“The Vanishing City” is a great documentary about real estate in Manhattan over the last 30 years. It covers the changes in zoning laws, pushed by developers and adopted by politicians, which have turned New York into a city of “luxury”. Among other exposures, it casts light on the mayor’s plan to build a convention center in Willets Point, seizing via eminent domain laws the property of businesses employing 15,000 people.

Dec. 15, 8pm. The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South (E. 20th St.) Admission is free.

DeRosa was commenting on the possible irony that we had gathered to watch his film in a so-called “luxury condo” development. Eighty Metropolitan was built on the site of an old mustard factory in Williamsburg, and DeRosa said that he actually thought it was pretty tastefully done. Sure, it has a lap pool, but the building is only six stories, and it kind of resembles a factory in this old industrial neighborhood. Perhaps he was being diplomatic, but I found him sincere. His thoughts also closely resemble my own feelings about the building.

What he and Senko do have a problem with is “the city funding these changes”, and favoring the rich at the expense of the poor and middle-class. They set out to make the film because they noticed their own neighborhood changing, with locally-owned shops going out of business. “It was originally supposed to be a nostalgia piece,” DeRosa said. “But as we got deeper into it, we started learning things that really pissed us off.”

A common refrain from developers is that they are catering to the free market, and supplying a demand. “Well, if that’s true, then what’s city planning for?” asked DeRosa. “Our tax dollars are subsidizing these efforts which may eventually push us all out of our own city.” He was referring to the $500 million in annual tax abatements now granted to certain developers of high-priced residential and commercial property, a result of the shift in the 1970s toward accommodating businesses in the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). Although the film criticizes Bloomberg, his PlaNYC, and his conception of New York itself as a “luxury product,” it says he is only the latest NYC mayor to embrace this development philosophy, which unfairly targets working-class and lower-class neighborhoods for re-zoning.

Cities never stand still, nor should zoning.
—NYC Dept of City Planning

The Equitable Building sparked the first zoning law in NYC

The key to everything is zoning, a concept first introduced to New York City with the rise of the Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway. Built in 1915, the Equitable replaced a 7-story building that burned down in 1912, and the new construction dwarfed the old; at 40 stories, it rose over 500 feet in the air and each floor was built out to the full extent of the foundation, i.e., it had no “setbacks”, and cast a 7-acre shadow across the city.

Much like today, the city fathers viewed such development as progress. John Purroy Mitchel, the “Boy Mayor of New York”, personally laid the cornerstone of the Equitable’s foundation, the first time a mayor had done so for a building erected solely with private financing. In a short speech, he compared the building to the city itself, its owners to public servants. However, he seemed to already anticipate the public reaction to come. He congratulated the builders for “having, what I feel may possible be, the last of these cities within a city – but that is a problem for tomorrow.”

The Equitable set off a public outrage. People worried that such enormous towers would deprive the streets of light and air, making the city a dark and gloomy place. This led to the city’s first zoning ordinance, the Zoning Resolution of 1916, which limited not the height of buildings, but the amount of mass at certain heights – builders had to include setbacks which slimmed the buildings as they rose. These regulations spurred the design of Art Deco buildings like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

The zoning resolution was updated again in 1961, with provisions mandating parking lots and encouraging open spaces. This is the period when the modernist Robert Moses was advocating the leveling of neighborhoods and the construction of highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway. Jane Jacobs famously opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have connected the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges via an 8-lane elevated highway, displacing in the process some 2,000 families and 8,000 businesses.

Today the organization of the city depends on the involvement of its residents more than ever. As someone states in the film, the traditional process has been that “the board creates a plan, and then the community has to fight the plan.” It’s important to remember that the city will change no matter what. We can do nothing, and allow other forces to shape our city in their own image, or we can speak up and demand that the character of our neighborhoods be preserved in city planning.

The Junta will convene Thursday, September 9th, at 7:30pm

Film screening followed by discussion. 80 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn (near Wythe Ave), in the media room. Please bring your own ___. All are welcome.

Cities must change, but how exactly does that happen? What steps are necessary to ensure the change is constructive and positive? And how can we even achieve consensus on what constitutes constructive and positive change?

Everybody complains about how expensive the city is. Our film offering Thursday night will look at real estate development in Manhattan, and ask if maybe there hasn’t been a concerted effort to build the city up as “The City” – that wonderful place of imagination, where dreams and fortunes can be claimed. Isn’t Manhattan just turning into a playground for the wealthy? Or is Patti Smith wrong?

I highly recommend that you watch the trailer of “The Vanishing City” to get a sense of it. In an interesting coincidence, Tim Noah’s Slate series just began looking at the widening inequality gap in this country, pointing out that the US now has a greater disparity between its rich and poor than do Venezuela and Nicaragua. And I’m surely the only Lapham’s Quarterly subscriber here, but their Fall issue is called “The City“…

It all adds up to a fascinating conversation. See you Thursday.

For more on Thursday’s topic, see the most recent posts in this thread.

I’m been skeptical about those who are quick to attack the way a city is changing. I remember first visiting Prague in the mid-90s and then moving there a few years later and hearing from the beginning “oh, you should have been here X number of years ago, it used to be so much better”. When we are fond of a place we automatically want it to stay exactly the same. For those in Prague it was that special moment after Communism fell, when there was a decrepit, gray aspect to the city that hid a decadent and at times beautiful soul. The dated and decaying aspect of the city was something that was so refreshing for expats coming over from their version of the US, dominated by slick malls, not rife with coal smoke, not infested with spider-like prostitutes hovering on so many street corners. It felt different, exciting, edgy. Over time many of the gritty corner markets, where bent-backed babickas would hunt for a tiny savings on crusty onions or hairy carrots, became big international banks. We came to feel that the Prague that was ours was threatened and people were offended by the city changing. So while I understood why some of my friends lamented those changes, I felt that asking the city to not change, to not evolve, was unfair. And I actually found the changes exciting, watching business grow, checking out the better restaurants that took root—it felt better to me to celebrate, or at least dispassionately observe, these changes then just complain about them and parrot the line “you should have been here back when, it was way cooler.” Maybe it was in some ways, but what’re you gonna do?

I hate wading through the tourists on Times Square and would consider declining a free meal at some of the chain restaurants in the area because they are so annoying. But was NY better off with Times Square as a seedy, dangerous area? I can buy into the beatnik memories of Times Square being edgy and full of character, but I think it’s just a rose-tinted memory, not a way for a city to grow and thrive.

Similarly, I’m living in Williamsburg in a new construction building—am I somehow causing the demise of what makes that area special? In the same way I didn’t begrudge the bank replacing nasty market, I don’t think it’s a bad a thing for a new luxury building to replace a derelict warehouse. I was at a new beer garden by the BQE the other night, until recently a dilapidated gas station and now a thriving venue—is this a sign that Williamsburg isn’t what it used to be? Or that it’s becoming all that it can be? Sure, some artists are being priced out of Williamsburg, but they’re moving to Bushwick and other places nearby and I think those places will now thrive in a new and exciting way, in fact they already are.

I don’t think that we should accept any new development or a Starbucks/Duane Reade/Chase bank on every corner of our neighborhoods. I’m aware that there are sad results of neighborhoods changing. Whites moving up to Harlem are displacing black families that have lived in the area for generations—that’s not necessarily a good thing. I like the blog that Rindy posted about, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, and the faceless cafés that he mentioned, I love those kind of places, the anonymity they provide, and don’t want to see all of them vanish and become Starbucks. We shouldn’t shrug our shoulders and accept everything. But I feel often that it goes too far in the other way and we are automatically skeptical of changes.

When Rindy and I have discussed this particular Junta we have talked about how gentrification, urban change, could be seen as an analogy for changes and challenges to our own identities. How many times have we said “oh, so-and-so has changed so much?” Many times that change is for the worse—whether they’ve gotten rich and are now affected, or whether they had kids and are now boring—but the way I see it we should welcome change, not fear or attack it automatically, the question is in how we manage it, and the really interesting aspect of all of this is the gray area where change, growth, and development meet our desire to capture our lives and put them in a frame.

“The Vanishing City” is an upcoming documentary about New York’s real estate market leading up to the Great Recession of Our Time, which “exposes the real politic behind the alarming disappearance of New York’s beloved neighborhoods, the truth about its finance-dominated economy, and the myth of ‘inevitable change.’” It argues that the change over the last 30 years has not been natural but has been driven by policies favoring commercial and luxury development at the expense of affordable housing. In the process of driving out the middle and working classes, New York has lost some of the dynamism and grit that defined its identity.

“Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York” is a blog with much the same theme (it’s not clear if the blogger is involved in the film, although the film links to the blog). The writer worries that things ain’t what they used to be, that the city loses its character as the rents go higher, that art and love are trampled by the pursuit of money and things. This was where we read about Patti Smith’s comments about New York, that young artists should try Detroit instead… or Poughkeepsie.

I wonder if the city is vanishing, or if we are just allowing other people to determine what changes will happen. How can we empower ourselves to control the future of our city?

A principle issue is gentrification and the expanding of the luxury-condo style of living. Think of the changes that Bloomberg has been behind, like cookie-cutter newsstand structures that allow for standardized advertising spaces. Is it crazy to think that something so seemingly minor represents the suburbanization of the city, “turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich”?

Back at the end of 2008, Josh Cohen lead us through a history of the Downtown Scene and its removal from SoHo and the Lower East Side through city policies that favored cracking down on petty crime and making neighborhoods safe for tourists and Starbucks stores. The makeover of Times Square into Disneyland is a perfect example. We want to revisit this theme and discuss how it will affect New York’s standing as a premier global city in the decades to come, as well as lessons that can be applied to any city worldwide. For example, is it wise that Beijing and Shanghai relentlessly tear down slums and replace them with luxury condos that few can afford?

Jeremy is going to follow up on this and spearhead the topic. We’re looking to write a series of posts outlining the discussion, and everyone’s input is appreciated.

Patti recalled coming to New York without money, when it was “down and out,” and you could get a cheap apartment and “build a whole community of transvestites,” artists or writers, or whatever.

Today, she said, “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie… New York City has been taken away from you… So my advice is: Find a new city.”

Patti’s words picked up steam when the Huffington Post ran it, but the original source was a blog called “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York“. In both places, the item stirred a number of reader comments:

This is true only if you consider downtown Manhattan to be the horizon line for “the city,” which would be unfortunate. #

To “build a whole community of transvestites or artists or writers” is to start the gentrification process. This can be accomplished in the South Bronx or other places in the “outer boroughs.” #

The need to be close to the art scene in New York to get noticed is negated by the internet. We’re talking actual freedom here, not just slightly cheaper rent. #

If you’re good and you have talent you can make it here, no problem. #

Between the Guliani [sic] effect (although crime stats were already down before his mayoralty), Sex and the City, and the real estate boom, the city has become extremely homogenized and lost most of its soul. The newbies brought too many cars with them, and think it’s weird to talk to strangers. #

As I was following the links last week, I became wrapped up in this blog Vanishing New York. Before I knew it, I’d spent most of the morning reading the archives. The writer focuses on what was just touched on in that last comment: gentrification and what he calls the “yunnie” phenomenon – Young Urban Narcissists. Think Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Have you seen or read it again lately? Though it was set in the 80s, it doesn’t seem dated at all. You can see Bateman-style condos for sale all over the city.

Check out some more Vanishing New York, this is a great blog:

• American Psychos
• Post-Crash Revisionism
• Park Slopers Want Geisha Girl