Rich Mintz  

In “Life in New York — Then and Now” (referenced by Urbanophile), John Podhoretz evocatively discusses how New York, and specifically the Upper West Side, has and has not changed over the past 40 years.

To those of us who came to live in the city in the last decade, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine the Upper West Side, and New York City generally, as Podhoretz (like Saul Bellow, and a parade of others) assures us it was: physically neglected and crumbling, the social fabric frayed, at times menacing to the point of anarchy. Neighborhoods that today are overrun with $900 strollers and yoga studios and some of the most expensive brownstone real estate in the city can be difficult to imagine otherwise. But it was not always this way, and the documentary evidence exists of how it used to be: in the Times, in contemporary news footage and in the photo archive of the Museum of the City of New York (seen in the current exhibit and in the “Lindsay Years” documentary recently shown on WNET), in the memories of three generations of people born between 1920 and 1980. All those people didn’t move to Westchester and Merrick (and, on the coast I grew up in, to Northridge and Anaheim and Walnut Creek) for nothing; they were searching for a place where they could be free of the weight of a place where (in their view) the social contract seemed to have broken down. I knew a family of Brooklyn refugees in the San Fernando Valley in my early childhood; they obviously longed for the sweet place they had known, but they longed for it with (as I inferred) the resolution of people who knew that, at least for now, it was gone.

Even I am old enough to have had experience of New York in its anarchic and menacing days, or at least the tail end of them, in the 1980s, when the chattering classes were unified in the sense that something had to change — that the old responses to the breakdown of the old ways weren’t going to work — but nobody was yet quite sure how to pull it off. When I first visited the city in 1982, the overwhelming impression was of a place where people had lost the daily experience of routine social order, though they never lost the hope of regaining it. A city where armed guards sit in the entranceways of college dormitories is a city that is gritting its teeth in the face of an onslaught it can’t quite marshal the resources to defeat, waiting for a savior to come along.

We all know what happened: the city bounced back, changed in some ways but not in others. Podhoretz seems pretty emphatic that all the changes are for the better; I’m not so sure. The corporatization and homogenization of the city have exacted their costs (most notably in pushing popular cultural activity out of the central core). But, re Podhoretz, what right have I to expect otherwise from someone who in childhood was serially mugged, grew up in a world where assault was routine, watched a generation of failed attempts to tame the chaos in his own neighborhood? If you’re the one being punched in the face and knocked to the ground, it’s hard to take the long view.

I’m on the train back from Philadelphia after a very short business trip (3 hours 10 minutes on the ground). I must say that based on what I’ve experienced in the dozen or so times I’ve visited it over the years, I love love love Philadelphia and am sure I could easily live there. The entire central core of the city seems more vibrant every time I visit, the arts scene is obviously great, there’s a friendliness toward and respect for tourists and flaneurs that you don’t see in Washington or New York — and you don’t seem to have to pay that inconvenience tax that we’ve got in New York, where everything is unnecessarily complicated and schleppy and you get home at the end of the day covered with a thin film of grease. It’s kind of like New York, but after an attitudectomy, and shrunken by 40%.

The parochialism would grate eventually (as it did when I lived in Atlanta, Washington, and for that matter San Francisco), but then in Philadelphia you’re so close to so many other interesting places, including New York, that I don’t think it would matter as much.

Coming later today: bonus pic of me on a park bench with Ben Franklin.

Here’s a map, via Ryan J. Davis’ blog and CitizeNYC, of exactly what’s going to happen when the V train goes away and the M train changes from brown to orange. (The map’s a little out of date, since if I recall correctly the MTA bowed to pressure and decided to use the much more historic designation of M for the train, and do away with the V — but the proposed routing didn’t change, just the name.)

Ryan points out that for many people in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Ridgewood, life will actually improve, because they’ll now have a one-train route into Manhattan.

I’ve just watched “Fresno: A City Reborn” all the way through. It’s a documentary commissioned (and “presented as a public service”) by the pioneering shopping mall architects/urban renewalists Victor Gruen Associates in 1968, and it’s at once fascinating and horrifying, given our 40 years of hindsight on these all-or-nothing redevelopment projects of the 1960s.

Fresno’s Fulton Mall pedestrianization project (which was originally planned to cover roughly a 20-square-block area) was the largest of its kind I’m aware of in any American city, and was hailed (in part by Gruen) as a transformative model. We all know what happened to those pedestrian malls, which were all the rage for about 10 years; their regravitation of their city centers was no match for the centrifugal force of suburbanization, and in any case (we know now) came too late. With very rare exceptions (like Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road and Santa Monica’s Third Street, both of which have been carefully curated and serve populations that include hundreds of thousands of strolling tourists), this kind of brutal pedestrianization has been a failure, at least on its own terms. (In contrast, more organic and porous pedestrianization and “auto diet” programs very often work well, like the new plazas along Broadway in Times and Herald Squares.) Only a force greater than urban renewal — namely, the organic reurbanization of America over the past fifteen or so years — has been able to start bringing the people back to places like these and reanimating them with some of the spirit they were originally intended to have.

This video is worth a watch if only to capture the sense of hopefulness in the narrator’s voice. There’s a wistfulness to the experience. Everyone was so sure this was going to solve everything! In Fresno, I can assure you (having stood on Fulton Mall myself roughly halfway through its current lifetime), it didn’t. Despite the blistering heat in the summer of 1986, I enjoyed my visit to Fresno, which had a sense of place and pride that was missing in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in; but it was in spite of, not because of, Fulton Mall. But oh, how I wanted to believe!

History and photos are on the excellent Downtown Association of Fresno Web site, which is also the source of the postcard photo you see above.

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I started this post on the Long Island Rail Road and finished it on the AirTrain. Yes, I’m on my way to JFK, and musing about infrastructure.

Accreted urban infrastructure (today’s, yesterday’s, Robert Moses’, and on and on back to whatever motley crew of Dutch and English filled in Lower Manhattan’s canals) is everywhere in New York. Indeed, metro NYC must benefit from the densest infrastructure (especially given its land area) of any settled place in human history, with the possible exception of London. And infrastructure is the single most important reason that New York, and especially Manhattan, remains such a desirable place to live and do business. Infrastructure is what makes Manhattan levels of density bearable in the first place, which in turn enables all the positive second-order social effects of such a dense environment.

And all that infrastructure is the result of hundreds or thousands of smart, forward-looking choices made over the past 300 years.

Consider the infrastructure I’m using right now: from where I live and work, I have my choice of two separate and mostly non-overlapping public transit pathways to JFK, and three or more to Newark Airport. All of of those routes will get me to their respective airports in about an hour, give or take; all cost about $12 or less. (Apparently, Google Maps’ transit planner isn’t yet aware of the Newark AirTrain; any human smart enough to make it to Newark Penn Station can probably do better than Google thinks.) We in New York take these things for granted, but they should not be taken for granted, as a visit to any place of comparable size with an “infrastructure gap” (like, for instance, Los Angeles, where I grew up) will make immediately clear to you.

Those smart choices didn’t happen by accident; in each case, someone decided that they were worth the pain and cost of planning, construction, ongoing operating subsidies perhaps forever. (Don’t discount the costs of coordination and promotion, either: the fact that I consider “A train to Penn Station; LIRR commuter rail to Jamaica; Port Authority dedicated rail to the terminal” as simply “the train to JFK” constitutes a marketing triumph by the Port Authority.) And each component of these systems took years, sometimes decades, to put in place. New York City has been extending and tinkering with the subway system more or less continuously for 106 years.

What are we going to need in 50 years? 100 years? We’d better get moving.

Now, if only someone would build a dedicated high-speed link to La Guardia Airport, we’d be in business. Then again, La Guardia is the most overtaxed (and the most convenient to the central core) of our three major airports, so it was probably smart policy to link to the others first.