The New York Times: 

Sam Roberts. Jan 18, 2012

“100 Years of Grandeur. The Birth of Grand Central Terminal

One hundred years ago, on Feb. 2, 1913, the doors to Grand Central Terminal officially opened to the public, after 10 years of construction and at a cost of more than $2 billion in today’s dollars. The terminal was a product of local politics, bold architecture, brutal flexing of corporate muscle and visionary engineering. No other building embodies New York’s ascent as vividly as Grand Central. Here, the tale of its birth, excerpted from “Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America,” by Sam Roberts, the urban affairs correspondent for The New York Times, to be published later this month by Grand Central Publishing.”

 The Atlantic Cities:

“A Bold Concept for Post-Sandy Manhattan

Roy Strickland. Dec 28, 2012

In New York City, the wreckage caused by Hurricane Sandy has created the unique opportunity not only to plan for the protection of the city, but also to re-imagine it. Rising water tables and increasingly frequent “100-year storms” are big challenges. New York City needs to respond in a big way.

Following Hurricane Irene, a team of young architects, landscape architects and urban planners from the University of Michigan’s Master of Urban Design Program, where I teach, gathered to develop an innovative concept to keep Manhattan safe from climate change.

The concept took the long view – 25 to 100 years out – and emerged from a set of assumptions. These included decreases in regional climate stability; global decreases in the availability and affordability of oil; increases in Manhattan’s population; and increasing emphasis on health, education, research, technology and tourism in the city’s economy. The team did identify an important constant: the power of the street grid in organizing Manhattan’s urbanism. It also understood that the concept’s capital costs – in a city where the new Second Avenue subway line is expected to cost $17 billion – would be high but when placed against the New York area’s contribution of nearly 10 percent of the nation’s GDP (as quantified by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto), would be worth it.”

Image:  Concept Plan: Highlighting waterfront reconfigured with marshes, tidal defense berms, hydroponic farms and floating neighborhoods; areas for highest density development outside of flood plains; and thoroughfares turned into soil channels providing water run-off, new public spaces and light-rail routes. University of Michigan. 

“The Atlantic

The Hideous Inequality Exposed by Hurricane Sandy

David Rohide. Oct 31, 2012. 

In Manhattan, the storm revealed a city more economically divided than it has been in a decade.

A hotel bellman said he was worried about his mother uptown. A maid said she had been calling her family in Queens. A garage attendant said he hadn’t been able to contact his only relative - a sister in New Jersey - since the storm hit. Asked where he weathered the hurricane, his answer was simple.

“I slept in my car,” he said.

Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city.

Hours before the storm arrived on Monday night, restaurants, corner grocery stores and hotels were open in the Union Square area of Manhattan. (My wife and I moved to a hotel there after being ordered to evacuate our apartment in lower Manhattan.) Instead of heading home to their families as the winds picked up, the city’s army of cashiers, waiters and other service workers remained in place.

Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents like me who could invest all of their time and energy into protecting their families. And there were New Yorkers who could not.

Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city’s cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home.

New census data shows that the city is the most economically divided it has been in a decade, according to the New York Times. As has occurred across the country, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Twenty-one percent of the city is in poverty, and the median household income decreased by $821 annually. Per the Times: ”Median income for the lowest fifth was $8,844, down $463 from 2010. For the highest, it was $223,285, up $1,919.”

Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest and most gentrified borough, is an extreme example. Inequality here rivals parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Last year the wealthiest 20 percent of Manhattan residents made $391,022 a year on average, according to census data. The poorest 20 percent made $9,681.

All told, Manhattan’s richest fifth made 40 times more money than its poorest fifth, up from 38 times in 2010. Only a handful of developing countries - such as Namibia and Sierra Leone - have higher inequality rates.”

Photo: Reuters

“COMMENT> SPURNING SPURA

David Bergman protests the planning strategies of the proposed Lower East Side mega-project.

David Bergman. Sept 27, 2012

Forty-five years ago, when the lots on the south side of Delancey Street in the Lower East Side (LES) of Manhattan were first cleared for “urban renewal,” the prevailing planning theory called for “towers-in-the-park.” Indeed, that was what was installed slightly south and east of the site: one of the many bastardizations of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris. To the north and west, the landscape of low-rise walk-up tenements largely remained.

In between them is a hole, the black hole of the Lower East Side. If you arrive by the Williamsburg Bridge or emerge from the Delancey Street subway station, look south and you’ll see entire vacant blocks occupied mostly by parked off-duty delivery trucks.

This site, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) has a long and contentious history. And finally a plan for its redevelopment is near approval. Community Board 3 and the City Planning Commission both recently gave the go-ahead.

Community groups and elected officials fought hard for a primary need of the neighborhood: affordable housing. Reaching a successful accord on that, though, seems to have distracted attention from the two disastrous backbones of the plan, both of which rely on old school ideas of urban renewal and zoning. Even more frustrating, newer enlightened policies are being promoted by the city’s planning department, while the outdated and discredited ones are still retained by another city organization which happens to be SPURA’s owner, the Economic Development Corporation (EDC).

The EDC policy derives from the continued presumption of the primacy of cars. A basic tenet of what’s known as transit-oriented development involves restricting the amount of parking in order to both discourage driving and congestion, and to free up funds and land for other, more valued uses.

But the EDC insists on pursuing the opposite track: requesting an exemption to provide additional parking spaces beyond what the current—yet to be updated—zoning allows. With the confluence of mass transit and existing density around the site, there is no justification for this outdated approach. (Please recall this is from the agency that brought us the white elephant of a parking structure sitting empty at the new Yankee Stadium.) People do not come to the LES by car to shop. Nor should we want them to. Delancey is already one of the most dangerous and difficult streets to cross in the city. While the city is in the midst of some safety improvements following a rash of fatal accidents, adding parking and traffic will just worsen the situation.

There’s an even more significant flaw in the EDC’s master plan. Though it’s informed enough, thankfully, to avoid repeating the street life-draining nearby towers, it doesn’t really get that it’s not just a matter of building to the street line.

In the 1970s and 80s, the low-rise sections of the LES might have been mistaken for some of the worst areas of the South Bronx, replete with trash-filled vacant lots and burned out shells of six-story walk-ups. In the following 20 to 30 years, the neighborhood picked up dramatically, coat-tailing on the bubble economy.

Unlike some other Manhattan neighborhoods, the Lower East Side managed its mini-boom fairly gracefully, at least at first. Abandoned walk-ups that no longer had stairs to walk up were gutted and repopulated. Some of the vacant lots were “infilled” with new buildings similar in height to the adjacent survivors.

Yes, gentrification took place, but there was a bit of a difference here from the typical pattern. Because of a combination of tenant protection rules and the availability of vacant space, the gentrifiers (myself included) often ended up meshing into the existing fabric, which, in turn, was strengthened with newly infused economic vitality. It wasn’t a perfect evolution, to be sure. But the LES became a rare example of change without upheaval and, aside from the inevitable issue of rising rents, few questioned whether it was an improvement over the previous decades.”

Via: the Architect’s Newspaper

Image: RENDERING OF PROPOSED PLAN FOR SPURA ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE.

“Close Quarters

VISITORS to the High Line often marvel at the panorama the elevated park affords: open-sky views across the Hudson River, an unbroken sightline up 10th Avenue to Midtown and beyond. But in recent months, in a section of the High Line around 23rd Street, a more intimate, domestic cityscape has emerged.

Where the park widens to form a seating area with bleachers and a lush lawn, several apartment buildings rise up and enclose the space on either side. Three are newly constructed glass and steel towers that just began filling with residents, and the most prominent of them, the architect Neil M. Denari’s sleek HL23, is so close it’s as if parkgoers could walk right into one of the multimillion-dollar apartments.

Pierre Salamon, who lives in the Marais, another building rising above this section of the park, called it “a secret new city waiting to be discovered.” It makes him feel, he said, “like I’ve arrived in another dimension of Chelsea … I slow down on purpose to retain that feeling.”

Annik La Farge, who wrote a book about the park called “On the High Line,” looks onto this section from her office and living room windows in the Spears Building. The space is made more striking, she said, by the narrow, forested path that precedes it, known as the Chelsea Thicket. “Horticulturally, the area goes from dense, shady thicket to open, sunny lawn,” Ms. La Farge said. “And in more human terms, it goes from a very private space to a very, very public one.” 

Walking this neighborhood in the sky is like finding yourself in a mash-up of “Blade Runner” and “Rear Window.” The thrill isn’t the wide angle, but the close-up, being at eye level with high-rise apartments and the people inside them. Like the hulking, metal-sheathed 245 Tenth, an 11-story co-op designed by the Brooklyn-based architects Jared Della Valle and Andrew Bernheimer: on a recent evening, a couple rested among moving boxes inside their new third-floor apartment there, obviously exhausted, in full view of passers-by.

Just a few steps down the High Line is Ten23, another glass building, which opened along this section of the park in January. In one west-facing corner unit, a mod-looking candy-red chair was displayed prominently in the window, as if this weren’t an apartment, but a store or a design studio.

While casual voyeurism along the High Line (the “ ‘Pry’ Line,” as The New York Post dubbed it) has been going on since the park opened three years ago, the residents of new buildings like HL23, Ten23 and 245 Tenth are different from earlier High Line dwellers in at least one respect: they moved here knowing their homes would be among the most exposed in the city.

Moreover, the cutting-edge architecture, the bleachers and lawn, and colorful metal “Urban Rattle” sculpture by the artist Charlie Hewitt, installed in May in the courtyard of Ten23, have all made this section of the High Line a popular gathering spot.

Thousands of people go by these apartments every day, and no doubt wonder who lives in them. But what do the residents see? What is life like on the other side of the glass?

We talked to people who live in HL23, Ten23 and 245 Tenth, and two other buildings, the Spears Building and the Marais, which predate the High Line but are integral to the skyline of this section of the park.”

Via: The NY Times

Photo: SIGHT LINES In a section of the High Line near 23rd Street, five apartment buildings, three of them newly built steel-and-glass towers, overlook the park and create a sleek update on “Rear Window.” Robert Wright for The New York Times

“A GRANDER GRAND CENTRAL

New York City Planning positions East Midtown for upzoning.

The last major rezoning push by the Bloomberg Administration in Manhattan could be upzoning the grand dames around Park, Madison and Grand Central. On June 6, the Department of City Planning (DCP) went to Community Boards 5 and 6 to open the discussion on East Midtown, a-yet-to-be-defined business district surrounding Grand Central. While Midtown is hardly a tabula rasa along the lines of Hudson Yards or the World Trade Center, rezoning has the potential, according to Edith Hsu-Chen, director of DCP’s Manhattan office, to “seed” a healthy amount of new development for the next ten, 20, or 30 years, while boosting the value of one of the world’s premier office addresses.

At least one developer has already taken notice. Earlier this month The Wall Street Journal reported that SL Green, one of the city’s largest commercial property owners with more than 25 million square feet of office space throughout Manhattan, has assembled a one-block parcel right next door to Grand Central between Madison and Vanderbilt on 42nd Street to be developed in a joint venture with architect-savvy developer Hines. The company has already rehabbed several old buildings in East Midtown, including 62-year-old 100 Park Avenue, which sports 14 green rooftops and LEED Silver certification. “If we don’t do something now,” Mary Anne Tighe, the powerful broker and CBRE chief officer has said, “in the fullness of time we might find these areas have become orphans.”

Edward Piccinich, SL Green’s executive vice president of property management and construction, appears to be in it for the long haul, but not without concern about the next Planning Commission. “Whoever goes in [to Midtown] is going to have to work in a very strategic way, whether it’s coordinating with the MTA, mixed-use development, or circulation,” he said. “It’s not just about creating a plaza.”

Developing East Midtown will not be for the harried or the faint of heart. The applicable zoning codes in the area are a paralyzing mess of contradictory allowances. The 1961 zoning law implemented floor area ratios, or FARs, in many cases tighter than what was already built. In 1982 a Special Midtown District was created to restrict FAR in an attempt to shift development west to help Times Square. The plan worked all too well and development in eastern Midtown slowed. Then in 1992 the Grand Central Subdistrict—from 41st to 48th streets and between Madison and Lexington avenues—was created to allow for air right transfers from Grand Central Terminal and other area landmarks to new developments nearby.”

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: TOM STOELKER / AN

“The East River Blueway Plan

Urban Omnibus

As New York City’s waterfronts have deindustrialized over the past forty years, residential and recreational redevelopment has transformed the edges of Manhattan’s West Side, Brooklyn Heights, and the East River’s eastern banks in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Long Island City. Its western banks, however, confront a much harsher set of edge conditions, especially in the southern half of Manhattan. The FDR Drive, disused piers, superblocks of towers-in-the-park housing, and large institutions like hospitals and power stations all conspire to limit public access to the waterfront and, moreover, to the water itself. And while the aim of all the recent attention paid to riverside public spaces (such as the renovation of East River Park) is to create high quality spaces near the water, these efforts don’t necessarily prioritize access to the waterway itself, a fast-moving tidal strait long considered unsafe, unclean and otherwise unfit for a wide range of uses, including waterborne recreation, transportation, and ecological education and restoration.

Providing New Yorkers exactly those opportunities has led the Office of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and State Assemblymember Brian Kavanaugh to support the efforts of local community-based organizations, community boards, City and State agencies to make it easier for New Yorkers to get into the water.* WXY Architecture + Urban Design is the firm charged with planning a network of sites, listening to community stakeholders, recommending access strategies and identifying opportunities for capital projects along the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge up to East 38th Street. So we sat down with Adam Lubinsky, a managing principal at WXY, to discuss the process behind the East River Blueway Plan. The potential of New York City’s waterways extends beyond riverfront open space or residential real estate with river views. But to get past the water’s edge, as Lubinsky tells us in the interview below, requires a multivalent strategy of community engagement, urban planning and design.”

Via: Urban Omnibus

Image: WXY Architecture + Urban Design