The Battle for Gotham (39 page)

Historically, the West Side has always been “the other side of town.” It was always twenty years or so behind the East Side in development trends, and it wasn’t until mansions and townhouses spread over the East Side that the developers gave serious attentions to the West Side north of Fifty-ninth Street.

When in 1880 Singer Sewing machine heir Edward S. Clark began construction of the city’s first luxury apartment house—a chateau of gables, bay windows, and incomparable detail at Seventy-second Street and Central Park West—observers teased that he was building so far into the country that he might as well be in Dakota Territory. The name Dakota stuck, and today it is still considered one of the city’s most exclusive addresses.

Soon after, the Ninth Avenue El (elevated train) was completed, opening the West Side to the first of many waves of upwardly mobile middle-class families and the beginning of serious development. Row houses were built in great numbers for single-family elegance through the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Gracious high-rise apartment houses—not as opulent as the Dakota—started going up slowly on Broadway after the turn of the century with the Beaux Arts Ansonia at Seventh-third Street and the more sparsely ornamented Apthorp at Seventh-ninth Street and Belnord at Eighty-sixth Street. By the 1920s and ’30s, Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive were lined with fashionable high-rises that remain the housing anchors of the entire area.

After World War II, as the middle-class Irish and Jewish occupants moved farther north to the Bronx, to the East Side, or to suburbia, brownstones were subdivided to house waves of new immigrants—blacks from the South and the West Indies, Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and South America. Because the units were small, overcrowded, high in price, but low in maintenance, many rapidly deteriorated.

CATACLYSMIC CHANGE KICKS IN

Then, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, came the beginnings of the city’s two largest urban renewal programs—the twelve-block (fifty-three-acre) Lincoln Center and the twenty-block West Side Urban Renewal Area between Eighty-seventh and Ninety-seventh Streets—and construction of two large-scale middle-income developments, Lincoln Towers at West End Avenue in the Sixties and Park West Village at Central Park to Amsterdam, Ninety-seventh to One Hundredth Streets.

When I referenced this urban renewal area in my 1974 articles, I didn’t mention Robert Moses’s connection to Urban Renewal policies up to that time. But I did note in my article a major population shift taking place: “Co-operative conversions of pre-war high-rises started in the 1960s, anchoring the professional middle-class that had moved there for the large rent-controlled apartments. The brownstone movement spread north and south from and west of the Urban Renewal Area, reclaiming some of the most solidly built housing in the city for young middle-class families seeking space, elegance, value and backyards.”

The article noted that the scores of low-income residents displaced by assorted Urban Renewal projects were now concentrating along Amsterdam Avenue and north to the Manhattan Valley area, 107th to 110th Streets, Central Park to Broadway. Many also relocated into the ten public housing projects containing 4,628 apartments scattered around the area or in buildings leased by the Housing Authority and rented to low-income families. The West Side’s low-rent apartment supply filled up, and many displaced families moved to other boroughs.

More than just the housing supply was rapidly changing when I observed this scene in the mid-1970s. Seven new public schools had been built since 1960. Private schools, too, had built new facilities or expanded old ones. And there were now seventeen day-care centers, including four Head Start programs. Block associations had planted trees; Broadway malls had been relandscaped. Playgrounds had been rebuilt.

Signs of renewal were showing more and more in the commercial fabric of the West Side as well. The impact of the women’s movement was evident in the growing number of entrepreneurial women opening the small, local businesses appearing on the scene. This trend—women-owned businesses—was new, and it was emerging early, as many trends did, on the Upper West Side. Restaurants and bars, in the blocks from the Eighties through the Nineties along the avenues, offered live jazz and had become favorite spots for the steadily growing black middle class moving into the area.

Slowly but surely, theater groups were taking hold, with
Godspell
in its fourth year at the Promenade Theater and
Sgt. Pepper
at the newly renovated Beacon. New restaurants gained a loyal local following. “We won’t eat anywhere but on the West Side, where prices are still reasonable,” I quoted one resident saying.

In the second of the two articles I wrote on the Upper West Side, I focused on the problems. I wrote in part:

Behind the facade of renewal and renaissance that covers great chunks of the West Side from 59th to 110th St., there are areas of great discontent and frustration.

The “great sore” of the West Side—the Single Room Occupancy-Welfare Hotel problem—floods the area with unsupervised former mental patients, alcoholics, junkies, multi-problem families, and leaves the elderly vulnerable and the younger families scared.

A 1969 city-wide study of SRO buildings indicated that almost 50 per cent of the entire city’s SRO tenants live on the West Side, occupying some 25,000 apartment units between 74th and 110th Streets. Although the hotels Hamilton and Hargrave have been converted to housing for the elderly and the Kimberly at 73rd and Broadway is vacant, not much has changed in five years.

The West Side Urban Renewal Program was initiated in the 1950s as the nation’s model for economic integration within buildings. Promoted by Planning Commission chair James Felt as an alternative to Moses’s clearance strategy, the plan had been stumbling past the half-completion mark with a few years of stormy community debate. Some groups called for increasing the proportion of low-income housing. Others claimed any increase would cause the community to tip into a slum or ghetto. The argument was whether 20 or 30 percent was the right amount of low-income housing. And while the conflict was enough to cause some of the bitterest community battles the neighborhood had seen in years, federal housing funds stopped and made things worse.

The spreading phenomenon of the fast-food chains was another issue of debate. At one point a rumor circulated in the area around Seventy-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue that a McDonald’s would open. “The community was up in arms,” said the late councilman and then congressman Ted Weiss. “Five years ago a McDonald’s would have been considered a neighborhood improvement. Today it’s an anathema.”

Fast-food chains have become an accepted way of life today in almost all urban neighborhoods. Now they are not as threatening as in the time I was writing these articles. A generous selection of local food outlets of every scale and price exists and flourishes.

Crime, of course, was a constant worry, but statistics don’t seem to affect the way people live with the reality of crime as much as people’s “feel” for it does. As more stores stayed open late, as new restaurants proliferated and nightlife in general picked up, many residents felt the community had gotten safer. One guide was the newsstands. Only a few years earlier, none stayed open late except at Seventy-second Street. Now they were open late up and down Broadway.

The article also noted the small-town feel of residents:

Consistently, when you speak to residents about what’s good and bad on the West Side, they will tell you everything that’s happening within a small radius of their home. They know who lives above and below them, those their children meet in the playground. They organize food co-ops or babysitting services and they know the local shopkeepers as well as their neighbors.

Actor Jordan Charney, who lives in a 10-story apartment house on 74th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, talks of “the marvelous shops offering home-made things” and “the assortment of people going into their own business.”

“Lincoln Center has pushed problems uptown,” Charney says, “hiding them a little better because they’re out of my neighborhood. Up there it’s as scary as it used to be when we moved here seven years ago.”

Boundaries differed. Problems varied. But a do-it-yourself state of mind pervaded each subcommunity. Whether it was tree planting, day care, playgrounds, block-by-block security guards, or housing problems, West Siders didn’t wait for City Hall to solve them. Residents lived with the realities of the problems; alternatives were less desirable. Sometime in the 1970s and ’80s, however, a real upward shift began. Government money for big projects had stopped flowing, as it had in the heyday of Urban Renewal in the 1950s. The city was flirting with bankruptcy. The state was suffering serious financial setbacks, and the federal government was no friendlier to New York than in the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” 1970s days. The cessation of the big projects gave license to the smaller ones to advance. No one thing is identifiable. Instead, an accumulation of successive steps occurred. It was a clear case of incremental change, if ever there was one.

A variety of new stores opened, more upscale now, a sign that someone thought the area was an underserved market to which nonneighborhood shoppers would also come. New children’s clothing stores appeared, a clear reflection of the increasing number of new families. Until then, one small children’s department store, Morris Brothers, had been the sole outpost for shopping parents.
⁴
East Siders began to consider the West Side’s private schools for their children. An assortment of new banal apartment houses went up across from Lincoln Center, a sign that big developers decided the district had value. And young singles and families kept buying and fixing up the brownstones not destroyed by Urban Renewal.

THE LINCOLN CENTER MYTH

Credentialed experts often attribute urban regeneration of any kind to the official plans and developments of the day. Most planners and government officials and observers don’t give credence to the gradual block-by-block and business-by-business improvements that mark organic incrementalism. They can’t recognize it until it is full-blown. They insist that ad hoc change is insignificant. They are wrong on all counts. One needs to recognize the often small precursors of positive change to understand its emerging appearance. The precursors were in abundance on the West Side, as all the gradual changes already mentioned indicate.

According to conventional wisdom, Lincoln Center was the catalyst for regeneration of the West Side. This is a myth. Simple observation illustrates how this was not the case.
If
this were true, renewal would
only
have occurred in the late 1960s and ’70s on the West Side around Lincoln Center, or in proximity to other big new construction projects. This was definitely not the case. SoHo, the Lower East Side, areas of the South Bronx, and the many areas of brownstone Brooklyn showed early signs of nascent rebirth at the same time as the Upper West Side. Positive change was bubbling up in small doses all over the city. It was observable, anecdotal, and nowhere yet ready to be measurable. And, indeed, it was happening in many traditional and historic neighborhoods all over the country. Thus, experts and the press did not recognize its significance as the beginning of a shift. They couldn’t imagine this happening without a big catalyst like Lincoln Center.

Ignoring where else regeneration was slowly taking hold, the myth prevails that Lincoln Center rejuvenated the West Side. In reality, it did not. The rebound of the Upper West Side and scattered neighborhoods throughout the city was people driven by the vanguard of urban pioneers. Value-hunting brownstoners and apartment dwellers were attracted to the solidly built historic building stock and middle-income apartment towers. They were resisting the expected move to the suburbs. In neighborhoods farther out, way off the radar screen of city experts, immigrants were filling largely vacant housing where people had moved out. With them came new businesses as well. The Russians went to Brighton Beach and the Syrians to Atlantic Avenue, both in Brooklyn. The Chinese filled the Lower East Side. The Koreans went to Astoria, Queens. In each neighborhood, the new residents sparked a gradual rebirth that is explosive today.

Trends always start small, almost invisibly. Values and lifestyle choices brought new settlers to the West Side. Lincoln Center was clearly a sign that government and financial institutions thought the West Side was worthy of reinvestment in big government-supported projects. But what Lincoln Center really did was bring East Siders and suburbanites to the West Side in the evening—all visitors who had been afraid to venture into the area because of its reputation for crime and poverty.

Visitors, whether from other neighborhoods or out of town, are never enough to spark rebirth. Local residents and businesses do the spade work, reenergize a place or district, give a place character, and make visitors comfortable. Visitors follow locals in the process; they are never catalysts for the rebirth process. Years later, after the Upper West Side had turned dramatically upscale, many of those visitors came there to live, too.

If anything, Lincoln Center and, later, Lincoln Towers made rejuvenation more difficult, if one understands rejuvenation as the gradual return of young, middle-income families and new businesses to a stabilized, existing population mix with new buildings fitting in with existing ones. Enlivened street life, diversity of population and activity, and social interaction follow that new population. That was not what followed the development of Lincoln Center. What did follow were several large new developments, including a series of dull residential towers across Broadway. Together with Lincoln Center, they do not add up to a definition of natural, positive change. In fact, unrest caused by the displacement of seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses
⁵
in twelve blocks demolished for Lincoln Center complicated life and made it unsettling and stressful for longtime residents and new.