The Battle for Gotham (58 page)

THE DENSITY ISSUE

Advocates of new green buildings argue that not all old buildings can be made energy efficient. And they point to the overarching need for re-creating density, particularly in cities. First of all, given where they start from, most old buildings worthy of preservation can be made as energy efficient as necessary to strike a balance between preservation, especially of culture and history, and conservation.

The density issue is more complicated and is often used by those who do not recognize the density already existing in low-rise urban neighborhoods with buildings of varying scale. Brooklyn, for example, is on its own one of the densest cities in the country, and the predominant scale is the brownstone, with most apartment houses under twelve stories. But the urban fabric is tight, varied in height, and stylistically diverse.

And remember that the Lower East Side, where the dominant scale is the tenement, small apartment house, and former-loft manufacturing building, is an area still densely populated and economically vibrant. Next door to the synagogue, as another example, stood a classic five-story nineteenth-century brick row house. It once was owned by the synagogue and for decades had ground floor retail. It had a great backyard on the roof of the first-floor shop that was built the full one-hundred-foot length of the site. Pear and magnolia trees bloomed there magnificently. For years the Chinese owners maintained the trees.

New owners tore down the structure and built a taller new, perhaps upscale, version, including a ground-floor shop. One floor was added, but the apartments were made bigger and the ceilings higher. Thus, less people live there now, but it is bigger. When it comes to density, size can be deceptive.

Brownstone and tenement districts are already dense. One of the brilliant features of urban row houses of brownstone size or tenement is their versatility. Single family-residence, two-family or more, take your pick. They can convert to any configuration and back again, depending on the market and population. If density is appropriate, that four-story can be four apartments or eight, rental, condo, or co-op. In such cases, versatility is the key; density, when called for, can be the result.

As far as the density issue goes, it will be decades before any city in this country need demolish one more existing structure in the name of new density; enough vacant land exists, from prior demolitions for big projects that never happened and parking lots, to accommodate the next hundred million people, to be sure.

I don’t think I have seen a city in this country without a parking-lot surplus. Not all of them are as dramatic, perhaps, as Tulsa, but they all share the same disease. Tulsa experienced a building boom in the oil-discovery days of the 1920s and was rich in great Art Deco architecture. Many wonderful downtown specimens remain, but on a visit not long ago, I couldn’t understand why the streets around them remain empty of pedestrians. Little street-level retail was apparent. Some of the retail exists in the interior of buildings or at suburban malls, but that is not a sufficient explanation. Then I happened to go to the top floor of one of the city’s typically banal newer bank buildings. Looking out at the cityscape gave me an “aha moment.” Before me lay a sea of parking lots more numerous than the buildings they were created to serve. What a resource for future density, with parking built underground or unnecessary at all. People living and working in cities need to get used to walking a few blocks to their destination if density is ever to be achieved. Again, that means nibbling in one more way at the car culture.

Even New York, as tightly built and dense as it already is, has a sufficient supply of parking lots to fill a big portion of the so-called anticipated need for the population expansion that is supposed to take place by 2030, although it is not clear how that assumption was arrived at. And certainly, planners’ calculations for future needs in all cities did not anticipate the economic collapse, the slowdown in new immigrants looking for jobs, or even the return of some immigrants to their home countries because of the loss of jobs.

IF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING CAN, WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

The Empire State Building was already undergoing a $500 million renovation in April 2009 when manager Anthony E. Malkin announced $20 million in additional work to make it more energy efficient.
¹⁰
The improvements to this 1931 Art Deco landmark with its 102 stories, 2.6 million square feet, 6,500 windows, and 73 elevators are meant to serve as a model for older skyscrapers everywhere. The building has 302 office tenants, and 13,000 people a day use it, including visitors to the observation tower. The renovation add-ons are expected to reduce the skyscraper’s energy use by 38 percent a year by 2013, at an annual savings of $4.4 million. Up-front costs, Malkin noted, are often a deterrent for retrofitting older buildings, but the energy savings are expected to pay back those costs in only three years.

This is an enormous precedent for New York and every city. Seventy-eight percent of New York City’s greenhouse gases comes from the city’s buildings. Commercial buildings contribute 25 percent of that figure. At a press conference announcing this plan, Mayor Bloomberg said, “They are showing the rest of the city that existing buildings, no matter how tall they are, no matter how old they are, can take steps to significantly reduce their energy consumption.” Exactly!

The retrofit includes restoration, not replacement, of the existing double-hung wood windows. Here again, restoration versus replacement is significant. Restoration of wood windows is the least-understood building alteration today. The new windows never last as long as the restored wood windows do, and the vinyl of the new ones is not even recyclable when replacement is necessary in about ten or twenty years.
¹¹
Double-paned glass can be inserted in wood frames, and the result is often better than new.

The Green Building Council, even with some baby steps to improvement, still resists acknowledging the true value of historic preservation. The popular point evaluation system still is skewed heavily in favor of new construction. The resistance is difficult to comprehend, unless it is coming from a construction industry of contractors and suppliers that has not yet embraced the economic potential of preservation.

Environmental and green building movements undervalue preservation. The tension between them and the historic preservation movement is palpable. “A simmering rivalry,” Blair Kamen,
Chicago Tribune
architecture critic, called it. This is somewhat illogical, she notes: “Both camps drew inspiration from brilliant women who wrote brilliant books—Jane Jacobs, whose ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’ assaulted the conventional wisdom about ‘urban renewal’; and Rachel Carson, whose ‘Silent Spring’ helped give birth to the environmental movement by documenting the harmful effect of pesticides. . . . Whether it was the built environment or the natural environment, these women moved their causes from the fringe to the mainstream. The movements they helped birth would seem to be the equivalent of sisters, or brothers—destined to be allies, not adversaries.”
¹²

Battles over this issue in the future will be many, and, to be sure, some iconic landmarks may not accommodate any and all energy-saving add-ons. If they can’t, that shouldn’t mean they are disposable. They may not even need to be mechanically adjusted, if the inherent natural systems are allowed to perform as they were meant to. No building need automatically be eviscerated to increase energy efficiency; competing values must be weighed. Community values count. Balance does not mean 100 percent either way. The essence of sustainability is cultural as well as scientific. And preservation is as much about culture as anything else.

The good news is that both the historic preservation and environmental movements share similar goals, and both reflect the legacy of Jane Jacobs. In her sixth book,
The Economy of Nature
, Jacobs reinforced her early embrace of both the preservation and the environmental movements. The more these two movements can find common ground—and like Jacobs be both preservation environmentalists and environmental preservationists—the more New York and all cities will continue to come out from under the residual shadow of Robert Moses.

Historic preservation, as we saw earlier in this book, is a precursor of urban regeneration. But it is also a precursor to a greener planet. Preservation is good environmentalism; good environmentalism starts with preservation. The Eldridge Street Synagogue is a model of both; when I first walked in in 1982, who would have known that it would be such a good story?

Appendix:

Jacobs’s Arrest in Her Own Words

“A very curious thing was occurring. I was used to hearings at the Board of Estimate where the microphone for the speaker faces the people holding the hearing, the ones going to make the decision. The speaker’s back was always to the audience. At this hearing, however, the microphone was directed the other way. The state people, engineers and people like that, not elected officials, sitting on the stage, had the speakers address the audience. The speaker’s back was to the officials. This was very symbolic. The hearing was being held with the idea that it was necessary for people to let off steam, not that they would have anything that would be instructive or informative for the hearing officers whose minds were plainly made up. So when it was my turn to speak, I drew attention to this, how we weren’t talking to the hearing officers; we were just talking to each other. It was a charade. Furthermore, it wouldn’t matter if we were talking to these officials, because they were not the people who made the decisions anyway. They were just errand boys, sent from Albany to preside while we let off steam under the guise of a hearing. It was phony as a hearing.

“So I decided that at least I would send them back to Albany with the message that we really didn’t like this, and since talk would never be that kind of a message, since they didn’t hear anything, I planned to just walk across the stage and let them know that I was not content to remain down there talking to my fellow citizens, that I wanted to give them an immediate message. And I said, anybody who wants to come with me, come along. I addressed them instead of the hearing officers. They had set it up for us to talk to each other, so I was going to do that. And so I started up the stage. And pretty nearly all the audience got up and began to follow me as I walked across the stage. That’s all I was going to do, walk across the stage and down the other steps. And this threw them into the most incredible tizzy. [She laughs with obvious enjoyment at the memory.] The idea of unarmed, perfectly gentle human beings just coming up and getting in that close contact with them. You never saw people so frightened. They had a policeman up there on the stage. As I came up on the stage with I guess pretty nearly all the audience coming along too, everything was quiet, absolutely quiet, except the chairman, a state engineer, kept yelling, ‘Officer, arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!’

“[The policeman] didn’t arrest me at first. He came over to me and he said, ‘Mrs. Jacobs, come on over here and sit down.’ And so I sat down where he suggested, and the chairman was now standing blocking the way. Nobody knew what to do. The woman with the stenotype had jumped up in alarm—nobody was even making an ugly face—and her tape was all running out, and she grabbed her stenotype. So people began picking up this tape that was all around now and sort of tossed it around. That was all that was happening, and this eerie silence and sort of leisurely kind of confetti, it was really surrealistic, because nobody was tearing it up or doing anything violent, just wafting this paper and the engineer was yelling, ‘Arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!’ Everybody else was absolutely silent. Nobody knew what to do. The policeman said, ‘March down the other side; just make a gesture.’ So, I made some derogatory remark to him about these people holding the hearing. I forget what I said; it was pretty plain. Something like, ‘They’ve got their minds made up; they’re just trying to do us in, these people.’ And he said, ‘Aren’t they, though.’ And so there I sat. This scene went on, and after a while I thought, ‘Somebody has to bring this to an end. Nobody knows what to do any more than I do.’ So I got up from the chair—all these frightened men went down the other side—and went to the microphone again. I said, ‘What’s the charge? Why am I being arrested? ’ The policeman said, ‘It’s at the request of Mr. Toth [John Toth, chief engineer for the State Department of Transportation]. I wouldn’t arrest you except that he has demanded your arrest.’ So, I said again, ‘What are the charges?’ And he said, ‘Well, that will be worked out at the station house. But I must arrest you. I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think they’re making a mistake.’ And he said, ‘I think they are too, but I have no choice.’ [laughter]

And at this point, Jacobs might have figured it would do the cause well if she were arrested. She didn’t want to be arrested, but she was. The crowd followed her to the station and continued the protest as she was booked. It was the same arresting officer who had been on the stage.

“He was really nice. He was always on my side. I was booked on disorderly conduct. A court date set. When we got to court I waited and waited all morning. My case wasn’t called. My arresting officer came down to me at one point and said, ‘They’re making new charges against you. They’re opening up law books they’ve never opened up before.’ Jacobs laughs recalling this and laughs further as she reports that the charges they came up with were ‘riot, inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing government administration. Four years in jail. They’d have liked to put me in for it too. They really would. Then my arresting officer had to take me back to the Tombs, the central police station, to get a mug shot, fingerprints, and get me booked as a serious criminal.