In This Issue:

– My Father Would Have Backed the Big Switch

– New Designs for Governors Island Envision Summers of Tomorrow There
– From the Editor: How to Walk and Talk at the Same Time

– Calendar


My Father Would Have Backed the Big Switch
More than a decade ago when the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was first seeking funding to improve the disaster that is Pennsylvania Station, certain colleagues told him that the cost was exorbitant.

To which my father would reply, “Money used for infrastructure isn’t spending; it’s investing.”

Thanks to his logic, political skills and will power (and his position as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee), Senator Moynihan secured the money, the approvals and the congressional legislation, all ready more than ten years ago. But the city and state dragged their feet, and precious time was lost.

However, when Sen. Moynihan conceived of the original plan to convert the Farley Post Office into a transit hub, there was no hope of ever moving Madison Square Garden off the grave of the old Penn Station.

Today the project has grown into something hitherto unimagined; two stations, Moynihan East and Moynihan West. Relief for every passenger on the LIRR, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak, who must endure the chaos and squalor of the present Penn Station, otherwise known as “the Pit.” The new plan means more public space for all citizens, an improved arena, and a vital first step in developing the fallow wasteland of midtown west.

Were my father alive today, I know that he would champion this new plan, and he would bring together the developers, preservationists and civic leaders together to make it work.

We do not have his guiding hand, but we have his vision, and thanks to our New York Senators and Representatives, we still have the funds he left to the city he so loved. And now we have a vigorous new team in Albany that wants to hear jackhammers. The Mayor’s office wants to hear them too. The Garden is willing to move. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: This chance will not come again!

Some preservationists and planners have questions about moving Madison Square Garden into the James A. Farley Post Office building. There are important issues to consider, such as how moving the Garden into the landmarked building will preserve its form and beauty, but let us not allow pre-emptive objections to stall this critical public works project. Let us not waste any more time, because we have no time to waste.

RPA recently held its annual Regional Assembly. It is always a lively and illuminating affair, but this year it conveyed urgency, because the theme was global warming. As I listened to Mayor Bloomberg and the other distinguished speakers present their data, I was relieved to see so many professionals taking Al Gore’s cause seriously. I was also alarmed – terrified is perhaps more accurate - to face the fact that we are lurching towards catastrophe if we don’t make changes. I was also gratified that the Mayor’s long term plan for climate change includes funding for Moynihan Station. We need to invest in more public transportation, in energy efficiency, in green technologies, not in ten years, not in five years, but right now.

We are entering a time of crisis on this planet. We are at war. We know that this is not the time to argue, nor is it a time to demand perfection from any project or any plan. Surely the people of New York have endured the indignity of the Pit long enough.

After the death of my father in 2003, I created the Friends of Moynihan Station, a citizens’ group dedicated to getting the station built. Our group includes preservationists, urban planners, transportation analysts and architects, and resides at Regional Plan Association. We do not want to see the architectural crimes of the past repeated; we want what our late Senator labored for: a public space that is beautiful, a train station that is functional, and a chance to reincarnate the late great Penn Station from what Lewis Mumford called a “cheap jukebox,” which chokes the space that was once as grand as the ancient Baths of Caracalla. Above all, we do not want to lose the one billion dollars of government funding that Senator Moynihan secured for this critical public works project in the city that he so loved, because we know this chance will never come again.

During a contentious meeting on the train station project in the mid 1990’s, Sen. Moynihan stood up, silenced the warring crowd, raised his arms and said, “Everyone must hold hands and come together.”

We can come together on this. We know it. Let’s do it, now. I believe that the people of New York, and their late Senator, deserve nothing less.
– Maura Moynihan, Senior Fellow, RPA


New Designs for Governors Island Envision Summers of Tomorrow There
Imagine a world park that brings together the spirit of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Or how about a green island where layers of nature and culture fuse into a new world to explore. Or a mollusk that makes the Island the center of a restored harbor ecology.

These are some of the high concepts and grand strategies on view at an exhibition that showcases the five finalists for a new comprehensive re-design of the island. The opening of the exhibition kicks off a 2007 summer season filled with concerts, theatre, historic tours, lectures and outdoor picnics. This enhanced set of public programs, starting with a family festival this Saturday, is sure to attract many visitors to what is still undiscovered country for many.

These early offerings provide a glimpse at the island’s promise as an important amenity for Lower Manhattan and the region, and a justification for the important work being done to re-imagine how the island could better fulfill this role.

It is these future summers that the five finalists of a park design competition are imagining in their entries. The winner – to be selected by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) upon the recommendation of an outside jury - will receive the contract to plan and then build the roughly 90 acres of parks and public spaces mandated for the island. Their designs are on display on the island and at the AIA – NY Center for Architecture; and subject of public forums on June 11th and June 20th. There are also special evening walking tours scheduled for June 21st and 27th.

The five competing teams (Field Operations/WilkinsonEyre Architects; Hargreaves Associates/Michael Maltzan Architecture; REX/ Michel Desvigne Paysagistes; West 8/Rogers Marvel Architects/Diller Scofidio + Renfro; and WRT/Weiss/Manfredi/Urban Strategies) have created a fantastic array of ideas and images for the Island.

All the razzle-and-dazzle is purposeful. The teams were specifically asked to produce the extraordinary: urban park as attraction, not just recreation. Once a winner is selected in July, there will be a year-plus process of producing an actual plan and running the details through various approval processes and inevitable technical and political compromises. The goal is to have park construction start in 2009.

But for that ground to be broken, the State and City will need to follow up with substantial capital and political commitments. Since the Coast Guard quit Governors Island in 1996, the island’s redevelopment has proceeded by fits and starts.

Under the terms of its by-laws, Governor Spitzer takes the reins of GIPEC this year. But this change in leadership should not mean a change in direction. The park design competition can be the first step in creating the amenity, identity, and access that will ultimately drive development decisions.

To make this new approach viable, the State must work with the City to make a substantial long-term commitment of capital funding to build the island’s 90 plus acres of parkland. The total capital cost for the parkland is estimated by GIPEC to be at least $200 million. The Mayor has proposed $37.5 million for fiscal year 2008. This capital commitment – if matched by the State - would clear the site, substantially improve public access in Summer 2008, and start preparing the island for parkland and other development.

Unfortunately, the State’s current budget includes only $20 million for fiscal year 2008. Matching the City’s current proposal is an essential commitment for securing developer interest and private capital down the road. After years of false starts, it is an essential step toward making the design competition more than a summer daydream.
–Robert Pirani, Executive Director, Governors Island Alliance.

[The Park at the Center of the World: Five Visions for Governors Island is at the Center for Architecture, 534 LaGuardia Place, two blocks south of Washington Square. Exhibit opens tonight, May 31st at 6 pm and runs through August 25th. A public forum is scheduled for May 11th (www.aiany.org). The teams will present their work on Wednesday, June 20 6-8 pm at the Fashion Institute of Technology (www.govisland.com). You can also see the proposed designs while taking part in special walking tours of the Island. The tours take place on June 21st and June 27th from 5 to 7 pm. See www.governorsislandalliance.org for details on the walking tours, family festival, as well as the complete summer schedule of weekend concerts and other activities. See Calendar below for more details.]


From the Editor: How to Walk and Talk at the Same Time
As the Internet has risen, so has New York City. Even as the quantity and velocity of information – sound, pictures and words – that can be shoved through a wire increases, so has the population, employment and financial muscle of New York City and its region.

It wasn’t supposed to work this way. With the advent of the Internet and computer, people could live anywhere they want to, the theory went. Architect Michael Pittas predicted in the June 1994 issue of Metropolis magazine that in a decade or two telecommuting would turn center city office districts into "dinosaurs" and "may be the prelude to the extinction of the modern office building as we know it."

Not the case. While some people do live on the beach and communicate via laptop with their offices, there has also been a big growth in classic central business district office employment.

It seems that the explosion of global commerce that the Internet has fueled – things like back offices or even front offices in India – has also fueled the need and productivity of people gathering together in an old-fashioned way – on the same street, in the same building, or at least in the same city.

So today is New York City’s time in the sun. Even as more and more people have access to things like Wifi and hi-speed Internet, so does the region proceed with things like another tunnel under the Hudson, the 2nd Avenue subway and the construction of a new Moynihan Station. We are expanding our communication systems even as we expand our transportation systems. In fact, the two compliment each other.

All this comes to mind because a while ago it hit me that communication is really a form of transportation. Cars, trains, planes and ships move people or things from one place to another. Telephones, the Internet, the postal service, radios, fax machines and other devices move words, numbers, images and sounds from one place to another.

Maybe that's why both are so crucial and transformative. While people use them for purely utilitarian means, both transportation and communication change the nature of places.

But they change places in ways that are difficult to predict. The telephone around 1900 was, according to MIT Professor Julian Beinart, supposed to save the family farm by connecting it better to the outside world. Instead, the telephone, if anything, accelerated the family farm's demise by accelerating commerce and large-scale industrialization that could brush aside a small family farm.

Streetcars and subways in the early 20th century were supposed to decongest urban centers like New York. Instead, big cities got even denser as train lines enabled even more people to swoosh in and out of work to and from new higher-rise buildings. And the car was supposed to bring people closer to nature. Only a few individuals foresaw that when everyone drove, the city would come to the country and nature would recede into the distance.

Transportation and communication are alike in other ways. Government is heavily involved in both. It originally set the operating systems for communication and transportation, be it Internet protocol or rules of the highway, even if companies like Verizon or Toyota carry out the actual construction. Government also does much of the basic research and infrastructure development on both fronts. If you study the development of either transportation or communication, you find yourself immersed in government research grants and agencies, ranging from the first federal Bureau of Public Roads in the 1880s, to the work of the defense department’s DARPA after World War II. Microsoft, Intel and Google built their fortunes by standing on the shoulders of government, as did transportation companies like Ford, Pan Am and Pennsylvania Railroad.

In recent decades, our communication systems have taken quantum leaps in their pace, range and capacity.

That's not the case with transportation today, at least in the United States. We still get around by car, truck, train, plane or ship at speeds and capacities that haven't improved much in half a century or more.

In the early 1930s, my late father drove between his hometown of Norfolk and the small resort town of Virginia Beach in a Ford Model A. It took him half an hour. Eighty years later, that same journey takes, well, half an hour, depending on traffic.

Better intercity train service hasn’t sped up such trips. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Even air travel is in many markets less robust than it used to be. For short hops now, you sometimes board a low-ceiling, propeller-driven plane that requires you to walk across an open runway, even in the rain. Soon, they'll be handing out goggles for open-cockpit seating.

Why hasn't transportation, like communication, kept on improving? Simple physics may be one reason. It’s more difficult to accelerate a physical object than an electrical impulse through a fiber optic cable. But leaving that aside, part of the reason is probably the shrinking involvement of government in research and advanced infrastructure construction. Oh, we still build plenty of roads and even some train lines. But government has shied from investing in magnetic-levitation trains or supersonic passenger planes – things that would really push the envelope of what is possible in transportation. That’s not the case in Western Europe and Asia.

Given how vital both communication and transportation are to virtually any field of endeavor, it pays to pay attention to both. On that, we are at least on solid footing.
– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Questions or comments on what’s in this issue? Send them to the editor of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall at alex@rpa.org

May 31, 6 to 8 p.m. (Exhibit continues to August 25th) Exhibit: Designs For Park Space, at the Center for Architecture, 534 LaGuardia Place, two blocks south of Washington Square. See www.aiany.org. The Park at the Center of the World: Five Visions for Governors Island. The proposals of the five landscape architecture and architecture teams selected to present their ideas for the future open spaces on the Island will be on display for the first time. On June 11 there will be a panel discussion of the designs at the Center (see below). Expert jurors for the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) will pick the winner in July. See aiany.org for more information. An identical exhibit of the five designs will be open on the Island from June 2 through September 2 in Building 110, to the right as you leave the ferry (govisland.com).

June 1, 8:00 to 11:00 a.m. Urban Conversations: Strengthening the Middle Class. Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy. Brian Lehrer, WNYC, moderator. Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, Second Floor. Free. LINK: newschool.edu/milano

June 2, 12:30 p.m. (Part of ongoing series through Sept. 2) CUNY Climate Change Science Lecture Series and Exhibition. Lecture at Pershing Hall and The CUNY exhibition is located in the eastern part of Building 110 on Governors Island, NY. Lecture by: George Hendrey, Queens College, Title: Gotham's Future Climate. Free. LINK for Ferry Schedule: govisland.com or more information contact Dr. Stephen Pekar at QCccasa@gmail.com

June 2, 12:30 to 4:00 p.m Governors Island Family Festival. Come celebrate the opening day with a Harbor-themed festival featuring children's theater, sea chanteys, making puppets, yo-yo artists, musicians, storytellers, face painting and more! Bring a picnic. There is only limited food available on the Island. The festival is sponsored by the Governors Island Alliance with the support of Councilman Alan Gerson. See governorsislandalliance.org for the complete lineup.

June 6, 8:00 a.m. to 12:35 p.m. Delivering the Goods: The Freight Needs of a Growing Population. Rudin Transportation Center. Kimmel Center, Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, New York University. Speakers include Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association. $50. LINK: wagner.nyu.edu/rudincenter/news/Freight_Registration_Brochure.pdf

June 8, 9:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. TDR Summit: Planning for Environmental Protection. University Inn and Conference Center at Rutgers, New Brunswick. The New Jersey State TDR Bank, in association with ANJEC, New Jersey Future, RPA, NJSLOM and the American Littoral Society, are holding a day-long summit to discuss how Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) can provide for resource protection while accommodating the need for appropriate growth. The summit will provide a unique opportunity for municipal officials, professional planners and environmental commission members to hear first-hand from the state officials, planners and members of the environmental community involved in carrying out TDR in New Jersey. Fee: $25. LINK: www.state.nj.us/agriculture/sadc/tdrsummit07.pdf

June 11, 6 to 8 p.m. Governors Island: Panel Discussion on Park Designs Center for Architecture, 534 LaGuardia Place. Panelists: Susannah Drake, Rogers Marvel Architecture, American Society of Landscape Architects of New York; Suzanne Wertz, Grunig, Wertz Associates and American Institute of Architects - New York Chapter; Robert Pirani, Governors Island Alliance and Robert Hammond, Friends of the High Line will comment on the five proposals from design teams vying to plan the Island's parkland. Introduction by GIPEC president Leslie Koch. (There will be another panel session after the winner is selected in mid-July.) See www.aiany.org.

June 15, 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Crest Hollow Country Club, 8325 Jericho Tpke., Woodbury, NY. Vision Long Island 2007 Smart Growth Awards, honoring: Robert Yaro, President of the Regional Plan Association; The Beechwood Organization & The Benjamin Companies for Arverne by the Sea in Rockaway Beach; Oak Street Plaza in Copaigue, in the Town of Babylon; Patrick Duggan, of the Nassau County Department of Economic Development; Four Star Variety Store in Northport, East Northport, and Farmingdale; The Peconic Land Trust for Preserving Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty, Historical Buildings, and Critical Environmental Areas; Suffolk Community College; Sustainable East End Development Strategies (SEEDS; The Village of Roslyn, Master Plan; Andreaus 13 of the Afrikan American Media Network; Bill Chaleff, of Chaleff & Ryan, Architects; Dr. David Sprintzen, of the Long Island Progressive Coalition. For more information, visit www.visionlongisland.org or call 631-261-0242.

June 20, 6 to 8 p.m. GIPEC Public Forum on Park Designs Fashion Institute of Technology, West 27th St. between 7th and 8th Avenues. Each of the five teams that responded to GIPEC's request for design proposals will present their ideas to the public for the first time. The public is invited - indeed, encouraged - to attend and speak up on the open microphone. The designs are an exciting variety of schematics for the Island's terrain and its waterfront. One team and its ideas - or perhaps a combination of ideas - will be selected by a jury this summer to guide the ultimate development of the Island's park space. See www.govisland.com.

June 21, 5 to 7 p.m. Park Design Walking Tours This special evening tour, repeated on June 27, will focus on the Island's public spaces, present and future. On June 21st the Tour will be led by Tupper Thomas, president of the Prospect Park Alliance, together with staff from the Governors Island Alliance and GIPEC. Open to the public. Pre-registration required: 212-253- 2727 x 317. See www.governorsislandalliance.org.

June 27, 5 to 7 p.m. Park Design Walking Tours This tour repeats the June 21 tour (above) but will be led by Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Open to the public. Pre-registration is required: 212-253-2727 x 317. See www.governorsislandalliance.org.

Saturdays in July: Folks on the Island!
A Governors Island Folk Festival: Every Saturday in July, 1:30 to 3 pm, enjoy concerts featuring the music of classic American folk artists, co-sponsored by the Governors Island Alliance, Trinity Church and WFUV. See www.folksontheisland.com.

Saturday, July 7: Odetta
Saturday, July 14: Richie Havens
Saturday, July 21: Harry Chapin, Celebration in Song
Saturday, July 28: Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway Music in the spirit of Woody Guthrie, featuring Jimmy LaFave, Eliza Gilkyson, Tom Russell, Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion, Gretchen Peters, Butch Hancock, Terri Hendrix and Ray Bonneville.