Tag: new york city

Book Review from the Journal: Urban Legends, Peter L’Official

April 29, 2022 / odrozd

In anticipation of Volume 47 of the Carolina Planning Journal coming out next month, this week we are featuring another book review from Volume 46, The White Problem in Planning. Veronica Brown reflects on Peter L’Official’s Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin.

Book Review by Veronica Brown

A few televised moments speak to their era so well that they surpass television history and stand in for an entire period in American history. Surely the 1988 World Series, in which the camera panned from Yankee Stadium to a burning building in the South Bronx as Howard Cosell announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” is such a moment. Except for the fact that Cosell never said his most famous line. Peter L’Official debunks this story in the introduction to Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, an exploration of how during the late twentieth century, various media constructed a South Bronx that stood in for both the concept of urban decline and for the place itself. When presidents visited the rubble of Charlotte Street, as L’Official writes, they “did not visit the ‘South Bronx’ as much as they did the site of the nation’s shorthand for urban ruin” (129). Through thoughtful analysis of the period’s visual art, books, and movies, L’Official provides a necessary reexamination of the South Bronx’s history that also serves as a compelling argument that places are constructed not only through plans but through their artistic representations.

In the strongest two chapters of the book, L’Official pairs the photographs of Jerome Liebling and Roy Mortenson and the conceptual work of Gordon Matta-Clark with examples of what he terms “municipal art” (14), or work with a function that is bureaucratic as much as aesthetic. This “art, at work” (46) includes the Department of Finance’s project to photograph every lot in New York City from 1983 to 1987 in order to standardize the city’s tax assessment system. In this “administrative mode” (77) of photography, life emerges at the corners of straight-on photos of South Bronx buildings caught in the process of abandonment. Passersby move from one photo to the next as the city photographer progresses down the block. Situating these tax photos within a rich tradition of artists depicting urban ruin, including through conceptual photography, L’Official creates a “dual-purposed ethic of viewership” (76). This mode of looking considers the art-historical canon as well as sociopolitical upheaval in the urban environment. In another inspired pairing, L’Official uses the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and the Occupied Look program, two forms of urban trompe l’oeil, to demonstrate how perception and perspective shaped understandings of the South Bronx. Through Occupied Look, the actual windows of abandoned buildings were covered with panels with painted-on windows. Occupied Look presents itself as an easy subject for derision, but L’Official rejects cynical mockery, instead comparing the initiative to Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts in the Bronx Floors series. L’Official’s deft exploration of these various artistic interventions in Bronx abandonment proves municipal art projects as worthy of analysis and also figures the period’s conceptual artists as key urban theorists of twentieth-century decline.

In later chapters, L’Official turns to popular media depictions of the South Bronx, including books and movies, and continues to home in on well-chosen details. In a particularly gratifying turn, the main character of Abraham Rodriguez’s Spidertown (1993) has a scavenged Occupied Look window mounted on his bedroom wall, literally reversing the direction of the faux portal and co-opting its furtive purpose as he hides his cash behind the panel. The 1981 films Fort Apache, the Bronx and Wolfen each center on Charlotte Street, a block sufficiently metonymic for urban distress that Jimmy Carter staged a photo opportunity there when he visited the borough in 1977. In Fort Apache, the Bronx, both character and setting assume the identity of Charlotte Street. Pam Grier, the ultimate blaxploitation star, plays a sex worker named after the street. The film received significant protests from the local organization Committee Against Fort Apache, which argued that the film was reductive and offensive. Charlotte Street, however, had become a studio backdrop rather than a neighborhood with residents, a transformation made clear through the construction of a new building that appeared to be burnt-out for the production of Wolfen. Although L’Official does not extend his analysis of Charlotte Street to Ed Logue’s zealous development of the corridor into a row of single-family homes in 1987, recently detailed in Lizabeth Cohen’s Saving America’s Cities (2019), the aestheticization of the street through its movie appearances demonstrates why the American aesthetic ideal of the white-picket fence would be all the more appealing as a solution to the borough’s problems.

Full of both rich detail and exciting ideas, Urban Legends is an enjoyable book for any audience interested in the South Bronx, but the book provides a particularly important meeting ground for urban planners and historians of visual culture. As L’Official argues, the South Bronx “has been hard to ‘see’ clearly beneath the layers of myths, stereotype, and urban legend” (245). Urban planners have historically failed to see the Bronx and used its representation to obscure a clear vision of countless Black and Latinx urban neighborhoods across the country. This pattern has fostered rampant exploitation of these neighborhoods, including current gentrification and displacement in the South Bronx. What is perhaps most useful for planners to take from Urban Legends is an understanding of how representations will continue to construct the space. When L’Official asks “What vision of the Bronx will live on” (247), planners should recognize this vision will not only be constituted through their efforts but also through art and popular media.

Buy Urban Legends here.

Find Volume 46 of the Carolina Planning Journal online here.

Veronica Brown is a 2021 graduate of the Master’s of City and Regional Planning program. She received her undergraduate degree from Smith College, where she studied the psychology of contemporary visual culture. Before coming to UNC, Veronica worked in communications at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Power Broker: The Movie! Motherless Brooklyn and Villainy in the Planning World

December 12, 2019 / odrozd

By Evan King

Alec Baldwin plays Moses Randolph, a Robert Moses Analogue, in Edward Norton’s *Motherless* Brooklyn

Recently, I went with two of my classmates to the Chapel Hill premier of Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton’s new noir drama, featuring Jane Jacobs in all her sharp-witted, bespectacled glory, and Robert Moses as a fully-fledged Hollywood villain. It felt like an obvious choice for me, as a planning student, but I really had to wonder how fans of the original book would process the differences. The book, so I’ve been told, is a detective novel with the protagonist going after a Japanese seafood cartel, while the movie has the same detective, 50 years earlier, grappling with the injustices of urban renewal.

Well, maybe not exactly, he is solving murders, trying to keep loved ones safe, while getting a lesson in mid-century growth-machine politics and power dynamics. As far as realism goes, this is where it gets a bit ridiculous – the real Robert Moses did not hire goons to kill people. His was not a reign of terror, but crucially, one of unshakable financial and bureaucratic control and mistaken public worship. This is alluded to by one character during a brief scene, but the need for fast-paced danger in a movie obliges some more crass methods on the part of Alec Baldwin’s Moses.

If you are not familiar, Robert Moses was a public official in New York who assumed vast powers over the city’s (and region’s) public works construction for much of the 20th century, through manipulation of political and governmental processes, toll revenue collection, and sheer force of personality and will among other things. Much of the city’s modern landscape and problems are the result of his efforts, as are, arguably, those of the country as a whole – he trained planners from all around the United States in his arts of relentless freeway building and degradation of public transit. Moses retained power during the mid-20th century, a time of extreme generosity of federal funding for public works and trust in public officials in the United States. These circumstances have since changed, so contemporary planners struggle to collectively undo what he did, in a congealing world of cars and highways of his making.

The Robert Moses portrayed in Motherless Brooklyn (pseudonym Moses Randolph) is evil, exalting in the power to ruin vast numbers of people’s lives (Robert Moses displaced vast numbers of minorities and other disadvantaged people in clearing corridors for his urban freeways), where the one in The Power Broker is simply blind, unaware of his cruelty, still less of his horrific and lasting impact on the American city. Even the overwhelming arrogance that author Robert Caro speaks of is more paternalistic than sociopathic. Still, what both versions have in common is power disease – lust for power for its own sake. This is what makes Robert Moses (in Caro’s depiction) the quintessential Hollywood villain. If you’ve read The Power Broker, you can probably imagine no more apt historical figure for a villainous monologue (Dick Cheney maybe), and on that score, this movie delivers.

I sure would have enjoyed a more in-depth depiction of Moses’ empire, but the movie also happens to be a highly enjoyable detective drama with other characters and dimensions. I am not a film critic, but I do know that a movie can’t do everything, certainly not capture the whole essence of a very long and deeply researched book. Still, this is likely the closest thing we’ll see to “The Power Broker, the Movie” and I am inevitably left wanting more.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons and Warner Brothers Pictures

About the Author: Evan King is a first year masters student in city and regional planning. His interests include transportation policy in the developing world, light rail, and freight movement on inland waterways. He can found in his free time trying to kayak long distances and making hand-drawn maps. Evan hails from central Connecticut and completed an undergraduate degree in Maryland. Opinions are his own.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Seeing Race in the City’s Structure

June 21, 2016 / odrozd

We typically do not use literature for city planning texts, but Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) deserves careful consideration. Ellison weaves a narrative through New York City’s urban spatial structure to map how race is physically built into the city’s neighborhood composition, street networks, and utilities. Using the binary of invisible versus visible, Ellison defines invisibility as the African-American experience of being isolated explicitly and implicitly to pre-determined neighborhoods, economic opportunities, and basic utility services. Utilities, particularly electricity and lighting, shape the Invisible Man’s being within the city. I highlight Ellison’s argument alongside “Monopolated Light & Power,” a paper sculpture I built to visualize the interplay of visible versus invisible; being versus non-being; and access to city life versus segregation.

Monopolated Light & Power by Danny Arnold

“Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility. This is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know.”[1]

After a long series of hopes and opportunities being stripped forcibly away, the Invisible Man finds himself forced into a hidden Harlem basement. Here, he exercises complete control his space. Above ground, the city structure refuses his visibility, the recognition of his own being.

Below ground, the Invisible Man hacks into the electrical grid owned by Monopolated Light & Power, siphons power for his 1,369 light bulbs, and enjoys his visibility alone. It is an extraordinary number of inefficient bulbs that will eventually line every surface of his basement.

The Invisible Man presents a city structured by race, or the provision of space and utilities to some people, but not to others. Visibility versus invisibility. It stands in for segregation, redlining, and the denial of access to everyday life’s typical opportunities like electricity and lighting.

Planners might assert, “surely we’ve gotten better!” But herein lies the Invisible Man’s strength. Perhaps some neighborhoods have improved, but not others. The real point remains that life, the ability to be, what Ellison calls visibility, is at stake for the “others”. The state of emergency in Flint, Michigan, continues because of its water supply. Decision-makers converted the city’s water to the Flint River in 2014, which was “an industrial dump site and absorb[ed] contaminants from road runoff.”[2] Water of varying colors, rashes and other pains for children, and rapidly elevated blood pressure in adults ensued. In Ellison’s framework, utilities, like water, are for some cities, but not others.

[1] Ralph Ellison (1952). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International.

[2] Laura Bliss (February 4, 2016). “How Democracy Died in Flint.” CityLab. Found at http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/02/flint-water-crisis-democracy-failure/459825/.

Danny Arnold graduated from DCRP in 2016 and works as a transportation planner in Raleigh. Along with transportation, his interests include integrating art and planning and participating in spaces in which visual art, literature, and planning practice can inform each other. His paper sculptures explore various imaginations of urban spatial structure, memory, and environmental sustainability through using discarded materials.

Street Seats: a student-designed parklet in NYC

May 13, 2016 / odrozd

On the corner of New York City’s 13th Street and 5th Avenue, hundreds of people use the sidewalk adjacent to The New School University Center every day. For a university in Manhattan, “campus” is a loose term that defines the parts of the city traversed by its students. Union Square Park—a magnet of public life—is a proximate and popular space for students and faculty to relax outside, though there is a noticeable lack of activities taking place there. Aside from the park, public seating is otherwise nonexistent in these highly trafficked parts of Manhattan. To approach this challenge, the city’s Department of Transportation’s (DOT) created a parklet initiative: Street Seats.

Union Square Park. Photo: chensiyuan

The New School’s relationship with the DOT began last year when the first iteration of Street Seats was built. Ten architecture students volunteered to redesign an on street parking space in merely two weeks. They built off of the standard design provided by the DOT, then constructed and installed the design themselves. Because of the overwhelmingly positive response to the parklet, The New School’s School of Constructed Environments created a course called “Design Build” open to students of any major.

2015-street-street-platform-customizable-design-new-school-manhattan

The New School’s 2015 Parklet. Photo: NYC DOT

This semester, fourteen fellow students and I formed an interdisciplinary team to design, construct, and install a parklet in little more than three months. Whereas last year’s Street Seats was twenty five feet long, this year’s was approved for forty feet. With more time and space allowed, our group had the ability to develop a more complex design.

A rendering of the 2016 parklet. Photo: Camille Petricola and fellow students

The parklet will bring together the University community and the public for the spring and summer months. With a generous amount of planters and movable seating, this public seating area will be an evolving space over it’s seven month lifespan and will set a precedent for next year’s design.

The parklet, created with multiple tubes of many heights, encourages a diversity of uses. Photo: Camille Petricola and fellow students

Featured photo: The New School Community enjoying the 2016 parklet. Photo: Camille Petricola

Camille Petricola has lived in multiple cities around these United States but considers herself a native Pittsburgher. She majors in Communication Design at Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she focuses on urbanism and public space. Her favorite color is cobalt blue.

A Streetcar Named de Blasio

April 30, 2016 / odrozd

Two months ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio debuted a proposal for a streetcar line that would link the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts. His announcement was welcomed by many, as it addresses the inequities of travel around New York City. As denizens of the city are well aware, commuting to and from the Manhattan central business district is easy and convenient, but inter and intra-commuting between the outerboroughs is arduous and time-consuming. The streetcar would be the second transit line (in addition to the G train) that does not traverse into the urban core, but rather meanders through the neighborhoods of western Brooklyn and Queens. In addition, it would mark the historic return of streetcar service, which was last provided on October 31, 1956. However, upon closer scrutiny, this reiteration of streetcar service has many shortcomings.

Proposed route for the Brooklyn-Queens street car line. Source: Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector

One of the most glaring issues with de Blasio’s plan is that parts of the streetcar line run among mixed traffic. Transportation planners and city officials across the United States often celebrate the idea that streetcars are acceptable only insofar as they are flexible with the environment in which they are built. The prevailing thinking dictates that streetcars should not require any more infrastructure other than the rails that guide the vehicles. Exclusive right-of-ways for transit vehicles are considered unacceptable because they challenge the status quo of an automobile dominated streetscape. It is this planning ideology that is reflected in the latest streetcar incarnation, and which makes the design so problematic.

Well-designed streetcars require more than a set of tracks embedded into the pavement. The underlying principles of great streetcar systems is that they are fast, convenient, and reliable. As Yonah Freemark points out, these basic tenets demand the “[redistribution of] street space away from private automobiles and toward public transit.” The dedication of an exclusive right-of-way ensures that the streetcar can proceed along its route without any obstructions, which raises the operating speed and reduces travel time of the vehicle. Investing more into physical segregation between modes increases streetcar reliability and guarantees regular ridership. There is evidence that the lack of a separated street lane impedes, and even chokes, ridership as seen in the case of the Seattle South Lake Union streetcar, whose ridership numbers declined since its opening. Without the full dedicated right-of-way along the entire line, it is not clear whether the streetcar will exact true mobility in the way the mayor claims.

A rendering of the proposed streetcar in Long Island City. Source: Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector

The design flaws are not the only issues plaguing the streetcar proposal. While it is true that the streetcar will add a more direct route to the subway system’s current hub-and-spoke layout, the areas it serves are not transit deserts. The neighborhoods through which the streetcar runs are already served by multiple subway lines and a plethora of bus services. Furthermore, much of the proposed route runs parallel to existing subway lines. The streetcar would not actually contribute to transit equity because there remain sizeable swaths of the city that lack any form of rail infrastructure, including most of peripheral Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Although Staten Island has a standalone rail line, it is not connected to the rest of the boroughs, which leaves the borough isolated from the rest of the city.

Rather than focusing on the streetcar, the mayor should refocus his attention on other plans that would do more to serve transit-starved neighborhoods and that would foster greater regional mobility. For example, New York’s City Council, citing above-average commute times for the Fordham Road corridor in the Bronx, advocated for a new subway connection that would connect several subway lines. Another project worth exploring is the reactivation of the abandoned Rockaway Line in Queens. Both projects are located in transit deserts, and would provide basic transit service to the demographic groups that depends on it most: low-income and immigrant households, as well as households of color.

Featured Image: Credited to The Brown Brothers. The New York Times photo archive, Public Domain.

About the Author: Allen Lum is a 2016 graduate of the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC. He was born and raised in New York City, and thrives on the constant visual, sonic, and interpersonal stimulation that big city life offers. Allen is a transit enthusiast, which is what brought him to planning school at UNC. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in history at Williams College, and understands the paramount importance of thinking about urban issues from multidisciplinary and intersectional angles. During his time at DCRP, Allen was involved in the Curriculum as well as the Alumni and Career Development Committees, the latter of which he chaired in his last year. He will return to New York and hopes to find work within the area of transit and TOD planning.