Common Law Urbanism

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A Haunted and Enchanted City

I spent part of last week in New Orleans — my first time in that city. The photos included in this post are mostly of architecture and a few street scenes around the Vieux Carré. I’ll post other batches, including of jazz clubs, houses in the Garden District, and the enchanting light that came over the streets during an impending and fierce storm (including a visit to the again-going Old Absinthe House) in a later post.

A group of young women, dressed as angels (with iridescent haloes), congregate in front of the St. Louis Cathedral to prepare for a Joan of Arc-Twelfth Night parade that also marks the start of the Mardi Gras season. Photo: Theo Mackey Pollack.

I hope to spend time in New Orleans, again. It is a fascinating city to explore, and to try to process, on so many levels: its architecture and urbanism, its layered social and cultural history, the surprising way in which its high culture, cheap alcohol, traditional Catholicism, hedonism, classicism, neon, jazz, old money, abject poverty, and all else seem to (mostly) gracefully coexist. It reminds me of no other place in America, yet it could not exist in any other country.

The streets of New Orleans (at least, those in the Vieux Carré) are reminiscent of a Mediterranean city, maybe one in Spain, with low rooflines and floral balconies and breezy palms, and everything organized on a grid around a central plaza (anchored, of course, by a fine old church). Other aspects seem not-quite-American: many people dress more carefully in New Orleans than most Americans do elsewhere (except, perhaps, Boston). Streetcars still operate. Alcohol is everywhere in public. As is live music. And, in stark contrast to the genericism that has now conquered much of the United States, the local culture here struck me as the most vital I’d encountered in the States. That is, people participate in it. (Following the image above, an entire parade, including floats and more costumery, sponsored by a local krewe, would arrive.) Yet, for all its distinctions, it is a distinctly American city, combining influences that have only ever converged in this corner of the Deep South.

There were moments when I felt like I had opened a time capsule and entered a world where the twentieth century hadn’t quite arrived. Instead, this potent preserve of Victoriana and Vaudeville was floating obliviously on the sea of 21st century America. I’m sure such an impression is engineered by the tourism bureau; and pressing beyond the confines of historic neighborhoods would yield plenty of evidence to the contrary. But with such a concentration of historic spaces, inside and out, and so many people still participating in centuries-old traditions, any line between fantasy and living memory, like other contrasts in this strangely familiar city, can seem ephemeral.

Hover over or tap the image below for slideshow.

Vieux Carré
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Edward Glaeser on the Housing Shortage

In his recent City Journal article, “Free to Build,” Edward Glaeser begins to reframe the zoning-driven housing crisis as a national phenomenon, requiring national solutions, rather than a merely local or coastal problem. Advocating for the use of federal policy to unwind the cumulative, national effects of zoning overreach strikes me as a stark milestone in the right-leaning policy world. That said, I think this may represent one facet of a pent-up, multipartisan response to the NIMBYism that, for generations, has damaged the US economy and environment through land-use policies that promote rent-seeking behavior and de facto segregation at the expense of traditional, participatory, incremental urban growth.

Photo by the author of some traditional apartment houses located in Cape May, New Jersey, illustrating how traditional urban housing is an artfcat of more liberal historical building laws.
Traditional urban housing is an artifact of more liberal historical building laws. (TMP)

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A Top Ten List for Urban Code Reform

R. John Anderson has an article at CNU’s Public Square identifying ten code-reform priorities that would help to address the endemic shortage of housing units in the United States. Several of these principles align with recommendations I’ve touched on here at LT, or in other articles, including: provisions to reduce parking requirements for new units; zoning that allows accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built, as-of-right; amendments to state and local building codes to allow small multifamily (Missing Middle) buildings to be built in accordance with the International Residential Code (IRC), rather than the more compliance-costly International Building Code (IBC); and a general liberalization of structural massing requirements and lot-size minimums, to facilitate more efficient uses of scarce metropolitan land parcels. This top-ten approach strikes me as a practical summary of salient points for code reformers to keep in mind. David Letterman would be proud.

To this list, I would add: amending state subdivision statutes (or municipal ordinances, in some places) to actively encourage the creation of new, tiny, privately-owned lots. I have in mind parcels less than 30 feet wide at the street line, with no side yard requirements. This would allow traditional attached buildings to be built in diverse designs, as part of a coherent overall pattern. Over time, this would foster the growth of a variety of small housing options, along with the richness and equity of a broad base of participatory property ownership. Ultimately, it would allow the kinds of tight urban blocks to be generated today, in plausible settings, that already characterize our favored old neighborhoods.

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The Traditional Urbanism of New York’s West Village

I thoroughly enjoyed this pair of online classes from the ICAA. The planner Rodrigo Bollat Montenegro takes us on a grand tour of the urbanism of Greenwich Village, in which he touches on everything from Leon Krier’s elements of good traditional cities to the still-visible remnants of colonial property lines and century-old street extensions. 3.25 credits toward your ICAA Certificate in Classical Architecture if you complete the quiz at the end.

Part of the urban fabric of the West Village, as it stood in 1895, from a Sanborn map of Manhattan.
Part of the urban fabric of the West Village, as it stood in 1895, from a Sanborn map of Manhattan. Red is brick; yellow is wood frame; green is a special hazard (with brick or frame construction signified by dots or X’s, respectively). Evidently, the lot that now contains one of the city’s great jazz clubs, 55 Bar, was already numbered 55 Christopher Street in 1895. Next door, the building that would become the landmark Stonewall Inn, stood at 53-51. Source: New York Public Library.
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The Missing Middle for Incremental Growth

I have a new essay in City Journal that looks at Daniel Parolek’s Missing Middle Housing — and the case for both land use and financing policies that encourage builders to develop more midsized housing options in growing regions. The bottom line: traditionally, homeowners could develop additional units as neighborhood markets signaled demand through rising prices. As this demand was met, prices would trend toward an equilibrium — with the smaller units being most affordable.

Today, land use policies often prevent or limit these kinds of resourceful adaptations by owners — and subject any proposed changes to the gauntlet of local politics, where those who oppose any change often have a deep advantage. (Note how even the legal concept of ‘spot zoning’ militates against boards allowing incremental change, by deeming it facially illegitimate to change the rules for a single property outside the comprehensive planning process — even though such gradual adaptation in response to opportunities is how cities have historically grown.) One result, in the aggregate, has been a widespread shortage of affordable housing in growing regions.

Victorian-era rowhouses in New York’s Hudson Valley. Such construction traditionally provided an attractive segment of housing on small amounts of land. Photo: Theo Mackey Pollack.
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Urban Forms of the Mediterranean

My latest piece is up at TAC‘s New Urbs — an essay reflecting on how nature and culture have shaped the urban patterns of the Mediterranean region, and what we might learn from the wisdom of this particular Old World approach. Not surprisingly, the writings of Camillo Sitte (about Italian towns, in particular) figured heavily in this piece — as did a fascinating scholarly book: Mediterranean Urbanism, by Besim Hakim, which identifies, translates (!), and analyzes many of the written laws that historically shaped the towns and cities of Southern Europe and the Near East. Hakim’s book, which examines influences from Greece and Rome through Byzantium and Islam, is an incredible resource for understanding one of the world’s richest cultures of traditional urbanism.

A street in Rome.
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Building the West Bronx

A surviving Victorian in the West Bronx. Photo: Theo Mackey Pollack

I have a new piece in City Journal about how the West Bronx evolved from a series of suburban neighborhoods of Victorian houses (built in the late 19th century when the City of New York first incorporated the wards north of Manhattan), into an urban environment of (often beautiful) apartment buildings. The transition mainly took place between the turn of the 20th century, when subway service began, and the onset of the Great Depression, when construction and migration both came to a near standstill. It remains a model of how cities can grow incrementally, by allowing the construction of apartment buildings when demand for housing rises.

As it looked in 2012. Credit: Google Maps

This piece is something of a spinoff from the original research that I did several years back, and reported on this blog, about the last few Queen Anne-style Victorian houses along Woodycrest Avenue in the neighborhood known as High Bridge. Sadly, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission declined a proposal to preserve these last few detached gingerbread houses on the NYC street grid (that is, the one begins in Manhattan and continues north to the Westchester County line), and many have now fallen to the wrecking ball.

Several people have expressed interest in this topic. In addition to the ones on Woodycrest Avenue, I tried to document the handful of other remaining houses like these that are on the Commissioner’s Plan-Risse Plan streets of the West Bronx. I documented the research several years back, and most of it can be found here: https://www.legaltowns.com/category/the-bronx/

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The Singer’s Sisters

Although New York’s Singer Building (149 Broadway, New York City) was lost in the late 1960s, at least two other buildings remain today with strong claims of sisterhood. One is in New York City, just about a mile north of where the lost Singer Building once stood. The other is halfway around the world.

The Little Singer Building (561 Broadway, New York City) was built in 1903. Like the (Big) Singer Building, it designed by the Beaux-Arts-trained architect Ernest Flagg for the Singer Manufacturing company. The Little Singer is an attached, zero-lot-line building, in keeping with traditional urban forms. But, unlike Flagg’s next project, it does not have a freestanding tower. Although it was sandwiched between two other buildings, the architect found ways to make it stand out, including the use of cast-iron, arches, and a recessed bay that gives shape to its distinctive color scheme (red brick and green), which presaged the palette of the Singer Tower. Today, it has a clothing store on the ground floor, with residential units above. Here it is, today:


Singer House (28 Nevsky Prospekt, Saint Petersburg) is located on one of pre-Soviet Russia’s grandest commercial strips — the Nevsky Prospekt. Designed by Pavel Suzor, and completed in 1904, the Singer House is more playful in its Art Nouveau design than either of its Beaux-Arts, New York sisters. Yet, in a less formal way, it expresses a similar tendency to combine solid materials and ornate flourishes in a way that defined the visual themes of the company. The Singer House couldn’t have a tower, because the Czar wouldn’t allow anything to exceed the height of his nearby Winter Palace. Here it is, today:

I never find a site on Google Maps without doing some virtual wandering. Roaming around Saint Petersburg on StreetView makes me want to visit. It’s a beautiful and complex city. I’m often taken aback by the incredible richness and refinement of Russia, and its contrast with the country’s seemingly interminable political harshness. It’s a mystery — which makes it interesting.

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Remembering the Singer Building

My latest piece at TAC‘s New Urbs looks at New York’s lost Singer Building, which once stood at Broadway and Liberty Street in what’s now called the Financial District (but was once known simply as Downtown New York).

Seen above, a mural in the Liberty Tower, at Liberty and Nassau Streets, shows how the Singer Building might have appeared during its early days. The painting was commissioned by one of the great architects of recent restorations, Joseph Pell Lombardi.