Learning from Bryant Park

Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces

Andrew M. Manshel

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978802452
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

By the 1970s, 42nd Street in New York was widely perceived to be unsafe, a neighborhood thought to be populated largely by drug dealers, porn shops, and muggers. But in 1979, civic leaders developed a long-term vision for revitalizing one especially blighted block, Bryant Park. The reopening of the park in the 1990s helped inject new vitality into midtown Manhattan and served as a model for many other downtown revitalization projects. So what about urban policy can we learn from Bryant Park?In this new book, Andrew M. Manshel draws from both urbanist theory and his first-hand experiences as a urban public space developer and manager who worked on Bryant Park and later applied its strategies to an equally successful redevelopment project in a very different New York neighborhood: Jamaica, Queens. He candidly describes what does (and doesn't) work when coordinating urban redevelopment projects, giving special attention to each of the many details that must be carefully observed and balanced, from encouraging economic development to fostering creative communities to delivering appropriate services to the homeless. Learning from Bryant Park is thus essential reading for anyone who cares about giving new energy to downtowns and public spaces.

CHAPTER 1

Jacobs, Whyte, Bryant Park, Jamaica, Queens, and the Return to the Center

In the 1990s, the tide changed in how Americans perceived their country’s cities. I use the metaphor of the tide rather than saying that a “revolution occurred” because this change in perception took place over an extended period of time. It came about because a series of small, calculated changes over a number of years shifted the perception of safety by residents of urban centers.

It is widely acknowledged that many American cities, particularly the older ones of the Northeast and Midwest, began to decline in the early 1960s. They were perceived at that time to be places that one moved out of if one could. In the American public imagination, cities were thought to be unsafe and physically decaying. For New York City, the low points were the 1975 municipal fiscal crisis and the 1990 New York Post headline “Dave, Do Something,” which begged then mayor David N. Dinkins to take action after a series of particularly violent events.

But then the tide began to turn. In the mid-1990s, perceptions of city centers began to change, and by the end of the decade, cities—and New York City, in particular—were thought of as safe, clean, and vibrant. People began moving back downtown, and real estate prices, which hit bottom in New York City after the market crash of 1987, began a steady increase, climbing to today’s dizzying prices of as much as $6,000 per square foot of residential space in new buildings in Manhattan.

This book makes the case that the ideas that played a critical role in this sea change were first incubated in the 1950s, crept into the minds of those managing urban public spaces in the 1960s, were refined in the 1970s, and started being implemented by the early 1990s. By the end of that decade, principally as a result of the practice of these ideas, the urban tide came back in.

The relevant strategies revolved around reversing the negative perceptions of public spaces by making them feel safe, comfortable, and interesting instead of frightening. After decades of post–World War II development that focused on cars (designing public infrastructure to increase their capacity and speed) and new buildings (glass and steel towers with only one ground-floor entrance), planners, developers, and public officials began instead to center their thinking about public spaces on people. The showpiece in this change of practice was Bryant Park in New York City, at Forty-Second Street and Sixth Avenue, one block from Times Square. Bryant Park is a highly visible public space that for decades was deemed to be dangerous and unpleasant. It was “restored” in 1992 to widespread praise and, more important, wonder. The success of Bryant Park was a signal that public spaces in dense urban centers could be managed in such a way as to make them thought of as safe and inviting. Bryant Park became a model for similar projects around the country as well as a sign of urban possibility. Later, I employed those same strategies and tactics in Jamaica, Queens, to similar effect. Jamaica is becoming a model of a modern, diverse, vibrant downtown in a neighborhood that had previously experienced severe disinvestment and had a dreadful reputation for a lack of safety and violence in its public spaces. It is the next great New York placemaking success story.

One individual catalyzed this slow but massive change in managing public spaces in the United States. William Hollingsworth “Holly” Whyte was an author of a best-selling book1 and a longtime editor at Fortune magazine. At Fortune, Whyte published the work of Jane Jacobs, America’s most recognized urbanist. Jacobs went on to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which is widely regarded as the seminal work in the history of thinking about how cities work. Although Jacobs became the high-profile leader of new thinking about urban places, Whyte’s work on public spaces, while less recognized, is foundational to the changes that occurred in American cities. The new strategies described by Whyte centered on designing and managing public spaces with the goal of making them attractive to people rather than having them serve as throughways for cars or grand statements of design. Whyte was a careful observer of urban spaces, and he made time-lapse photography a key observational tool. Whyte was given to Yogi Berra–like aphorisms such as “You can see a lot by looking.” The conclusions he drew from his hands-on research resulted in the books City: Rediscovering the Center2 and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.3 Whyte became involved in the restoration of Bryant Park in 1979, and his principles laid the foundation for the park’s tremendous success and widespread impact.

Although it gets used a great deal, different people employ the term placemaking in different ways. Recently, some have begun to use the term tactical urbanism to mean approximately the same thing.4 In this book, when I use the term placemaking, I am referring to a practice of activating public spaces through programming, high-quality maintenance, and attention to detail. Central to placemaking is the monitoring of space users in real time in order to fine-tune the programming and management of streets, sidewalks, parks, and plazas to draw people to them. Placemaking is about improving public spaces through small moves and adjustments rather than through planning on a grand scale. Over the last thirty years, those of us involved in improving downtowns and public spaces have gained a great deal of practical information about what kinds of things bring people into public spaces and revitalize them. The goal of this book is to describe that knowledge. These aren’t big ideas. They are the small ones that make a difference.

The Beginning of the Bryant Park Restoration

The story of the Bryant Park restoration began in 1979 with Andrew Heiskell, the chairman of both Time Inc. and the New York Public Library (NYPL). It is very hard now to imagine the physical and operational decrepitude of NYPL in the 1970s, but the once-elegant central library building at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, built in 1911 and designed by Carrère and Hastings, had become a run-down and antiquated facility. Heiskell set out to change that and began raising funds for its renovation and improvement. One of his fundraising calls was to William Deitel, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a charitable foundation established in 1940 by the sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr.5 While Deitel was receptive to this appeal for funds for NYPL, he told Heiskell that he thought no revival of the central library building would be possible without doing something about the dangerous eyesore that surrounded it, Bryant Park.

For nearly its entire history, Bryant Park had been an unsuccessful public space. Edith Wharton refers to it in The House of Mirth (1905) as “that melancholy pleasure ground.”6 The site of the park, two full blocks bounded by Fifth and Sixth Avenues and West Fortieth and Forty-Second Streets, was first used as a parade ground and an open space. It became a park, referred to as “Reservoir Square,” in 1847. The Croton Distributing Reservoir was located on the eastern half of the block. It was a gigantic structure, said to be Egyptian in design, with a popular promenade on top of its walls. In 1853, the Crystal Palace was built in the park as part of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, based on the model of the Crystal Palace in London. That structure burned down in 1858. In 1884, the park’s name was changed to honor the editor, abolitionist, and terrible poet William Cullen Bryant. In 1899, the reservoir was demolished to make way for the new main building of the New York Public Library, and a new park was created. That park (Wharton’s “melancholy” spot) was never popular, and during the Depression, it became a Hooverville. In 1933–1934, one of the young Robert Moses’s first capital projects as parks commissioner was the elimination of the encampment of the poor and unemployed and the implementation of a new design. This 1933 design—the result of a competition won by a landscape architect, Lusby Simpson of the New York City Parks Department—in large part remains today.

Figure 1. Bryant Park after its Lusby Simpson redesign in about 1936.

But Simpson’s design also proved unsuccessful, particularly with the Sixth Avenue El running alongside, casting a shadow and generating considerable noise and smoke. By the 1970s, Bryant Park was principally known as a haunt for drug dealers, prostitutes, and homeless people. There was only one long block separating it from the seediness of Times Square and the Deuce, the block of Forty-Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues that was dominated by pornographic movie theaters. (That slightly scary but also exciting walk between the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Broadway was a memorable part of my youth.)

Deitel told Heiskell about William H. Whyte, who had left his editorship at Fortune magazine to spend his time investigating how people behaved in public spaces under the auspices of the Brothers Fund. Whyte had been studying the success of Paley Park on Fifty-Third Street and Greenacre Park on Fifty-First Street (the site of which was a gift from the Rockefeller family). These were successful “vest-pocket parks” in Midtown Manhattan that featured movable chairs, shade, and water features. For NYPL, the Brothers Fund commissioned Whyte to perform a study of Bryant Park and make recommendations.7 After the completion of Whyte’s study, the Brothers Fund, along with NYPL and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), then led by Commissioner Gordon Davis, decided to establish the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (now called the Bryant Park Corporation, but it will be referred to here as BPRC) as a private, nonprofit entity to spearhead the implementation of Whyte’s recommendations. Dan Biederman, a graduate of Princeton, a couple of years out of Harvard Business School, and the chair of local Community Board Five, was hired to head the operation, with small grants from the Brothers Fund and the library. The initial staff was Biederman and an assistant. Biederman was charged with raising capital funds for the park’s improvement, creating programs to activate the space, and developing a restaurant, the rent from which was proposed to support BPRC’s operations. However, it would be a long road from those plans to their actual implementation, and BPRC struggled for a decade.

While the Restoration Corporation was founded in 1980, capital improvements to the park didn’t begin until 1988. Those improvements, as it turned out, were mostly paid for out of city capital dollars allocated to the NYPL. The situation at the NYPL improved through the 1980s as a result of the leadership and fundraising prowess of Heiskell and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s president, and the library knew that it needed modern storage space for its collection. Before the advent of the internet, the amount of printed material that libraries needed to maintain for researchers was growing exponentially. The storage facilities at the main library were far from up to date and lacked basic modern archive features like climate control and compact storage.

NYPL’s vice chairman at the time was Marshall Rose, a creative real estate developer, advisor, and investor who also actively served on the board of BPRC. It was Rose’s idea to use the land under Bryant Park to build a two-story extension of the library stacks. He essentially created new land for the library. That 120,000-square-foot, two-story facility was planned with all the modern archival amenities.8 The project also accomplished another important library goal: it jump-started the physical restoration of the park. The plan was to dig up the park’s great lawn, build the stack extension under it, and then, when the stack extension project was complete, restore the site—not to its original condition, but to an improved design implementing Holly Whyte’s recommendations regarding the park’s physical layout. The firm of Hannah Olin Design created the plans in accordance with Whyte’s suggestions. This was all to be paid for using $25 million of New York City capital dollars, raised through the city’s general obligation borrowing. These funds proved much easier to secure than the private philanthropic dollars BPRC had spent almost a decade trying to raise. BPRC did raise several million dollars to pay for noninfrastructural amenities, which included the restoration of the landmark comfort station (paid for by the J. M. Kaplan Fund), lamp stanchions copied from those on the north entrance to the NYPL (paid for by Celeste Bartos), lighting on top of the New York Telephone Company Building, perennial gardens (designed by Lyndon Miller), and concession kiosks.

After four years of construction, during which it was closed to the public by a cyclone fence, the park reopened informally on April 21, 1992.9 It included new entrances from Forty-Second Street; openings in the balustrades to allow visitors to cross the park; a working Josephine Shaw Lowell Fountain, which hadn’t functioned for decades; and a cleaned-up monument to William Cullen Bryant, which had previously been scarred by graffiti. There were brand-new, high-quality trash receptacles; the rear wall of the library had been cleaned of its perpetual yellow stain; and the boxwood parterres, which had grown to more than seven feet tall and made the park particularly forbidding, had been eliminated. The Sixth Avenue steps were reconfigured to be less steep, with better sight lines from the bottom. The corner at Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street (now called Andrew Heiskell Plaza) was completely opened up and reconfigured. The narrow stairs were eliminated and replaced by a broad entrance and two concession kiosks. The restaurant still remained only in the planning stages. Paul Goldberger celebrated the reopening in the New York Times and credited the restoration as a tribute to Whyte, whom he called “our prophet of urban space.”10

Figure 2. The construction of the New York Public Library Stack Extension under Bryant Park.

The stack extension was attached to the library by a 120-foot tunnel (the tunnel included an exit door that led to the not-yet-built restaurant pavilion). There was a fire door in the lawn that was designed to release smoke that now is covered by a panel listing the original donors to the capital improvements. The lower level of the two-story structure was planned for future needs and was not built out. Unfortunately, after construction was complete, it was discovered that the lower level was built in the path of a historic and latent underground stream—and it began to flood. It was therefore effectively unusable. However, the current plan for the storage of books, the result of a tremendous controversy about the future programming of the library, calls for the waterproofing of the lower level and its fit out for storage.

I Enter the Picture

While construction on the par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Jacobs, Whyte, Bryant Park, Jamaica, Queens, and the Return to the Center
• Chapter 2. The Basic Strategies of Placemaking
• Chapter 3. Why Bryant Park Is Important
• Chapter 4. The Role of Business Improvement Districts in Urban Revitalization
• Chapter 5. Operating Public Spaces
• Chapter 6. Programming Public Spaces
• Chapter 7. Learning from Your Mistakes
• Chapter 8. Improving Downtown Streets and Sidewalks
• Chapter 9. Suburban Main Streets: What Works
• Chapter 10. Homelessness and Equity in Public Spaces
• Chapter 11. Artists, Downtowns, and Creative Placemaking
• Chapter 12. Real Economic Development
• Chapter 13. Downtown Jamaica
• Chapter 14. Revitalizing Smaller Towns and Spaces
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author