Finding Patina in Soho

I went window shopping with Dianne in Soho. We strolled pass the rows of buildings uniformly painted in a shiny cream color, glistening like jewelry. We saw lingerie displayed sparsely in the window spaces where metalworkers once rolled out their fabrications in the brief era of cast iron architecture.

On Greene Street we saw something unexpected. The next handful of buildings were vacant and worn out. One of them was hidden behind a cocoon of netting and scaffolding. The others had a hundred years weathering.

We had taken our time weaving in and out of the cobblestoned streets. I had little doubt these were the last collection of neglected cast iron buildings in Soho. It was like finding a pair of Levi’s torn and stained from cattle roundups untouched in a turn-of-the-century trunk.

Soho—the name was coined during the district’s revival in the 1970s—was a nineteenth century manufacturing district. New York’s era of prefabricated building materials began with metal products used as façades. Buildings adorned with art nouveau scrolling and Greek temple columns demonstrated how cheap fabrications could replicate any craftsmanship or style.

Prefabrication techniques steadily moved on to change almost everything about the built environment. The muscular era of concrete and steel arrived and never really left. Builders built grandiose projects that pierced the sky: the Flatiron, Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State—all took a turn as world’s tallest building.

By the post-World War II years, manufacturing changed. The old district south of Houson was a relic before its time. It didn’t have the floor space, parking lots, or truck access found across the river. Property values fell as the long-term manufacturing tenants moved out. The neighborhood of buildings dressed up in metal ornamentation sunk into disrepair. From the number of fire calls, the Fire Department took to referring to it as Hell’s Hundred Acres.

In the Robert Moses era of the 1950s, urban planners favored only one approach for dealing with these kind of changes that were happening to little old New York: fund a bloated public works project to do the double duty of obliterating the problem away. Plans were drawn up for the old neighborhood to be razed and ten lanes of expressway cut through to be connected to Long Island and New Jersey.

Yet Soho survived. In the 1960s, communities were learning to join together. In Soho they did it with the zeal of a community under siege. Greenwich Village resident Jane Jacobs, who understood the importance of the attachments people make to a place, saw a cause which gave practical expression to ideas in her The Life and Death of American Cities. She became the leader to save Soho. Once, she led a march inside a meeting room during city proceedings. The voice of the community was not to be ignored.

The expressway plans were finally scrapped in the 1970s.

By this time the small neighborhood had been around for two important urban movements. The first was when it was built as a collection of innovative demonstration models ushering in the new age of prefabrication. The second was when it became the rallying cause for community planning. Big gains were made for unwieldy public processes by Jacobs and her crowd, and the undemocratic practices of managerial planning took a heavyweight beating.

Soho was soon zoned as a historic district, a risky idea for the old manufacturing district. This approach was known to turn around New York’s residential neighborhoods, where a homeowner could restore a dilapidated brownstone with the comfortable knowledge that the neighbors would not be issued permits for cheap vinyl siding. The risk in Soho was, unlike residential areas, its historic uses were all but over and done with. For a historic district to work, tenants were needed for the manufacturing spaces.

Meanwhile, quietly at first, the veteran neighborhood of buildings incubated another urban movement. The lofts with open floors and sunlit windows were custom fits for artists. Doubled up and used as mixed work and living spaces, rents were even affordable to this struggling class. Greenwich Village was becoming too pricy anyway. Artists moved into the vacant buildings.

Things moved quietly at first because the work-living arrangement wasn’t legal. Zoning rules didn’t allow people to live in spaces built for manufacturing. But, in the spirit of community planning, changes can be made. The artist pioneers and the gallery owners that supported them were recognized as forging a new urban model. In the upcoming years, other cities would turn to the experiences of Soho for the solution to the depleted manufacturing districts in their own urban cores.

Relationships among the newcomers grew close from working and living in a tight urban space and the art scene got hot. Artists sent new art pieces down the old elevator lifts to the galleries below, and yuppie investors took the short cab ride to the galleries after a big day on Wall Street—of which there were many—to pay bloated prices for freshly painted pieces.

Sensing his opportunity, the unknown Jean-Michel Basquiat introduced himself to Andy Warhol at an outside table in Soho, selling him a print for one dollar. In his artwork, Basquiat, like his personality, would pry open opportunities from his own mix of experiences and abilities. Seven years later, Basquiat overdosed on heroin a millionaire 500 times over.

In Soho, contemporary art was spectacularly marketed as never before. In narrow streets and mixed-use buildings, people tapped into a wellspring of creativity and entrepreneurship. Once more this small neighborhood saw the power of the spirit of public association.

When the frenetic art scene bubble was over, its artists and hanger-ons moved on. “Neo-expressionism” and other catchy marketing faded from use. Today, galleries and boutiques are posh and homes in loft spaces are precious. Soho has stepped into the gentrified phase of whispering money.

Of course, on that day on Greene Street I took a long hard look when Dianne and I unexpectedly came across the last collection of neglected cast iron buildings.

The cast iron, left alone to age, seemed peculiarly defiant to the battery of time’s brutalizing forces. It didn’t crumble, chip, rot away, sag, or break apart. The cast iron darkened with red and brown smudges of color, a weathering process that deepened into its own shadows. The buildings held their unique patina like the testimony of aged beauty.

Twenty-eight Greene Street was the building hidden behind netting and scaffolding on that day. My guidebook says it’s the queen of the cast iron architecture in Soho. Next time I’ll check out it out.

As for the rest of the last collection of neglected buildings—next time I expect to see fresh coats of cream colored enamel paint.

Subway City #2: Civics and Threats of a Public Good

My faith in government is strengthened by public officials who follow the creed of handling the public’s money like a sacred trust. My faith fades rapidly when they act without a strategy to long-term fiscal health. MTA seems to be a government agency run by those with a bad habit of borrowing money—the kind of borrowing that leads to more borrowing.

Currently, 12 percent of MTA’s annual budget is for interest payments on carry-over debts from previous years. By 2008, interest payments are projected at 21 percent. Planned capital investments for 2005-2009 will cost $27.8 billion, including $10 billion for new projects. Outside of a $5 billion federal subsidy, no revenue sources yet are identified for these investments.

To me, this feels like a looming threat to this nation’s most intrinsically efficient metropolitan transportation system. Fewer new subway cars and station-upgrade projects would be bad enough. But the system’s problems are deeper. It operates on equipment that is obsolete, unreliable, and hazardous. Furthermore, the system remains frightfully vulnerable to terrorist attack. It is vital that the New York subway system be “brought up to code” and become fiscally solvent.

The obvious approach to slashing operating costs would be to turn operations over to a private contractor. MTA chairman Peter Kalikow should openly discuss this idea at the public forum. The experience of other cities that adopted this approach, such as London and Copenhagen, suggests remarkable savings can be achieved.

In addition, MTA revenue must increase. Raising fares would be the obvious revenue enhancer. But the subway system, like most public transit systems, has built-in limits to fare rate hikes. This is primarily because an individual’s choice to take public transit often comes after weighing clear, obvious advantages over taking a private car. Substantially hiking up fares tends to diminish the consumer’s assessment of public transit. At worse, high fares could mean fewer riders and more cars in the traffic lanes, a result contrary to public transit’s mission.

Effective systems of public transit like New York’s subway system are public goods because they increase possibilities for public association in the urban landscape. Maintaining lower fares does not mean that affordable public transit is a civil right—there’s no such thing as an inherently endowed right to a cheap ride downtown. Rather, it is a policy goal that conforms well to the wider purpose of a free society which thrives upon human exchanges which drive the forces of creativity and entrepreneurship.

MTA should look to other sources for new revenue by identifying other beneficiaries of the subway system. For example, retailers and food establishments are beneficiaries because the subway delivers much of their customer base. However, these types of businesses already pay their share into the system by collecting state and local sales taxes on all the prepared food and goods they sell.

Employers who are not retailers—businesses that rely on commuting office and industrial workers—are a different story. In several ways public transit is sized and operated chiefly according to their needs. Most working people commute during morning and afternoon peak hours so that businesses can schedule their operations during the same busy timeframe. In this way, rush hour is a good thing from the perspective of business. Operating during the same daily hours as other businesses is essential for efficient commerce.

New York’s subway system has remarkable flexibility to increase and decrease service to efficiently correspond to busy and slow periods of usage. It is a transit system designed to the task of moving rush hour traffic quickly. But the subway’s value to Manhattan’s businesses goes far beyond moving workers back and forth when it counts the most.

In most cities, new floor area for growing businesses happens only by also turning over additional real estate for parking. Sometimes the developer might pay a parking mitigation fee to a public agency to furnish public parking. Subsequently, public parking might happen only by eminent domain condemnation of a neighboring landowner’s property. This Darwinistic development cycle is one way that cities outside New York struggle with the overabundance of parked cars.

In Manhattan, on the other hand, subway riding employees don’t need parking facilities upon arrival. Manhattan real estate remains available for development rather than for vehicle storage. The vertical heights of Manhattan were built upon the network of subway lines in more ways than one. Business development reached skyward because workers left their cars at home. A scale of urban density was achieved to allow a level of public association and business activity that befits New York’s global stature.

MTA has a deplorable habit of borrowing to meet expenses. New York’s array of global, national, and local businesses relies on MTA’s ailing subway system. It is time for MTA to turn to this thriving business community for a serious discussion about how both can better meet their civic responsibilities.

Subway City: Making Plans for Rush Hour

The 2000 Census projected that New York will experience a population gain of two million over the next twenty years. Nationally, the 2000 Census projected a population gain of 60 million. To the urban planner, population growth and rush hour traffic are issues that go hand in hand.

From what I can observe, if the MTA subway system is kept running well in 2020—if public moneys are spent along the way to maintain and improve the system appropriately—the subway system should be able to absorb the added riders with little negative effect to the rush hour commute.

Nationally, however, it is a far different story. The nation’s growth will occur primarily in places that rely on private vehicles. The subsequent increase in vehicular traffic from growth will further bog down the lines of vehicles already in a crawl waiting in rush hour traffic.

It may seem odd to people who daily face the aggravation of bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but not every transportation system operates on the basis of saturated levels of congestion at rush hour. In New York, the world’s second oldest subway system actually moves people along faster during rush hour than any other time of day. (London, by the way, has the world’s oldest subway system.)

When I enter a busy subway station in rush hour, I find that navigating on foot through the station is usually no more time-consuming than at other times. Teeming commuters deftly weave and dodge each other around me with a flexibility of movement not possible in vehicular lanes of traffic. Subway cars arrive at a pace designed to avoid unmanageable levels of build-up of the burgeoning crowd. When I arrive at the platform, the frequency of oncoming subways is from 90-second to 10-minute intervals.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority subway system is composed of 468 stations along 660 miles of track. It has a fleet of 6,400 subway cars that moves 1.4 billion passengers a year. Total annual distance traveled amounts to over 347.1 million miles. In terms of energy, the subway system uses 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to operate for one year. Using an online conversion table, I found that the kilowatt hours amount is the equivalent to less than 49.2 million US gallons of gasoline for a year's operation.

The New York’s subway system is capable of providing peak efficiency during rush hour for moving vast masses of commuters with relatively small energy consumption. This is quite a contrast to my experiences as a consulting planner dealing with growth issues outside New York.

As a consulting planner, I have served public and private interests. Either way, it was often important to discuss the development proposal under consideration in terms of its effects on rush hour traffic patterns. I would find myself meeting with a developer, consultants, staff members, or project neighbors to turn over questions related to the local rush hour phenomena. Many of us would arrive at these meetings from our own rush hour commute.

If a formal traffic study was involved, we tended to talk in terms of peak-hour trip generation numbers, intersection counts, circulation requirements, capital improvement plans, sensitive noise receptors, cumulative future scenarios, and so forth. Lacking a formal study, discussions might be more qualitative, sometimes led off by technicians with balanced skepticism of their own opinions. Perceptions from past experiences were shared. Cost considerations were mentioned whenever hopes for one or another expectation needed to be trimmed back.

As a planning issue, rush hour traffic is typically treated like peak storm water runoff, in which an overloaded system requires a technical explanation and a design and schedule for responsive capital improvement. Somehow, though, drain system problems tend to fade away after improvements are made while traffic problems only worsen.

My experience was that board members who publicly and sincerely face indecision on a development proposal want to be illuminated from the fundamental principles they feel drawn to in their public role. Consequently, when it came to the issue of rush hour traffic impacts, I sought to find simple explanations that cut through the methodologies and statistics, quasi-legal interpretations of significance thresholds, and the rest of minutiae covered up and down in the typical traffic meeting. A traffic meeting usually proved its worth if I gained simple explanations that helped build persuasive and ethical conclusions about the development proposal’s effect on the rush hour’s commute.

The developer was in luck if a simple explanation was available that convincingly portrayed the development proposal as either not appreciably slowing down the flow of commuters during rush hour, or, given minor ancillary improvements, the transportation system’s capabilities could be tweaked to serve the project. Developers who were out of luck usually were left facing the prospects of a scaled-down project or a scaled-up transportation system.

I doubt many of us consider rush hour traffic to be the symptom of healthy social behavior, yet that is how I view the wider picture. During rush hour, our transportation systems are filled with people going to work, kids going to school, and people on errands or going to their appointments. Our way of life is synchronized to our daily routines for being together within the same timeframe. I can’t think of an alternative to this way of life.

Rush hour is a source of aggravation to people caught in the routine of inefficient transportation systems. However, in the wider picture, a lesser rush hour would indicate lesser public association. People cannot easily meet up with each other and interconnect without getting out of the house at the same time. Rush hour results from the inevitable crosscurrents of people and institutions pursuing patterns of social routine in the daily mix of public association.

Thanks to an urban form that is largely based on ,as well as served by, the template of a 101-year old transportation system, New York should be able to move capably into the period of growth ahead. Whether the MTA will meet the challenge only seems to be a matter of political will.