The Suburbanization of New York: Home Town, No Town, or New Town?

By Jane Holtz Kay

Is America's "greatest city" succumbing to 'burbism'? Is the nation's most vibrant urban nexus substituting suburban sprawl for the pulsating vitality of its neighborhoods? As anyplace architecture and automobile policies impinge on Manhattan...as big box stores wrapped with parkinglots maul neighborhoods...as traffic grows while walkability shrinks...and gentrification squeezes out the long-time low-rises for highrise interlopers, the questions multiply:

Is Manhattan slipping into the 'mall'-dom, car glut and sterility of suburbia?

Look at the vanishing ma and pa stores...the disappearing door-to-door cafes, neighborhood groceries usurped by chains, the idiosyncratic bookstore bowing to Barnes and (Ig)noble chains. The sidewalk, the preserve of the vaunted flaneur, is cut up by Big Box Store driveways where industrial-strength, anonymous Best Buy or Home Depot parkinglots shoot SUVs and Hummers towards the pedestrian. Forget meandering. Dismiss window shopping as idiosyncratic storefronts displaying knickknacks, idiosyncratic attire, and tasty food samples vanish at the base of blank-faced new towers that shun the jam-packed displays of a the once-lively art of window dressing.

Find a neighborhood of the last generation and, as sure as the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, you find this more suburbanized style of building and streetscape: Aaron Naparstek who returned from a German Marshall Fund scholarship in Germany to study human, not automobile, accessibility, blames the usual suspects of the superscale and the suburban as he surveys his Brooklyn neighborhood. Talking to the progressive Planners Network conference at Hunter College in the summer of 2004, he cites the ma-and-pa and small shops gone missing. Goodbye to the ethnic restaurants shuttered over and the coffee hangouts drowned by the tsunami of Starbuck chains.

That phenomena multiplies across Manhattan-- from a Targee, as the franco-fiers say, or Home Depot now entering Chelsea to an oops-there-goes-the-neighborhood sports arena. Supported by the New York mayor and powers-that-be, these pricey crowd-drawing stadiums, a staple for the less urban Chambers of Commerce afflicted with empty Downtowns and flagging cities (or non-cities) like Phoenix, Manhattan's sports entrepreneurs serve their investors and undermine the neighborhoods. Likewise, the office buildings wrapped with skirts of vacant asphalt and windowless first floors, pursue a suburban pattern of development far from the tight, packed, pedestrian-pleasing vistas that made New York ...New York.

"An unjust and inefficient allocation of public space," says Naparstek . And one that represents the least socially-responsible way of movement and construction, the dedicated city cyclist tells his fellow urban aficionados. Beyond the economic and physical loss of life, this suburbanization and rupturing by the parkinglots and congestion they inspire, create the "Walls and Bridges" (as the conference titled the two-day event), that isolate communities. When the price of entry to a job is a car that costs the owner $7000 a year for a car (vs. public transportation, bikes or walking) the "wall" is social and financial as well as physical. Add the pedestrian obstacles as not-so-progressive planners in the Department of Transportation permit the massive parkinglots that surround a phalanx of big box stores and use of the public realm shrinks: accessibility is denied, urbanity lost for the sidewalk flaneur.

Not everyone agrees with this prognosis and perspective. Planner Tom Angotti who organized the conference offers a less gloomy view that resonates with non-New Yorkers like this writer who still admire Manhattan's nitty-gritty, vibrant urban mix. "My immediate take is that this is the last city to cave in to the suburban big box store," says Angotti. "It hasn't happened here the way it's happened in the rest of the country." Big Boxes have slowly taken over parts of the outer boroughs but have been slow to invade Manhattan and the most densely populated areas, he notes,

More significantly," in his eyes, "a coalition of community-based organizations defeated a 1990's zoning proposal that would have opened up still more land for big box development," he adds reminding this writer of the group's summer conference where attendees paced the city from the South Bronx--home to the activist "MOMs" group allied to protect themselves and their progeny from negligent landlords; to the brownfields hardby Hunts Point--where wholesale food warehouses idle amidst toxic emissions while community arts center advocates struggle to rouse the neighborhood spirit.

You can also make a case that the outer burroughs are picking up on that "lost sense of neighborhood" of New York City-- the green and the red, of, say Windsor near Park slope: "that the suburbs are being urbanized," Angotti continues, describing the new development, the increased density and vitality of commutable places like Teaneck or Montclair, New Jersey, he says, though others are less assured that the density and vitality of city-ness appears as Corbusian towers destined for the outer boroughs become suspect.

Still, the planner goes so far as to parallel the oft-lambasted Big Box chain with the department stores of yore: "a little this, a little that," he says, applauding the "potpourri of goods" such chains for one-stop shopping manner, providing, he goes on, that the city doesn't grant "bragging" i.e. parking rights to the chains whose parkinglots create gashes in the citiscape. But the major offense of the giant chains is that beyond Manhattan and other urbanized neighborhoods, they swell the parking spaces to super-scale hardtops. Built for drivers, not walkers, they no longer function as drop-by department stores. "They are suburban all the way." No Pollyanna, Angotti records the vanishing drugstore and local pharmacist...now replaced by the here-today-gone-tomorrow shifting staffs of a Duane Reade's...the Starbucks snuffing out the "cuppa" coffee joints and the big box stores turned into ladders of lookalikes, suburbanizing the city wall-to-wall with Wal-Marts and Home Depots.

Still, Angotti continues, "You can overhype these things but in many of them, there's change for the better not the worst in the last twenty years." "Think of street life in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst or Borough Park." There's very little change though the population has shifted from Jewish and Italian to Chinese and Russian. In these neighborhoods, there has been very little space to squeeze in the Big Boxes, " though a number of medium-sized supermarkets and oversized retailers have swollen their space. "It's idiosyncratic," he says.

He, like other New Yorkers distinguishes between the outer fringes (like Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx) where a car is a necessity, not, say Manhattan's Burlington Coat Factory or Bed and Baths where you have access to a cab. More somberly, he, like others worries that driving is up by 21 percent and the New York City Department of Transportation still functions as a not-so-jolly, not-so-green giant machine for the laying of asphalt and the production of motor vehicle traffic in faceless environments.

The sense of personal loss is stronger in older Manhattan neighborhoods. Speak to those who've witness the transformation and you hear their nostalgia mixed with regret for the bygone landscape, the home grounds of place, of play, of the personhood of their childhood. One young lawyer recalls the fading urbanity of his Germantown childhood in the East Side a generation ago displaying more chains and sterile apartments than charm these days. "They're all the same," says the once lanky youngster who grew up with his six siblings at the top of 89th street. "It's very difficult to find the flavor of the neighborhood."

Where once the world outside his door was animated with the annual Steuben Day parade of Knights of Columbus marchers in overalls, summer afternoons offered pool and baseball at the Rhinelander club, live German music and food enlivened the neighborhood eateries, youngsters played in Carl Schurz park...borscht and sauerkraut..and songs and laughter among the neighbors.

Today, the up-pricing and new building of denser, higher units, threatening and driving out large families like his own, sterilize the once-colorful community . Clean up comes and trace elements linger-- the fixup to the Murphy Center, an old landmark of the sanitation department whose land provided a ball field, still endures amidst the sky-reaching structures. But the flavor is gone in the dulling of "suburbanization," this not quite defined six syllable word that remains a noun waiting for consensus.

To transportation activist Charles Komanoff, the most obvious and disturbing sign is the supersizing of apartments-combining 2,3,or 4 units into one or creating giant echoing spaces (4,500 square feet or larger, say) in gut rehabs. "Not only does this keep lifting the price bar, " he notes "but it squanders space that others could have or (did) use, and thus works against density, urb sine qua non."

Another advocate for the poor, specifically low-income housing, who looks out of his sleek modernist windows on the attractive new mixed-income rowhouses and cleaned streets of the "new " Harlem, might disagree with complaints of the homogenization of the neighborhood. His working life, salvaging low-income renters from being squeezed out by greedy landlords, may contradict with his gentrifying neighborhood but to deem it "suburbanization" as an epithet undercuts more complicated analysis.

The changes in upscaling a once-poor neighborhood bear no simple "suburbanization" label or "tale of two citizens," the one displacing the other, but a mixed blessing. And Harlem was no heavenly abode. While some local bodegas and neighborhood stores vanish, this activist and other advocates for the poor, applaud the fact that some upscaling brings options to the single-choice, non-competitive earlier "ma and pa" markets that made for pricey milk and high cost goods with no competitors to drive them down. On the other hand, if "poverty preserves," as the preservationists say, such massive takeovers as Columbia University's new campus plans present a clearer case of urban gentrification or upscaling: not unlike the critics' questioning of the privatization of the Hudson River Park, making a derelict site a landscape attraction, but privatizing and commercializing a once-public site.

Others perusing the upscaling neighborhoods of New York, along with their changing ethnicity, observe that one person's "suburbanization" or cleanup --at, say, Central or Brooklyn parks --is in fact, the enlightened "urbanization" that has rejuvenated the virtual island nation. And, for all these epithets, perhaps, Manhattan, the crown jewel of America's metropolitan culture, needs a more nuanced use of the word "suburban" for these shifts in city life. That new word would include the influx of new and varied immigrant populations on the still-lively streets of Harlem, along with the slowly shifting sites of the battered South Bronx and other urban quarters whose re-greening has turned treeless streets, ravaged housing and troublesome corners into neighborhood klatches, or at least, comfort zones.

The most frequent complaints of "suburbanization" sound from the most visible corners of the city, it seems. Opponents to the new New York regularly bash the development at 2 Columbus Circle or the sterilized glamour of the new Times Square where backlit billboards seem like commercial barnacles obscuring the nitty-gritty old city. These commercial banalities may make old-timers long for the grainy urbanity of Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman's seedy "Midnight Cowboy" landscape, a generation ago, Or, at any rate, lament the loss of their non-plastic reality of the sidewalk noir of days past. Still, in 2004, on the 100th anniversary of Times Square, you can see the sparkling bulb-lit theaters renewed, and, for all the semi-sanitized Ralph Lauren-ized billboards, take the new tours pausing to applaud the old theaters with nary a nod to the palpably gritty, squalidly seductive old imagery in this should-we-say suburbanized and homogenized zone.

It is the question of the hour as cities attract new congregations and cleanup: How can we cherry-pick the pleasurable, even hygienic, elements of the best of the suburban way of life-the lack of crime, the good schools, the tidy parks-without the sanitized boredom? What indeed is suburbanization beyond the pejorative that repels New Yorkers and other urban aficionados? How can the city be safe and vibrant, blessed with the good schools and edged lawns of suburbia, but relieved of their "Stepford" boredom, classicism and racism? How can we get away from the stereotypes of torpid domestication and transfer their positive elements to an urban nexus?.

To "think like a city" is no simple task for the urbanist, to be sure. Far simpler, to "think like a river," in the naturalist mode, to "think like a Tiger," in the warrior mode or, for that matter to "think like Leonardo DaVinci" contemplating an artistic vision. If you're so inclined, you can indulge in thinking like a lawyer, a fox, an artist, a leader, a scientist, a Muslim or Christian. And, if you really want to go the route of creating vast pyramids of "thinking like..." you can try "celebrating your freedom in the pursuit of happiness" or ponder your full stature as a Homo sapiens on and think like Darwin.

Still, at its roots, "thinking like a city" means thinking of an urban complex of sidewalks not roads, of intimate-scaled stores and shops, door to door, store to store, not massive concrete block concoctions whose sign medium is the message... not aloof federally-funded, road-driven design and gaps of parkinglots, but public access to public transit. Not lawns green from poisonous pesticides versus sidewalks, their weedy blooms shoving thru the cracks; their ailanthus pushing skyward. Not suburbs tended by chemical-strewing lawnmower men. Not lone drivers in loan cars to nowhere. But like a community of workers and travelers sharing sidewalk space, nurturing greenspace, promoting affordable urban space and, hence, creating a city mix, a wonderland of diversity.

So why, I ask you, if you were New York City, would you ever want to think like a suburb. Blessed with the largest train system in the world:

2000 miles of track including 700 of subway. "Peripatetic," "jammed," "cramped" these are positive descriptions for urbanity. Sprawling, spread out, isolated, these are the sorry, suburban goals of 20th century men and women. Tell that to the DOT, too, whose action plan is to move traffic, turning, say Queens boulevard into a twelve-lane monster....failing to reinforce a metropolis and a way of life that still retains great diversity in human and animal populations alike from Central Park Conservancy's list of 215 bird species, to the Chamber of Commerce's 474 Eskimos, culminating in Manhattan's 17,312 eating establishments. Okay, getting better schools and services is one retort (I confess) but they are, and should be more, amenable to policies that make them better. Beating our lawns into public parks is another. Re-thinking re-enforcing urbanization by "just saying 'no'" to Wal-martization is another. Above all, thinking like a city is the holistic, and urban, response.

"Thinking like a city" is not a restrictive gesture, as the great historian John Reps offered in describing the beginnings of the City Beautiful movement during the last century. In the frenetic activism of the World's Fair of 1904, St. Louis "sought and largely got-play grounds , public baths, tree planting, overhead wire removal, billboard regulation, wastepaper basket installation, sanitary inspection of poor neighborhoods, civic clean-up drives and other goals," he wrote. Plunk in the middle of the classically composed City Beautiful movement, the southern town got urban animation and life and, one should add, some quite splendid and even walkable suburbs...as did New York along with countless elegant suburbs by the Olmsteds and others, all connected to vastly improved public transportation. Walkable suburbs. Not sprawl.

"Real Cities Have Trains," one article in our own century confirmed the universality of those thoughts. Real cities view their clear-cut zones as part of the grid of life past. By this definition, Ground Zero should not be reclaimed as merely a green or sculptured wasteland punctuated by a sky soaring shaft, but as a place to mark the past memory of tragedy with the present vitality reuniting the streets of Lower Manhattan as part of the urban core, not corpse, of then New York to come.

Thinking like a city, finally, is thinking like sidewalks, shops, and Streets for People as William Whyte had it, people-filled places at a human non-automoted scale. Feet first for pedestrians, street fairs, book sales. The stuff of activism, even rebellion, in public spaces shaped for protest as it grows and pleasure day by day. No longer should we bow to the adage "I went to join the revolution but I couldn't find a parking place." We must walk and reinforce the underbelly of rail to subvert suburbanism with community-building. To be sure, old, like new, New York has always been "suburbanizing" in the epithet of the day. But, if nothing else, it is also undergoing a change that is the essence of urbanity.

A generation ago, Kate Simon's Fifth Avenue: A Very Social History complained that the street or the city "was no more finished than it was one hundred years ago," and open with evenhanded equality to depredation and improvement. The city of New York could handle it then and it will handle it now. Surely, after allotting all the goods of what we call "suburbanization" to the few for generations, the next half century can and should shift to urbanizing for the many.

And they have. Parks are better, neighborhoods cleaned, a back-to-the city and fix-the-city movement in process. When you turn the harsh, highway-esque underbelly of the Queensborough bridge into a chic bar, you are not gentrifying or suburbanizing an industrial artifact for the swells but utilizing it to enhance the urban scene. When you improve schools and services, and keep the sidewalks and streets for people, you are making sure that New York City will never be a Lost Eden smothered by the anti-city extremes ­sprawl or the slums-- but a place of opportunity for an inclusive urban legacy. Stewarded by those who care enough to vitalize its future, this kind of living city can endure and grow as the still new century advances.

The above article ran in Progressive Planning Fall 2004 magazine.

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