Sustainably Delirious New York; City of the past, the presence and the future

“Manhattan is the arena for the terminal stage of western civilisation... a mountain range of evidence without manifesto”, Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 1978
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Density, scale, texture: New York

Climbing down from one of those small Manhattan walk-up apartments into the busy streets pedestrians filling the sidewalks and streaming across the streets; students, business people, parents picking up kids from school, shoppers and idlers, I can not avoid remembering the time half a century ago when I was a toddler. I walked on my mother's hand through the busy streets of Stuttgart. So much then was like New York today, living centrally, all errands being completed on foot or after short rail transit rides, the small locally owned retail, the bicyclists, the carts, the street-vendors and the many, many pedestrians.

Of course, the comparison is ridiculous, Stuttgart then was a bombed out smallish southern State Capital in Germany and New York is the quintessential modern metropolis. But many of the things that make New York work occur on a very small scale, are details really, obscured from the view of the tourist sitting on the upper deck of the "hop on/hop off" bus. They reveal themselves to a visitor only when spending a few days and nights in one of those tiny New York apartments, taking kids to school, buying groceries and going to a neighborhood bar. It is maybe on this level that the comparison and my childhood memories make sense.

Koolhaas was taken by New York at a time when it was nearly bankrupt and down on its heels. Much has happened since then and no matter if the times are good or bad, New York has been the focus of urbanists during much of its history. “Manhattan is a theater of progress...the cyclical restatement of a single theme: creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked” (Kohlhaas). Today New York presents itself as a success story and its current set of planners (more Jane Jacobs than Robert Moses) are hailed across the globe for every linear park they create (the Highline) or every bikelane or pedestrian space (Times Square). See at the bottom of this article for more facts and figures about NYC.

delivery "doors" to the basement on Broadway

Grocery Market at 110th and Broadway

Westside Market: Cheese section

The subway entrance: Noticeable and tight, fits anywhere (not ADA, though) 

Some of the details, that make New York work and which are old fashioned and modern at the same time.
The apartments might be heated by old rusty steam pipes coming from ancient boilers. Yet the efficiency of tightly packed apartment living allows to keep all radiators to be shut off and still have more heat than needed in the flat. Even if the building infrastructure is not green in itself, the configuration is efficient and allows for less need of energy per squarefoot than many "green" freestanding homes in the suburbs. The elevators may be missing in the older buildings and the views into courtyards do not allow for much sun. But walking the stairs is healthy; there is marble in the hallways and the lobby has space for a surprising number of strollers. That is all the parking the whole apartment complex provides. It is surprisingly quiet in the courtyards, except for the sudden flutter of the pigeons when they get disturbed by someone stepping up to the window where they were sitting on the sill.
But it isn't just the childhood memory or nostalgia  or even the need for energy efficienc that lets me observe Manhattans life fondly. It is also my quest for good urbanism and quality ways of living. I am old enough to have seen several fashionable planning trends come and go. New York has prevailed through all of them, has survived even Robert Moses, the General Haussmann of New York, slum remover and urban freeway engineer. Much of what didn't change is now avantgarde, the density and highrises, the mixed use, transit, walking and great urban parks. And for all its messiness, New York is a feast for the eyes, a bonanza for the senses, rich, never dull and full of life.

The food stores are still be local and they carry the latest items for the foodies including increasingly local foods. The retail, to a large degree of the "mom and pop" variety, is mostly run by immigrants, thus representing the cosmopolitan diversity of a modern metropolis.

The subway may be old, but it runs frequently and reliably and now even allows prepaid fare cards. Buses and taxis are modern diesel/electric hybrids. And for those with a car, they are subjected to the old rules of twice a weekly street sweeping and its associated rituals of moving the parked cars from one side of the street to the other. While across the country signal poles on commercial corridors get bigger and clunkier, New York's historic street lights still do double duty as traffic signal poles, even while their lights are state of the art solid state diodes bright and efficient.

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Typical trash bins along apartment building, bagged by the "super"

Apartment trash can be a big issue as any architect knows who has sat through site plan review meetings with City agencies. Here in many of the narrow residential Manhattan side streets, trash is simply kept in built in black iron containers sitting right in front of the buildings. They blend so well in with the black iron fences around the ubiquitous areaways giving light to basement units that they are barely noticeable. They are easily adapted to recycling requirements, though they require that they are emptied by hand by "the super"every time the trash trucks comes along.The plastic sacks are piling up along the curb for a few hours, not ideal but good enough when the pick-up is reliable and frequent. This system would be illegal under most urban and suburban zoning and development rules today which would require service alleys or concealed rolling containers for the trucks to be picked up directly. This produces either a lot of additional unfriendly looking pavement in dark alleys or equally pedestrian unfriendly service gates for the trash trucks to access.

Same with deliveries. Even the New York grocery Fairway Market at 74rd Street and Broadway, with sales per square foot that suburban grocery chains can only dream of, gets all their deliveries made from the front and the curb. This, too would be entirely unthinkable under most any zoning code I have ever seen. Not to mention the complete absence of parking. Imagine, all shoppers walking to the store! And yes, they bring their own bags. And not only are the deliveries made there out front but the sidewalk also doubles as the produce display area or around Christmas as the market for the fresh trees.
In many places the wide sidewalk become every morning linear flee, craft or farmers markets now augmented by the curbside food-trucks that are springing up in every city across the nation.

Abandoned ramps at the Westside Highway near 72nd Street, a vestige of the Moses plans do not prevent
waterfront enjoyment along the Hudson

Abandonment in Red Hooks waterfront provides additional opportunities for redevelopment.
The yellow water taxis are serious transit for those who can't afford to live in Manhattan

At certain times of the day lots of "Bilco Doors" pop open on the sidewalks providing access to the basements through wells and areaways. A really old fashioned method that any older city knows from times long gone. In Baltimore or Stuttgart these doors are still there but have only historic relevance, usually they have been opened in decades. In New York, out of these openings come the trash bags (yes, with conveyors belts as I observed at a Columbia University facility building on Amsterdam Avenue) or down go the supplies. A little red cone ensures that no pedestrians go down. Simply and effectively, this, too avoids nasty service bays and loading docks which would be otherwise required or needed.

Fire Stairs on front facades: Which design review panel would let this pass today? Let alone which fire inspector?

Modern traffic signals on historic poles: It doesn't have to be clunky

Coming back from New York into the everyday American landscape of auto oriented flat sprawl squeezed out over the landscaped like a gigantic pancake, one realizes how truly unremarkable almost any street in sprawl-land is and how dull and without any stimulation.

Sustainable New York?
"Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use." (Owen, David, The New Yorker, October 18, 2004 "Green Manhattan: Everywhere Should be More like New York" p. 111.)

New York, facts and figures (from Sustainable New York Treehugger Blog)

New York City is America's largest and most diverse city. Its 2006 expense budget of over $50 billion makes it far and away the largest local government in the United States. While the city appeared under enormous fiscal, political and social stress from the late 1960's to the late 1990's, in the 21st century it has emerged as one of the safest large cities in the United States. New York is a thriving center of media and finance, and a racially and ethnically diverse place where in the 2000 census 40% of its residents reported that they were born in other nations. The city's infrastructure, while aging has also been the object of a multi-billion dollar renewal effort. Each year the city's capital budget is about $5 billion, and additional billions are spent by state authorities and the Port Authority to renew the city's water, education and transportation infrastructure. Billions of dollars in private funds are spent to renew the city's energy and telecommunication infrastructure.
Despite or perhaps because of the city's complexity and diversity it appears to be successful at delivering a high quality of life to most of its residents and visitors.

New York City's infrastructure is large and impressive. About 7 million people are transported over 722 miles of subway track each workday. Over 25,000 tons of garbage is collected each day. Over 1.2 billion gallons of water are drawn daily from reservoirs that are over 100 miles from the city. Over 1.1 million children attend public elementary, middle and high schools and over 200,000 students attend the colleges of the city's public university. New York City has over twice as many college students as any other city in the United States. Over 600,000 people live in public housing. In 2003 the city's public hospitals handled nearly one million health emergencies, and about 5 million walk-in visits to outpatient and community-based clinics, and in-patient care for approximately 210,000 people.
The city devotes 13.5% of its land, or 27,000 acres to parks. Central Park, Riverside Park and Prospect Park are collectively visited 20,000,000 times a year.






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