Starts and Fits

An Introduction

2008-04-09T20:43:00.012-04:00

Delays at O'Hare. (Scott Olson/Getty Images via The New York Times)

Bad news for the airline industry today. American Airlines cancels 1,094 flights, causing by-now-familiar airport havoc so the FAA can inspect questionable wiring. Getting new planes to help in situations like these will be harder than everybody thought. And earlier this week, three U.S. airlines, Skybus, A.T.A. and Aloha, cancelled all of their flights, permanently. On top of that, Oasis Hong Kong Airlines shut down today as well.

Of all today's stories of stranded passengers, this one stood out:

At La Guardia Airport in New York, Yoree Koh, arrived and like thousands of other across the country found her American flight, to Chicago, canceled. Ms. Koh, 25, had planned to attend an orientation for the graduate journalism program at Northwestern University that she will attend, and to look for apartments.

She missed those appointments. An American worker told her to come back at 6:00 a.m. Thursday to get on a standby list for a 12:40 p.m. flight.

"I'm not holding my breath," Ms. Koh said. "It basically ruined my week."

Ms. Koh, get your week back. Allow me to introduce you to the Lake Shore Limited. Lake Shore Limited, Ms. Koh.

The Lake Shore Limited at Cold Spring, N.Y. (David Sommer / RRPictureArchives.net)

Instead of trying her luck at the airport the next day, she should have gotten to Penn Station by 4 p.m. and for $80 been at Chicago by 9:45 a.m. Sadly, at that time, she'll still be in New York, on line.

America's Thriving Passenger Railroads

2008-03-12T22:45:00.028-04:00

The Long Island Rail Road is the busiest passenger railroad in the United States. (Photo by David Wong / RailPictures.net)

The American Public Transportation Association released its 2007 ridership statistics last week. The regional railroad statistics (pdf) show the numbers behind a booming industry. Overall, ridership is up 5.4% year-over-year, and up 11.3% over five years. Two fledgling new passenger railroads have come into being in the Sunbelt in the last five years: Rail Runner Express in Albuquerque and Music City Star in Nashville. A third, FrontRunner in Salt Lake City, is scheduled to begin operations in April.

The nation's busiest passenger railroad, the Long Island Rail Road, recently reported its busiest year since 1949. And its cousin across the Sound, Metro-North, recently reported its busiest year in its 25-year history.

Here is a table summarizing the APTA data and Amtrak monthly data.

Railroad	Main Hub	'07 Riders	5-Year Growth
1. MTA Long Island Rail Road	New York	106,036,000	5.85%
2. MTA Metro-North Railroad	New York	79,724,700	8.89%
3. Metra	Chicago	75,099,600	8.28%
4. NJ Transit	New York	74,860,300	22.31%
5. MBTA Commuter Rail	Boston	38,961,600	-3.96%
6. SEPTA Regional Rail	Philadelphia	33,360,400	17.35%
7. Amtrak	Multiple	26,551,001	7.95%
8. Caltrain	San Francisco	11,377,200	26.70%
9. Metrolink	Los Angeles	11,146,800	27.55%
10. MARC	Washington	7,720,300	28.07%
11. South Shore Line	Chicago	4,245,900	18.30%
12. Virginia Railway Express	Washington	3,504,100	14.48%
13. Tri-Rail	Miami	3,502,500	33.21%
14. Trinity Railway Express	Dallas	2,497,200	11.18%
15. Sounder	Seattle	2,156,500	220.72%
16. Coaster	San Diego	1,615,600	24.28%
17. Altamont Commuter Express	San Jose	755,000	2.17%
18. Rail Runner Express	Albuquerque	500,900	N/A
19. Shore Line East	New Haven	483,700	40.16%
20. Music City Star	Nashville	142,100	N/A

A few observations. First, the numbers show how New York, and more broadly the Northeast, totally dominate regional passenger railroads in the United States. The No. 1 and No. 2 railroads are both run by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and together they provide 40.6% of all railroad trips in the Lower 48, not counting intercity service provided by Amtrak (which, by the way is reporting its own record ridership). Once you add in NJ Transit, the three railroads serving New York City provide 56.9% of all regional railroad trips per year, a figure that has held steady over the past five years.

The following table breaks down the statistics by region:

Region	Share of regional railroad passengers, 2007
1. Northeast (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, New Haven)	75.3%
2. Midwest (Chicago)	17.3%
3. West Coast (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, San Jose)	5.9%
4. Sunbelt (Miami, Dallas, Nashville, Albuquerque)	1.5%

Since railroads use a tiny fraction of the fuel per person that automobiles do, I think this data shows that the northeast will be better prepared than any other region to provide mobility to its residents in the event of increased gasoline prices. All of us northeasterners should be grateful for the sound stewardship and continued operation of assets handed down to us by previous generations.

A last thought: It's funny to me that outside New York and Connecticut, nobody wants to call their railroad a railroad. It's as if everyone got together, as all the new services came on line in the 1990s and 2000s, to focus-group their branding. They must have decided that the word "railroad" is considered too old fashioned. Hence, you have a variety of other names, a snappy one-word "brand," or a name that uses the word "express" or the abbreviated, "rail." That said, the two services that do use railroad in their name (and in the case of the nearly 175-year-old LIRR, the even more archaic "rail road"), just happen to be the two busiest services. Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Albuquerque's Rail Runner Express began operations in 2006. (Photo by Stephen Noyes / RRPictureArchives.net.)

'Your Warranty Has Expired'

2008-01-19T17:39:00.000-05:00

I received a telephone call this morning. On the other end was the automated voice of a woman speaking in an urgent yet authoritative tone. "She" said something along the lines of:

Attention! The warranty on your automobile has expired. We have sent you several warnings in the mail but you have refused to respond. Press 1 to renew your warranty.

I got really nervous for a second. It wasn't hard to believe that I hadn't replied to junk-mail, since I tend to let that stuff pile up. Then I remembered something. I don't own an automobile.

Whatever company is sending out these calls is lying. They have no idea if your automobile warranty has expired, and they don't care. They almost certainly haven't even mailed you anything. But they are calling thousands of people telling them they have. All this business needs is some percentage of the people they call to press 1 and inquire about automobile warranties. The company doesn't even need to pay someone to sit at the phone making calls. This shameful practice makes a mockery of respectable capitalism in which a benevolent entrepreneur earns an honest dollar by having an idea and tapping into a human need.

I would have pressed 1 and tried to ascertain who was making these fraudulent calls, but I had picked up the call on a rotary phone.

Urban and Suburban Sidewalks

2007-09-02T14:34:00.000-04:00

Here's a photograph of a bookstore in downtown Manhattan, or more precisely, the sidewalk in front of a bookstore. Every morning, employees from the store drag out racks of bargain books. The goal, of course, is to catch the attention of people walking by and get them to come into the store, look around and buy a more expensive book. And as you can see from the photo above, this probably works pretty well. There is a tremendous amount of pedestrian traffic on that block with people going to South Street Seaport and the many offices, apartments and stores in the area. So people who are walking past with no intention of shopping for books often serendipitously find themselves browsing inside this cavernous store. The rack feeds off of, and reinforces, the urban milieu that Jane Jacobs called an intricate sidewalk ballet. The diverse mix of offices, stores, restaurants and apartments all draw people out to the sidewalk at different times and for different reasons. And "In cities," she wrote, "liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life."

People have taken Jane Jacob's words to heart in many places, including many parts of suburbia that are in need of a good sprucing up. Below is a satelite image of the suburban shopping plaza where I bought my first copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was always easy to find parking here, and the parking never cost anything.

Unfortunately, a result of the 20th century planning orthodoxy of single-use zoning, the plaza isn't connected to anything other than retail. There are no apartments nearby, nor offices. Just stores. If you happen to live in the house on the adjacent property to the south, there's a fence preventing you from walking over.

On the western wall of the plaza there are three stores: a small liquor store, a pharmacy that takes up a little more space, and the bookstore where I made my purchase, a giant place that takes up three quarters of the frontage. Between these stores and their parking lot is a raised concrete platform that you might be able to call "a sidewalk." But it's really just a border zone, a vestage of the city. There's no reason to be on it unless you are going into one of the stores, and you wouldn't be there unless you drove. The bookstore so dominates the plaza that there's no reason to be on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore unless you're going to the bookstore. But funny enough, certain urban habits have been adopted out here, where they fail to stimulate the same sidewalk milieu.

Just like in downtown Manhattan, every day, employees of this bookstore put out a cart of bargain books. As if someone would just happen to be wandering past! Below, the results of single-use zoning, auto-only transportation planning and wishful thinking:

A South Bronx Neighborhood Rebuilds

2007-05-23T20:57:00.001-04:00

The Melrose neighborhood in the Bronx is coming to life as empty lots and vacant buildings are being replaced by mid-rise, transit-oriented, environmentally friendly and highly sought-after apartment buildings. As the months tick by, the urban fabric is being restored, and it is a wonderful thing to see.

Above, the second, third, and last buildings on the block of East 161st Street between Elton and Melrose Avenues have been preserved while the empty lots and a few buildings have been transformed, below, into affordable housing for low-income working households. Financed by the New York City Housing Development Corporation, these buildings were built by a partnership involving Nos Quedamos/We Stay, which worked hard to avert "urban renewal" and prepare a human-scaled master plan for the neighborhood.

Green States for Transportation

2007-05-03T23:44:00.000-04:00

States with senators co-sponsoring of S.294, the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act. Light green = 1 senator co-sponsoring; Dark green = 2 senators co-sponsoring.

The states above have senators who have signed on as co-sponsors of s.294, a bill that would provide five years worth of funding to Amtrak, the nation's most environmentally friendly form of inter-city travel. This is important because the bill would put an end to the yearly Amtrak appropriations battles in Washington, where every year the Bush Administration trys to get us to burn more oil driving and flying between places by reducing Amtrak's operating budget to zero.

Here's the same map, broken down by party.

Light blue = 1 Democratic co-sponsor

Dark blue = 2 Democratic co-sponsors

Purple = 1 Democratic and 1 Republican co-sponsor

Light red = 1 Republican co-sponsor

Dark red = 2 Republican co-sponsors

The Restoration of Beekman Street

2007-01-05T22:11:00.000-05:00

The block of Beekman Street between William and Nassau Streets in Downtown Manhattan has for a long time had that half-abandoned look you find in many dying cities, with parking lots being the predominant land use amid stately older buildings that managed to survive the wrecking ball.

That is changing, thanks to a continuing desire of people to do live, work, shop and recreate downtown. Both of the parking lots you see in the photo above are being converted to uses for people. The smaller lot at the left is at the southwest corner of William and Beekman Streets. This week, all the cars were booted and workers began dismantling the metal car-lifts that the parking lot had been using.

I haven't been able to figure out what's going on here, but the workers also removed the parking lot's sign as you can see in the right of the photo, indicating that something new is coming in here and we're hopefully not just looking at a fancier parking lot. Does anyone know what's going to be built at this site?

Across the street, construction is underway for what will be a 75-story mixed-use tower being built by Forest City Ratner and designed by Frank Gehry. It will have about 70 floors of apartments, five floors for a school and ground floor retail space. Think of the acres of woodland or farms that will not become culs-de-sac because of this tower, and you can see why an environmentalist should support tall buildings in Manhattan even as neighbors say it is "destroying the neighborhood." I posted the picture below on the Wired New York forum (scroll to end) back in October when the first indications that construction was starting on the long-discussed tower. The construction has continued and now the site is a big dirt pit awaiting pile driving.

Overheard at the Checkout Counter

2006-12-17T17:55:00.000-05:00

At my local bookstore and presented here without further comment: A woman working the register, speaking to two others: "The Explorer is registered in my name because Uncle Danny has a little DUI problem. [Chuckles.] I'm a 19-year-old female in New York State and the insurance is still expensive!"

Win-Win-Win

2006-12-10T14:16:00.000-05:00

The scaffolding is off at Fultonhaus, 119 Fulton Street at Dutch Street in Lower Manhattan's Financial District. This is an example of what might be called small-scale upfill development, and it embodies many principles that Jane Jacobs described as being beneficial for a city neighborhood.

Here the developer added six stories to an 87-year-old building, nearly doubling it size while converting the lower floors from obsolete commercial space into condominium apartments. The history of the building itself shows the versatility of a simple lowrise structure, part of a row of buildings that edge right up to the streetwall. According to the Department of Buildings BIS website, it was built as a factory and warehouse in 1919 and converted into retail showrooms in 1967. Now it is being transformed again, into residences. The benefits, or "wins" from this latest conversion are many.

Win 1: This building helps densify an already dense transit core of the city, encouraging people to travel via the nearby subway rather than sprawling outward into auto-dependent suburbs. There will be 19 apartments in this building. That represents an entire cul-de-sac's worth of farmland or forest saved from the bulldozer!

Win 2: This building will bring more residents to a business district after hours, giving it more of a 24-hour daily lifecycle, which subtly enhances safety to the neighborhood and rewards local business owners for locating downtown. As important as these two wins are, they stem from any form of downtown residential development. What makes this building particularly special is its relative small scale.

Win 3: The project exemplifies Jacobs' concept of "gradual money." I have no idea how much money the conversion of and addition to this building cost. It might have been quite a lot. But it is not as much as if they tore down a number of similar-sized buildings, consolidated the lots and built a much bigger building. Jacobs wrote of the need to supply neighborhoods with a continual supply of investment, a trickle of money as opposed to an occasional bucket-load of "cataclysmic money" that often resulted in the disastrous tearing down of many buildings to put up one, as was done in the "urban renewal" years of public housing projects. The result of small-scale rehabilitation and construction is what Jacobs termed a healthy city neighborhood, an "ever-normal granary" that is forever rejuvenating itself:

All city building that retains staying power after its novelty has gone, and that preserves the freedom of the streets and upholds citizens' self-management, requires that its locality be able to adapt, keep up to date, keep interesting, keep convenient, and this in turn requires a myriad of gradual, constant, close-grained changes.

Win 4: Historic architecture preserved. Even without consolidating lots, the developer here could have torn down the existing building and built a new all-glass one with economies of scale. But here, he chose to retain the old building, with its beautiful masonry architecture, which reinforces the historic urban fabric rather than obliterating it.

It is great to see such positive development taking place in the heart of the city.

Cool New Blog Alert: City Seen

2006-11-19T22:23:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn hasn't gotten its fair share of digital ink here at Starts & Fits. For that, take a look at City Seen. This blog uncovers the stories behind various building projects, and promises to cover local neighborhood development — in other words, exactly the stuff that Starts & Fits loves! In the inaugural posts, the 'Seen covers stalled building projects in Greenpoint, at at 271 and 279 Driggs Avenue and at 55 Eckford Street (in photo above).

What's going on over there?

A Clone Outgrows Its Parent

2006-09-11T19:44:00.000-04:00

Since everyone's attention is at Ground Zero today, I thought it would be fitting to look at the residential tower rising at 10 Barclay Street, just north of the site and towering next to the Woolworth Building. As The Sun has noted, this bad boy is going up fast.

Here is another photo:

Think that's a shot of 10 Barclay? Nope. That's the Grand Tier at 1930 Broadway, a building between 64th and 65th Streets that the developer of 10 Barclay, Glenwood Management, completed about a year or two ago. Here's a picture with more of it:

From these early indications, 10 Barclay Street is going to look identical to the Grand Tier. Not surprisingly, they were designed by the same firm, Costas Kondylis & Partners. Here are a couple of close ups of 10 Barclay, so you can really see it:

And finally, another overall view.

Regardless of its similarities to a (rather boring)* building uptown, it's great to see construction of a building that will bring 396 apartments to revitalize this part of the city.

*Boring, yes, but I do like the way 1930's base maintains the street wall for the first six floors and provides good neighborhood retail.

- 6-12 Barclay Street & More - Costas Kondylis [Wired New York Forum]
- 1930 Broadway [Wired New York Forum]

The Urban Naturalist

2006-08-09T22:07:00.000-04:00

Futurebird has been running an interesting series called The Urban Naturalist. She is trying to raise awareness of the ways in which cities are socially and environmentally more natural than suburban living, despite their leafy greenery. Here is the latest entry, A Palace With Many Rooms.

Suburban living embodies the compartmentalized, modernist understanding of man and nature. When we consider a suburban dwelling, we often see it in isolation from its social, physical, and environmental surroundings. Each house is a world unto itself complete with the symbolic markers of "nature" and the creature comforts of "civilization." Suburban living minimizes random encounters with other people and with nature. All aspects of life occur in private whenever possible (including transportation.) Despite the superficial trappings of greenery, the suburban environment is sealed of from nature, both in its wild and urban incarnations.

Urban living cannot be understood without seeing each urban dwelling as larger than the private spaces of apartments. The urban living space is integrated with the public realm in the same way that rural living is (ideally) integrated harmoniously with green nature. The city is like a palace with many rooms, but in this palace the rooms are shared with other people.

Here are the entries in the series so far:
July 19: Intro to the Urban Naturalist
July 26: Reconnecting With Nature
July 27: The Living History of a City
July 28: Sacred Places
July 31: Passing Through
Aug. 2: Naming Places
Aug. 7: A Palace With Many Rooms

Where I'll Be For a While

2006-07-11T22:47:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be doing some blogging for StreetsBlog, a website where we hope to draw attention to land use and transportation issues, and ways to increase urban livability and decrease traffic congestion and automobile dependence. My posts on this site will probably decrease in frequency at least for the time being. But stuff that I would have posted here you can now find over at StreetsBlog. Come on over and join us!

Contested Streets Premier

2006-06-26T23:53:00.000-04:00

Everyone who cares about New York City should watch Contested Streets, which premiers on Tuesday and compares the public environment of New York with those of London, Paris and Copenhagen. I will give the movie the full review it deserves at a later point. For now, I'll just say that this is a movie that was put together by people with a broad vision for how New York's streetscape should be significantly transformed and a many-layered theoretical underpinning on why it ought to be. In thinking about what could be, they are not bound by what is.

Two images from the film:

Trafalgar Square transformed from a traffic nightmare into an enjoyable public space that attracts people to the city.

The logical result of decades of planning for the car above all else.

- New Film Shows Route to Livable, Gridlock-Free Streets [TransAlt]

New Hope in the Bronx

2006-06-19T22:41:00.000-04:00

The building pictured above, a block south of Crotona Park in the Bronx, is one of those rarest of buildings that has the same address on two streets: It is located at 1500 Boston Road and 1500 Louis Nine Boulevard. Neat as that may be, though, this building is more remarkable for a reason that becomes apparent when you notice that the modest cornice and detailing end abruptly at two unfinished facades. It is as if the building was once just a piece of a greater whole.

Indeed, it was.

No. 1500, known as New Hope Plaza, survived the 1970s in the very epicenter of Bronx disinvestment. By the end of the decade, arson and abandonment had taken every one of its neighbors, and No. 1500 was the only building standing on its block.

From the mid-1910s through the mid-1960s, the eleven-block area you see in the map at right was a bustling neighborhood of businesses and five-story walkup apartment houses southeast of Crotona Park. "With a density of well over 500 units per acre, it was a vibrant neighborhood, consisting primarily of New Law tenements built after 1901," wrote Richard Plunz in A History of Housing in New York City (Columbia University Press, 1990, and the source of this map and the next). Three thousand people lived in 51 apartment buildings on the two blocks at the center of the neighborhood. Today, only one of those buildings remains standing, No. 1500, built in 1915, at the corner of Boston Road and what was then Wilkins Avenue.

Then came the destruction wrought by the arson and abandonment of the 1970s that came not long after Interstate highways began offering their promise of the benefits of the city and the country at the same time. This left a lot of rubble-strewn empty lots in the neighborhood. Not content simply to bring people to suburbia, planners also set about to bring suburbia to the people. Charlotte Street, where President Carter and Candidate Reagan famously stopped to promise to rebuild, was rebuilt by Ed Logue as a subdivision of detached single-family dwellings that offered housing for a relative handful of people at an enormous cost of valuable urban land.

No. 1500 once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, but now it looms over them as a lonely reminder of the once busy city neighborhood.

An aerial photo from local.live.com reproduced below shows the block where No. 1500 stands.

I'm not sure there is an image that better explains the spatial inefficiency of suburban development. New Hope Plaza at the corner has homes for some 100 people in 38 households (and three stores too), while the entire rest of the block has just 18 housing units, fewer than half the number in New Hope Plaza.

Despite the 1980s efforts that produced Charlotte Gardens (or perhaps because of them), the need to produce affordable housing remains a major goal of the city and state governments. Their agencies, along with banks, developers, nonprofit community-based development organizations and the "intermediary organizations" that fund them are all under enormous pressure to satisfy a demand for affordable housing that never seems to slacken. Thankfully, in the decades since Charlotte Gardens was built, the prevailing wisdom of this group of organizations has come to acknowledge that the only way to solve the housing crunch is to build at a greater density.

As a result, high-density apartment buildings are returning to the periphery of the Charlotte Gardens area, restoring a bit of that neighborhood that existed before. I've already written about a building called Urban Horizons II to be located just off the map above. Even closer, a big mixed-use building is nearing completion at 1490 Boston Road, just across the street from New Hope Plaza.

Designed by Hugo S. Subotovsky Architects, this red and tan brick building embodies a back-to-the-future understanding that the best and most useful built environment for the Bronx was the one that was being neglected and actively obliterated for much of the second half of the 20th century. No. 1490 shares many of the same characteristics as 90-year-old No. 1500: Six stories, a solid streetwall, ground floor retail. Even the rounded facade serves to compliment its neighbor.

1490 Boston Road will contain more than 9,000 square feet of ground floor retail space and 95 apartments (most of them two-bedroom units), all restricted to households earning no more than 60% of the New York City median income. It was financed in December 2004 with $9.5 million raised by the sale of tax-exempt bonds issued by the New York City Housing Development Corporation, underwritten by Bear Stearns and secured by KeyBank. The Housing Development Corp. lent an additional $4.18 million from its own budget to finance this building's construction, which is being developed by the Atlantic Development Group.

There are still vacant lots in the Bronx that can be built upon, but if present trends continue or accelerate, there will come a time when the land underneath Charlotte Gardens is more valuable for what could be there than what is. Now that lots near Charlotte Street are being put to use for apartment buildings, what will become of Charlotte Gardens? Will it be a permanent reminder of shortsighted planning policies and low urban land values, or will it give way to a restored dense urban fabric?

The zoning for the area, shown in the map below, makes these single-family detached houses a permanent fixture. In fact, if New Hope Plaza fell down in an earthquake, rebuilding it would be illegal.

As shown by the map, the area is zoned R1-2, which is almost the lowest density residential zone that exists in New York City. As described by the city's 1990 Zoning Handbook:

R1 districts permit only single-family detached houses on lots at least 100 feet wide (in R1-1 zones) or 60 feet wide (in R1-2 zones). These zones limit population density by allowing only four to seven families per acre. Usually, the houses are on large landscaped lots. Many of these areas are far from public transportation. Most families in these districts own at least one car. One parking space is required for each dwelling unit.

The R1-2 zone corresponds almost exactly to the area occupied by Charlotte Gardens, which is near the Freeman Street and 174th Street stops on the elevated subway line served by the 2 and 5 trains. The area all around it, including the site of 1490 Boston Road, is part of a much higher-density R7-1 zone, which corresponds with the density of the Charlotte Street area before its apartment buildings were razed.

A 1980 article about New Hope Plaza describes it as having at one time been "an elegant building," and quotes a resident, Helen Steiner, as saying, "It used to have stained-glass windows, overstuffed furniture in the lobby and a chandelier." What good luck that it has survived into the 21st century. It's survival has provided 38 homes, 37 of which could not legally be replaced. How did the people responsible for this building manage to keep it up?

The residents of 1500 Boston Road stayed in their building as many others were fleeing the neighborhood, and one big reason may be the tenacity of the building's superintendent, George Lascu, who in 1977 was 82 and toothless, and had lived in the building since 1937. "All the people here are just like a family," he told the Times in 1977, "my family."

Because it still stood while other buildings were empty shells or reduced to rubble, this No. 1500 began attracting new residents. As the Times described it:

There is little turnover in the multiracial apartment house. Those who have been there stay because the building is like an anchor in a sea of desolation; those who have come recently are also there because of the stability.

Around 1980 even No. 1500 was abandoned by its owner, and it fell into city ownership. Tenants remained but lacked heat and hot water. Led by a 73-year-old grandmother named Alice Myers as well as Helen Steiner and Mary Jones, and with assistance from the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, the tenants organized and formed a cooperative to buy the building and get their utilities restored. In 1983, they rehabilitated the building with $25,000 from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and another $25,000 from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. That led to a grand reopening, which the Times covered this way:

For four years it was Last Hope, the only building still standing, and still occupied, in a block of urban rubble in the South Bronx. With speeches, balloons and a marching band, Last Hope yesterday formally became New Hope Plaza and was welcomed as another sign of revitalization in a once-proud neighborhood.

Twenty-three years later, one looks forward to the grand opening of New Hope Plaza's big new neighbor at 1490 Boston Road.

- For New Hope Plaza, a New Look [NYT 5/29/1983]
- 3 Women Who Led Rescue of Building in South Bronx See Hopes Fulfilled [NYT 9/14/1983]
- The Bronx's Green Housing Boom [S&F]

Cars Give Way to People in SoHo

2006-06-18T21:20:00.000-04:00

The Tunnel Garage and its 188 parking spaces, built just as the Holland Tunnel and the automobile were first offering their promise of a quick exit from the city, is ancient history. In its place will rise an 8-story apartment building with 48 apartments, 7,340 square feet for stores (and 117 parking spaces). Because of this land use change, a net of 71 motorists each day will find it harder to park in SoHo, more or less removing that many cars from the roads. Meanwhile, households and businesses will find space in the building, further enlivening this pedestrian-oriented neighborhood.

I've been glad to see automobile-related uses vanishing from Manhattan, including many West Side gas stations and this garage, at the corner of Broome and Thompson Streets. In this case, there was an argument to save the garage on aesthetic reasons. Actually, there was something to be said for that old, pleasantly rounded facade and its "proto-Art-Deco" Model T medallion at the corner (pictured). But the traffic decongestion and strenghtened neighborhood fabric easily outweigh the loss.

- Landmark Status Sought, For This? [S&F]
- See Ya! [S&F]

Moving the Sidewalk at 96th Street

2006-06-12T21:23:00.000-04:00

As pointed out by Aaron Naparstek and the good people at Curbed, folks from the Upper West Side are upset that the sidewalks are going to be shaved by nine feet for the redesign of the subway station at 96th Street and Broadway. Nine feet of space where people walk would become one lane of traffic in each direction on Broadway. A classic case of taking away space from pedestrians and giving it to cars? Not exactly. As Curbed's commenter No. 8, "Dave the City Planner," retorts:

Yes, the sidewalk on the east and west ends of Broadway are being narrowed, but there is basically a new sidewalk being created in the median. At the end of the day, the same amount of sidewalk space will exist exist [sic] - it'll just be distributed differently. … This is not about cars vs pedestrians.

Dave the City Planner's point is mathematically correct — the amount of roadway devoted to traffic will be the same — but his point assumes the fungibility of walking space, i.e., that sidewalk space can be replaced one-for-one by the same amount of space in a median. That ignores the fact that a sidewalk takes you to stores and apartments and the far end of the block, while the median is the place you stand when you're waiting for the light to change.

The MTA's PDF'ed proposal, which comes to us via Community Board 7, notes that streetscape impacts will include "Reductions to sidewalk widths" and "Removal of 96th St subway entrances in sidewalk." I fail to be bowled over by Dave's appeal to mathematical precision. I am inclined to agree with the people who spoke in Clarence Eckerson's video who are upset about the sidewalk narrowing. But an even more important concern is the related removal of the subway entrance in the sidewalk.

Because elevators take up a sizeable amount of space on the sidewalk, the issue of allocating sidewalk space is going to come up again and again as the MTA continues its federally mandated mission to make renovated subway stations ADA accessible. Subways move a lot more people than roads, and we as a city should make the decision to make avenues that have subways underneath them (like the narrow-sidewalked Lexington Avenue) as pedestrian friendly as possible, even if that means taking space away from cars.

Right now, if you are taking the train to a destination on Amsterdam or Columbus, you get off at 96th Street and walk through an underpass to the eastern exits, walk up the steps, and proceed directly to your destination. But if the only entrance was to be placed in the median — enlarged though it may be — you will have to wait to cross three lanes of traffic before you can proceed. It turns out that this is about cars vs. pedestrians, because subway-riding pedestrians will be endangered so that no lanes of traffic will be sacrificed. Anyone who has ever ridden the West Side IRT knows that it can get insanely packed, and the express stations are especially busy. Think of crowds of people waiting to cross the street, some people running to catch the light, some not making it so quickly. This whole setup magnifies the risk of accidents, all to avoid taking away a lane of traffic.

The MTA and the DOT should look to their own earlier work in evaluating how to make an Upper West Side IRT express station ADA-compliant. Five or six years ago they expanded the 72nd Street station, and in the process took away all three of Broadway's uptown lanes between 72nd and 73rd Streets. The result is a greatly expanded Verdi Square, and a well used public space where there had been parked buses and traffic.

Drivers who want to continue northbound on Broadway have to make a left at 73rd and Amsterdam and then wait for a right-turn arrow. This new obstacle has caused a big reduction in traffic.

There is now so little uptown traffic on Broadway in the 70's that the next logical improvement would be to reduce these three lanes to two by widening the median and creating a series of true walking gardens, or maybe by widening the sidewalks in front of the Beacon Theater to accomodate all the concert goers.

On the Upper West Side, Broadway should be a street for people. It already has the most attractions for pedestrians — dense apartment buildings and popular stores and restaurants. For cars, Broadway is already two-way and so its light timing encourages through drivers to take the Amsterdam and Columbus one-way speedways anyway. Why not take this a step further? Elevators and stairway entrances on the Broadway median at 96th Street are fine, but the sidewalk entrances should not be removed. Doing so would inconvenience and endanger pedestrians.

To round out this post, I asked Futurebird to graphically depict her view of what would happen under the proposed plan. In her "before" view, pedestrians walk easily along wide sidewalks that are adjacent to their destinations. People with stollers and grocery carts don't obstruct the movement of others.

In her "after" view, chaos has set in. Much of the sidewalk has been lost (or rather, "relocated" to the useless median), a slow moving older person is now delaying a group of people rushing to catch their train but who can't get by her, and a crowd of people waits to get off the median.

BONUS! There is a public forum about this plan on Tuesday night at 7 o'clock at the American Bible Society, 1865 Broadway at 61st Street. People who have a say over what happens here are still listening.

- How to Spend the Next 5.5 Minutes of Your Life [Curbed]
- The 96th Street Sidewalk Nibblers [Naparstek]
- The Sidewalk Nibblers [Clarence Eckerson]
- 96th Street Station Rehabilitation Proposal [MTA via CB7 PDF!]
- Traffic Reversal [S&F]
- Retrofitting Bridges for Inefficiency [S&F]

264 Hours in a One-Hour Space

2006-06-11T21:09:00.000-04:00

Remember back in March when Starts & Fits' roving correspondent Gary Roth discovered a car parked in a one-hour space for two weeks? Mr. Roth has an uncanny ability to find these vehicles, and on Friday he outdid himself by finding another car long overdue for a tow. This one is parked in front of the Stage Restaurant at 128 Second Avenue (between 7th and St. Marks). According to Gary's conversation with the guy behind the counter at the Stage, this car had been parked there for three weeks as of Friday. To ascertain the veracity of this claim, Gary rifled through the many parking tickets on the windshield. Let's have a look at those tickets, shall we?

Got 'em under both wipers. That's pretty impressive. How about a closer view?


Tickets under the passenger's wiper.		Tickets under the driver's wiper.

Here is another sign that something here is a little off:

So has it really been three weeks? The earliest ticket that Gary found was dated Wednesday, May 31. I found the car this afternoon at about 3 o'clock. Let's say for the sake of easy math that that ticket was left at the same time of day. That's 11 days in the spot, or something like 264 hours parked in a one-hour space. Of course, it could be more if the car didn't get ticketed on the first day it was parked here, or if tickets were given before May 31 but have been removed.

A stack of parking tickets under the left windshield wiper. A stack of parking tickets under the right windshield wiper. A florescent green sanitation warning about parking obscuring an entire window. None of this seems to be deterring the owner of this car from keeping it parked here. Why doesn't the NYPD tow it away?

- Welcome to New York [S&F 3/18/06]
- Parking Math: Tow It Yourself [S&F 3/19/06]
- Did the Indiana Minivan Get a Good Deal? [S&F 3/29/06]

Induced Traffic and Central Park

2006-06-08T00:45:00.000-04:00

The Gates public art exhibition in February 2005 closed the Loop Drive of Central Park to automobiles and attracted millions of visitors to Central Park (and spawned at least one other public art idea pictured above). But it did not cause the kind of traffic calamity that Starquest expects to see from a closure of the Loop Drive.

Starquest, better known as Henry J. Stern, is a thoughtful person who not only wishes the best for the city, but has dedicated enormous amounts of energy in his former job as the New York City Parks Commissioner and more recently as an urban philosopher to improving the city's built environment. Having seen him deftly moderate a contentious public panel on the possibility of reopening a waste transfer station on the Upper East Side, I have grown to respect his abilities to navigate the city's political landscape and I enjoy reading his columns, which he kindly e-mails out to me (and anyone else who signs up to receive them).

He recently wrote a surprising column on the idea of banning cars from Central Park that appeared in the New York Sun and shows a misunderstanding of the results of a full closure of the Loop Drive (which would go beyond the partial closure announced last month). He wrote:

Although banning automobile traffic in Central Park would be pleasant from a park point of view, it would be disastrous for neighborhoods on both the East and West Sides of Manhattan. The cars prohibited from using the park at rush hour would not simply disappear; their drivers would use alternate routes, going south on Columbus and Fifth Avenues, north on Amsterdam and Madison Avenues, and both ways on Central Park West and Park Avenues.

As a former Parks Commissioner, one might hope that Mr. Stern would take the "park point of view," and let the Transportation Commissioner worry about the traffic impacts outside of the park. A parks commissioner should perhaps be advocating for better parks. But he's no longer in that role, so this isn't the main point of my criticism of Mr. Stern's opinion.

His view that rush hour traffic "would not simply disappear," for which he provides no supporting documents, is a hypothesis contrary to history. The more surface area of the planet that you devote to the movement and storage of automobiles, the more traffic you have. Adding lanes upon lanes to Los Angeles freeways has not helped that city avoid traffic congestion. It has encouraged a built environment that requires the car for all trips, thus boosting traffic congestion there. In L.A. and elsewhere, when you build lanes, cars will fill them. People are induced to drive by through public investment. This is called the "induced traffic effect." Central Park's use as a major traffic artery encourages people who would otherwise take the subway to drive instead.

The converse is also true. When you reduce the roadway space given over to automobiles, you discourage driving, causing traffic to disappear by squeezing it out of existence. We're not talking about Los Angeles here. This is New York City, where people evaluate each trip they take before they take it and select a mode according to a host of factors. Of course, closing the Loop Drive would eliminate a great deal of the north-south traffic at 59th Street's intersections with Sixth and Seventh Avenues. (Ditto for 110th Street's intersections with Lenox and A.C. Powell.) The benefits of this would radiate north and south from the park for many blocks.

But beyond these localized benefits, closing the loop drives would cause a percentage of the people who formerly would have driven to take the subway instead. Nobody is talking about closing the depressed east-west transverse roads. The loop drive is a north-south route that is parallel to no fewer than 10 subway lines, namely the A, B, C, D, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The air quality benefits of this modal shift are enough to make this a valid public policy decision, regardless of the improvement "from a park point of view," reduced asthma cases, better social interaction of the people who will come out of their metal-and-glass shells, fewer traffic deaths and injuries, a lowered demand for parking spaces south of 59th Street and increased revenue for the MTA.

The Gates went off without a traffic nightmare, and a regular closing of the loop drive will not either. History is filled with dire predictions of traffic nightmares that would result from street closures but that have failed to materialize. Why not test it out with a trial closure and see what happens?

- Horseless Carriages [NY Civic]
- Disappearing Traffic? The Story So Far [ContextSensitiveSolutions.org]
- 'The Buckets' [S&F]
- Partial Car-Free Trial in Central Park [S&F]

Why New York City Hurricanes Are Rare

2006-06-04T23:51:00.000-04:00

The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season started last week, as we all know by now. Since reading Aaron Naparstek's Big One last year and following what happened after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the rest of the 2005's hurricane-season-on-steroids, I've been pondering the possibility of a hurricane hitting town. After all, New York City is adjacent to the very same Atlantic Ocean as Hurricane Alley. An Inconvenient Truth portends future devastating hurricane seasons like 2005 as high sea surface temperatures continue to rise. Could New York City get hit by a Katrina?

Possibly, but unlikely. As I see it, there are two factors that keep New York relatively safe.

1) The Prevailing Westerlies
One reason that the Pacific Northwest has the cleanest air in the country is that the Prevailing Westerlies, the winds that, north of 35^o north latitude, tend to blow out of the west. In Oregon and Washington State, these winds blow in from the vast Pacific Ocean, carrying air that has with no trace of pollution. But here in New York, the Westerlies carry all the emissions from midwestern power plants and other sources of pollution across the American continent right over us. But the Westerlies also steer hurricanes away from us. The typical track of a hurricane is to be carried toward the northwest by the Trade Winds in the tropics. But by the time a hurricane gets to the Horse Latitudes, between 30^o and 35^o degrees north latitude, it will gradually veer toward a track that takes it north and east (i.e., away from land). Here's an image of the track for 2000's Hurricane Isaac, a category 4 storm that I think illustrates as close to a "normal" track as possible for an Atlantic storm.

Of course, it is not impossible that a storm could hit New York, but the Westerlies make it unlikely, because by the time a hurricane gets as far north as New York City, it should be embedded in the Westerlies pushing it out to sea. So the Prevailing Westerlies send us impure air but also steer hurricanes away: If we have a love/hate relationship with them, it's easy to understand why.

2) Low Sea Surface Temperatures
Hurricanes need sea surface temperatures in the low 80's Fahrenheit to gain strength. Luckily, our seas are cold and cloudy and not amenable to Hurricane strengthening. I've put together a page that displays charts produced by three NOAA buoys that track sea surface temperatures in the waters off New York City. (Unfortunatley the most southerly of the three got pulled from its mooring. It was retreived, but it hasn't been put back on line yet.) As of this writing, our waters are in the 60s, so it looks like we're in the clear for the moment. These are the kind of temperatures that cause people to avoid swimming, but also weaken hurricanes: another mixed blessing.

- Sea Surface Temperatures in the Waters Off New York City [NOAA via S&F]

WTC-Area Construction

2006-05-30T23:04:00.000-04:00

There is a huge amount of construction going on in the area north of the World Trade Center, helping to revitalize this important area and, at long last, fill in the Urban Renewal Area that stood vacant for many decades, and complete Battery Park City. Here is a photo round-up.

Crews are driving piles into the ground at 89 Murray Street / 270 Greenwich Street / 101 Warren Street, otherwise known as Site 5B.

Across the street, a new gramatically incorrect residential tower is rising at 200 Chambers Street Site 5C.

Goldman Sachs will move its headquarters from Broad Street to Battery Park City, here at Site 26.

And rounding it out is another residential tower underway on the block south of the Woolworth Building. I don't have much information about this one. Anybody know what's up with this building?

What About a Taxi Honkometer?

2006-05-23T21:20:00.000-04:00

Curbed and A Test of Will are carrying photos of a construction project at Broadway and John Street. These photos reminded me of an incident on Saturday morning as I was returning home from photographing 66 Leonard Street and 380 Lafayette Street for the ever-expanding Hardenbergh architectural database.

I was cycling down congested Broadway. Just past City Hall, the traffic had to wait as one of the trucks you can see in the pictures was making a left-hand turn, with great difficulty, onto John Street. Then I had the following conversation.

HOOOOONK HOOOOOOONK. HONK. HONK.

I turned around to see a cabby talking on his cell phone, obviously too busy to pay attention to the affect his actions would have on the world around him.

"Hey! What's the point of honking like that?"

"Did I honk at you, bro?"

"No, but it annoys everybody, not just that guy."

"He knows he's not supposed to turn like that."

A-HA! So the cabby was jolting scores of pedestrians out of their socks and annoying who knows how many people in the adjacent buildings because an overworked guy driving a super-noisy, eight-ton truck loaded with lumber that was destined for the exact spot where he was maneuvering would understand that he wasn't supposed to be turning like that. Either that, OR the cabby was just upset he wasn't moving faster than he would be in the car commercials.

Here are the problems with honking, as I see them:

As a monotone blast, it fails to communicate any actual information.
It annoys many people who are not the intended recipient of the transmission.
It shows that drivers forget that many of the people within earshot are not ensconced in metal-and-glass exoskeletons.
It rarely makes anybody go any faster.

My ever-innovative friend Gary says that all cabbies should be given a honkometer, which would charge cabbies X cents for every honk after a certain threshold is passed each month. They can still do it in cases of severe emergency (because there are always those times when you see someone darting in front of the cab and would rather hit the horn than the brakes), but they would simply know they are being charged.

Is there any reason this idea wouldn't work?

- Fulton Street Transit Hub Update: Screw Cutesy [Curbed]
- Corbin Building Scaffolded [A Test of Will]

Parking Spot Squat Furor

2006-05-17T20:25:00.000-04:00

The idea that a bunch of Park Slopers would congregate in a parking space in an effort to demonstrate that there are better uses for scarce public city land than the temporary storage of a single person's piece of property has caused outrage on comment threads at Naparstek and Curbed. There's been a lot of name calling and ad hominem attacks. Can't we all just get along and discuss ideas in a civilized manner?

The point of the people who staged the parking spot squat was to show that parking a car is cheap. Really cheap. A municipal giveaway, in fact. The squatters may also raise the point that public policy at the moment is to forbid bicycle parking in the curbside lane and then to confiscate bikes parked on the sidewalk if they get too numerous, as happened in Williamsburg near the overcrowded L train station at Bedford Avenue. The point of the critics is to note that the parking spot squatters have too much free time on their hands or are wrong to fault the car as a source of problems or are pursuing the wrong strategy for making the city more pedestrian-friendly.

Amid the frey, there was one idea that I want to pull out and comment on. The idea that cars parked in parallel along a curbside act as a buffer to make pedestrians feel protected from the speeding cars in the driving portion of the roadway. Here in the Financial District of Manhattan, there is no buffer of parked cars, and pedestrians are protected from speeding, road raging motorists only by the one- to two-inch height of the curb. Cars frequently drive onto the sidewalk to park, or to squeeze by cars that are parked on the opposite curb. But in general, there are just pedestrians and cars in motion.

What are the effects of this? Lack of a buffer zone is indeed slightly disconcerting. But I wouldn't say it makes one fearful to walk however. But every parked car becomes a moving car at some point, and the lack of on-street parking in the Financial District means that fewer people choose to drive to the area. As a result, during the off hours, there is very little traffic here, but because of the density, there are still plenty around. The neighborhood has lots of people but few cars, which is the perfect combination for urban vitality that we seek at some level by choosing to live in New York City.

I do like the idea of a buffer zone though. Cars parked in parallel compliment an unbroken street wall. Together, the two solid rows do create a sense of security. Many of the people who participate in the parking spot squat, I believe, did it not in an effort to eradicate parking, but to ask that the city charge a reasonable price for it. Others were there to protest the fact that the acres of curbside asphalt in New York City could be opened up to human beings, or bicycles, or grand pianos, or yard sales, or small-scale entrepreneurs, or to anyone who could spare a quarter. I'm not sure how this would be set up technically, but why not open up the curbside space to the highest bidder? If it is more important for a motorist to occupy the space than a group of cyclists, let him outbid them and pay for the privilege of using the real estate. In a city where money talks more loudly than anything, why should private automobiles enjoy a protected status?

- Parking it in the Slope [Naparstek]
- Fun with Parking Spaces: Parking Spot Squat [Curbed]
- Parking Squat: Kind of silly and yet... [Naparstek]

A Triangle Returns Decades Later

2006-05-15T00:22:00.000-04:00

One of the earliest things agreed upon during discussions of rebuilding the World Trade Center was that Greenwich Street and possibly other streets obliterated by the former WTC superblock (Fulton, Dey, Cortlandt) should be restored. The new 7 World Trade Center, more slender and taller, leaves room for Greenwich Street. A block of Greenwich Street that didn't exist on Sept. 10, 2001, has returned, thanks to good urban planning that understands the street grid. It also leaves room for the adjacent colorful triangular park. After years of construction, the area is starting to look promising.

Every Block of Every Street in Manhattan

2006-05-10T22:55:00.000-04:00

Sheridan Square, 1988.

Startsandfits.com recently enjoyed Waterfront, by Philip Lopate, a great recent addition to the canon of New York City walking-around literature. Another great addition to that canon — this one using digital photographs and shoe leather — is being produced every month by my friend Bob, who runs Coffeedrome.com, a website that contains my photo tour of Central Park West.

Bob is walking every block in Manhattan, and taking wonderful photographs as he goes. (Bob's photo at right is of my favorite building in Times Square, the Knickerbocker Hotel.)

In 1988, Bob walked every block south of 42nd Street, a 310-mile amble that took him past Sheridan Square (pictured above). Bob retired last year, and now he's finishing the job by walking every street in Manhattan north of 42nd Street. Check in and follow along as he makes progress. (He's up to 86th Street.)

For any Upper West Side trivia buffs who may be passing this way: Here's a question that came to light because of Bob's walk. There's a one-block street west of West End Avenue that connects 63rd and 64th Streets that doesn't have any street signs at it. Local.live.com calls it "W 63rd St." Google maps doesn't give it a name. The unlinkable New York City Map Portal calls it E TOWER DR. Does anybody know if that is correct? Bob is assuming it is, for now.

- Bob's Walk [Coffeedrome: Always Open, Never Closed]
- 40.77^o N & 73.99^o W [Local.live.com]
- 40.77^o N & 73.99^o W [Google maps]
- Waterfront by Philip Lopate [Gothamist]