The Battle for Gotham (24 page)

The designation of SoHo as a historic district in August 1973 marked a turning point in the evolution of historic preservation in New York and the country. It was the first gritty, working commercial district so designated and thus expanded preservation thinking from the limitations of individual architectural treasures and residential districts with a cohesive style. Its rescue and landmarks designation broadened the understanding of what makes areas historically, culturally, and economically important, not just architecturally significant. Until then, the Georgian, Federal, brownstone, and other period-dominant districts were the convention. Georgetown, Greenwich Village, Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, the French Quarter, and similar revered districts were the favorites.

INDUSTRIAL USES DISPLACED

Manhattan manufacturing during the Depression decreased less than in the rest of the country. During World War II, it increased moderately. The biggest cause of subsequent decline in New York City was the clearance for urban renewal at numerous sites around the city, including the dozen square blocks south of Washington Square Park to Canal Street, where SoHo now starts, and east of City Hall in lower Manhattan for vehicular access to the Brooklyn Bridge. Remember, these businesses were not planning to close. They were forced out. Some survived elsewhere; others closed for good.

In the 1960s decline accelerated considerably, as more neighborhoods were cleared and the new highways made cheap suburban sites readily accessible. It is difficult to recognize even today the viable economic uses in messy, down-at-the-heels working districts. Such areas are rarely pretty, seldom freshly landscaped, and hardly ever located in new, pricey buildings. Trucks proliferate. White-cloth restaurants are a distance away. On the surface, nothing significant seems to be happening. This is very deceptive. Incubation of the new and growth of the established are difficult to detect easily. This is the process Jacobs described as “adding new work to old,” the real expansion of economic activity. This definition of growth is quite different from the conventional economic development today.

This Lower Manhattan district had the kind of mix of size, style, and age of buildings that observers today recognize as cradles of diverse and productive activity. This is obvious today because so many districts have followed the SoHo pattern, but when Jacobs et al. were fighting the expressway, few recognized this economic occurrence. “Innovators like to be around people and environments that are friendly to them versus rigid environments,” Jacobs observed. “They want the SoHos of the world where they can function in idiosyncratic ways.”

A 1963 study of SoHo by Chester Rapkin, an economist and unconventional planner, revealed some fifty categories of industrial activity, including furriers and makers of dolls, rags, belts, pens, wheel hubs, and boxes, among other things. The twelve-block district contained 416 buildings, 2,000 housing units, 800 commercial and industrial businesses, and 12,000 jobs. Most workers were minorities; almost half were women.
⁵

Rapkin’s report officially changed nothing. “Good planners are powerless,” Jane Jacobs observed. The official word remained that the district was dead or dying, a collection of moribund, out-of-date, falling-down buildings. This is always the well-publicized, often-repeated official description of a district for which a new agenda has been written. Probably every rejuvenated district in the country has been, at one time, declared moribund and always “blighted” by the so-called experts, hired to justify the new political or development agenda. SoHo is probably the best known of them.

In this case, the new agenda was Robert Moses’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway and his large-scale housing schemes mentioned earlier. Thus, SoHo offers a sharp lens into urban change, Robert Moses style. Here, a highway is central; later, we’ll see on the Upper West Side, Lincoln Center and housing developments were central.

Nowhere was the Robert Moses approach to cities more clear. Vast highway networks and urban renewal plans were valued more than organically evolved cities; elaborate schemes gratuitously ripped through neighborhoods, setting a pattern of highway building, centralized planning, and urban annihilation for the country. Robert Moses was the earliest, most visible, and most powerful exponent of this view, as the next chapter demonstrates. From New York, the Moses doctrine took hold all over the country. Ironically, the Lower Manhattan Expressway battle began the shift away from the Moses doctrine to the views expounded by Jacobs.

CHANGING ART

Once the expressway was announced, serious deterioration set in. Vacancies multiplied. Artists grabbed the opportunity of vast, cheap space and pioneered the organic rebirth of the district. They began filling the vacant lofts illegally, creating attractive, functional living and work spaces. Residential use in the industrial area was against the law. But landlords, unable to find business tenants, welcomed the artist-occupant. It was a cash agreement and kept secret until the highway project was killed and the move began to legalize artists’ living and work spaces.

Coincidentally, contemporary art experienced a radical shift to large-scale work in the 1960s. Lofts averaged twenty-five hundred square feet of open floor space. (Manufacturers remained longer in the bigger ones.) The large windows of Cast Iron construction flooded each floor with natural light. Freight elevators provided useful access. Rents were affordable. It was a perfect prescription for artists.

Even before the SoHo loft trend took hold, Westbeth, an innovative industrial conversion, had occurred. This complex of thirteen attached buildings was built over twenty years starting in 1880 and served as the research center of the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1965, with critical support and guidance from the J. M. Kaplan Fund and designs by architect Richard Meier, the complex was converted to live-work spaces, the first on a large scale. The media attention it attracted surely helped the loft-conversion momentum.

Elsewhere, urban renewal and market high-rises were demolishing artists’ lofts and studios, along with whole neighborhoods, particularly in Greenwich Village, the artists’ neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s. Artist space was at a premium. The destruction in the Village was halted with its designation as a historic district in 1969. The expanding grassroots group pushing the Landmarks Commission for designation counted on the same result for SoHo.

With the defeat of the expressway and gradual occupancy by artists, the transformation of SoHo had begun. City planning, zoning, and land-marking policies just had to catch up.

Not one dime of public investment or developer subsidy made SoHo happen. In fact, the defeat of a big misplanned public investment made SoHo possible. Only in the defeat of the highway did urbanism have a chance. Only in the defeat of excessive, top-down plans did SoHo have a chance. After the defeat, spontaneous regeneration took hold. Individual creativity rescued the beleaguered district planners sought to raze. When not doomed by centrally planned, inappropriate projects, many urban and small-town districts can regenerate productively.

JANE JACOBS VERSUS ROBERT MOSES

This pattern of planned urban destruction parading as renewal, set by Moses and his disciples, led to the sprawling, dysfunctional landscape with which the country now wrestles. Jacobs was Moses’s most vigorous and visible opponent.

Jacobs argued that the unplanned mix of uses is what constitutes a healthy urban district and sustains a viable urban economy. Her concept of mixed use is defined here with the complex combination of industrial, commercial, residential, and cultural uses. Additionally, and quite importantly, a mix of building ages and scale is present. Districts like this, she argued, were more valuable to a city’s economy than highways. Their value was underappreciated, she believed. Such a sensible and observable reality was heresy when
Death and Life
was published in 1961. She contradicted what the profession of planning was about and threatened power centers everywhere.
⁶
The “sacking of cities” is how she labeled what was happening at the time. This adds significance to the expressway defeat, a significance that reaches well beyond even the rescue and regeneration of SoHo. Urban districts should not be sacrificed for expensive, wasteful, destructive clearance projects, she argued.

SoHo was the biggest and most obvious battleground of the Moses-Jacobs urban philosophies that first unfolded in Washington Square Park. Grassroots battles against similar wrongheaded plans increased exponentially across the United States, especially highway urban renewal plans, inspired by Jacobs’s words and activism. Community-based planning, historic preservation, and the “recycling” of buildings triumphed. Other neighborhoods and cities followed the pattern, stalling the bulldozers of urban renewal and highways in many places.

The lines were drawn dramatically in SoHo. This was a widely publicized and significant grassroots victory over top-down, autocratic planning. The reverberations had national impacts: Other groups were energized to fight harder if they were already embattled or to begin to do so if they weren’t.

There were other community leaders around the country leading local fights against highways through cities, as Jane Jacobs did in SoHo. None gained the attention she did, being in the media capital of the country. Until then, only government officials and business leaders made decisions. They usually didn’t live in the community and knew nothing of its vitality. If it was old, they just declared it a slum.

Before its designation for a highway, SoHo performed the age-old function of a healthy urban neighborhood that provides an outlet for innovation, gives birth to new businesses, permits established businesses to grow and adapt, adds new substance to the local economy, and exports its people and innovations to the rest of the city and country. “A lot more work than you imagine is occurring in SoHo,” Jacobs observed in a 1981 conversation, “especially in artists’ studios. Art is work, a very important work for cities, a very important export. Also, a lot of the services to this work, suppliers of various kinds, are there too. This is one of the few up-and-coming areas of New York. There ought to be forty to fifty neighborhoods like that.”

SoHo’s revival demonstrated that the spontaneous generation that once characterized New York’s growth was still possible. In fact, this revival was happening during the 1970s when the economic condition of the city as a whole could not have been bleaker. The impact of SoHo on the larger city of New York is endless. SoHo changed the way we view all cities.

SOHO BROADENED THE HISTORIC PRESERVATION MOVEMENT

Preservationists have long been in the vanguard of opposition to inappropriate change, since historically or culturally important resources are often in the way of misguided plans. Incorrectly, preservationists are often accused of being against all change and for freezing the city. In fact, they oppose the erasure, mutilation, and overwhelming of places of value.

The highway defeat gave heart to urbanists, community defenders, progressive planners, and all other opponents of invasive projects mislabeled as “progress.” Thus, SoHo helped slow the automobile-focused development nationwide that has destroyed so many viable neighborhoods, architectural treasures, and cultural resources.

SoHo survived the worst kind of planned impediments and then flourished under strict government limitations imposed first by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and then the City Planning Commission. Basic rules and regulations have protected the area from excessive and overwhelming change, not from change itself. SoHo buildings are being constantly altered by what Jacobs called “adaptations, ameliorations, and densifications,” and new Modernist buildings are replacing nonhistoric structures and filling empty sites. In fact, because SoHo was so successful, it attracted a parade of upscale, innovative contemporary buildings, designed by big-name architects (Jean Nouvel, Gwathmy Siegel, Smith Hawkinson), all enthusiastically approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in recent years.

These are the kind of rules that permit, even encourage, change within the context of what already exists. The integrity, scale, and individuality of scores of distinct neighborhoods are similarly protected by historic district designation. SoHo’s transformation after the expressway defeat defines productive change: New is added to old; some pieces are replaced, but new does not overwhelm the whole. Some old is renovated and updated for new uses. The layering process of history is continued, not interrupted. Most dramatically, the SoHo Syndrome has done more to retain the middle class in cities and stimulate new economic innovations than any planning or government-supported new development.
⁷

Discouragements to conventional development fundamentally helped SoHo’s spontaneous metamorphosis. The restrictions were precisely what prevented wholesale alteration of the district, prevented a different development agenda from overwhelming it, and gave it the value property owners enjoy today.

Citizen activists stood ready to defend SoHo turf each step of the way. They lost few battles. No public funding, tax incentives, or zoning bonuses were necessary. The conventionalists who once decried the messy mixture of urban uses in gritty districts now celebrated the “mixed use” that SoHo epitomized.

Conventional economists, Wall Streeters, planners, and city officials undervalue these microeconomies that feed, sustain, and expand the larger city economy, the way the city’s economy functioned in its most robust eras. These are the areas where new work is added to old, the kind of new work that authentically grows an urban economy. In recent boom years, misguided upzoning plans have been the constant threat to the continuation and expansion of these microeconomies. The frontiers within the city to which this dynamic energy can move are fewer and fewer due to a wave of upzoning, excessive development schemes, and escalating real estate values. Too many of these people and activities are simply being pushed out of the city limits.