Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (57 page)

Down the hill, a new community center is being constructed to serve the Polo Grounds Houses and its immediate neighbor to the north, the Rangel Houses. Hopper is happy with the results, saying, “We almost got it right this time. These towers-in-the parks that everyone hates give us some of the nicest opportunities.” I look around at the Polo Grounds towers, designed (if you could call it that) by Ballard Todd Associates, architects, in 1968. At thirty-one stories apiece, the four towers are the tallest in the NYCHA domain, serving an estimated population of 4,200. In spite
of their utter lack of distinction, I am not sure what, if anything, distinguishes them from a more desirable, middle-to-upper-middle-class downtown housing enclave such as Stuyvesant Town. When you walk around Stuyvesant Town, you see the same unrelieved façades of cheap brown brick, the same flat roofs, the same shadows cast by one high-rise on another in late afternoon. In fact, according to Hopper, Stuyvesant Town, Riverton, and other postwar private housing developments were actually built by NYCHA, which was subcontracted for the construction because of the agency's greater experience with these types of buildings. The main differences between Stuyvesant Town and a project such as the Polo Grounds Houses are not physical so much as tactical: the former has a much more elaborate security system (with a panopticon-like sentry hut perched in the middle), twice the rent, and more-stringent entry requirements than the latter.

Then what explains the stigma of public housing? How much of it can be assigned to the brick alone? Brick, after all, is a prestige material. True, I have seen white-brick housing projects that looked more benign than the dreary brown-brick ones, but can color alone be such a deciding factor? Structurally—if one were to make an X-ray of building types, their steel frames and ducts, their double-loaded corridors (i.e., apartments lining both sides of a central hallway), and even their floor plans—very little difference exists between project housing and subsidized middle-class housing. For that matter, there is very little structural difference between a project building and a luxury apartment tower. All New Yorkers who live in high-rises occupy roughly the same building, regardless of the price they pay. Different materials, you say? Only at an ornamental level, such as lobby marble. Space? Many costly studios and one-bedroom apartments are no roomier than those in the projects. So the main difference becomes service: doorman, concierge, elevator operator, housekeeping staff. If anything, the projects, constructed by strict government regulations, have been built better and have lasted longer than many luxury high-rises, with their thirty-year planned obsolescence.

The prevailing sociological wisdom has been that the low-income minority population that ended up in the projects had largely rural roots, so that they did not possess the background to adapt to high-rise housing, and therefore were especially hard on these buildings. I wonder. My suspicion
is that if the twelve-to-thirty-story projects had come equipped with doormen, concierges, swimming pools, and elevator men, the poor, even those on welfare, would have adapted smartly to their new circumstances. In any case, just as tenements were once demonized as being in themselves responsible for crime, prostitution, and a culture of poverty, so now high-rise projects are seen as the culprit. The tower-in-the-park projects were deemed enough of a failure nationwide that the 1968 Federal Housing Act even made it illegal for families with children to be placed any longer in high-rise project buildings, unless there were no other options available.

THE PERIOD THAT SAW the federal government's greatest investment in New York City's public housing began in 1965, under the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, and lasted ten years. After 1975 the federal government started to disengage from the construction of public housing. No funding has been available to build new public housing since the 1980s, when the last of the projects already in the federal pipeline were completed. But Congress, having defunded new public housing, has never managed to bring itself to delete from its budget the maintenance of preexisting projects. Inside that operating subsidy there exists some wiggle-room for improvements.

Len Hopper recommended that I speak to David Burney, the architectural director of NYCHA, to get his thoughts on upgrading the projects. Burney, thin, trim, good haircut and tie, looks like a wireless radio operator in a British World War II movie—unflappable and incurably decent. He grew up in London, and came over to the United States to work at Davis, Brody and Associates, but eventually became disenchanted with private-sector housing, and decided to work for NYCHA. Like Len Hopper, Burney appreciates the agency because it allows him to practice his profession while accomplishing some social good. (The Hasids say it takes only thirty-six good people to keep the world in balance. Sometimes I wonder why a place as accident-prone as New York does not simply fall apart, and then I meet these able idealists, and understand why.)

Burney maintains that the high-rise factor has been overplayed in accounting for public housing's image problems: “Above a certain height, ten stories
or so, New Yorkers aren't conscious anyway of how high the building they've just walked past goes up.” The continuity of the street-wall may be more critical than a building's height. If you had high-rise public housing that met the surrounding neighborhood in a typical street configuration, with adjoined buildings and ground-floor retail, it would help to remove the gawkiness of the projects. You might start by filling in some of that amorphous, empty space between towers with low-rise apartment buildings or “incubator” workshop spaces for residents to start small businesses.

Burney shows me architectural plans to put in more infill housing along the sidewalk perimeter of the Baruch Houses, in the Lower East Side. “We've got something of a street-wall here already,” he says, pointing to the drawing, “but the space leaks out. We want to put in townhouses there.” He envisions running streets through some superblocks. He is also eager to place more retail in housing developments. “Before, there was no incentive for NYCHA to do retail, because the agency couldn't keep the rentals. Every dollar had to go back to Washington. Now, as a result of recent deregulation, the high-performing housing authorities have more freedom to install retail. It's a way of generating revenue, so the agency has become interested.” You could invite in supermarkets and cineplexes, even a fancy bistro that could capitalize on the reverse-chic ambience of a projects address. Placing more retail in the projects would also lead inevitably to upgrading the areas around the shops, he says, because the storekeepers would expect a higher level of service and street design.

He would like to see NYCHA go into partnership with private developers, who could keep the income stream from the retail and help defray the costs for building more housing units. All that open space left standing in public housing developments represents “a fair amount of undeveloped land in pretty desirable neighborhoods.”

Burney is most enthusiastic about an ambitious five-year program he has been directing, to build community centers in housing developments. They offer the first opportunity in a while to enhance the architectural quality of the projects: budgeted around $59 million apiece, they break dramatically with the past's brick-box monotony, and are boldly handsome, gleaming with high-tech, shaped-steel curves. These award-winning recreation centers, featuring gyms and swimming pools, were made necessary by a spike in the teenager population. The elderly, the next anticipated
demographic bulge, will be served by construction of senior citizens' centers. There is also a ten-year plan to clean the brick façades of the projects, which may remove some of the stigmatizing grime.

But all these cosmetic improvements are, in a sense, a stopgap in lieu of what should take precedence: the construction of new public housing. In 2001 alone, the number of homeless people sleeping in shelters leapt 23 percent, the largest one-year increase since the city started keeping records in the 1970s. As the homeless problem has revived, it is also time we revived the dream of public housing. Whether it will occur again in our lifetime is the question: the federal government seems to have opted out of new public housing construction for good. But the political climate could change, and there is also the possibility that the city and state could undertake additional public housing, even without the federal govern-ment's involvement.

As it happens, the need for new public housing and for old housing developments to be more fully integrated into the city fabric have a common solution: infill on the Housing Authority's open land. David Burney points out that nobody else but NYCHA is doing low-income housing in the city at this moment, and NYCHA actually has the resources within its operating budget to build some new housing. All that has been lacking is political will—the leadership that can only start with the mayor and work its way down through his appointees. Meanwhile, Burney draws up his excellent plans.

When I look ahead at public housing's future in New York, I am staggered by the possibilities. If mistakes were made in the projects' design and execution—as everyone is so quick to agree—why couldn't these flaws one day be corrected? During the 1980s, the façades of many mundane, glass-box office buildings were given postmodernist makeovers to render them more attractive to the rental market. A dubious aesthetic practice, perhaps; but why couldn't the projects, too, be retrofitted someday? The projects. Their promise never stops beckoning. If New York, in the twenty-first century, can imagine its waterfront as a single zone, tantalizingly unfinished and therefore ripe for some master plan, why can it not also conceive of its public housing as an invaluable, decentralized galaxy comprising thousands of acres, each piece waiting to be polished and reset to shine within its larger Milky Way?

27 NORTH BROTHER ISLAND

W
E THINK OF NEW YORK CITY AS A FIVE
-
BOROUGH AMALGAM, BUT IT IS REALLY AN ARCHIPELAGO, MOST OF WHOSE ISLANDS ARE UNKNOWN EVEN TO the native New Yorker who has lived here all his life. Some, for instance Rikers Island and Wards Island, house city and state facilities; others, Liberty and Ellis Islands, have become national monuments; still others, such as Governors Island in New York Harbor, the privately owned Gardiner's Island, and the many nameless, mucky mounds in Jamaica Bay, hover in a continuous state of tantalizing potential, fantasy, and neglect, oddly unexploited by a metropolis otherwise so ruthlessly opportunistic in its land use.

In the nineteenth century these islands were often pressed into service as sites of exile and/or charity,
cordons sanitaires
where the criminal, the insane, the syphilitic, the tubercular, the orphaned, the destitute, the immigrant awaiting decision, were quarantined. Hart Island became a potter's field for the unknown dead. Rikers Island remains a prison.

To say that these unfortunates were tucked away like lepers, out of sight of polite society, would be inaccurate. Rather, the public charity institutions were often proudly displayed in the nineteenth century as the utopian arm of a mercantile metropolis, and even became part of the standard tour on the agenda for distinguished visitors passing through the city, such as Charles Dickens. Margaret Fuller, early feminist and member of the Transcendentalist circle, wrote an account in the
New-York Herald Tribune
about her visit to Bellevue Alms House, the Farm School, the Asylum for the Insane, and the Penitentiary on Blackwell's Island (later renamed Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island). Deploring the lack of either employment or instruction for the paupers, the wholesale supervision of the insane, the scrimped water and lack of hygiene in the penitentiary and farm school, Fuller concluded that “we longed and hoped for that genius, who shall teach how to make, of these establishments, places of rest and instruction, not degradation.” That genius never materialized, but the islands, for the most part, forfeited their social mission, as they were abandoned in turn.

WHEN JOHN WALDMAN, an ichthyologist with the Hudson River Foundation, invited me to join him and several others on an expedition to the deserted North and South Brother Islands, in the vicinity of Hell Gate, I leapt at the chance, not sure quite what to expect. I had come to know Waldman through his excellent book
Heartbeats in the Muck,
about the reviving environment of New York Harbor. He is a good-looking man in his forties, with silky, prematurely silvered hair, a scientist most at home in the outdoors. We gathered at the Chelsea Piers, by West 23rd Street and the Hudson, where two motorboats, one belonging to the Parks Department, one to the Hudson River Park Trust, were docked, waiting to transport our group.

The expedition's leader was Dr. Paul Kerlinger, an ornithologist and
consultant hired by the New York City Audubon Society to conduct population surveys of the birdlife in the harbor islands. The other three members worked for the Parks Department and the Urban Park Rangers. Now that the abandoned North Brother Island has come under the jurisdiction of the city's Parks Department, along with four other islands that constitute a Harbor Heron complex (South Brother, Shooter's, Prall's, and Island of Meadows), and declared a bird sanctuary, that agency is obliged to check on it from time to time. But Paul Kerlinger's bird count was the one serious bit of business that had to be accomplished on the day's expedition.