CUF report providing ideas and insights from NYC business leaders and architecture and design experts to help small biz make it through the winter cold
— Read on nycfuture.org/research/surviving-the-winter-nyc-small-business
POPS, meaning indoor or outdoor spaces that private real estate developers have promised to provide and maintain as public amenities in return for the right to build bigger buildings.
Exactly. We’ll get to a few of them on 42nd Street. Let’s head east to Bryant Park, a privately run city-owned public park, which I think it’s fair to say, back in the ’70s and ’80s, most people were scared to death to go into because it was a drug haven and dangerous.
Made worse by design features like being raised on a plinth and screened by hedges.
In the early ’80s, Andrew Heiskell, chair of the New York Public Library, next door, with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and others, created the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation — now just the Bryant Park Corporation — as a not-for-profit organization under the leadership of Dan Biederman, and they brought in William Hollingsworth Whyte.
Holly Whyte, the sociologist and urbanist. He suggested getting rid of the obstructing hedges, widening the stairs from Sixth Avenue, installing movable chairs, a Christmas market and skating rink in winter. Andrew Manshel, who worked on the park and has written a book about it, calls it “a triumph of small ideas.”
Jane Jacobs gets all the play, but Holly Whyte deserves to be celebrated more than he has been. All this happened in the late ’80s and ’90s, around the same time as the appearance of a legally created vehicle called the Business Improvement District, or BID, which Biederman had pioneered up the street at Grand Central Terminal. The Bryant Park Corporation took on some of the characteristics of a BID, meaning a private, not-for-profit that managed the park.
Larry Rifkin interviews me about “Learning from Bryant Park.”
Pershing Square in Los Angeles remain under-populated as a result of been insufficiently well-maintained and programmed
A trip upstate to Gloversville last week brought into focus issues I have been thinking about since completing the manuscript for “Learning from Bryant Park” two years ago. I’ve been wondering why there are so few successful public space and downtown revitalization projects across the country, given that several ventures employing similar strategies have been widely publicized for effective public space improvement. The demonstrated key ingredients to downtown revitalization are neither expensive nor complicated. And yet they are not often actually used or well executed. A number of knowledgeable, talented people and organizations have made themselves available to towns and projects as consultants – and while they certainly add value to the places they work on, there still aren’t dozens of success stories. Pershing Square in Los Angeles is the most visible blemish among failed urban public spaces and was the object of my thinking about this issue since completing the book. I wrote the book, in part, as a tool for public space managers to use with stakeholder sceptics of the approach – and a couple of downtown managers have reported buying multiple copies for board members (those people know who they are and have my sincere thanks).
Before the collapse of Pershing Square Renew, working with the gifted Philip Winn of Project for Public Spaces, I made myself available to the various Downtown LA stakeholders to help advance the project. At the request of former local Council Member Jose Huizar, I flew out to LA at my expense to meet with him and his staff. He didn’t show (Huizar was indicted and removed from office in June). I also contacted the newly appointed Chief Design Officer of the City of Los Angeles and asked if we could persuade the Mayor to get involved, without success. Again, flying out at my expense, I met with a very interested local BID leader to attempt to persuade him and the BID to take Pershing Square on as a project. While this individual clearly got what I was trying to communicate to him and was very sympathetic (and has said some very nice things to me about LFBP), the BID remains uninvolved. Most startlingly, using my professional network, I got in touch one of the highest profile real estate and civic leaders in LA. The person who made the connection for me, said that the civic leader would be pleased to meet and talk with me by phone – and then listed for me the actions the civic leader said would be non-starters – these were most of the important things that I felt needed to happen in order for the park to be successful; including wresting control of the space from the Department of Recreation and Parks. The civic leader conveyed that if I wanted to talk about those things, I shouldn’t bother calling him. I sent him a long e-mail explaining what I thought were the key elements to turning Pershing Square around and didn’t hear back. What was up with this? Why has this proved to be to be so hard? Continue reading
A review of Learning from Bryant Park by Andrew M. Manshel
Books in this article
Andrew M. Manshel
Rutgers University Press, 302 pages, $29.95
A visitor to New York City’s Bryant Park, a 9.6-acre gem at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue behind the New York Public Library, might find it difficult to believe its dismal state forty years ago. Now it is a showplace: teeming with people, immaculately maintained, and packed with activities ranging from book talks to ice skating to juggling (or at least it was until the coronavirus hit). But in the 1970s, it was infested with drug dealers and avoided by most everyone else, one of the spaces notorious enough to earn the sobriquet “Needle Park.” The story of how that changed—and how other urban spaces can be similarly transformed—is the subject of Andrew M. Manshel’s Learning from Bryant Park.
In much of the mid-century era, it was by no means obvious whether or not parks were an urban positive or negative. Many of them had fallen into severe disrepair, even Central Park. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities(1961), Jane Jacobs was ambivalent about parks, writing, “Parks are volatile places. They tend to run to extremes of popularity or unpopularity.” The many unpopular parks, she argued, could become themselves a form of urban blight, spreading danger to their surrounding streets. Continue reading
Aug. 17, 2020
Bryant Park was a parade ground and open space circa 1847 in New York City. The gigantic Croton Distributing Reservoir was there, and in 1884 the name was changed to honor abolitionist William Cullen Bryant. In 1899 the New York Public Library and a new park were added, but by the 1970s it was principally known as “a haunt for drug dealers, prostitutes, and homeless people.”
That began to change in the late 1980s. The author got involved in the early 1990s, and they tried something unique. Rather than just throwing a lot of money at the park and hoping it would become nice, the renovation team talked to people who lived in the neighborhood to find out what they wanted from the public space
“Central to the success of Bryant Park was that it was a triumph of small ideas. It was not the product of grand design. Its restoration was about excellent maintenance and programming rather than extensive capital improvements. “It was based on their close observation of how people behaved in the park, once it was reopened, and building on what worked and dropping or re-engineering what didn’t. “
They learned from Bryant Park “that no place has problems so unique that it can’t benefit from learning from the successes of other places.” The process that they created is called, “Placemaking”. It worked great in New York City in Bryant Park, and in a historic and culturally critical section of Jamaica, Queens, a place that was once the de fact of capital of Long Island. Right after WWII it was one of the few places in the region where African-American families could purchase single-family homes. It was filled with high-profile cultural innovators. By the later 20th century it needed an overhaul, and the author was one of the team that re-imaged it using “placemaking.”
So what are the basic strategies of Placemaking? First, make no “grand plans”. Instead make small changes and take small steps, learning as you go. Second, you must make people feel safe there. Perception is critical. Third, Placemaking takes patience, which is really a virtue.
“Placemaking practice should become at least as important in smaller cities and towns as it is in big city public spaces and downtowns.” Small cities often have many of the same issues that big cities do: property that goes to seed because the businesses moved out and the owner won’t spring for repairs. The author makes the point that since smaller cities have people who are even more separated by space than larger communities, there becomes a critical need for public spaces where all kinds of people can interact. Rather than staying on social media, enjoy getting to know your actual neighbors!
We’ll spend some very pleasant time with Andy Manshel discussing his new book, “Learning from Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Town and Public Spaces” from Rutgers University Press. Won’t you join us this Sunday Aug. 23 on WTBF’s ON THE BOOKSHELF?
It essential for northern cities to extend the season for socially distant eating and drinking for as long as possible!
Learning from Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces, is an entertaining and important book for urbanists across America.
— Read on www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/07/02/how-manhattan-park-pioneered-main-street-placemaking
16 Planning July 2020
MAKE SMALL PLANS
Then fix as necessary and have patience. By Harold Henderson
THE RESURRECTION OF New York City’s Bryant Park through programming, high-quality maintenance, and attention to detail is only part of this excellent book. The title could be misleading, as Bryant Park is just the starting point, and far from the only kind of place discussed. The author takes on suburban Main Streets, smaller towns and spaces, and economic development, as well as urban places. The book manages to be both sophisticated and compulsively readable. With any luck it will do its bit to bury beyond retrieval the grandiosity of Daniel Burnham and his heirs.
The author discusses how he came to this point: by “making a $600,000 decision that turned out to be a mistake.” Placemaking, it turns out, is iterative. “You learn as you go. It is essential in effectively improving public space to take risks—but those risks need to be small, manageable ones, risks you can back out of with minimal damage.” The keys are making people feel safe and recognizing that it may take three to five years to revitalize a public space.
It could be dangerous to skim this book. Manshel has seen conventional economic development and finds it “better than nothing, but maybe not that much better. In my experience, over the long term, its impact is generally negligible.” (For one thing, once the government-provided subsidies go away, so do the jobs.) Placemaking, by contrast, does work, because instead of bribing or forcing, it creates places where people and businesses want to be.
The author has equally devastating on-the-ground observations on the fad of contracting out services for all but the very smallest ventures. At the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation in Queens, New York, training and hiring their own security enabled them “to hire members of the community who were far more committed to our mission than security agency employees,” and to pay them better than an outside contractor would.
