In This Issue:

– On the Waterfront

– From the Editor: Slow Going

– Calendar


NOTE: Spotlight on the Region is shifting to a summer production schedule and will come out once a month in July and August, as opposed to bi-weekly. Enjoy your Summer!

On the Waterfront
Venture out to Hudson River Park’s Christopher Street pier in Manhattan on any sunny day and you’ll see evidence of the innate connection between people and the waterfront: the place is mobbed with sun-loving, bike-riding, music-listening, picnicking, recreating folks of all sorts. Chances are you’ll find many of them gazing off into that mysterious and captivating space where land gives way to water. Whatever the reason for this connection, the waterfront is a sure draw.

Hudson River Park is just one of a wave of new waterfront parks and public spaces being created all over the City – a high water mark for park development not seen since the days of Robert Moses. There are close to 700 acres of waterfront parks and public spaces in more than 50 projects now being planned or currently under construction throughout the city.

But these new public spaces are not parks as Moses might have understood them. Just take a trip to the park and environmental center at Stuyvesant Cove. The City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) owns it, yet it is maintained by a non-profit organization under contract to the City and funded in large part by revenues from an EDC-owned parking garage adjacent to the park. You might get to the Cove on the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, an island loop owned and maintained by five different city agencies. Right across the East River is the rapidly evolving Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront. Recent rezoning is ushering in towering residential towers whose developers are required to build and maintain public waterfront walkways and other open spaces. Some of these landowners are taking advantage of incentives to transfer ownership of these public spaces to the New York City Parks Department.

The rise of these partnerships is driven by both a changing political climate less tolerant of direct taxes and the extraordinary cost of the managing these spaces: waterfront parks are typically heavily used; in-water structures like piers and bulkheads require expensive repairs; the parks are long and narrow with sharply defined edges exposed to vehicle and foot traffic on one side and the harsh maritime conditions on the other. It costs about $135,000 an acre per year to manage waterfront public space, or about $100 million a year to take care of all the new spaces being created. Given past shortfalls in the general operating budget for parks, the City and parks advocates are turning to private partners to supply some of this money and management services. If done appropriately, this is a good thing.

But while partnerships with community-based non-profits and for-profit developers can add vitality, services, and funding to individual parks, they do not remove the responsibility of the City as a whole to provide for essential park services. While Mayor Bloomberg deserves much credit for increasing funding for parks in the last two budgets, still more will be needed to ensure that these spaces are maintained to an acceptable level and that public parks don’t evolve into private spaces.

Underlying any of these new funding arrangements is the fundamental partnership between a park and the public at large. The city’s parks and public spaces are at their best when they strive for Olmsted’s ideal of a democratic meeting space, open to all. A total dependence on private funding for park management will create a two-tier park system: quality spaces for those who can “pay to play,” and other, less desirable facilities, for those who cannot; potential new parks judged and designed not on their merits and/or the need for park services but on the park’s ability to generate its own funding.

The best and most direct way of achieving great parks throughout the city in an equitable fashion is by giving more authority to the Parks Department, the City agency that is ultimately held accountable for these public spaces; greater oversight to ensure that private developers fulfill their obligations; better guidance for the non-profit players and other agencies being asked to pitch in; and, most of all, a budget that meets the needs of the system, so that these partnerships add to rather than replace the City’s general responsibility.

We go into this analysis and recommendations in more detail in our recently released report, “On the Verge – Caring for New York City’s Emerging Waterfront Parks & Public Spaces.” The report is a first-ever accounting of the management implications of this city-wide expansion and it offers over a dozen recommendations for balancing public and private responsibilities along the waterfront. It is available at http://www.rpa.org/pdf/waterfrontparksreport.pdf.

– Robert Freudenberg, Associate Planner, and Robert Pirani, Director, Environmental Programs at Regional Plan Association.


From the Editor: Slow Going
It took four years to complete in 1904 the city’s first subway system, much of it hacked away using pick axes and mules.

It took less than a decade to complete in 1915 the central water line from the Catskill Mountains to New York City, a mammoth 92-mile aqueduct and tunnel system worthy of the Roman Empire.

It took just over a year to complete in 1930 the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world by far at the time, an intricately detailed structure of tiles and brick.

Today things generally take a lot longer, whether it’s the public or the private sector at work.

The first portion of the 2nd Avenue subway, which will be built using state-of-the–art tunnel-boring machines, will take six years to complete – if all goes well and enough money is found. Running from 96th Street on the Upper East Side to 63rd Street, it will have just three new stations, spaced every ten to 14 blocks.

Compare that to the city’s first subway line, the IRT, which ran from City Hall up to Grand Central, over to Times Square, and then up to 145th street. The IRT had 28 stations as well as local and express lines. And it was all built in just four years.

So just to make this contrast clear, the first phase of the 2nd Avenue subway in terms of track is a tenth the size of the original IRT and has three stations as opposed to 28. Yet it will take six years to complete as opposed to four for the much larger IRT. Why is this?

And I’m not just talking about subways. The city is taking much longer to finish its famous Third Water Tunnel, scheduled for completion in 2020, than either the Catskill or the Delaware aqueducts, which are much longer and run all the way from the mountains upstate.

Nor am I just looking at the public sector, which people habitually accuse of torpor. While the Empire State building went up in just over a year, the average two- to six-story apartment building, which are being constructed all around my home in Brooklyn, seems to take two or even three years to build. The new 52-story Bank of America tower at Bryant Park on 42nd Street will have taken four years to complete since its groundbreaking, if finished in 2008 as scheduled.

I’ve collected a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests that building times are much longer today, although you’d need some sort of comprehensive academic study to say so for sure. But if I’m right, it’s a strange phenomenon. We are richer and more technologically advanced than we were in olden days, which I think of as roughly before World War II. (Shoot, it took just eight years to build the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825.) Yet the richer we are, the longer things seem to take.

Almost every engineer or administrator I ask about this seems to agree that things do take longer today, but explanations vary. The usual suspect is environmental and regulatory review, but I’m not including that in my perspective. I’m just talking about actual construction time.

Tom Downs, CEO of the Eno Transportation Foundation and former head of Amtrak, had the interesting idea that our efforts to handle the complexity of big projects with advanced management systems actually end up slowing things down in the end.

“Computer design systems, flow chart systems, supply chain management, cash flow management, all create complexity,” Downs said. “In older times it was not just the labor that was cheap, so were the professional manager, engineer, and contractor. When problems arose, there were plenty of people to do the work around. Now there are systems that are like turning a battleship.”

This reminds me of something in journalism, where the shift away from lead type and hand-pasted photos seem to have actually increased the amount of time needed to produce and print a newspaper every day. At the newspaper I used to work for, this was evidenced by the earlier deadlines required for filing stories than in previous decades.

Perhaps though, slowness is not all bad. One engineer I spoke with suggested that taking longer at things may actually be a form of progress. We build things more safely now, and we have a longer and more thorough public review.

Meanwhile, the developing nations of Asia seem to be following a different model, one that resembles New York or Paris or London a hundred years ago. Beijing, for example, had only one subway line a generation ago. When the Olympics open in 2008, it will have five major subway lines and a total of ten are planned. In and around Shanghai, new, elevated freeways appear practically overnight and entire new sections of the city are approved and built in a matter of months. China has cheap labor, lots of foreign money, low environmental standards, low safety standards perhaps, and lots of pollution.

I think part of the answer is funding. If the funding stream for the 2nd Avenue subway were doubled, for example, could construction time be cut in half? If you add up all the personal time lost to individuals stuffed onto over crowed subways on the Lexington Avenue line, if you contemplated the dollar value of the new development that will spring from the East Side once the 2nd Avenue is completed, it would make sense to spend a lot more money sooner to make the subway happen more quickly.

Whatever the answer for today’s slowness, if indeed I’ve got this phenomenon right, I look forward to opinion from readers about whether this is true and if so, what to do about it.

–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

June 21, 6:30 to 8 p.m. Long Island Mayors’ and Supervisors’ Institute on Community Design Keynote Address, Alumni House, Adelphi University, 154 Cambridge Avenue, Garden City, NY 11530-0701, Directions: http://www.adelphi.edu/visitors/alumnihouse.php. Rohit T. Aggarwala, Director of New York City’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Institute. Mr. Aggarwala will provide one of the first presentations on the city’s PlaNYC 2030 initiative on Long Island and identify elements of the plan that will have a positive impact on the Island’s diverse communities.  A response panel will include Michael White, Executive Director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, and the Honorable Steve Bellone, Supervisor of the Town of Babylon. Mr. White will outline the sustainability plan that his board will be leading for the Island and Supervisor Bellone will describe the progressive green design implementation tools that his town has utilized at the municipal scale. The keynote will be followed by a reception, providing a unique opportunity to interact with the presenters as well as many of the elected officials who participated in this and last years Long Island Institutes. Open to the public.

The report from last year’s Institute can be downloaded at http://www.rpa.org/pdf/LIMSICD_FinalReport_LoRes.pdf.

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.