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The Balance of Organic Urbanism

Houses on Steiner Street, San Francisco. Lot sizes are the same.

What exactly made pre-Euclid development in American towns and cities more aesthetically rich than so many of the sterile developments of today?  I think one of the most significant factors was the inherent balance between uniformity and individuality that characterized the legal framework of traditional town planning: the paradox of organic urbanism.

Prior to use zoning, certain legal requirements enforced a broad uniformity among neighboring buildings that created aesthetic harmony: lot sizes tended to be uniform as subdivisions of paper streets were filled in; fire codes limited building heights to the reaches of available equipment; air and light requirements limited density.  Presumably, the codified requirements of the 19th and early 20th centuries evolved from the common law traditions and practical constraints of town-building that had controlled development in earlier times.  But while these rules defined the corners of the working canvas, the work, so circumscribed, was as varied as those who built it.  Uses were unregulated, except to exclude nuisances; architectural styles were driven by the tastes of individual builders and buyers; attachment, detachment, and maximization of coverage were driven largely by market conditions.

Other factors contribute to the abiding appeal of older neighborhoods: the availability of natural materials like clapboard, limestone, and slate, at the times of their construction; the rich detailing of a design that was intended for pedestrians rather than passengers in speeding cars; private law controls, within subdivisions, that ran with the land; generally, the relics of another time.  Variety also accrues over time, as identical buildings are modified in different ways.  But I suspect the most significant factor in the richness and authenticity of older towns and city neighborhoods lies in the inherent balance of the legal framework that shaped them: one that regularized the many canvases of a neighborhood, then stepped back and allowed them to each be developed according to a wide variety of individual tastes and specific economic demands.

Today, many urban redevelopment projects seek to recover the richness and variety of traditional neighborhoods, but their planners often fail because they attempt to exercise complete control over an entire, unitary project.  Often, it might be the case that defining the scale of development, the quality of building materials, and a set of specific exclusions would be enough.  Beyond these basics, planners could exercise a light hand, and let the marketplace of individual styles and economic necessities fill in the details, resulting in a variety that more thoroughly expresses the character of  the community.

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The Last Detached Victorians of New York Proper?

Houses on Woodycrest Avenue, New York City. Source: Bing Maps.

I suspect they are.  They’re a collection of about a dozen houses along Woodycrest Avenue, where it’s crossed by 164th Street, in the South Bronx.

Some NYC history: before 1898, Brooklyn was a separate city, and Queens was a collection of separate municipalities.  Staten Island was (and remains) a separate universe.  But the Bronx was the organic extension of New York City’s development beyond Manhattan: along with Manhattan, it comprised the City of New York before the greater, five-borough city was legally formed.  Evidence of the close relationship between Manhattan and the Bronx is still visible in the continuity of street and house numbering from one to the other; the continuities of Broadway, Park Avenue, and Third Avenue between the boroughs; and the fact that no ZIP code in the Bronx ends in the same two digits as any in Manhattan, due to the borough’s historic coverage by the “New York, New York” post office.

1896 Map Showing NYC lands beyond Manhattan.

So, onto detached Victorian houses.  There was probably a time when New York City proper had a large stock of detached Victorians, like those that remain in San Francisco or Boston, or the ones in the above picture.  (Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, of course, all have their fair shares of such houses.)  But Manhattan and the Bronx grew faster in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than any of those places, and most of their formerly low-density sections were completely built up with tenements and apartment buildings by the 1920s– long before historic preservation was an urban planning concept.  As a result, the stock of detached Victorians in New York City proper is almost totally erased.

Manhattan– the heart of the city proper– has barely any detached houses remaining, at all.  (There are literally three or four on Park Terrace West and a couple on Seaman Avenue, in Inwood, and a few in Marble Hill.)  The Bronx, on the other hand, has probably tens of thousands of detached houses, but most of them are simple wood-frames, Tudors, colonials, or brick duplexes that post-date the Victorian period.  In light of the historical context, this bunch of spacious homes with turrets, gables, and wraparound porches on Woodycrest Avenue is unique.  And it may actually be the last remnant of an architectural period in the city’s history that has all but disappeared.

Will research more, and update.

Update: there is a handful of smaller detached (possible) Victorians, much less elaborate, in Marble Hill.

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Proposal to Expand NYC Subway to Hudson County

The Flushing I.R.T., or the 7 train, would be extended to Secaucus.

This proposal, if completed, would mark a significant step toward the seamless incorporation of Hudson County, New Jersey, into New York City’s urban core.  This is a process that has been unfolding since the earliest days of the 20th century, when the PATH train (or the Hudson Tubes, if you like) first provided two heavy-rail, subway connections between Lower Manhattan and Hudson County– replacing the ferries that once linked railroad stations on the New Jersey waterfront with New York City.

If it were built, a Midtown connection to, presumably, uptown Hoboken and Weehawken, and then to Secaucus, would close the deal.  Almost inevitably, it would bring about the upgrade of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail (HBLR) line, since the right-of-way of the latter would link the Subway and the PATH by a north-south route, much like the G train links the subway lines that run out from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens.  It’s easy to imagine Hudson County becoming even more of a sixth borough with this sort of rapid-transit connectivity.  In fact, this would be the first time a NYC subway line ventured beyond the city limits.

Hudson Tubes, 1909.

This approach compares favorably, especially on a local scale, with the late, great ARC plan.  First, it would solidify Hudson County’s place, in conjunction with Newark, as the distinct urban core of New Jersey.  Second, like the ARC, it would increase the number of mass-transit seats that are entering Manhattan from New Jersey on a daily basis, thus alleviating the current capacity-busting rail schedule under the Hudson River.  Third, unlike the ARC, it would accomplish this increase in capacity without a parallel increase in the availability of single-seat access to Midtown from the suburbs.  This is important: in my view, the lack of additional single-seat bragging rights would make the increased capacity’s impact on development patterns more favorable to the redevelopment of suburban town centers, because, frankly, it would have less marketability for the kinds of developers who only seek to sell luxury units to Midtown commuters.  Finally, an exception, of course, would be found in those parts of central Hudson County which would be directly served by the subway extension.  These limited areas would see a rapid and powerful rise in demand: this, in an area which is already heavily urbanized, still undervalued, and which would, in my view, be an appropriate focus for very-high-density new development.

The Crain’s article cites a total cost of about half the projected expenditures for the ARC.  This strikes me as a simple, practical solution, given the current political and budgetary situations, and the region’s ongoing rail capacity needs.

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Spotlight: Ouro Preto, Brazil

Amazing town.  Architecture dates to the Brazilian Gold Rush, mid-19th c.  Nearby Belo Horizonte, a pre-planned city, replaced it as the capital of Minas before industry or growth set in.  Check it out in Google Street View.

One thing that’s really captivating about this town’s plan is the natural way in which it was built into the wild contours of the land.  For example, take a look at the 0-200 blocks of Ruo Claudio Manoel, and note how the dense buildings of the town center are worked into the steep hillside, without any sacrifice to the quality of architecture on a lot-by-lot basis.  A little further up the hill, near where the map is centered, the Praça Tiradentes represents an almost perfect adaptation to the land of a classic plaza or forum that one might find in a small European city.

Photos remain the copyright of Google, and are used in accordance with the principles of Fair Use.  Explore the streets of Ouro Preto, yourself, here.

Rua São Francisco.

Praça Tiradentes.

Rua Conde de Bobadela.

Ruo Claudio Manoel.

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“The Place Making Dividend”

Georgetown Apple Store. Source: ULI

Interesting piece from the PCJ, via the Urban Land Institute, that highlights the powers that local boards may have over the design of buildings subject to their approval.  The storefront (photo, left) looks nice.  But I do wonder whether an Edison or a Yonkers would really have the same ability to leverage concessions that a Georgetown or a Cambridge would have.

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UK Housing Benefit Cuts

This caught my attention, mostly because I don’t know very much about affordable housing policies in the UK.  The Guardian provides some insight, through its article on housing benefit cuts, into the vast differences that exist between types and degrees of governmental involvement in the urban housing economies of America and Britain.  Although, when you consider the amount of revenue that the US public sector loses annually by maintaining the mortgage interest deduction, the American system may actually be more generous.  As long as you aren’t actually, you know, poor.

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NYC Pre-War Apartment Lithos

 

The Alclyde. West 94th/CPW. Source: NYPL

 

This is a great archive from the New York Public Library: floor plans, footprints, drawings, and details of classic New York City apartment buildings, all in original, color lithographs from the turn of the 20th century.  The bulk of the buildings are in Harlem, Washington Heights, and on the Upper West Side, but the collection goes as far downtown as the twenties, and as far up as the Grand Concourse.   Note the parlors and chambers, rather than living rooms and bedrooms, in these units; and the fact that even modest apartments were designed to have living space for domestic help.  I found this cache during research for a paper about efficient land use in Late-Victorian New York City.

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A Thesis

One idea behind this project is a goal of developing several related strands of thought that could inform and enrich the drafting process for local land use codes.  Since I’m at Rutgers, I’ll focus primarily on approaches that could work within the legal framework of New Jersey.  And since Euclidian zoning is a national phenomenon (curse? blessing?), what works in New Jersey could likely be considered in other American states.  So, yes, I’m working under the rubric of Euclid, and– in my own state– the equitable doctrine of the Mount Laurel cases.   But the aesthetic theories that are presented here build on a number of influences that are entirely unrelated to any American legal doctrine, and include some which have been directly abrogated by the generic boilerplate that has been enacted pursuant to the post-1926 Euclidian zoning model.

The planning approaches of Victorian America and England, and those that have been recovered from Classical world, are currently two my strongest interests.  I find the organic urbanism of the Greco-Roman world engrossing, as well as the detailed architecture and simple layouts of US and British towns that were built in the later 19th century.  And, interestingly, the building stock of the two distant periods, as well as their street plans, have some striking similarities.  But I don’t want to get too caught up here in a web of theoretical pretensions.  And I’m not an architect, so I won’t act as if I am.  What I’m really looking to do is distill is a practical assortment of the basic physical, aesthetic, and socioeconomic building blocks of cohesive, attractive, and viable neighborhoods, and the ways that their key elements can be memorialized in land use codes to encourage future development.

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New Cairos?

About a decade ago, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto captured the informality of land use practices in developing countries in his book, The Mystery of Capital.  The popularity of de Soto’s writings has made it almost a cliché to point out that people in developing countries carve out many of their land uses beyond the formal boundaries of the law.  In light of that, or maybe in spite of the oversimplification of de Soto’s premise, it’s interesting to read the Times‘s coverage of Egypt’s response to the crowding and sprawl of Cairo with a policy of large-scale, government-sponsored urban planning, which is actually reminiscent of some of the socialist practices in Latin America and Eastern Europe during the second half of the 20th century.  Is Egypt’s policy an anachronism, or could its success herald a return to the sorts of grand-scale, government-sponsored development policies of the past?