Where Old Bricks Go

For years, I have delighted in finding the debris of old buildings resurfacing along the shores of a local river like the remnants of some lost civilization. Over a century ago, the river was reengineered to change the course of the stream as part of a restoration project. Buildings along the river were demolished to create parkland, and the building materials from the demolition was used for fill to build up the new riverbanks. A hundred years of erosion is now bringing the broken bits of those old buildings back to light. 

I'm a NIMBY for Toxic Mortgages

I was awoken yesterday by a pre-dawn ATF raid on a house behind mine. My dogs started barking the alarm as men with rifles walked across the neighbor's yard and started looking over my fence. Three more men armed with rifles were spreading across the roofs of the attached houses behind mine. Soon they crossed my fence and were asking if they could search my basement for somebody who had fled as they arrived.

This was merely the boiling point for a problem that has been simmering with that house for a few years. Neighbors have been concerned about the squatters. There was an ebike battery fire in the driveway a few months ago. I watched a raccoon crawl inside through a taped over hole in the broken kitchen window earlier this year. The neighbors in the attached and immediately adjacent houses have legitimate concerns about life safety conditions.

The neighbors contacted local officials, hoping for assistance to ensure safe conditions for their homes, but there have been no apparent attempts to address the problems. And if the conditions at this house and the complacency of elected officials and government agencies aren't troubling enough, I have also grown concerned about the deep problems brewing for the economy when you look into the property ownership.

Our neighbors knew the elderly lady who lived there before she passed away a few years ago, and they have a copy of her reverse mortgage and her death certificate. They also knew her boarder, who continued to live there until he also passed away shortly later. After he died, strangers took up residence, so the neighbors contacted the bank as well as their local officials. Nothing happened.

As the house came up again in discussion periodically over the past few years, I would check on New York City's ACRIS system from time to time to see if anything about the ownership had changed. Sometimes it did. The reverse mortgage has been sold from one bank to another a couple times since the death of the reverse mortgage holder.

These banks are not selling the house to realize the profit from the reverse mortgage. Instead, it looks like the paperwork is being traded without any concern about the real value of the underlying asset. Even after my neighbors contacted the bank, nothing has been done to sell the property or manage it in any way. Spread across the city and more broadly throughout the nation, this type of fraudulent commodification of residential properties can result in deteroriated houses and the ultimate loss of housing stock in the midst of a serious generational housing crisis. It can create unprotected properties that can be taken over for criminal operations, like the house behind me. And it may be setting the stage for another market crash that could destroy the livelihoods of many families and destabilize communities, like the Great Recession of 2008 when the bubble of toxic mortgages burst.

I am obviously concerned about criminals running guns out of my own backyard. Now I am also concerned about financial institutions eroding communities and threatening our nation's economic stability. 

A Buried Building

Beginning in 2016, I have been finding architectural fragments in the Bronx River. Chunks of brick, concrete, and a bit of terra cotta occassionally fall into the riverbed as the bank gradually erodes. 

When the Bronx River Parkway was built in the 1920s, the river itself was redesigned as a restoration and beautification project that included the clearance of hundreds of buildings from the areas along the river. Apparently the rubble from some of those buildings was used as fill when they realigned the stream, and now, a century later, a little bit of it has gradually been resurfacing as the forces of nature take their turn reshaping the river.

Among the fragments I have stumbled upon are four pieces from the same terra cotta cornice that surfaced years apart, two of which fit with one another. They are enough to piece together the design of this band of the vanished building's facade. 

The Grand Cavern and the Back Corner

I got around to visiting the new Gilder Center by Studio Gang at the American Museum of Natural History last weekend, and it's visually stunning. It's a grand cavern, with stairs and stadium seating at the focal point. It's breathtaking. It's also a little heartbreaking.

Street Corner Campaign Stop

A campaign stop on a street corner is a politician's opportunity to connect with voters by speaking directly to them. When you draw a crowd, people walking by tend to stop to see what is happening. It is also an opportunity to produce images for campaign material, so the backdrop can make a difference in choosing the right corner.

In the Norwood neighborhood in The Bronx, one street corner stands out after a couple campaign stops:

It was great to be out in Norwood this morning with our dedicated team of volunteers! Looking forward to many more days like this as we work our way through every corner of our district. pic.twitter.com/Z0vRFIb00x

— Jessica Haller for NYC Council 2021 (@JessicaHaller) August 21, 2020

The mural creates a distinctive, identifiable place, while its bright colors lend positive energy to the scene. The wall without building entrances, combined with a relatively wide sidewalk, make it function well for drawing in a crowd to listen without blocking anyone.

Sitting on Public Stairs

They are a place to rest, to wait for someone you're meeting, to relax and watch the world go by. On a thriving city street, large public stairs are naturally filled with sitting people.

Steps at the New York Public Library https://maps.app.goo.gl/2mDZYiMqBh4AhmRH9

Steps at the Metropolitan Museum of Art https://maps.app.goo.gl/AUwfbgf6ENYpHErr5 

So when I see an image of a large staircase on a busy street with nobody sitting on it, something is wrong with the picture:

The Narrow Channel

This is the sort of project that makes people resentful of cyclists.

The bike channels installed on newly reconstructed step streets like this look like a useful upgrade to help cyclists who may have difficulty going around to power up the steep hills. A different design, however, could have been useful for more people, namely pedestrians with carts. 

People struggling to return home with their shopping can easily look at the money the City spent to rebuild their step street, consider the attention given to the needs of other people (the people with bicycles), and easily conclude that nobody cared about their ability to lug their basic necessities home. And they wouldn't really be wrong.

The Path of Restoration

Abandoned places in New York City are becoming increasingly rare. On a recent excursion with my son, I intended to go explore an abandoned place I hadn't visited for a few years. When we got there, I discovered that it had been reactivated.

The staircase down from the street had previously been walled off, but now the wall and the fence on top of it had been altered to reopen the stairs onto the sidewalk. The path that wraps around under the railroad tracks to the train station has been cleared and repaved. The vines that had covered the carved stone on the wall have been cleared off. A new fence closes off the train tracks, replacing the ruins of the old iron fence that had been broken and partially consumed by decades of tree growth. Construction debris that had previously been dumped in this area was gone and the place looks remarkably clean. We saw a couple people stroll or jog through enjoying the path and stairs while we were there.

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Bad Markings

This shared-use path becomes precariously narrow on the bridge over the Bronx River. It is barely wide enough to comfortably ride; forget trying to pass anybody else. The thing is, there is some residual roadway space that could be repurposed to fix this problem.

The path drops from a full 14-feet-wide shared-use path
right at the bridge

Policing Graffiti

When the police remove graffiti, it is not about beautifying the neighborhood. It is not even really about crime, either. It is about control.

It is remarkable how often the NYPD publicizes its graffiti cleanups, and troubling how disappointingly ugly the results often turn out. My first reaction is to feel like that is a petty complaint. They are volunteering their time, after all, to do something for the community, right? The thing is, what they are doing is trying to maintain their control over the neighborhood.

Graffiti is a crime and removing the traces of crime makes the neighborhood feel more safe, so the story goes. Often they will throw in the fear of gangs, too. Yet when they remove the graffiti, they often do not actually remove the traces of "crime."

Consider these photos recently tweeted by the NYPD:

Crudely covering over the tags leaves the walls with a mangy appearance. It is still "unsightly," and anybody who glances at it can plainly see that somebody's tags have been covered over. There is a two-part dynamic in these unsightly displays: it symbolically demonstrates the power of the police to remove competing claims to public space, and it preserves a sense of disorder that justifies the need for strong policing. Ugliness is a tool to produce fear, and the police use it to foster a sense of dependence on them for protection.

If there is any doubt that the effect is to exercise control, rather than to create an environment that communicates respect for the law, consider this tweet:

Cleaning up the neighborhood bit by bit. #graffitiremoval pic.twitter.com/s9vEpCwoot

— NYPD 5th Precinct (@NYPD5Pct) August 15, 2020

In both sets of photos, there were illegally parked NYPD vehicles blocking the fire hydrant and the crosswalk. What these images show is that they have little concern about the actual safety or appearance of the law. Instead, they just show that they removed a challenge to their power.

The NYPD has even gone as far as removing a legal mural when they did not like the way they were being portrayed. They called that censorship "broken windows policing," too.

So it really is not surprising that the "Blue Lives Matter" teenager who traveled across state lines to confront protesters, and murdered two of them, was out removing anti-police graffiti before he went on his killing spree.

Going Back to Work

Sure, there was the ridiculous "New York Is Dead Forever" article that came out this week everybody is hating on twitter, but Richard Florida is supposed to be an urban planning expert that people take seriously. So it was odd to see him announcing the demise of Midtown Manhattan:

1. Rebuilding the Central Business District (CBD):
My view is that the central business district like you see in Manhattan—the financial district, the Mid-Town Headquarters District—is a relic of the past. It’s kind of the last echo of the industrial age.

— Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida) August 16, 2020

It's hard to see what Florida could think was "industrial age" about Midtown Manhattan. Midtown was the epitome of the age of FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate). Its development was New York's coming of age as a post-industrial city. 

2. There is no reason that hundreds of thousands and millions of people need to get in cars and trains and busses and subways and commute a half hour, 45 minutes, an hour, 90 minutes each way to go to work

— Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida) August 16, 2020

There has long been a reason that so many people have continued to commute into Manhattan to work: it is a center of specialized work that draws on the entire metropolis to assemble teams with the necessary skill sets. Additional workers are drawn in by relatively higher wages to provide support services. As long as teamwork for specialized work relies on collaborative work spaces, and the workers have living preferences and family circumstances that disperse them across the metropolis, central locations with strong transportation access will continue to draw commuters.

Claim to the Sidewalk

Last night, the @placardabuse Twitter account posted an observation that a burning police van was parked on the sidewalk. It got me thinking. Streets are famously the contested spaces of protest and revolution, so it may be worth looking more closely at how those struggles are being fought within our public right-of-way. In the conflict over who controls our public space, there is a hierarchy within the streetscape driven by tactical considerations as well as the issue of who occupies the image of the street.

The first thing the NYPD seems to do when trying to "control" a protest is to keep the protesters out of the roadbeds. This has strategic aspects, as well as the potential for abuse.

Often this appeals to a traffic management justification. The transportation rationale implicitly prioritizes the movement of people cutting through the area in cars over anybody using the sidewalk, who becomes trapped on the overcrowded sidewalks. It sets the privileged minority who own cars in New York City above the majority who live car-free. It does also keep the roadways open for emergency vehicles to get through quickly.

Rapid responses may be critical to provide medical assistance for anybody who may be injured by a confrontation or stampeding from the crowd.  It also allows the police to mobilize their own resources, enabling them to respond with overwhelming force, both in terms of bodies and weaponry.

NYPD are keeping people on the sidewalk #GeorgeFloydProtest pic.twitter.com/uDSuCYhe9M

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) May 29, 2020

Former Mayor Giuliani once expressed this rather concisely:

I have a zero tolerance for riots. I, you know, took over a city that had two riots in four years and I had none. And they knew they couldn’t riot on me. And when I saw the people on the street in New York City, I said to myself, you’re breaking Giuliani’s rules. You don’t take my streets. You can have my sidewalks, but you don’t take my streets, because ambulances have to get through there, fire trucks have to get through there. People die when you crowd the streets of New York City with protesters. You can do plenty of protesting on the sidewalk.

As the statement by Giuliani shows, there is a hierarchy here between the "streets" and the "sidewalks." There is also a power of ownership ("my streets") at work here, and the protesters are merely allowed use of the lower status portion of the public space by those in power.

The Forbidden Forest

I assume all kids who grow up in neighborhoods on the edge of wooded areas live in a land with made-up names for places defined by childhood imagination and fears. We certainly did. There was the Pretty Forest, the Forbidden Forest, and the Beaver Pond.  Ironically, the engineered drainage stream that formed the spine of our childhood wanderings, and continued into town as a major landscape feature, had a real name.  That name was unknown to us and unneeded.  It was "The Creek," with a sense of primacy that needed no description to distinguish it from others.

The names were passed along among the kids.  We learned them from older siblings and friends, and younger kids picked up the usage from us.  I don't know the origin of the name "Pretty Forest," which was the closest and most widely used of the wooded areas.  I guess it did look kind of pretty when you looked up at the sky through the trees, or when the leaves kind of, sort of changed color a bit in the fall.  The name "Forbidden Forest," on the other hand, seems to have arisen from parental prohibitions against going too far, and was almost certainly reinforced by the fear kids had about following the creek out of the woods into the open to get to the next thick stand of trees.

Not-So-Safe Streets

During the current global pandemic, there has been a precipitous drop in driving. Traffic has all but evaporated on New York City's streets. Meanwhile, sidewalks and parks are not providing enough space for people to walk for essential trips, including some basic exercise. Repurposing the residual street space for walking is an obvious solution, and one that is increasingly pursued in cities around the world. New York has been slow to follow, with the Mayor resisting the very idea until continuing to refuse to open streets became politically untenable. Under order of the Governor to do something, he initially opened a few random streets and posted lots of police officers on every block. Shortly thereafter, he pulled it, claiming the police costs were too high.

Public and political pressure continued to mount, expecially as examples continued to come in from other cities. Photo after photo of from other cities closing streets with simple barriers without a heavy police presence made it untenable to continue insisting that New York City was so unique that we could not open our streets too. Finally, another small number of short street segments were announced for an initial opening this past weekend.

The charitable way to greet this is that ... it's only a start. They risk making destinations of these streets with slow ramp-ups, though. You can have my street! pic.twitter.com/HQ03v3p4sJ

— Nicole Alone of Silent West Midtown 🌸🐿💐🌺🌹☔️🐥 (@nicolegelinas) May 1, 2020

The first day at the Oval only had a small hiccup. The barriers were placed at Reservoir Oval itself, stopping traffic after it had turned onto the inlet streets, with no good way to turn back around. When the street openings were announced with their mileages, I wondered why DOT had not taken credit for the additional mileage from those side streets. The day before the street opened, my 8-year-old son was even thinking out loud on his own about where the barriers would need to be placed for these streets. Just a couple hours after the Safe Street opening, the NYPD recognized and corrected the situation by bringing out additional barriers to intercept the drivers before turning onto those streets. Still, it was an inexplicable mistake for professionals to make.

The Oval seems to be working well as an open street today. pic.twitter.com/PjPjd1vc54

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) May 2, 2020

Minimum Width

During this time of social distancing due to COVID-19, many essential workers are traveling by bike, and others use them for their limited excursions outside for exercise. A bike ride on the nearly empty streets easily enables social distancing, and generally feels safe as long as you avoid the wider streets that seem to attract reckless speeding. Where the social distancing gets difficult is on the bridges.

Can't wait for @nycdot upgrades to the Harlem River Bridges. The Washington Bridge is inhumanely narrow! pic.twitter.com/DCXo7WPUiJ

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) March 1, 2016

Most of the bridge walkways are far too narrow, as though they've been treated as the space left over on the structures, which people who have been left out are permitted to use. These walkways have long been poor connections for cyclists, since it is technically illegal to actually ride over them. The regulations ostensibly address the concerns about cyclists sharing inadequate space with pedestrians, where a wobbly rider might accidentally jam their handlebar into somebody's ribs.  The narrow width takes on a new dimension when social distancing becomes a safety imperative. Any essential workers who rely on the bridges to get to their jobs are forced into unavoidable contact with others.

But what if they met the minimum recommended width for a shared-use path?  As it turns out, a width of 10 feet, plus a two-foot shoulder on each side, provides just enough space for people to maintain six feet of social-distancing, as long as they both stay to the sides.  Obviously, this would be a bare minimum for social-distancing purposes.  It does not account for people walking side-by-side, which may happen if people in the same household go out for some exercise.  At any real level of activity, it seriously curtails opportunities for cyclists to overtake pedestrians.  Additionally, it doesn't account for the larger distancing that is advisable for people working out.

In practice, the minimum recommended width is often treated more like an aspirational goal, and the shoulder space is often sacrificed on bridges.  If the precautions of social distancing become a more regular concern that will be taken into account in design, it would reinforce and perhaps expand an actual minimum width for shared-use paths.

An Alleyway and the Joker Stairs

In a dank alleyway, far beneath the metropolitan skyscrapers, there exists a temporal loop. A rich couple, having taken an ill-advised shortcut from the theatre to reality, are shot dead over and over, each time in slightly different variations but always with the same outcome.

Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities

On Halloween, I watched the new Joker movie at a cinema in The Bronx. There has been a lot of discussion locally about the influx of tourists to "the Joker stairs," but as an urban planner, I would have been scrutinizing the details of the newest version of Gotham City anyway. As I noted in a review of Imaginary Cities, the variations of Gotham over time show changes in the fears lurking in the dark places of our collective consciousness.

Joker almost entirely abandons any effort at developing a fictional Gotham City. With almost no alterations, it is unmistakably New York City. More precisely, it is the mythos of the "bad old days" of New York in the 1970s and 80s, complete with the 1981 garbage strike. Stylistically, it draws visual and acting cues from Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), a reference that is directly reinforced by Robert De Niro's character in the film. The details in the streetscape that were altered to recreate the appearance of New York in 1981, and even those that were missed, can be informative. The tagging on the subway and the porn titles on the theater marquees (channeling the Times Square's era of infamy) keep the sense of disorder palpable. Choosing this period was an effective way to capture the grit that has always defined Gotham in the comics and movies, something that has become more difficult as cities have been largely rebuilt into glossier places that are much safer. More importantly, it captures current anxieties about going back to the "bad old days."

The only significant real fictional change to New York's built form in this movie was the insertion of an alley into the old Deuce. Although it appears much of this may actually have been filmed at locations in Jersey City and Newark (places where commercial strips have not been as extensively redeveloped), there is no doubt this was a recreation of 42nd Street in the Time Square area. New York is not a city of alleyways, but the filmmakers revised the infamous streetscape of porn theaters to include one. As usual in dark urban fiction, an alley is a residual space where garbage collects and the retreating effects of society no longer reach. The opening sequence of the movie concludes in this lawless Gotham locale; we see the violent nature of this city as we get to know Arthur Fleck as a helpless victim before he transforms into the Joker. It is this attack that sets in motion the series of events that send Arthur spiraling out of control.

Arthur Fleck lying in the alley after he was attacked

Copyright Warner Bros.

Priority Sign Repair

On September 17th, the New York Post ran a story about an overhead bus lane sign that was covered in chewing gum. The sign had gradually been accumulating gum for years, but the media attention soon brought this to an end (at least for the moment).

Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked about the sign two days later. Then, sometime before the morning of September 23rd, a new sign was already installed.

Depending on whether DOT started processing a work order for the sign on the day of the initial news story, or the day the when the Mayor was asked about it, the replacement took a total of only 3-5 calendar days. With the weekend, that was a 1-3 business day response.

That is faster than stop signs are replaced in my neighborhood when somebody reports that a car knocked them down.

Please replace stop sign @NYC_DOT. Already > than 3 business days allowed by law. Thanks.
C1-1-1312649621
Cc @AndrewCohenNYC @MMViverito pic.twitter.com/1nTCHLEkSg

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) October 6, 2016

Barriers Against What?

There have been dire warnings recently that car manufacturers might try to exert their influence to take over city streets at the expense of pedestrians (again). A recent flare up followed the suggestion that some executives were considering the installation of gates at intersections to keep pedestrians from crossing against the light and interfering with autonomous vehicles. The backlash from urbanists was immediate: We should not repeat the mistakes of the past when cars were first introduced into cities. People should not be penned in on the sidewalks like cattle. Etc.

A couple of examples:

Pedestrians enclosed behind gates that only open so often.

Cities reordered to a potentially "antiseptic" level to accommodate self-driving cars.

This is what AV industry reps are telling the New York Times they envision.

Pretty alarming stuff 😱https://t.co/27brdgWAUa

— Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) August 2, 2019

An autonomous car is still a car, and they're still out to ruin our cities.

"One solution, suggested by an automotive industry official, is gates at each corner, which would periodically open to allow pedestrians to cross." https://t.co/dXeYwJjyxX

— Mark Bennett (@md_bennett) August 2, 2019

Caution is warranted, of course. The ability of autonomous cars to successfully navigate dense pedestrian areas is dubious, and some of the materials released by the auto industry have been outright frightening (see below). I agree with the need to be vigilant about the policies that may redesign our cities very quickly, setting new patterns that may hold for generations to come. In this case, though, it seems like a knee jerk response of the "if it's good for cars, it must be bad for pedestrians" variety. The idea surfaced, after all, as a solution to the potential problem of pedestrians interfering with the automated vehicles, which might become paralyzed if people deliberately walk in front of them, knowing that safety procedures designed to avoid injuring people will make them stop.

Ford Hub at the World Trade Center is not inspiring much confidence in @Ford's attention to pedestrian-vehicle interactions... pic.twitter.com/a5NexUexXd

— Urban Residue (@urbanresidue) February 15, 2017

Nonetheless, I am fairly optimistic that automated vehicles can be leveraged to transform the places we live for the better, and I see crossing gates as an acceptable tradeoff. Likely enough, they could become a welcome addition to our streetscape.

Programmed Out

Not long ago, I was at an event where a wealthy developer spoke for a few minutes to a group responsible for making public improvements in a local community. He proudly described how he had worked to "program every linear foot to make sure there was no space available for street vendors." This was expressed as though it was a self-evident truth that vendors along the curb would be a blight on the neighborhood.

I was horrified. The prospect of such complete design that it admitted no emergent activities sounded rigid and dull. Worse, it expressed a disdain toward the lower-income entrepreneurs whose daily labor anchors a vibrant street life in busy neighborhoods. While it is true that poorly regulated street vendors do sometimes contribute to sidewalk congestion in the densest areas, they also meet needs for cost and convenience that will surely be lacking in this man's new development.

I had little doubt that the intent of the design is to keep out both the working class businesses and the customers who would be attracted by their cost and convenience. This developer also mentioned racing his sail boat, and he was clearly building a neighborhood for the sort of people who can afford a yacht to go out sailing like him.

It is a vision of luxury that relies on exclusion for its sense of validation. It is a vision we should reject for New York City.

Who Do You Live With?

We were trying to explain the Census to our 7-year-old son. They want to make sure they count everybody, we said, so they send a questionnaire to every home. We have to fill it out and send it back.

"So they want to know everyone in our family?" he asked. We said yes. "Cheddar too?" Cheddar is our dog. No, the Census does not ask about pets... but shouldn't it?

Just the day before, I had gone to see a new doctor. They sent me an online form to complete in advance, and they wanted to know if I lived with any pets. On an individual level, there was a clear medical interest in pets. The data would also be invaluable on the larger scale of the Census.