Saturday, September 7, 2013

New Plans for Old Avenues in New York City

In its recent endorsement in the New York City mayoral race for sudden frontrunner Bill de Blasio, StreetsPAC cited de Blasio's street safety platform calling for "a city with zero fatalities or serious injuries caused by car crashes on the streets of New York." In addition to various law enforcement measures, including speed limit reductions, de Blasio's platform also calls for design-based changes, including "narrowing excessively wide streets that encourage reckless passing and speeding, widening sidewalks and medians to make streets easier and safer to cross, and adding dedicated bicycle infrastructure to create a safe space for New Yorkers on bikes."

Under Mayor Bloomberg, numerous design interventions of this sort have been carried out, and although some redesigns have brought significant transformations -- Times Square, for example, or the reworking of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn -- others have been little more than glorified patch jobs, taking common-sense but modest steps to address notoriously dangerous crossings and intersections without unduly interfering with the primacy of high-speed automobile circulation. While there has been abundant use of colorful paint to widen sidewalks and expand pedestrian plazas, and the wonderful addition of bike-sharing and new bike lanes, few streets have seen thorough overhauls that are consciously geared toward improving quality of life for those on foot rather than simply enhancing safety and mobility.

Incremental changes make sense as a general rule, but in a city like New York, surely there is room, and appetite, for at least one transformational street project?  However, certain major changes, such as wide-scale permanent pedestrianizations, have generally fallen out of favor since the 1970s, while the imaginations of some planners and architects can get carried away in impractical, overly-complex or even fantastical directions when presented with a large blank canvas to work on, as in the case of this fanciful example from last year's Greatest Grid exhibit, showing a Manhattan street repurposed for agriculture:

A more realistic plan is the "Yorkville Rambla," developed by John Massengale and Dover, Kohl & Partners, which would essentially pedestrianize the center lanes of Second Avenue. The plan is simple, elegant, and most importantly, draws on established design predecent shown to be successful in similar urban contexts. The design does not contemplate a complete pedestrianization, but on New York's avenues, due to the need for dedicated bus and bike lanes, this is not likely to be feasible:

Source: Massengale & Co. LLC, Dover, Kohl & Partners et al., via Urban Design Week 2011

The plan pays homage to Barcelona's renowned thoroughfare, but there are in fact successful examples from New York itself very similar to the proposed design. Here, for example, is Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a city park nearby the United Nations complex which was completely reconstructed in the late 1990s. Although it is classified as a park, and is administered by the city's parks department, rather than the transportation department, when viewed in context of the adjacent 47th Street, it is clear that the so-called plaza is actually a classic urban promenade:

The plaza looking west, with 47th Street at right. Source: Old Urbanist
Its design is brilliantly simple in my opinion, incorporating a few basic principles:
  • Pave, pave, pave. The surface of the promenade is largely covered with functional brick and stone pavers, minimizing maintenance while maximizing the area for human use (which includes weekly farmers' markets). There are few if any concessions to "green" or "landscape" urbanism: no berms, no bioswales, no stormwater filtration areas, and half the right of way is not given over to indigenous grasses or drought-resistant shrubs (there is, however, an adjacent garden, to the far left in the photo, although this is not integral to the design).
  • People-oriented seating. Bench seating is simple and faces toward the promenade, not away from it or in random orientations. If "what attracts people most ... is other people," in William Whyte's words, this straightforward design is a great success.
  • Green to the eye, not green on the ground. During summer, the promenade is luxuriantly green to due an abundance of trees (planted regularly and formally, not pseudo-naturalistically). However, these trees take up very little space at ground level, minimally interfering with use of the space. For me, this is the true mark of a successful green area ratio: maximizing visible greenery while minimizing the street-level square footage actually occupied by that greenery. Planted areas can enliven a very large space, but this should be done with care, and with thought given to what sort of use the space is likely to receive.
Another promising and perhaps even more feasible plan would restore Park Avenue approximately to its early 20th century configuration by widening its median, although the plan by SHoP shown here does put a lot of unusable green space on the ground:

Source: New York Observer.

This seemingly High Line-inspired use of plants to restrict the area available for human use (without adding much visual green -- note the ratio of visual tree area to plant area of about 5:1, though the plant area probably occupies 100x the ground area) seems to be characteristic of many contemporary plans, including one by SOM for the elevated roadways around Grand Central. If that is the cost of deriving political will and public support from the High Line's success, though, then it may be an acceptable trade-off after all.

Whatever the plans of the next mayoral administration, whether led by de Blasio or another candidate, one hopes that at least one street redesign such as these makes it onto the agenda. For a relatively modest cost, the benefits not only in safety but in quality of life would be substantial.

Related posts:
  • Recivilization also features the Yorkville Rambla at a post here, and outlines a set of very similar principles (which I didn't see until after writing this -- showing that there may possibly be something to them!).
  • At Strong Towns, Steve Stofka provides a thorough post on street design and the perception of street width, using the addictive new program Streetmix.

13 comments:

  1. "no berms, no bioswales, no stormwater filtration areas, and half the right of way is not given over to indigenous grasses or drought-resistant shrubs"

    LOLZ.

    I love all of those things, but I have to admit they're basically just mitigation for autocentrism.

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  2. Agree with your statement "pave, pave, pave." - good and simple. Planting grass in the middle of a street doesn't make any sense...

    I also want to say that Dag Hammarskjöld plaza is a very nice place to be in.

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  3. The "Yorkville Rambla" idea looks pretty impressive!

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    1. Hi Kyle -- thanks for the comment, and good luck with the blog!

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    2. Thanks. I'm a frequent visitor to Old Urbanist :)

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  4. I think the contrast between "green to the eye" and "green on the ground" was very poignant. It seems that many contemporary "greening" efforts, like the Landscape Urbanism fad, are preoccupied with a "green on the ground" approach that results in rather ambiguous (and suburban!) public spaces that aren't really of much use. IMO the last thing cities need is to be ruralized and filled with ersatz suburban lawns of "native grasses."

    "Green spaces" are fine if they take the form of formally-maintained greenswards in traditional parks (where you can actually use the lawns for something), but what good is an airlifted prairie filled with waist-high weeds (as is commonly depicted in all the LU renderings)?

    So I emphatically agree with Alex that a human-centric approach is preferable, and that Dag Hammarskjold Plaza is a perfect prototype worthy of emulation. The SHoP retrofit for Park Avenue is a step in the right direction, though as you said it still seems to resort to too much unusable "green space" in the form of boring shrubbery bunkers. It's sad how there are so many surviving successful prototypes that avoid the bunker+art stunt approach, yet designers seem to ignore them in their zeal for something "innovative" (which always turns into tomorrow's costly eyesore!)

    Wasn't it Jacobs who, when discussing the midcentury tactic of placing buildings and other urban infrastructure in their own pods of "green space," noticed that "people don't seek settings for buildings [or sculptures]; they seek settings for themselves."

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    1. Hi Marc -- I was exaggerating slightly with my "green to the eye" point: usable greensward, as you mention, is an entirely appropriate element of urban parks, though its success is dependent on relative lack of intense or linear use, since grass, regularly trampled, will inevitably turn to mud.

      Part of the reason the "green" areas are segregated by SHoP into bunkers, as you so fittingly call them, may be precisely to avoid the inevitable trampling in an area with such high pedestrian volume (unlike, say, the example of Baltimore's Park Ave that you've linked, or Commonwealth Ave. in Boston's Back Bay, but even there the approach to the grass median is fenced off, presumably to discourage walking on it: http://goo.gl/maps/MLSi8).

      If grass couldn't survive under such conditions, to me that signifies that a paved surface is the proper substitute to accommodate the pedestrian traffic. Adding the bunkers elevates the pursuit of "green" above the needs of human beings, but then again, anyone who has attempted to walk the High Line on a summer's day can amply testify to this tendency among contemporary architects and landscape designers.

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    2. "If grass couldn't survive under such conditions, to me that signifies that a paved surface is the proper substitute to accommodate the pedestrian traffic. Adding the bunkers elevates the pursuit of "green" above the needs of human beings, but then again, anyone who has attempted to walk the High Line on a summer's day can amply testify to this tendency among contemporary architects and landscape designers."

      Agreed; that's a good way of putting it. To me this suggests that some (not all) designers have focused more on picturesque vignette-making (i.e. the importation of ersatz "wilderness," as the GCT proposal reveals) rather than creating spaces for *people-centric uses* per se. Unfortunately the ruralize-the-city tactic has a *long* history in the US, but the tactic seems to be growing more and more abstract: a century ago even Olmsted, who was preoccupied with ruralization, still knew how to make his parks intensely people-centric, whereas now we think that photoshopping a bunch of hipsters into a rendering of a prairie will actually work.

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    3. BTW, regarding my closing comment on the contemporary tactic of designing "green spaces" by idly photoshopping people into prairies, there's an excellent critique of this tactic here, particularly in the intro:
      http://issuu.com/landscapeurbanismdiscontents/docs/luaid_excerpt

      In short, we risk slipping back into an abstract "object in the park" method of "urbanism!"

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  5. Forgot to add that there are scores of examples of modest street narrowing/closure/reconfiguration that often fly under the radar and perhaps deserve closer study.

    This short stretch of Lanvale Street in Baltimore was closed to all but pedestrian traffic several decades ago (swing 180 degrees around to see the original excessively wide-but-empty street):
    http://goo.gl/maps/HlH8o

    While the architecture along the open section of the street is superior to the architecture along the closed section, I think the streetscape of the closed section is more comfortable, though IMO it still resorts too much to the 'shrubbery screen' tactic.

    The good news is that for every busy Park Avenue in the US, there are thousands of quiet streets with surprisingly little automobile traffic, yet these streets are very wide, requiring constant maintenance of asphalt that isn't really needed. Bolton Hill, for example, was elaborated purged of through traffic many decades ago, yet most of its wide - and now eerily empty - carriageways remain. Many of these streets could be reconfigured to contain promenades down their center, and in fact Bolton Hill is lucky enough to contain two precedents of impressive quality (though even here a LOT could still be done to tame the carriageways):
    http://goo.gl/maps/IkmVR
    http://goo.gl/maps/ZY6Vz

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    1. Yes, great point -- you might also like this example of Court Street in New Haven: http://goo.gl/maps/ugbgS. I believe the redesign dates to the 1970s as part of the counter-urban renewal movement of the time (New Haven being a notable victim of urban clear-cutting).

      I'm a bit conflicted about the grassy promenades, to be honest. They're a huge improvement on a wide expanse of asphalt, and I agree that where excessively wide streets exist, they are a great option, but their origins seem very much mired in the mid-19th century parks movement, where green space was perceived as an antidote to urbanism, rather than something that worked with it and reinforced it.

      The great promenades of European cities, such as Vienna's Ringstrasse or Barcelona's Ramblas, are simultaneously major commercial thoroughfares, while Commonwealth Ave., self-consciously designed as a pedestrian promenade for the well-to-do, segregates walkers from the buildings (which are single-use residential anyways) with a broad strip of grass. Pedestrian volumes are ten times higher or more on nearby Newbury Street, which, although the true shopping strip for the neighborhood, does not have nearly the same attention given to pedestrians. It's not terrible, but sidewalks are too narrow in places and have constant obstructions (http://goo.gl/maps/ijKom) that create chokepoints. You can't really promenade down it so much as jostle.

      Really, it is Newbury Street that should be the graceful promenade, since it is where the people are, after all, no matter the intentions of the planners. By contrast, the green space of Commonwealth seems oversupplied relative to demand.

      Anyways, another pedestrianized street with what I would consider an ideal green area ratio: https://ssl.panoramio.com/photo/25390990

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    2. "I'm a bit conflicted about the grassy promenades, to be honest. They're a huge improvement on a wide expanse of asphalt, and I agree that where excessively wide streets exist, they are a great option, but their origins seem very much mired in the mid-19th century parks movement, where green space was perceived as an antidote to urbanism, rather than something that worked with it and reinforced it."

      I wholeheartedly agree; I just happened to cite the more "romantic" Olmstedian promenade examples from Baltimore because that city no longer really has any Ramblas-style commercial promenades (these failed in the 80s/90s and were reopened to vehicular traffic), though I suppose the Inner Harbor promenade could qualify. Baltimore does, however, have some examples similar to New Haven's Court Street (or Philadelphia's alley streets).

      Since Bolton Hill is so quiet, though, I do think Olmstedian promenades can work (not much foot traffic to trample the grass since there are few shops), and in such dominantly residential areas like BH I've seen bits of promenade lawn used for sunbathing, reading, etc. But even here I think some kind of porous traditional pavement would be more useful - particularly for children who want to play street games.

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  6. http://goo.gl/maps/jir3n

    The Google Map link above shows a StreetView of Stockholm along Karlavagen. Circle around in StreetView to see the huge green center with the bike lanes, the intersecting pedestrianized street. Just beautiful.

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