DONALD TRUMP & EVIL – A Post-Halloween / Election-Eve Story

Almost forty years ago, I owned a small house in the Greenwich “backcountry” just a few miles from the Westchester County Airport. One morning, I was talking on the phone with a friend whom I would see later in the day at an event he had organized in Miami. I was one of the speakers.

“Don’t you have to be at the airport?” he asked after a while.

I was very late, but luckily, this was before 9/11, and one could be on the plane within 10 minutes of arriving at the airport. And the roads between my house and the airport were sparsely settled.

I drove at ridiculous speeds along little winding roads. I was rushing down a narrow, twisting street on a steep hill when I saw a house out of the corner of my eye. “What was that?” I said to myself, out loud. “Someone evil lives there.” Continue reading

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My Comments at the Midtown South Social Equity and Music Festival

On the left: John Massengale protests the destruction of the neighborhood around Penn Station. On the right: Jane Jacobs and Philip Johnson protest the destruction of Penn Station. Video Below

FIFTY-ONE YEARS AGO, the Pennsylvania Railroad tragically tore down Pennsylvania Station. Not only is it the best building ever torn down in New York, but in the combined Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, we got the worst building in New York.

Today, the railroads, Mayor Adams, and Governor Hochul want to tear down the block to my right. The Governor represents the Real Estate State: they believe the biggest donors get to build the biggest buildings. Like Vornado and the Related Companies. Mayor Adams represents the City of Yes, which has 4,000 pages of zoning changes that say “yes” to Big Real Estate.

If you want to see what the new block will look like, just walk over to Hudson Yards, the poster child for the City of Yes. New York City taxpayers spent over $5 billion to help Steve Ross — or maybe Stephen Roth, I get them mixed up — build that pile of unsustainable glass towers that make you feel like you’re in Dubai, Mumbai, or Shanghai. Dubai-on-Hudson, they call it. Whatever you call it, it’s not New York.

These things matter. “We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us,” Winston Churchill famously said. It’s the most quoted line in architecture because it’s true. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists confirm this. Architecture matters.

Cities and the buildings and streets and squares that make them are among the greatest achievements of humanity. We want to pass them on to our descendants. We don’t want to pass on inhumanly-scaled, energy-hog glass towers that increase climate change and make the world worse now and in the future.

New Yorkers love New York City. Our city needs buildings like the one on this block, Music Street. The block houses hundreds of residents and thousands of workers. New Yorkers like Eugene Sinigliano and Steve Marshall live and work and work here. So I close with a quote I got from today’s organizer John Mudd. It’s my new favorite quote.

“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, or what aesthetic values we hold.” – David Harvey, Rebel Cities.

Video of short presentations by Layla Law-Gisiko, Eugene Sinigliano, George Calderaro, John Massengale, Tom Lurka, and Sam Turvey.
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With Rhetoric: The New York Apartment House

WHEN I was in graduate school, I was one of the editors of VIA IV: “Culture and the Social Vision.” I helped Robert A.M. Stern write New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890-1915. My summer job turned into a five-year journey.

It turned out that Bob thought it would be good, and a good test, for me to write the first draft of the article from notes he had made and source material his Columbia students had collected over the years in a New York housing seminar he taught.

It’s a short history of the New York apartment house, with a particular focus on duplex apartments and the courtyard building. Here’s a scan of the article.

VIA IV, CULTURE AND THE SOCIAL VISION – HEWITT,MA, KRACAUER,B, MASSENGALE,J, MCDONOUGH,M
1/1/1980, ASIN:B005XS6DE6, pp. 77-111, MIT Press & UPenn GSFA

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A Short Discussion of Residential Building Heights in New York City

NOTE: The following was written for the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Street Design, The Secret To Great Cities and Towns, where it will appear in a shorter version. This version still needs a little editing for its new context. Part 1 is another essay from Street Design, “Location, Location, Location, Location, Location, Location: Affordable Housing and Urban Form in Manhattan.”

The subject of height limits is relevant in any discussion of street design and urban design. While discussing East 70th Street, let’s briefly look at the planning regulations and building laws that contributed to the design of “the most beautiful block in New York.” The towers of the New York City skyline are world famous, but few stop to think that the tall towers were mainly office buildings. Until the 19th century, practicality limited buildings of all types to six or seven stories, because climbing to the top of taller buildings was too difficult as an everyday activity. By the 1870s, increasing use of safety elevators and steel-frame construction[1]* meant that new office buildings could be as tall as eight to ten stories. New Yorkers began to worry about the effect that tall residential buildings might have in residential neighborhoods.

Common law traditions suggested that homeowners had a right to the sunlight that would “naturally” reach their land.[2] Many residents of New York feared the shadows from tall buildings: in the 1880s they commissioned studies of “the high building question” and asked the city and the state to impose a moratorium on tall buildings. The New York State Legislature responded in 1885 with a bill limiting the heights of residential buildings in New York to 70 feet on side streets and narrow streets and 80 feet on avenues and wide streets.[3]

Interestingly, 70 feet was the same number ancient Rome used in the year 64 AD,[4] while Georges-Eugène Haussmann set lower height limits in Paris in 1859. Haussmannian boulevards 20 meters wide were lined with grand apartment houses 20 meters tall (65 ½ feet). Buildings on narrower streets were limited to 57 ½ feet.

A series of Tenement House Acts, building laws, and fire laws regulated the design and construction of residential buildings with multiple dwellings after 1867. With the rise of new technology and safety elevators, New York City raised residential building heights to 1½ times the street width or 150 feet, whichever was less (as mentioned above in “Height & Density: Quality & Quantity”). But not until thirty-one years after New York first limited the height of residential buildings, did the city famously pass America’s first zoning in 1916, similarly regulating non-residential buildings.

In other words, New York City controlled the height of residential buildings long before it passed zoning regulations that controlled the height of commercial buildings, which it allowed to be larger and bulkier. The old laws and regulations for residential buildings continued to apply until New York State passed the Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929.[5]

There were three primary reasons New York wanted height limits for residential buildings and neighborhoods that were lower than the limits for office buildings in business districts: for different fire-safety conditions; for more natural light and ventilation in the apartments and on the streets; and to maintain a visible and psychological connection to the street from the apartments. The last deserves more consideration today, when developers are mounting a strong attack on height limits.[6]

The 1929 Multiple Dwelling Law allowed one-hundred-and-fifty-foot towers on top of a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot base,[7] if the building lot was thirty-thousand square feet or bigger and the adjoining street was wide enough. After the stock market crash in the same year limited the development of new buildings in New York City, however, only a handful of the three-hundred-foot towers were ever built. The Great Depression, World War II, and the move to the suburbs that followed the war meant that few new luxury buildings were built until New York’s 1961 Zoning Resolution, which favored taller buildings with plazas on the street. Tower construction costs were too high for low-income buildings until post-war Modernism introduced bare-bones construction paid for by Federal funding that dictated “towers in the parks” in projects built by the New York City Housing Authority.[8]

The Multiple Dwelling Law did not limit the 300-foot towers to one-sided streets like Riverside Drive and Central Park South that face open spaces, but with one exception, all the towers were built on Central Park West, facing Manhattan’s largest park.[9] The four buildings on Central Park West all had twin towers above podiums that maintained the streetwall.[10] A Fifth Avenue association prevented the development of equally tall towers on the other side of Central Park [TKTK to be verified]. Today we can only guess that builders thought 300-foot towers wouldn’t sell on other wide-open streets like Riverside Drive.[11]

Residential buildings on smaller lots or narrower streets could be slightly higher than before 1929, but only if they included steep setbacks above the old height limits. The new buildings maintained the street wall and the cornice line of the street established by previous regulations at the same time they provided penthouse terraces and dramatic tops. Developers built several examples on Park Avenue, a street of luxury apartments that was also extra-wide. One example is at the end of the block of East 70th Street that we are discussing (720 Park Avenue, Figure 2.TKTK).

New York’s planners wanted to keep a visual connection to the street from the apartments and also wanted to give apartment dwellers at least a glimpse of the sky. Tall buildings on residential sixty-foot-wide side streets would have made the streets feel dark and enclosed, and keeping the distance between the street and the sky small minimized the sense of peering into the neighbors’ apartments across the street. Street trees screen from view the apartments across the way.

Apartment Hotels

Part of the impetus for the Multiple Dwelling Law was a widespread belief in New York that during the building boom of the 1920s, when new buildings were in great demand, developers took advantage of a loophole for apartment-hotel buildings. Apartment hotels could be taller, but the unwritten rule before 1929 was that they would be in business districts. The best examples were built in business areas on squares and wide streets.

Today, the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) wants to build to the sky in the most profitable locations in the city. REBNY is the most powerful donor and lobbying group in New York, and some of the super-luxury, supertall towers on the recently built Billionaire’s Row below Central Park are the most profitable buildings in the history of the city. REBNY has lobbied the Governor and state legislators to remove all height restrictions across the state. Of course there is no market in most of the state or even most of the city for expensive supertall towers. Despite the arguments they make to remove all height restrictions, the reasons are almost entirely about making a profit in a few already-expensive neighborhoods, not about housing supply or making New York City a better place to live.[12]

The largest of the new towers is 1,550 feet tall. Supertall towers like that drive land prices to new levels, and only the most expensive apartments can cover the land costs and the high price of tower construction. They steal sunlight in Central Park at all hours of the day towers and are symbols of conspicuous consumption and income inequality, visible from many parts of the city and even the suburbs.

[TKTK Caption]Figure 1.27: West 74th Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, looking towards Central Park. The rowhouses and the apartment house on the street were limited to ninety feet by the width of the street. But the San Remo apartment house on Central Park West, seen at the end of the block, followed the 1929 regulations. [TKTK end of caption]

[1] [TKTK this is an asterisk FOOTNOTE] * Before steel frame construction, “tall” buildings had load-bearing masonry walls that held up the building and everything in it. The taller a building was, the thicker the walls needed to be on the lower levels. The thickness of the wall on the lower floors became a limiting factor in construction.

[2] See Michael R. Montgomery, “Keeping the Tenants Down: Height Restrictions and Manhattan’s Tenement House System, 1885–1930,” Cato Journal, vol. 22(3): 502-3, https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/cato/v22n3/cato_v22n3mom01.pdf. Montgomery, op cit, . Montgomery’s article for the Libertarian Cato Institute takes the position that all zoning is restrictive, raising costs and lowering supply. He ignores that in a normal market, tall buildings increase land costs and construction costs, the two most important factors in the cost of any new building. Montgomery also states that more apartments would have lowered costs throughout the history of New York, but he provides no proof.

[3] J. Ford, Slums and Housing (with Special Reference to New York City): History, Conditions, Policy (Harvard, 1936): 502-503.

[4] S.B. Landau and C.W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913 (Yale, 1996): 112.

[5] For the New York State Multiple Dwelling Law, see https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.ar53650689&view=1up&seq=6.

[6] In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul asked the New York State Legislature to remove height limits on new building across the state. See “URGENT: Hochul Plan to Lift Residential Density Limit in NYC Advances to State Budget; Write Legislators in Opposition TODAY!,” Village Preservation, February 7, 2022, https://nylandmarks.org/news/budget-victory-stops-state-from-lifting-12-far-ca/ and “Budget Victory Stops State From Lifting 12 FAR CAP,” The New York Landmarks Committee, https://nylandmarks.org/news/budget-victory-stops-state-from-lifting-12-far-ca/.

[7] In practice, there was room to modify the formula. The base of the San Remo is taller than fifteen stories, because terraces and setbacks crown the podium. The towers were ten stories tall, but elaborate, uninhabited tops made the buildings taller than 300 feet. After the 1961 Zoning Resolution, the tops were converted to penthouse apartments.

[8] Until Federal Title I funding authorized by the Slum Clearance Act required Robert Moses to build Modern towers, Moses preferred traditional low- and mid-rise buildings. But Moses embraced the Title I funding that enabled his urban renewal plans in New York City. TKTK link to Washington Square South.

[9] The only other 300-foot-tall apartment building enabled by the Multiple Dwelling Law was the River House, which stood on the East River with its own dock before Robert Moses built the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive. Built in 1931, the building went into foreclosure 10 years later: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_House_(New_York_City). The River House was not an apartment hotel, even though it included the River Club in the base of the building on the river side. Two notable apartment hotels built before the Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929 were the Master Building on Riverside Drive, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Apartments, and One Fifth Avenue, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fifth_Avenue_(Manhattan).

[10] The twin-tower apartment houses were the Century, the Majestic, the San Remo, and the Eldorado. Architect Emery Roth designed the latter two, as well as another apartment building on Central Park West that was taller than 150 feet. That was the Beresford, completed in 1929. The history of the Beresford is murky, however. It was apparently owned by a notoriously corrupt bank that went bankrupt in 1931. It is too tall to have been built as an apartment house, and there is no record that it was approved as an apartment hotel. It is the type of 1920s residential construction that led to the Multiple Dwelling Law. For the history of the Beresford, see Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes/The San Remo; 400-Foot-High Twin Towers of Central Park West,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/19/realestate/streetscapes-the-san-remo-400-foot-high-twin-towers-of-central-park-west.html. For Emery Roth’s buildings on Centeral Park West, also see Paul Goldberger, “Design Notebook,” New York Times, February 16, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/16/archives/design-notebook-emery-roth-dominated-the-age-of-apartment-buildings.html.

[11] The Master Building on Riverside Drive (footnote TKTK above) was a genuine apartment hotel, built in 1926-27 by the artist Nicholas Roerich with artist studios, all with small pantries rather than kitchens. Between 1929 and 1961, however, most apartment construction consisted of rehabbing luxury buildings. Insurance companies and banks foreclosed on many buildings during the Depression. When World War 2 began, they frequently replaced large luxury apartments in existing buildings with smaller apartments that increased the housing stock in New York without increasing building size.

[12] See note TKTK in this chapter. [currently new footnote 22, which begins, “In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul asked…”]

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Location, Location, Location: Affordable Housing and Urban Form in Manhattan

NOTE: The following was written for the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Street Design, The Secret To Great Cities and Towns, where it will appear in a shorter version. This version still needs a little editing for its new context. Part 2 is another essay “A Short Discussion of Residential Building Heights in New York City.”

Since we wrote the first edition of Street Design, frequent discussions about building heights and population density have become common across America. Affordable housing for all is an important issue in many places, and there is a large and well-funded YIMBY movement that argues all zoning and height limits are restrictive regulations that make it more difficult and expensive to build. If cities, towns, and suburbs would just let developers build what they want, where they want—the YIMBY argument says—we would have all the affordable housing we need. The authors of Street Design think the truth is more complicated and nuanced. Here is a brief discussion of some of the reasons why we think that, and how the topic is closely related to street design.

In the original discussion of East 70th Street, we wrote that for thousands of years, good traditional streets frequently had a width-to-height ratio of 1 to 1 or 1 to 1½ (page TKTK). We did not say that for many years New York City limited residential building heights to 1½ times the width of the street (see “A Short Discussion of Residential Building Heights in New York,” page TKTK). The physical character of the great residential neighborhoods like the Upper East Side and Harlem come from that time and those limits. Today, the tallest “supertall” apartment tower on the new Billionaires’ Row in midtown Manhattan is 15.5 times as high as Fifty-Seventh Street is wide (and 25.8 times as tall as the with of 58th Street, on the north side of the building). The residential tower is also 300 feet taller than the Empire State Building, which was the tallest building in the world from the time it was built in 1931 until the first World Trade Center tower passed it in 1971. But New Yorkers never wanted to live in the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center. We talk about some of the reasons for that in the discussion of residential building heights in New York (page TKTK).

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs discusses “the kind of problem” that building and maintaining a healthy city is, calling it “a problem in handling organized complexity.”[EN29] Among the many interrelated issues, a successful business district with tall office towers has a different character than a neighborhood where people want to live. The YIMBY discussion, on the other hand, uses simplified talking points that emphasize one simple numeric quantity at a time: either building height, population density, the number of new building permits, or the residential unit count. Focusing on individual numbers one at a time erodes the quality of cities and city life. Paraphrasing what Jacobs said about looking at street traffic in terms of pedestrians versus cars (page TKTK, reducing building design to simply height or unit count is “to go about the problem from the wrong end.”[TKTK change EN30] Urbanists must be generalists, balancing social, economic, environmental, transportation, and health issues with urban form and placemaking. If not, specialists like traffic engineers and luxury housing developers can erode cities and their quality of life.

Density can be reduced to a number, but that number does not tell us what a place is like. East 70th Street is a part of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which has over 100,000 people per square mile. That makes it one of the three or four densest residential neighborhoods in the Western world, more than twice as dense as the average neighborhood in Paris. Builders achieved that density 100 years ago with an average building height under 100 feet tall, and without an apartment building taller than 150 feet (see “A Short Discussion of Residential Building Heights in Manhattan,” pages TKTK). And as we have seen, there are other qualities that make some blocks better than others with almost identical dimensions.

Questions about urban form are essential for street designers. The height of the buildings on East 70th Street affects what the space between the buildings feels like, how the buildings enclose the street, and how they meet the street. The qualities that make East 70th Street feel good are missing in the photo of New Brooklyn (Figure 1.27), ironically on a street in the part of the borough widely known as Brownstone Brooklyn. The neighborhoods surrounding this section of Flatbush Avenue have the greatest collection of rowhouse streets in America: they create neighborhoods that are in great demand. [Figure 1.28]. Jane Jacobs was right when she observed that a greater variety of residential building types could have made the neighborhoods even better (page TKTK), but these new apartment towers don’t do that. Figure 1.27 shows what New Urbanists call “density without urbanism.”

TKTK NOTES

TKTK Add to EN30?

DELETED:

Location, Location, Location

Real estate developers and investors agree that the three most important factors in determining the value of a property or building are “location, location, and location.” Logically, the real estate market in Manhattan, Kansas is very different than the market on Manhattan Island. Yet YIMBYs argue that the reason so many cannot afford a good place to live is the same everywhere, regardless of location: we don’t have enough housing (which is true), and if we would just get out of the way of the market, it would provide housing for all. Let’s look at some of the reasons why we disagree with the second part of the argument.

First, why should we expect the market to provide affordable housing for all? Developers are not required to be philanthropists or altruists. They are business people, in business to make money. They respond to the local market. They typically look for the highest profits, which in most of America today means luxury housing, whether that means mansions, McMansions in the suburbs developed by production builders, or super-luxury “supertalls” like Billionaires’ Row in Manhattan.[EN31] Building low-income housing produces lower profits, or no profit, so few developers build that. And despite the “filter” or “trickle down” argument, no matter how many large, expensive condominiums New York City developers build as an investment vehicle for the global 1%, the supply will not trickle down to lower the rent on apartments for the poor.[EN32] For a variety of reasons, including the growing problem of income inequality, relying on the market to meet the needs of all has damaged our cities and towns with simplistic solutions that ignore the kind of problem a city is.

Location, location, location means that different markets have different conditions, different problems, and different solutions. Where is housing cheap? Where is land cheap? Where can buyers “drive till they qualify”? Not in New York or Los Angeles, and don’t forget the high cost of owning and operating cars.[EN33] Where is the economy strong, providing good jobs? Where do buyers want to live? (The COVID pandemic changed some of that.) What about income inequality? Where can a developer build houses or apartments that the average local buyer can afford, and will there be enough profit at that location? Are the global 1% or the global 5% driving up prices? Are hedge funds buying up all the starter homes? That’s a real thing.[EN34] Simply removing zoning will not solve the problem, although that probably is part of the solution in many places in America, which is primarily zoned for single-family houses in unwalkable sprawl. There is no question that we need more housing. The question is how to get housing that 80% of Americans can afford.

Some of those questions do not directly involve street design. But in the future, most affordable housing will be built in walkable cities and towns. Owning and operating a car is expensive (not to mention bad for the planet). The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing and Affordability Index underlines just how expensive that is with data that shows combined housing and transportation costs. “Expensive” cities where one can live without owning a car frequently have lower overall combined costs for housing and transportation than regions that require lots of driving, particularly for households in which multiple family members must each own a car.[EN35] Without exception, every place that has low ownership rates for cars either has streets where people want to walk or has high rates of poverty, with people living there because it’s the best they can afford. The second condition is not “affordable,” it’s simply all the residents can afford, usually in a place where living without a car is a hardship.

Please note: we are not saying that good streets must be expensive. Good streets are for everyone. They shape the public realm where public life takes place and city residents meet each other every day. The luxury towers in Figure 1.27 do not make good public spaces or create the great city where most New Yorkers want to live.[TKTKEN39]

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What’s good for General Motors is good for America

On March 15 I tweeted, “If America hadn’t decided to create a new national transportation system based on individuals in private cars driving everywhere for everything, climate change would be a very different—and smaller—problem than it is.”

I posted the Tweet on a couple of listservs for urbanists and followed up with some notes, comments, and questions in reaction to comments on the listservs. Some of the answers about data exist in various places. But frankly I’m not great at looking up data, so I wanted to run this by people. At this point, I’m intentionally avoiding extending the comments into conclusions.

    • In 1908, when the Ford Model T went into production, America had a great national transportation system of trains, subways, streetcars, and boats. Many of the services were privately owned but regulation required public access for both passengers and freight.
    • The transportation system connected walkable towns and cities. They had to be walkable since most people didn’t own a car or a horse. The carbon footprint produced by Americans was low. See below
    • Today we have a system that primarily depends on private vehicles on public streets. In more urban situations, that includes the storage of private vehicles on public streets.

    Continue reading

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Traffic Flow and the Status Quo: There are better ways to spend $10 billion than rebuilding the BQE


New York City plans to spend more than $10 billion on a project that will speed up climate change and increase the number of New Yorkers killed by traffic and pollution. The good news is that the city will hold meetings so the public can comment on the plan, which is rebuilding the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway (BQE). The New York City Department of Transportation commissioned three schemes for discussion: the designs are good, but the concept is wrong. Now is the time to say so. Future public meetings are listed at https://bqevision.com/events.

Continue Reading at NYDailyNews.com<

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Car Free Brooklyn Bridge – photos and drawings

A Car-Free Brooklyn Bridge Is Possible Images and Illustratons

AFTER: Aerial view looking east towards a car-free Brooklyn Bridge. Centre Street and Park Row next to the Brooklyn Bridge are reimagined as an extension of City Hall Park. © 2020 Massengale & Co LLC, rendering by Gabriele Stroik Johnson.
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My Meals With Bob: My Mini Memoir in Common Edge


A photo of New York 1900. showing two of the four images of the Colonial Club in the book. We included so many images of the pleasant but unremarkable building because that was where we wrote the book, in Robert A.M. Stern Architects’ first office. On the southwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street, 200 West 72nd housed RAMSA for many years in the former Ladies Dining Room of the club (illustrated on page 391).

After the club closed, a number of developers had offices in the building, including the prolific Paterno Brothers and the Cuban Holding Co. Architects in the building serving the developers included Rosario Candela and Geo. F. Pelham, the architect of my apartment house.

ONCE upon a time, long, long ago, I was lucky enough to get a summer job with Robert A.M. Stern while I was in graduate school. Stern’s new memoir, Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture (MonacelliPress, 2022), has prompted my own mini-memoir, with some relevant details not included in the book.

I arrived at the office in the early summer, not long after the dissolution of Bob’s marriage and then his office, Stern & Hagmann. I found two young architects-to-be, a sweet but disorganized secretary-receptionist-bookkeeper, and Bob. The office grew during the summer and beyond—and today there are over 200 in the office, including 16 partners in Robert A.M. Stern Architects (aka RAMSA).

Continue reading at Common Edge

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“Big Real Estate’s Continuing Stranglehold Over New York City”

Recently, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times about the causes of unaffordable housing in New York City. He blamed the crisis on a few things, including a powerful financial “monoculture” in the city, NIMBYs, and the city itself blocking new construction. That last element, however—that the city blocks new construction—is an increasingly popular myth that needs examination.

When we look at construction in New York, we see that the city is not an economic monoculture. Property taxes are the largest revenue source for the city, and both New York City and New York State work to increase property taxes by subsidizing new development with zoning changes, planning policies, new interpretations of zoning and building regulations, economic development plans for rebuilding, the use of eminent domain, tax abatements and credits, public-private capital projects, and sweetheart real estate deals for major political donors—and this is only a partial list.

It all adds up to billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies for billionaire developers like Stephen Ross, Steve Roth, and Gary Barnett. So much for the idea that New York “blocks” construction.

Please note: the first three rules of real estate are traditionally “location, location, location.” The following discussion about affordable and unaffordable housing is specific to New York City in our time.

Continue reading on CommonEdge or ArchDaily

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“My Open Letter to NYC DOT Commissioner Rodriquez”

Dear Commissioner Rodriquez,

I’m writing to you because I just signed up for a workshop to improve Canal Street that your department is running tonight. I met you when you were a Councilman. I know you care deeply about making New York streets safer and better for city life.

There was more carnage than usual on New York’s streets this weekend. One reaction I have is that until the NYC DOT fundamentally changes in at least two ways, most of the department’s work will be band aids.

The agency still sees its primary job as moving cars. And it does little or nothing to reduce the number of cars in the city.

The two priorities are both incompatible and bad for city life. If you want cars to move, you can’t put five pounds of cars into two-pound bags. If you want a city where the space between the buildings supports public life, you can’t take most of that space for machines.

Continue reading on Streetsblog

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Why GoDaddy’s Microsoft Exchange Email for Mac Users S*cks

After three years of unreliable, expensive email service from GoDaddy and Microsoft, I’ve reluctantly concluded that I have to find a new service for my domain name email. For reasons I won’t go into here, that’s a problem. GoDaddy is part of the problem.

Why do I have to move my email? Because,

  • I have a Mac desktop, a MacAir, an IPad, and an iPhone. At least 10% of my email never syncs across all four “devices.”
  • Another 20-30% of the email can take up to an hour to go to any device.
  • At least one of the GoDaddy support people suggests I would be better off switching to Windows. But he can sell me tech support for $50.

Microsoft’s email is moderately expensive, but the problem is that I have 30,000+ emails in my account. Three years ago GoDaddy told me they would transfer all my old messages into the new account.

“We can’t guarantee any other provider will be able to move it all,” they said.

I’ll be glad to leave.

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Take Back The City

On a recent episode of Billions, the New York Attorney General stands on the roof a car in the middle of a New York City street with a bullhorn. Why? Vecause he’s positioned himself near a meeting on the Highline where the Mayor is announcing a plan to bring the Olympics to New York City. With the Mayor is the billionaire behind the plan, a man whom the AG wants to thwart. Through the bullhorn he yells,

So they want to revitalize the city? These plutocrats? Have they thought about the unintended consequences to the average citizen.? Do they think about the average citizen at all?

A cabal of billionaires remaking the city. What the hell do they know about the real New York? How many will be displaces, so they can build an Olympic stadium? Have they at all considered what real New Yorkers want for our city?”

Maybe we should remind them who we are. What do we do when the carpetbaggers and the land barons try to shove us out of the way? We shove back. We shove back!

That’s right! And together, the people, and those who represent the people, we will take back our city.

Take back our city!
Take back our city!
Take back our city!

Repeat, fade to credits and the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”

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MSG

Two MSG quotes: “In animal studies, injecting high doses of MSG into the brains of rats made them fat.” – Wikipedia

“Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god…. One scuttles in now like a rat” [under Madison Square Garden]* – Vincent Scully

PS: Archpaper called Governor Cuomo’s proposed Penn Station replacement “less soul-deflating” than its predecessor. The Empire State can do better than “less soul-deflating.”

Here at massengale.com, we support ReThinkNYC’s plan to rebuild McKim, Mead & White’s great station.

McKim, Mead & White Bonus: Spoke Up at the Hotel Pennsylvania

* McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station is the best building ever torn down in New York City. Its destruction is widely said to be the turning point for historic preservation in the city.

The second greatest building ever torn down in New York City was McKim, Mead & White’s Madison Square Garden. Ironically, it is the current Madison Square that is the biggest impediment to recreating the old Penn Station.

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