Karrie Jacobs

The view from Stillwell Avenue.

Yesterday, seduced by the warm, sunny weather, I got on my bicycle and pedaled out to Coney Island, and after riding all the way down to the end of Surf Avenue, where I was sent packing by the guard at the entrance of Sea Gate, I cruised slowly back up along the Boardwalk, soaking up the splendor of the day.

I rolled off the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue and began looking at what developer Joe Sitt has done with the property that he bought up and bulldozed, property that the city has been trying to wrest away so it can build a bigger, better amusement district. What has Sitt done, besides putting up a lot of chain link fence? He’s done the Orwellian thing; he’s hung bright banners inside the no-man’s-land he’s created heralding “The Future of Coney Island.” Some of the banners just feature the slogan, and others show Coney Island’s iconic skyline — the Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone — in silhouette with giant, stylized waves in the foreground.

The future of Coney Island? Apparently it involves a tsunami. Maybe this is Sitt’s idea of a metaphor.

Meanwhile, City Planning has backed off a bit on its plan. Originally, the city was going to rezone 15 acres as parkland, to be developed by a company such as Tivoli Gardens. The revised plan, announced this week has shrunk that area to nine acres. Sitt seems to be holding fast to a portion of his acreage, but some of the families who’ve been running the amusements at Coney Island for decades will also be included in the redevelopment team. On the surface, this sounds like decent compromise because it suggests that Coney Island will remain a neighborhood zoned for amusement, with a patchwork of owners and a motley aesthetic, instead of being overtaken by a single, seamless, corporate theme park.  However, I’ve been hearing from my Coney Island connections that this is not a good deal at all, because the city is backpedaling on its commitment to reserving a core area of the neighborhood for amusements.  More details to come.
For more analysis and a helpful graphic treatment of the changes in the city’s plan, visit The Gowanus Lounge. And for background, you might want to read the Metropolis column I wrote about Coney Island around this time last year, End of the Line.

The Muji Almond House is Gary Panter’s answer to…

…the Glass House by Philip Johnson

I have posted about artist Gary Panter’s little houses before. But that was back on the now defunct House & Garden version* of the Itinerant Urbanist. (If you try to go to that URL what you get is a page welcoming former H&G readers to Domino Magazine which, in my opinion,  only adds insult to injury.) Anyway, I’m posting my favorite Panter house (and its conceptual cousin, my favorite Philip Johnson house) because, for the first time ever, all of Gary’s little houses are on public display. If you go to the Clementine Gallery right now you’ll find a big room full of Gary’s screamingly vivid paintings, hung on walls that the artist has generously drawn all over. If you keep going, you’ll find a backroom where several shelves are stocked with Gary’s outsider architecture.

And, yes, the big, new Gary Panter book is also available. And it features roughly a zillion paintings and drawings and a number of authoritative essays on art, plus an essay by yours truly about the little houses.

*I found a ghost version of the H&G Itinerant Urbanist, at least the posts from the final month or two. And someday I’ll turn the files I saved into a nice, online bootleg archive.

Panterville, USA.

The Ledner House, New Orleans, December 2006

Sounding suspiciously like an “acolyte of urbanist Jane Jacobs,” New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff today argues against a plan by St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village to demolish several of its buildings and replace them with luxury highrise apartments and a new hospital.

You know, it would be difficult for St. Vincent’s to build a more hideous set of buildings than those it currently owns. The Seventh Avenue intersection dominated by the hospital is perhaps the least appealing spot in the Greenwich Village. But there’s one exception: the O’Toole building, an example of oddball 1960s modernism by New Orleans architect Albert Ledner, also responsible for the much maligned dormitory tower that re-emerged a few years ago as the stylish Maritime Hotel.

I visited Ledner, now in his 80s, and his wife Judy, in late 2006, as they were finishing up the restoration of their idiosyncratic New Orleans home that had been, after Katrina, largely under water. And what I discovered was one of those quirky modernist architects who, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, has a passion for design that transforms structure into ornament. Ledner’s buildings, including his own house and backyard studio, are repositories of his ideas and inventions.

The Maritime Hotel and the building that St. Vincent’s wishes to demolish are the legacy of Ledner’s long tenure as the in-house architect of the National Maritime Union, and his attempts to find a modernist language that would somehow forge a connection between landlocked urban buildings and the sea. I haven’t been inside the O’Toole building, so I don’t know how much of Ledner’s unique style has survived the hospital’s renovations, but judging by what I’ve seen of Ledner’s work, I suspect we’re on the verge of losing an unsung treasure. It would be nice if St. Vincent’s could somehow rejigger its plans — using the O’Toole’s air rights while preserving the building — so that the building could find a new owner who would cherish and reuse it as Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson did the disused maritime dormitory.

For more on Albert Ledner, read Christopher Gray’s Streetscapes column from last November, or my article on Ledner’s house (the Times did a nice slideshow). Or just take a look at the photos below:

Albert Ledner by the portion of the 17th St. Canal that runs behind his house. (The levee breach occurred a mile or two further north.)

Ledner’s backyard studio. (Its big windows were blown out by Katrina’s winds and, at the time of my visit, hadn’t been replaced.)

The studio’s innovative poured concrete ceiling.

The unusual spoke-and-hub structure supporting the Ledners’ roof.

It’s been a turbulent week in the life of New York’s major development schemes. Last night, I was sitting at a long table at the Strand with Phillip Lopate and Ben Katchor, waiting for a panel discussion on the legacy of Jane Jacobs* to begin. However, our moderator, Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, was running late. When he arrived, he explained that he was delayed because the Dolans, the family that controls Madison Square Garden, which sits atop Pennsylvania Station, had just pulled out of the complex deal to build a new Moynihan Station.

For the details on this saga, I’ll refer you to the New York Times‘ ace reporter, Charles Bagli.

For my own point of view, I’ll refer you to a column I wrote for the December 2007 issue of Metropolis, “Madison Square Station?”

Here’s the salient paragraph from my December column:

Long ago, Senator Moynihan secured funding to pay for a $900 million project. It is now projected to cost upward of $14 billion. And the development rights have been awarded to a pair of large private developers, a joint venture between Steven Roth’s Vornado Realty Trust, owner of much of the property surrounding the project site, and Stephen M. Ross’s Related Companies, developer of the Time Warner Center. The entity is known formally as the Venture and informally as the “Two Steves.” The fact that a civic project has become a vehicle for commercial interests is clearly a sign of the times. Or as Maura Moynihan put it, “The public sector can’t do it anymore: this is America.”

“The public sector can’t do it anymore: this is America.” Right.

I’m not angry at the Dolans for deciding not to move Madison Square Garden, thus upending a $14 billion dollar mega-development. I’m angry at the city, the state, and the country for turning an elegant civic project into an overstuffed commercial scheme, a nice roast chicken into a grotesque turducken. Unlike Moynihan’s original vision, the plan that apparently collapsed yesterday was at the mercy, not just of the Dolans, but of Wall Street, the credit markets, and shaky projections for economic growth. It collapsed under its own weight.

Maybe after the ‘08 elections we’ll have a public sector again. If so, can we please just build a train station?

*I have heard it said — even by my fellow panelists last night — that Jane Jacobs is to blame our inability to plan and execute major developments, that her anti-planning philosophy has somehow rendered us impotent. I don’t buy it. Surely one dead public intellectual can’t be to blame for the Moynihan Station imbroglio. And I don’t see any sign of impotence here, just a surfeit of BSDs.

Actually, I’m not singing the blues. Yes, the Murphy/Jahn buildings shown in the renderings that developer Tishman Speyer is circulating, representing the winning bid for the air rights above Manhattan’s westside railyards, are bombastic in that special 1970s way. But they’re not really buildings. They’re conceptual place holders. Another firm might have drawn up more pleasing, stylishly twisty, au courant place holders, but it wouldn’t matter.

It’s hard to know, given the current economic picture, when and if the big office towers would get built. How they wind up looking will surely be determined by economic conditions and architectural fashion at some later date.

The thing that’s worth examining right now is the landscaping. Specifically the way the new neighborhood that sits atop the deck over the railyards connects to the rest of Manhattan. The problem with many plans for this site, going back to the 1990s, is that the whole development is, like the old World Trade Center (to which the Tishman Speyer scheme bears an unfortunate resemblance), jacked up above street level, isolating it from the surrounding city. So I think it’s encouraging that landscape architect Peter Walker (or maybe master planner Cooper Robertson, of Battery Park City fame) has thought to include the “New York Steps (shown above):”

Descending down from the Forum, the New York Steps, a contemporary reinterpretation of the Spanish Steps in Rome, provide landscaped seating terraces with views of the gardens, parks, and the river beyond.

At least the development will be properly connected to the Hudson River waterfront,* an obvious linkage that was totally overlooked in the design of the nearby Javits Center. However, I can’t tell from the renderings on the Tishman Speyer website whether the connections to the north, south, and east are as well thought out, and honestly, I think that those are the sort of design elements that it makes sense to critique at this juncture. How friendly the railyards district is to the pedestrian and the mass transit rider will do more to make or break it as a viable urban place than how the big towers will eventually look on the skyline.

*You know, the rendering shows the steps leading to a southbound avenue. So Hudson River Park access might be my own overly optimistic addition to the plan.

Back in 2005, I wrote a Metropolis column called, “Oh, Brooklyn, My Brooklyn” in which I outlined the difficulties of being a advocate of innovative architecture when there were developers like Bruce Ratner and projects like Atlantic Yards. In that piece I concluded:

First thing in the morning I am not an architecture critic—I am a Brooklynite. And I wake up with the local’s mantra running through my head: “May the bubble burst before they get a chance to build.”

And, wouldn’t you know it? It has. This is not exactly news. The intrepid little Brooklyn Paper has been reporting for weeks that the wheels are falling off Ratner’s wagon. (Check out this story!) But now that Charles Bagli has said it in The Paper of Record, it must be true.

Once again, I say what I’ve been saying all along, that the biggest problem with the scheme is not the scale (too big!) or the urban plan (superblocks!), but the way the deal was conceived and done. New York City neighborhoods are not supposed to emerge from backroom deals between guys like Marty and Bruce. The city (in conjunction with the state, which owns the railyards) should have, with community involvement, drawn up a master plan for the area and chosen a group of developers by issuing an official Request for Proposals. Once the railyards were decked over (and, yeah, they would have had to come up with a funding mechanism), the individual developers could have come in and built their pieces of the neighborhood over time as the market and their resources allowed. (Even Dan Doctoroff finally acknowledged that the process was flawed as he departed his job as Deputy Mayor in December.)

Instead, we’re stuck with the ruins of one developer’s unrealistically immense vision. All because Marty and Bruce took a shortcut.

Meanwhile, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is mourning the demise of Gehry’s “gesamtkunstwerk.” Now that Gehry can’t build all his buildings at once, now that Miss Brooklyn, the office tower without a tenant, will take a back seat to the basketball arena, Ouroussoff is suggesting that Gehry pack up his napkin sketches, his cardboard boxes and his computer modeling software and go home. Well, Ouroussoff isn’t exactly the first to argue that it would be better for Gehry’s reputation if he extracts himself from a bad situation. Author Jonathan Lethem made a more convincing case for an exit strategy back in ‘06.

But the thing that really gets me is the naive hero-worship embedded in Ouroussoff worldview (or should I say weltanshauung?):

If large-scale development is unavoidable, why not enlist serious talents like Mr. Gehry to come up with an alternative to the bottom-line proposals that have been the accepted norm for decades? Finally a big developer had turned to a legitimate architectural hero for help, rather than the usual corporate hacks.

Finally? Has he not noticed that architectural heroes have become the new corporate hacks? That’s what happened here post-9-11. That’s what developers learned during the whole “public” process in which a plan for Ground Zero was chosen. Flashy architectural renderings made people happy. Starchitecture was the new way to package big development schemes, to sell bad plans to good people. Gehry was not Ratner’s architect. He was Ratner’s marketing tool.* Gehry should have recognized that long ago. And Ouroussoff should have, too.

That said, come to the Strand on Thursday night, March 27, from 7-8:30, where Ben Katchor, Phillip Lopate and I will be discussing Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York. Will Atlantic Yards come up? I don’t know. It just might.

(And read my latest Metropolis column in which modern architecture comes to Santa Fe.)

Also, for more thorough analysis of the Bagli and Ouroussoff articles, check out Develop Don’t Destroy, and Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report.

*If you don’t believe me, just read Bagli:

In another indication of the problems facing the project, Forest City recently sent a letter signed by the project’s celebrity architect, Frank Gehry, to chief executives of many of the city’s biggest corporations, inviting them to become a tenant in the “centerpiece of the project,” Miss Brooklyn. It was originally scheduled to be completed in July 2009.

A sample of the Sheikh Zayed skyline.

You know what Dubai looks like, right? It’s one big construction site, with a zillion Manhattan-sized skyscrapers going up at once. The photo above, a stretch of the main drag, Sheikh Zayed Road, as seen from the pool deck of my hotel, is a fair sample. Multiply the newly constructed towers in the photo by, oh, a thousand and you might begin to imagine the scale of development there.

After five days of running around the city (well, actually, riding in taxis), interviewing architects and developers who would speak casually about their plans for new sections of town that will someday be home to a million or more, I came to a new appreciation of the term “mind-boggling.” By my last evening in Dubai, I was convinced that no project as ambitious as Dubai had ever been undertaken in human history, but for all the intensive planning and all the bold architectural gestures, I wasn’t at all sure that the end result would be recognizable as a city.

And I began to wonder, what would Jane (no relation) Jacobs think of all this? What would Jane Jacobs do if she were here?

That first question is harder to answer than it might seem. Clearly she would hate much of the heedless tower-mania. But real the answer would depend on whether she regarded the contemporary, relatively sophisticated approach to mixed-use place-making as an improvement over the sterile environments churned out by the urban planners of the 1960s. And whether she thought that systematic place-making could ever result in authentic places being made. I’m not sure what J.J. would think because, to be quite honest, I’m not even sure what I think.

The answer to the second question, however, is obvious: What would Jane Jacobs do in Dubai? She would go for a walk.

And so I did. Looking out my hotel window, I’d noticed lots of people trekking to work in the morning, streaming out of the low rise neighborhood that was situated between the traffic-clogged swath of Sheikh Zayed Rd. and the Arabian Gulf. So, a bit before sunset on my last evening in town, I followed the homeward bound pedestrians into what turned out to be a vibrant, very real working class neighborhood, like one that you might find in any city (see below) and wondered if this rare enclave of ordinary life could weather the massive real estate boom going on all around it.

A street scene in a neighborhood called Al Satwa.

A view of Sheikh Zayed’s towers from lowrise Al Satwa.

Dubai vernacular.

Speaking of J.J.,  a Metropolis column I wrote in 2006 about The Death and Life of Great American Cities was included in a little compendium called Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York published by the Municipal Art Society and Princeton Architectural Press in conjunction with a Jane Jacobs exhibition.
The exhibition closed a month or so ago, but there’s an event coming up on March 27 at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan in which cartoonist and playwright Ben Katchor, essayist Philip Lopate and I discuss Jane Jacobs, New York, the future, and maybe even Dubai.

That’s Thursday March 27, 7-8:30 at the Strand (12th St. and Broadway).

Oh, and while I’m plugging, here are a few articles I’ve published recently:

May the Best Logo Win, in Salon.

The Thrill is Gone, in Metropolis.

San Francisco’s Eco-Evolution, in Travel + Leisure

Education City

I am spending my afternoon in the business class lounge at the Doha airport. It’s my own fault. I was supposed to be on a 9:45 flight to Dubai but I somehow imagined it was the 11:45 flight. My brain is clearly not at its best. And, so, here I am, making myself at home. Next flight: 17:45.

I’ve been in Doha since late Sunday night (or maybe very early Monday morning), mostly attending and speaking at a conference called Tasmeem (design in Arabic) Doha staged by a far flung branch of Virginia Commonwealth University. The event was held in a part of town known as Education City, a cluster of US university outposts (complete with a Starbucks) on a vast, campus — like the rest of Doha, it’s very much a work in progress — that’s being master-planned by architect Arata Isozaki.
I am too tired to blog coherently. I’m just going to attach a few photos and captions, and say more when I have the energy.

Isozaki building at Education City. Perhaps the nicest building in Doha.

Isozaki on the inside.

The wiggly towers of Doha.

A few of the 800 new towers, mostly non-wiggly, that are either under construction or planned for the near future. Why? Don’t know. This seems to be the “if we build it, they will come” school of planning.

In this morning’s email came a link from my friend Daisann to a blog post she’s written for the International Herald Tribune. Daisann lives in Hong Kong and she described her recent jaunt to Kuala Lumpur. The piece concerns the difficulties of finding a truly tacky souvenir in an increasingly self-conscious, status obsessed world. The thing that really got my attention, though, was that the person she was shopping for in K.L was me.
This is odd on a number of levels. First of all, I had roughly the same experience on my brief visit to K.L. a few years ago. I was in Malaysia mostly to spend time in Putrajaya, the nation’s built-from-scratch capital city, but managed a daytrip to the Petronas Towers. And all I got was a lousy shot glass (above). My diligent research reveals that souvenir shot glasses are one of the last redoubts of inspired cheesiness.

The second thing is that Daisann’s fruitless search for the obvious twin tower gift items — earrings and salt and pepper shakers — is an echo of one of my old obsessions: the dearth of suitable World Trade Center souvenirs. I’d been looking for a pair of WTC earrings pretty much since the buildings were completed. The last time I went to the top of the WTC, sometime in the late 1990s, I was amazed by the fact that not only had no one thought to manufacture earrings (or S&P shakers), but that most of the merchandise didn’t represent the buildings themselves, but rather the view from the top. We now forget that the WTC was not a universally beloved icon, and so the gift shop management didn’t think that the souvenir-buying public would want replicas. Instead, there were lots of Statue of Liberty snow globes and postcards of New York Harbor. 9-11, of course, changed that. Maybe one of those souvenir vendors who’ve set up shop near Ground Zero sells WTC earrings, but I tend to doubt it.

But the third thing, the truly strange thing, is that the real souvenir here is not the deeply tacky* item that Daisann eventually purchased for me, but the blog post. The image has replaced the object (Guy DeBord) and the private gesture has become public (Jean-Francois Lyotard). I’m having a disconcertingly 21st C. morning, one that calls for a third cup of coffee. However, even in a post-post-modern world, you have to be courteous (Mom). So:

Thank you so much for the beautiful cocktail forks, Daisann. I will use them with my Petronas Towers shot glasses. On my upcoming trip to Doha and Dubai, I will do my best to find you something equally nice.

Oh, just you wait.

*I mean tacky in a good way, not tacky in a bad way like those M&M Statues of Liberty below. I think we could organize a whole conference on the subject of souvenir aesthetics.

The $99,000 House by Murphy Mears Architects, Houston.

As unrealistic as I was told my house-hunting budget was, back when I was working on my book, The Perfect $100,000 House, that beguiling price-tag now seems to be in fashion. For example, there is the Philadelphia 100K house project that I wrote about in the January issue of Metropolis (although, to be honest, 100K is their construction budget; the actual selling price for completed townhouses will be in the low 200s).

And then there’s the house shown above by Murphy Mears Architects of Houston, one of five finalists in a $99,000 house competition sponsored by the city of Houston. The designs are supposed to be energy-efficient and generally green. This one has a roof designed to collect rainwater. (Thanks to ArchNewsNow for the link.)

And from Holly Odom of the Austin firm, Mark Odom Studio, I got the following email:

“I know Austin has its fair share of modern homes, which are getting greener by the day, but I don’t know of one that hits all points like this one: urban infill, an under $150K price tag and projected 5 star rating.” (See photo below.)

And three,* of course, constitutes a trend, although I don’t know that my book is responsible. I tend to believe that the rise of the green movement combined with the collapse of the residential real estate market is behind this renewed interest in enlightened modesty. And if that’s the case, the demise of the housing boom might turn out to be a good thing.

The $150,000 house by Mark Odom Studio, Austin.

*Actually, since the first of the year, I’ve been emailed several more houses in the same price range, but I don’t have pictures of all of them.