St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble
Like Yogi Berra, Holly Whyte is often remembered for his tautological aphorisms: “People tend to sit where there are places to sit,” “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people,” and “If you want to seed a place with activity, put out food.” I have one of my own to add “You can generate activity in a public space by allowing activity in a public space.”
I’ve noticed over the years that the first reaction from people who control public spaces to requests to use the space is generally an emphatic “No.” There appear to be two motivations for this automatic reaction. The first is a fear of risk and the liability that might arise from it. The second is a desire not to lose control over the space. People seem to be empowered by control over space and enjoy asserting that power. Resist the urge! In retrospect, one of the most important unplanned reasons for the success of Bryant Park is that in the early years I said “Yes” to just about everyone who wanted to do something in the park. Activity in the park created a virtuous cycle. The more stuff we had going on in the space, the more people came to use it and the more other people wanted to use it and be there or be associated with it. I believe my colleague, Bob Gregory, at Campus Martius in Detroit has had the same experience.
We did “prime the pump” at Bryant Park. I spent my first year at Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (BPRC) doing fundraising and programming for a four-month schedule of daily lunchtime programming. It was hard, frustrating work. Eventually we secured funds and in-kind services from The New York Times Company Foundation (thanks to the late Arthur Gelb, former Times Associate Managing Editor and Foundation President, who was a great friend of the park), HBO and the Paul Foundation. In the summer of 1992, the first summer the restored park was open, we presented concerts by students from the Julliard School and the Saint Luke’s Chamber Ensemble and HBO presented a wildly popular comedy series. From the beginning these events drew crowds; the comedy series drew audiences in the thousands.
Julliard Student, Audra Ann McDonald, was one of our regular performers on the New York Times series.
Then an odd thing started to happen. I would get an occasional call from a national public relations firm (often Edelman) asking for permission to do a promotional event, usually a product launch, in the park. I would ask them how much their client was in a position to donate to BPRC in connection with the event. This would generally be a low four figure number, to which I would say “yes,” and send out a form of license agreement I had come up with. This trickle eventually became a stream, and then a torrent, and the general offer got to be about $5,000 per event. In the early years we almost never turned anyone down, and we took whatever amount they offered. We were highly opportunistic. This turned into a major source of revenue for park operations and maintenance, part of a diversified revenue stream for the park.
The 7th on Sixth Tents
The fashion shows came to the park because Stan Herman, the President of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, had an office overlooking the park and had been a colleague of Dan Biederman’s on the local community board for a number of years. Stan came to us after the New York Public Library stopped making its beautifully renovated Bartos Forum available to New York designers for fashion shows. We were chatting about how the annual shows might be centralized in one location. We took out a scale drawing of the park and began measuring how much space there might be between the fixed features of the park where we could shoehorn tents to house the shows, initially not including the lawn, which we argued was sacrosanct. It was a tight fit – but we figured it out. What started out as a $50,000 a year fee to BPRC ended up generating millions of dollars and national exposure. Nothing contributed more to the park’s public profile than Heidi Klum’s weekly dangling before hopeful designer contestants on “Project Runway” the prize of a show in Bryant Park.
Fashion Week
Bill Clinton campaign appearance in Bryant Park
The movies happened in a similarly serendipitous way. While the comedy series was extremely popular, it was also the source of numerous complaints about its volume and scatological language, which, in particular, carried up to the offices of the New Yorker magazine. Michael Fuchs, the HBO Chairman, Dan Biederman and I were standing around waiting for a more than two hours late Governor Bill Clinton to arrive for a campaign rally in the park. We got to talking about what we were going to do to replace the comedy series. Someone mentioned (who it was is remembered differently by those present) the idea of doing a drive-in movie, but without the cars. Michael immediately jumped on the idea and put his assistant, Susie Sigel, and me to work on creating an outdoor film series, for which he would personally select the films to be shown. The first two or three years only a couple of hundred people turned up on Monday nights for the films. But it quickly became (and remains) a phenomenon attracting thousands. And showing movies outside turned out to be another one of those ideas hatched in Bryant Park that went viral.
Movie Night
One of the things that made it possible to say “yes” to a wide range of events was that our excellent insurance brokers ,Michael Fishman and Lenore Carasia, were always able to put a price on the additional risk created by new or unusual uses, and the cost of that additional coverage was always affordable, especially compared to an event’s revenue generating potential. Being trained as an attorney helped. I was in a position to understand the very limited risks and legal consequences involved in various events and other uses and to make reasoned judgments about them. I understood that saying no to stuff that seemed risky was easier, but that it was essential to our mission for me to try to figure out how to make programs happen.
As the volume of requests increased, we were then able to select among the various possibilities. We sorted through various requests by hardly ever saying no to uses, but by raising the asking price on uses we thought were less likely to provide a positive experience for our stakeholders to a point where the sponsors of those events would decide themselves to take their idea elsewhere. We also began to try to encourage events to take place in what we called the shoulder hours – early in the day, after work, at night, and during the winter, like the skating rink and holiday market. Two of our most memorable “asks” were film shoots for Howard Stern (fun) and Woody Allen (not so fun).
Howard Stern in “Private Parts”
Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in “Manhattan Murder Mystery”
We did have instances where we lost control of what was going on in the park, and we learned from those experiences. The fashion shows grew to include the lawn, taking up an ever-increasing amount time and space in the park. The producers of the shows became insensitive to their responsibility to the physical stewardship of the park and to the interests of other stakeholders. Eventually they were persuaded to leave for the greener pastures of Lincoln Center. As a result of First Amendment issues arising out of other uses we had permitted, we were required to say yes to the construction of a Sukkah in the park by the Chabad movement.
Chabad Sukkah
But saying yes to these less than ideal situations was a price worth paying for the tremendous level of activity we were able to generate. I brought this philosophy of saying “yes” with me to Jamaica and it proved equally valuable there. Greater Jamaica Development Corporation had a range of real estate assets that I encouraged third parties to use. This approach produced a tremendously valuable pop-up art studio and gallery project in partnership with chashama, as well as the Queens International Night Market, which was the genesis of wide media coverage about how Jamaica had finally begun its revival. In the disinvested downtown, it also produced huge amounts of goodwill and positive programming from community partners to whom we provided free meeting or event space and free or reduced cost parking.
chashama Gallery
Some of the tools of placemaking take time or money to implement. Some require close cooperation with government and community stakeholders. But saying “yes” is something totally within the control of the public space manager and produces unanticipated and unimagined positive results. It ought to be easy to do, but for many people it’s not. It actually takes a certain discipline to say yes, and it’s a discipline that is essential to creating active downtowns and public spaces.