Public Spaces In New York City

1227 Words3 Pages

For more than 100 years American cities have been hustling and bustling powerhouses hosting major corporations and millions of inhabitants. Urban environments are ever changing spheres of constant improvement sculpted by the power of city planners and designers striving to create a perfect utopia. But city authorities can’t always hope that the public will stand in solidarity with their ideas. A few visionaries such as William Whyte, Mike Davis, and Jane Jacobs see the errors made by those who shape the city. An urban project could can initiate a domino effect of problems when not executed properly, leading to issues concerning safety on the street to the shattering of tight knit communities. Power and poor planning are clear factors of the …show more content…

In respect they didn’t seem to be acquired in 1961, when the city of New York began rewarding developers 10 square feet of commercial space for every square foot of plaza built along with their buildings. This permission to go over the amount of space permitted through zoning by creating plazas was a steal for the building developers. Focusing more on gaining space and profit, developers did not consider what was needed to make a plaza appealing to the public. Almost 11 years later, 20 acres of Manhattan’s most valuable land was substandard public space. At this time there was no standard code to creating usable open space. With permission from the City Planning Commission, William Whyte and his team spent 3 years creating hard guidelines to planning urban parks. “As a condition of the open space bonus, developers should be required to devote at least 50 percent of the ground floor frontage to retail and food use”. Considering sun, art, music, sitting space, etc. Union Square is a perfect example of good open space planning using these new guidelines. 180 degree low stairs wrap the 14th street plaza, a centered green park with asymmetrical walkways and sitting spaces, and store and restaurants encircling the park. Although these codes helped regulate the way plazas were built, city planners and building developers …show more content…

Robert Moses played a substantial role in power and poor planning during this time. Built between 1948 and 1972, the Cross Bronx Expressway is known as the brainchild of Robert Moses. In the effect of Bisecting the Bronx in half, middle and upper class residence migrated to the north, leaving the south section to be filled with run down slums of the impoverished. Moses’s dream was to carve right through lower Manhattan with an expressway (aka LOMEX), it would raze through what is now known as the West Village, Soho, and Little Italy. In contrast to Whyte’s improved park planning codes and Davis’s investigation of militarized cities, Jane Jacobs was the leading force of preserving downtown Manhattan from LOMEX. Uniting the inhabitants of lower Manhattan they protested against the construction of LOMEX. She emphasized how the wonder of a city's unique cultures lie within the network of communities, the streets, ma and pa shops, etc. “Moses had written over the people who disagreed with him, brutally negating the power of votes with money. Nevertheless after almost a year of protests and widespread disapproval from the public, the projected was turned down in 1962. Just 3 years later, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was established. It would protect and preserve the decay of historic structures that hold New York’s identity from the powers that

Open Document