she proposes modest infill development to increase density—building on empty lots and changing zoning regulations to encourage growth in the city’s less populous areas.
Posted by eric at April 2, 2010 10:39 AM