Politics & Society
Have a Seat (If You Can Find One)
Public spaces next to private buildings are often indifferently maintained
rmm289@nyu.edu
It was an ingenious idea: let developers build bigger, taller buildings than the law allowed, in exchange for providing the public with some pleasant outdoor space – a few benches and trees, perhaps a fountain.
New York City adopted that policy in 1961, and now there are more than 500 privately-owned public spaces. Chicago and San Francisco pursued similar policies.
But in New York, a lot of those spots are too small, barren or just plain forbidding for people to realistically use. Some 41% of the spaces, dubbed POPS, are “marginal,” according to a 2000 study by the city and the New York Municipal Arts Society. (The study has been published as a book: Privately Owned Public Spaces: The New York City Experience.)
“The only way to affect change is to get voluntary compliance from [building] owners,” said MAS special projects director Vanessa Gruen. The law lacks an enforcement mechanism to oblige owners to keep the spaces useable, she said.
Indeed, a tour around some spaces in midtown Manhattan turned up some awful specimens.
The public plaza at 450 Park Avenue—a few blocks southwest from that great public space, Central Park—is vacant and claustrophobic, hugged on three sides by skyscrapers. A large exhaust fan drones from an adjacent building, echoing through the dimly lit cavern. A café in the rear wall once made it a popular lunchtime destination. But now the store is gone. Even though the plaza is always open, it’s hard to imagine visiting past dark.
A space around the corner, on 54th Street, is just a wide, white set of stairs, rising from the sidewalk to the building lobby. The security guard is nice enough to allow you to sit on them if you wish. On 55th Street, one “public space” is an empty granite patio, distinguishable from the sidewalk only by its darker hue. In yet another, a squat homeless man held out a ratty glove, repeating “spare change…spare change.” He turned to a visitor who lingered for a few moments too long, whispering “drugs…” desperately under his breath.
A vendor selling handbags beside a marginal private-public plaza on Sixth Avenue, across the street from the panhandler, suggested the space adjacent to his stall was actually meant to repel.
“They built this not to help you, but to keep certain people out,” said the salesman, Sal Oppenheimer. Where Oppenheimer worked, the building guard gruffly denied that there was any public space at all.
Cheryl Mitchell of the Building Owners and Managers Association said she’d never heard of this law.
Newer spots are better, since the city raised standards for these spaces said New York City urban designer Patrick Too. He cited the upgraded General Motors building, at 57th and Broadway. And indeed, that plaza has chairs and fountains to spare. But a few months ago a large glass cube, heralding a new Apple store, popped up from the center of the space. Bizarrely, comments on a radical Islamic website claimed the cube was meant to mock the Kabaa in Mecca. Guards are now posted at each corner of the cube. They seem uneasy if you linger too long.
And not all developers drag their feet. Donald Trump, for one, embraced the deal with aplomb. Inside the 58-story Trump Tower, at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, opera blares as you pass the uniformed guard at the entrance, and the deep red marble floors shine. Trump merchandise, from his signature golf clubs costing almost $3,000 to his newest book, is on display in gleaming brass display cases. There’s hardly a surface you cannot see yourself in, befitting a space so driven by ego. Just as the initial shock wears off, the sound of falling water clues you in to a two story waterfall just around the corner. The whole spread is a public space.
Naturally, the POPS report gave it top marks.
Trump “just has to go over the top, to take the extra step,” said Alvin Whitaker, a Trump Tower uniformed guard. “If he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it right.”
A group of high school students in matching blue and white sweatshirts printed with apples and the tagline “Take a Bite out of the Big Apple!” were visiting Trump Tower recently – because, as one said, “It has a Starbucks.”
Not everyone approves of such lavish public spaces, though. A tourist with a light British accent commented to a companion as she walked through the lobby that the room was “a waste of electricity, really.” A short, dark-haired man darted off the elevator, a cell phone pressed to his ear. Eyes cast down at the marble floor, he apologized to whoever was on the other end of the line: “Can you say that again? I’m not in a good spot.”
Donald Trump is in the minority of developers who created elaborate public spaces in their buildings, in exchange for the right to build tall.