Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (56 page)

For Baldwin, the culprit was the ghetto. Curiously, this was what the housing reformers and the slum clearance lobby had been saying all along: you have to tear down the ghettos. Baldwin, with his characteristic blend of brilliant laser acuity and apocalyptic generalization, had hit on a truth: public housing had become, in effect, the New Ghetto, as segregated and harsh as the old ghetto had been.

This same argument was later advanced by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton in their hard-hitting 1993 polemic,
American Apartheid:
“By 1970, after two decades of urban renewal, public housing projects in most large cities had become black reservations, highly segregated from the rest of society and characterized by extreme social isolation. The replacement of low-density slums with high-density towers of poor families also reduced the class diversity of the ghetto and brought about a geographical concentration of poverty that was previously unimaginable.”

So was this all that public housing had accomplished: to give hideous permanence to an ugly system of American apartheid? Twist the kaleidoscope another quarter-turn, and the picture becomes more complicated.

After all agreed the projects were a very bad idea, time went by and they remained standing and we were left with a more ambiguous understanding. We had to rethink our position: faced with the city's chronic
housing shortage, its inflated rents and homeless problem, the projects, which domicile three-quarters of a million people, began to seem not necessarily so bad, maybe even useful, certainly something we were grateful to have around. I shudder to think how New York would have coped without them.

In city after city, the federal government has torn down high-rise public housing, imploding the buildings with dynamite, as at Pruitt-Igoe Houses in St. Louis, and replacing them wherever possible with scattershot low-rise houses, under a special Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program called Project Hope 6. But not a single public housing building in New York City has been torn down. In fact, there are still long waiting lists, several hundred thousand people waiting to get into the city's public housing, and the turnover rate is lower than normal because the tenant population stays put longer. Whether they do so because they are happy with their accommodations or just resigned, given the even worse alternatives awaiting them, the fact remains that they are being sheltered adequately and sometimes more than adequately.

Whatever its aesthetic shortcomings or social stigmas, public housing in New York has proven to be, on the whole, a success. Why has the program worked better here than elsewhere? First, there already exists a culture of apartment towers in the city, so that less opprobrium attaches to high-rise projects. True, one might say the same for Chicago, which has a more troubled public housing record, but that leads to the second reason. New York has managed to keep the percentage of its tenants on public assistance down to 33 percent, largely because of its low turnover rate. (In Chicago the welfare figure is closer to 90 percent.) The Housing Authority has striven to maintain balanced demographics of one-third low-income workers (the “working poor”), one-third lower middle class (the latest rulings have lifted income ceilings, making it more possible for strivers to remain, if they so desire), and one-third welfare recipients. Advocacy groups for the homeless and the welfare poor have compassionately lobbied to open the public housing gates wider for these neediest cases. But there would be a downside were this to occur: those on welfare come with many more social problems—higher rates of drug addiction, criminal records, school truancy—so that you would not only be hurting the other housing tenants by allowing the projects to be overrun by families
on public assistance, you would not necessarily be doing a favor to those presently on welfare who have been allowed entry.

The third reason, I am told, is that the New York City Housing Authority is a much more capably run agency than the typical housing authority, offering not only better support services for its tenants, but a more sophisticated, enlightened viewpoint regarding its urban mission. I decided to test this hypothesis by talking to some officials at NYCHA, and getting their perspective on how the projects are functioning.

LEN HOPPER IS IN HIS LATE FIFTIES, of average height, paunchy and very friendly, with a snow-white mustache and beard. A native of Bayside, New York, where he still lives, he was trained as an architect and then fell in love with landscape design; he has spent most of his professional career at the New York City Housing Authority. A former president of the American Society of Landscape Architects, he is highly respected in his field, and is frequently asked to speak at conferences.

Hopper first has me see a slide show of recent NYCHA housing developments that have undergone improvements, then takes me around to the projects on the East River. We inspect the grounds, but do not go into any apartments, which would be an intrusion on the tenants' privacy. I am well aware that I am being given a guided tour slanted toward the positive, but this is precisely what I want.

At our first project, the Jacob Riis Houses, which runs along the river from East 6th to East 13th Streets, I feel I am trespassing. This reluctance to enter is partly brought on by the project's indefinite border, which refuses to behave like a normal street, so that crossing onto its grounds is like violating an invisible gate. In an odd way, it's like entering a college campus in an urban setting for the first time: buildings are strewn about, you're not sure you know how to navigate the public space, or, indeed, if it is public space. With the projects, an added caution arises from fear. But I don't show that to Hopper, I act gung-ho, laughing at the anecdote he tells me about out-of-town visitors who could not believe he was asking them to get out of the car and venture forth on foot. Sure enough, once inside the project's grounds I relax, and begin to see the housing development through Hopper's eyes, as a series of site-design problems.

In the Jacob Riis Houses, what had been a large, undifferentiated space at the heart of the projects, he tells me, has been subdivided into a number of areas with specific functions: playground, garden, lawn. “This space used to be so large and unbroken you could land a 747 jet on it,” Hopper remarks. During the mid-1970s, when New York was going through its fiscal crisis, the city had no money for maintenance or landscaping, and simply paved over everything with asphalt. All this anonymous, asphalted open space invited antisocial loitering and criminal behavior, such as drug deals, robberies, and violent assaults, which peaked during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Since then, the projects have become much safer overall. Not only have they benefited from the abatement of crack and a nationwide decrease in crime, but the housing authority has altered its thinking about how to make the spaces under its care more secure.

Spurring that transformation in thinking was a slender book that came out in 1972, Oscar Newman's
Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design.
Newman, a sociologist and a disciple of Jane Jacobs (hence his advocacy of informal surveillance by residents, and his distrust of undifferentiated open space), based his study of crime on the New York City Housing Authority projects, because their variety of spatial arrangements and building types made comparisons easier. Also, NYCHA wisely kept data tracking crime to specific locations: whenever a cluster of criminal incidents appeared at one site, it became possible to analyze the problem from a spatial standpoint, and ultimately, if possible, correct the situation through physical design adjustments. In a famous example, Newman showed how two projects only a few blocks apart, almost identical in acreage, density, and population characteristics, had strikingly different crime rates. The one with the lower crime rate was, for the most part, low-rise, like the Harlem River Houses, with its overall space divided into “smaller, more manageable zones,” and with its activity areas (including benches) located closer to the buildings, so that they could be placed more under the scrutiny of neighboring residents. Its building lobbies led to only a few apartments at a time, and everyone in a wing knew each other, making it easier to spot an unwanted intruder. By contrast, the project with greater crime rates was composed of high-rise slabs and “had the appearance of a large, monolithic project.” High-rises were more subject
to elevator crimes, particularly frightening for the defenseless victim, and inviting easy escapes by perpetrators through fire stairs.

Newman made many commonsense observations about sight lines, such as that circuitous paths and shrubs positioned at turns in the paths created visual barriers, giving criminals places to lie in wait. Such empirical observations led to a new specialty called CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), which has come to dominate the field—so much so, alas, that landscaping and architecture for public housing can sound at times like a subdivision of criminology. The good part about CPTED is that it gives a ready-made, pragmatic rationale for funding aesthetic improvements in a project and enhancing the residents' quality of life, through new gardens, playgrounds, child-care centers, and so on. Len Hopper came to work at NYCHA during a time when “defensible space” was the watchword, and he has sagaciously used that vocabulary to justify expenditures on amenities, while departing from Oscar Newman's recommendations when he disagrees.

For instance, he does not share Newman's fondness for fences, because their ubiquity promotes a police-state atmosphere. In the Jacob Riis Houses, Hopper shows me a green lawn cordoned off by a dauntingly high fence, imprisoning the grass, which only affords visual pleasure from between bars. He had tried to persuade the residents at least to install a fence five feet or lower, so that people could look over it and enjoy the view; but they chose the higher one, as residents often do, because it made them feel safer.

In Hopper's view, the best way to ensure that the grounds of a housing development will be safe is to get the residents involved, by giving them decision-making power and a hand in the renovations, to the point where they can take pride in their immediate environment. He tells me about vegetable and flower gardens tended lovingly by project dwellers; about community meetings on design issues that draw more than a hundred residents, where building models are moved about to offer various options; about teenagers paid to learn elementary drafting and construction work; and about volunteer mothers who take turns sitting in the lobby of a high-rise project tower, from where they can chat with incoming residents while keeping an eye out for strangers entering the grounds.

At the Riis Houses, he shows me an amphitheater that was built by
Paul Friedberg, a celebrated recreational architect, with funds from the Brooke Astor Foundation. Amphitheaters were all the rage a few decades ago, promising a renaissance of Greek tragedy and guerrilla theater troupes and community meetings in low-income neighborhoods; but these bare, concrete circles descending into a pit turned out to be awkward, dead spaces, used only a half-dozen times a year, if that, for performances. Relatively secluded in a lower quadrangle, the Riis Houses' amphitheater became a hangout for drug dealers, drawing rough customers from the surrounding slum and intimidating the project's residents, who were terrified of getting mugged if they came within fifty feet. The benches suffered physical damage and defacement with graffiti, and when funds became available to restore the amphitheater, it was also decided to rethink the site. A spray shower was added to the amphitheater's base, so that little kids could use it during the summer months; the steps and surrounding paths were modified to connect it more directly to the housing development, and trees, landscaping, and colored pavers were employed to soften the initial impression of concrete minimalism.

Quality-of-life improvements in the projects also issue from new technology. In the past, for instance, garbage was often stored in brown bags in the open, near where children played, and sanitation trucks would drive right into the playground areas to collect it. Worse, the garbage would draw foraging rats that ripped open the bags between collection days. The solution was to set up an enclosed area, with a row of garbage compactors that would keep the refuse contained inside and compress it eight times more. At another Lower East Side project, Hopper showed me one such operation: The city's sanitation truck hooked up to the garbage compactor and extracted the debris cleanly. These compacting machines did not come cheap: each cost $25,000, the set of four totaled $100,000, and the area had to be laid out properly, an additional $100,000. But the results—no more mountains of garbage, no more rats, and, given the compression, much less bulk to be transported by truck and added to dumps—made for an ecologically sound practice that private apartment houses would do well to emulate.

There is something profoundly moving to me about this patient effort to assess, inch by inch, the space of a housing development and put it to active, positive use, while at the same time redressing the misuses that have
cropped up through past mistakes. Until you actually see the gorgeous flower bushes and lush lanes of shade trees and tactfully placed outdoor seating in some of these projects, you might be forgiven for thinking that “public housing landscaping” was an oxymoron.

WE MAKE A TOUR of some public housing in Harlem, along the river, starting with the Harlem River Houses. By now I am attuned to certain grace notes I might not otherwise see: the beautiful glass brick staircase in the Rangel Houses, or the popular basketball courts of the East River Houses. Most intriguing of all are the Polo Ground Houses, around 157th Street and Harlem River Drive, which I had explored on my own, some months back, and found too drab to see as anything but the archetypal high-rise project (as well as a desecration of the old Polo Grounds baseball stadium). This time Hopper shows me the central court, another amphitheater, surrounded by stadium seating. The space looks complexly and convivially broken up, inviting you to wander each section. A metal trellis painted bright blue, red, and yellow, fabricated from elements similar to those of the play equipment, makes an exuberant, sporty logo for the project. Shade trees (“for vertical definition”) and lampposts hover over the more intimate benches and seats placed in the outer ring; brick-shaped concrete pavers (“for color and texture”) line the ground at an angle, like the brick path of an English garden; a spray shower anchors the amphithe-ater's base, ensuring summer use, and much has been done to enliven the open area (“to disperse forms”), to give it “a more human scale,” to lessen “the overbearing feeling of the tall towers,” and keep it from being “just an empty bowl.” (Not only am I seeing it through Hopper's eyes, I am processing it through his language.)