The $600,000 Mistake

Daniel Burnham was wrong. I learned this from making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake. Placemaking/tactical urbanism is an iterative process. You need to learn as you go. It is essential to effectively improving public space to take risks – but those risks ought to be small, manageable ones; ones you can back out of with minimal damage. When ideas don’t work out, for example when they aren’t effective in drawing people into the space, then you need to bite the proverbial bullet and reverse course. That is an important part of listening to the community – admitting that what you’ve done isn’t working when they are voting with their feet (in the wrong direction).

At Grand Central and 34^th Street Partnerships in the 90’s we created a sidewalk horticulture program. Our President, Dan Biederman, came back from a vacation France where he saw sidewalk planters and hanging baskets and decided that replicating that experience in Midtown Manhattan would improve the streetscape and the pedestrian experience. Our horticultural team, led by Lyndon B. Miller had already scored a great success with the perennial gardens in Bryant Park. So we went to work trying to figure out how to extend that success to the streets around Grand Central and Penn Station. We were furrowing new ground here because, while some smaller American towns had hanging baskets (like Cooperstown, N.Y.), we weren’t aware of any large city where baskets and planters had been implemented on a large-scale. It was several years before Mayor Daley (who sent his staff to spend time with us in Bryant Park to take notes) implemented the spectacular Chicago State Street streetscape redesign, with its beautiful horticulture program – which eventually expanded all over the Loop.We did our research and found a catalog source for the hanging baskets and coco-mat liners. Our fantastic horticultural supplier, Starkey Brothers, helped us select plants and buy a truck with a long wand for watering. But we were stumped in finding a source for high quality planters of the scale we were looking for. So we decided to create our own model. Lyndon suggested a young architect friend of hers who had a classical sensibility, refined taste and was a pleasure to work with. The architect went to work creating a lovely square-based design that tapered up to a fluted rim that was imposed with the logo of GCP. Once a design had been agreed upon by our staff, we then went searching for a fabricator who could cast the planter in high quality concrete – that would have sufficient weight to hold its place on the sidewalk and would be of the highest quality in the casting of the detail and the quality of the surface. It took months working with the fabricator to get a prototype – which looked spectacular when delivered to our offices. The planter had an elegant shape and a gorgeous, rich surface.

Something like what the planters looked like new.

We loved it, and we ordered half a dozen of them for our streetscape prototype block on Vanderbilt Avenue. The various agencies that had authority to approve the project came to look at the prototype and signed off – and we then started mapping out locations around midtown where the planters and hanging baskets would be appropriate. The fabricator quoted us a price of $1000 per planter, and we ordered 600 of them, as I recall. When they were delivered, we installed them, along with the hanging baskets and sat back and admired them.

And the planters looked great for about six months. Then we noticed that the square corners were being chipped off by parking trucks backing into them, and by hand carts making deliveries. We started to repair them, but what was originally was a trickle turned into a torrent. Over time, what seemed like a majority of corners on the planters got knocked off. We also noticed that they were beginning to discolor and we tried regularly power-washing them; which wasn’t terribly effective. They got increasingly dirty and most acquired a black cast to them. The beautiful surface effect that we worked hard with the fabricator to create, absorbed dirt, grime and exhaust from the New York streets (particularly in the winter). I had made a $600,000 mistake.

What I learned from this experience was to make smaller bets – and to have a “Plan B,” in the event that a program doesn’t work out. It would have been wiser to order a couple of dozen planters and see how they performed over all four seasons, evaluate them and then decide how to move forward. It is very difficult to predict how a program will actually work once it gets out on the street – we’re just not capable of anticipating and accurately predicting the impact of all of the variables that exist in public spaces. One of the principal lessons we learn from Holly Whyte is the importance of close observation of how people actually act in public spaces – and that goes for capital investment as well. We need to implement new ideas in capital improvements incrementally, observing how they work in the real world and then adjusting plans accordingly. That’s what I mean when I say that placemaking/tactical urbanism is an iterative process.

The end of the planter story is also illustrative. We went back to the drawing board and found a round planter that was fabricated from extruded PVC that was one-tenth the cost of the concrete planter. The PVC planters were lightweight and much easier to install, but when filled with planting material sufficiently heavy to remain in place.

The Round Planter

The round planters, obviously, had no corners, and the plastic didn’t chip or discolor. They worked when put on the street. Maybe they didn’t look as elegant as the concrete planters looked when they were first installed, but they looked way better over time. The hanging baskets have always been a success. The color palette and horticultural materials used in planters in Bryant Park, on 34^th Street and around the country has expanded way beyond our original choice of New Zealand Impatiens in pink and orange.

What happened to the concrete planters? We sanded off the logos and gave them away to civic improvement groups in other neighborhoods. I still occasionally see them in areas around the city, with the surface painted over, looking derelict and terrible.

Amazing. Twenty years later. This is it in the smaller version. Taken last week on Lafayette Place across the street from the offices of Project for Public Spaces.

The tell-tale corner! Exhibit “A.” Taken last week.

Oy!