New York: After the Bubble

[LindbergMTL]

March 15, 2009

ON THE HOMEFRONT

 

 

By JONATHAN MAHLER

 

 

A few years ago, while working on a profile of Mayor Bloomberg for this magazine, I had dinner with his deputy mayor for economic development, Dan Doctoroff, at an Italian restaurant in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. At the time, the city was flush with cash — weeks earlier, it reported a budget surplus of $3.4 billion — the Dow was above 12,000 and still climbing and Doctoroff was presiding over a long list of extensive public-private projects across the five boroughs, bold strokes of urban re-engineering reminiscent of the days of Robert Moses.

 

 

As a violent summer storm raged outside, Doctoroff sketched out for me Bloomberg’s ambitious plans for New York. The rail yards and warehouses of the far West Side would be replaced by condos, hotels and retail stores. Thousands of apartment units and a new arena for the Nets would rise on the site of the Atlantic Yards in downtown Brooklyn. Penn Station would undergo a gut renovation (and be renamed after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan). Lower Manhattan would be transformed into a recreational playground, with cafes, performing-arts pavilions, ball fields, an outdoor ice rink, even a floating garden on the East River.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about that dinner over the past several months, while watching the Dow plummet and the city’s unemployment rate soar. All of Bloomberg’s mega-projects are now indefinitely delayed, victims, in part, of the credit crunch and the mounting municipal deficit. Even if he’s elected to a third term, the mayor probably won’t ever realize his grand vision for New York. And yet his legacy is already visible on the city’s landscape. It is less sweeping, perhaps, but no less significant: he empowered the private sector to remake the city bit by bit.

 

This was partly a function of the way Bloomberg ran New York, a natural byproduct of his ability to govern the ungovernable city. “The perception under Bloomberg has been that New York is a good place to do business, and that’s very important for developers,” says Jonathan Miller, one of the city’s best-known real estate appraisers.

 

 

But it was also deliberate. Bloomberg is a businessman. He believes in growth and has faith in the private sector. His administration expedited permits and signed off on building designs with minimal interference. It also freed up underutilized land — old piers, elevated freight lines, warehousing districts, rail yards — either by rezoning or by threatening to employ its powers of eminent domain. In many cases it offered attractive incentives, most notably tax breaks, to encourage companies to build. The administration did its share of construction too, adding parks across the boroughs and along the city’s long-neglected waterfront and, in partnership with private developers, initiating New York’s largest affordable-housing project in decades.

 

You don’t have to be an architect or an urban planner to recognize how much the city was transformed along the way. Walk around most neighborhoods in Manhattan and many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, and you will be confronted with new construction, whether the steel-and-glass condominium complexes that tower above the old factories and warehouses on the rezoned waterfront of Greenpoint and Williamsburg; the 43-story headquarters for Goldman Sachs that recently sprouted in Lower Manhattan (thanks, in part, to a generous financial incentive from the city); or the two virgin ballparks where the Yankees and Mets will soon open their 2009 seasons (with the help of big municipal tax breaks and an enormous infrastructure investment in the stadium’s respective neighborhoods).

 

All of these structures represent the newest layer in a cityscape that bears witness to the cyclical nature of New York’s economy. The post-Civil War bonanza, when New York cemented its status as the nation’s commercial and financial capital, produced the iconic cast-iron structures of today’s SoHo; the city’s ur-luxury apartment building, the Dakota; and such Beaux-Arts masterpieces as the American Museum of Natural History. (Not to mention a park, Central Park, laid out on an undesirable strip of land that had housed pigsties, slaughterhouses and shantytowns.) It was during the Roaring Twenties that many of the city’s most recognizable steel skyscrapers — the Chanin and Chrysler buildings, among them — sprang to life. Post-World War II peace and prosperity ushered in a wave of Modernist structures like the Seagram Building and Lever House.

 

The “greed is good,” precrash 1980s brought another real estate boom to New York, though one with a limited impact on the physical appearance of the city. Much of the development community’s energy was focused on converting rental units into co-ops. The new construction was largely confined to the island of Manhattan and, with the notable exception of the handiwork of a young real estate mogul named Donald Trump, was generally unremarkable.

 

During the most recent binge, with property values soaring and capital readily available to both builders and buyers, developers didn’t bother with generic, low-slung apartment buildings and conversions. Soaring glass condo towers sprang up everywhere. New York, long criticized for its lack of cutting-edge architecture, became a destination for celebrity architects like Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Charles Gwathmey and Renzo Piano.

 

That era is over. Since November, some $5 billion worth of development has been delayed or canceled. New York is again a city of abandoned lots, half-finished buildings and free-floating anxiety. “At this particular moment, I think that everyone who is honest with themselves can’t but help think about 1929, which came at the end of an extraordinarily fertile period for architecture,” says Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and designer of the apartment building 15 Central Park West, which in 2007 earned the distinction of being the highest-priced new apartment building in the history of New York. Even for the rare developers who still have credit lines, there’s the separate question of whether they want to bring a new building to a market with vacancy rates climbing all over the city.

 

The city has been here before. Work on the Empire State Building was completed in 1931, when the Great Depression was already under way. Renters were scarce — so scarce, in fact, that the city’s tallest skyscraper became known as “the Empty State Building.” Not until 1950 did it become profitable. During the 1970s, those infamous years of white flight and urban blight, the city was so broke and certain neighborhoods so desperate and depleted that one former city-housing commissioner, Roger Starr, suggested that New York simply cut off services to them and let them die — “planned shrinkage,” he called it.

 

The current downturn, like the previous downturns, is not something to celebrate; the city and its residents will suffer. But the building boom, while breathing new life into a number of long-struggling neighborhoods, was problematic in its own right. New York got some first-class architecture, but it also got more than its share of eyesores, and the proliferation of luxury-condo towers accelerated the regrettable transformation of Manhattan into an island of the wealthy. Too much of the new construction did nothing to enrich the fabric of the city. “Here we practice the art of the deal, not the art of the city,” as the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable has put it.

 

The downturn will give New York a chance to pause and reflect on this period of hyperactive development, and to think about what sort of buildings it needs in the future. Better still, the absence of private capital may spur federal investment that could enable the city to not simply patch up its deteriorating infrastructure but to reinvent it for a new, greener era. “Even though we’ve come through a period of real economic development, we have an infrastructure that badly needs investment and imagination,” says Vin Cipolla, president of New York’s Municipal Arts Society.

 

For its part, the Bloomberg administration has no intention of scaling back its Moses-like ambitions. When I spoke recently with Doctoroff, who is now president of Bloomberg L.P., he told me that he and his colleagues had always envisioned their grand scheme as part of a long-term plan for New York. They never assumed they could outrun the next bust. “We are now in the middle of the 12th serious downturn since New York became a major financial center in the early 19th century,” Doctoroff said. “The lesson of every single one of these previous 11 busts is that the city always comes back stronger than ever. History is perfect on that one.”

 

Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer. His most recent book is “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”

 

 

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/realestate/keymagazine/15Key-lede-t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=future%20of%20skyscrapers&st=cse

[jesseps]

Really good article