The Malling of Manhattan
As distinctions between city and suburb blur, a steep urban price is paid, as the public realm shrinks.
By Paul Goldberger
Photos by David Carson
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By the way cities generally measure success, New York is healthier
than it has been in more than a generation: employment is up, crime
is down, construction is booming, and tourism has increased so much
that
you can't get a hotel room. The glow of prosperity emanates from
most of the city, and almost everyone takes it as a truism that
New York's revival represents a triumph over the anti-urban sentiment
that prevailed in the 1970s, when people and jobs seemed to pour
out of the city with such zeal that the only question was whether
they were headed for the suburbs or the Sun Belt. But if New York's
resurgence seems to underscore the continued strength of cities,
it also paradoxically proves the opposite. For the New York that
exudes affluence today is--in its buildings, in its public space,
even in its social patterns--not nearly as urban a place as it once
was. New York has saved itself in part by becoming the very thing
it had always claimed to despise: suburban.
I say this not because of the much-maligned "Disneyfication" of
42nd Street, which for all the banality of its multiplexes and retail
stores at least has brilliantly preserved historic theaters
and, more important, some street life. In fact, the street life
around Times Square has more energy than it has had in a long time.
The new Times Square may be a bit sanitized for my taste, but it's
clearly not a place that's like every other place--and its primary
focus is still the street.
Once
public life in New York was lived largely on the street. The street
was the center, the heart of the public realm, and what had always
made the city profoundly different from the places it now seems
to want to resemble. The greatness of the public realm meant that
we didn't need big houses because we had the street. We didn't need
big yards because we had Central Park. We didn't need cars because
we had the subway. We didn't need a local church steeple because
we had the Empire State Building--and on top of that we had Carnegie
Hall and Lincoln Center and Grand Central Terminal and Rockefeller
Center and the Brooklyn Bridge and the New York Public Library and
Bryant Park. Together all of these places make up as potent a public
realm as any city in the world, remnants of a day when the notion
of community was expressed in great physical places that were open
to everyone and were intended to be shared.
The elements that always distinguished life in
the city--one defined by walking along streets, by a certain serendipity,
by a variety of shops and visual experiences, and by people you
believed could not be duplicated anywhere else--are increasingly
scarce, whereas the kind of experiences that exist everywhere else
are increasingly common. Plenty of Manhattanites now do their food
shopping by driving up the West Side Highway to the Fairway at 132nd
Street, where the cramped parking lot and ominous entrance under
the viaduct remind you that you're still in New York but the immense
shopping carts and warehouselike interior recall a discount food
depot on Long Island. They crowd the Fairway in vast numbers, filling
their carts with supersize boxes of cereal and megapackages of paper
towels, the sort never sold at traditional space-challenged Manhattan
markets. Then they load the trunks of their cars to overflowing
and drive home, making the delivery of food to the better apartment
buildings--which was once done at the back door by Gristede's deliverymen
and building porters--now just as likely to occur via Range Rover
at the building's front door. It is now the doorman's problem.
City life has been further changed by places like Chelsea Piers,
which contains a pair of ice rinks, a gymnastics center, a bowling
alley, a roller rink, a golf driving range, and a gym in a particularly
lavish and un-Manhattanlike amount of space replete with on-site
parking for more than 400 cars right off the West Side Highway.
Chelsea Piers is the mother church of the New Suburbanization. It
has probably done more than any other place to convince Manhattanites
who once thought of their cars only as a means of escape from the
city to begin using them as a system of routine transportation,
the way people do everywhere in the country except New York. Once
Manhattan kids whose athletic ambitions extended beyond gym class
were picked up by vans run by after-school sports clubs of the sort
J. D. Salinger wrote about in "The Laughing Man," and parents had
nothing to do with it except to pay the bills. Now they drive their
children to Chelsea Piers--or to the West Side Soccer League, Little
League, or some other program that has migrated into New York from
the rest of America.
Just a few years ago there were no chain stores like Kmart, Eddie
Bauer, and the Gap, and far fewer national fast-food
outlets like McDonald's and Burger King. Things in New York were
different than in other places, by definition. We got our fast food
at Nedick's and Chock Full o' Nuts--names that meant nothing outside
of Manhattan (and today don't mean much within Manhattan either,
except to people with long memories).
We bought our children's clothing at local shops like Morris Brothers
and Glad Rags, and food came from neighborhood markets that delivered.
There is nothing of that world left in, say, the stretch of Broadway
between 65th and 68th Streets, just north of Lincoln Center, where
the Nevada Meat Mar-ket held sway for 90 years. Now there is Eddie
Bauer, Pottery Barn, Barnes & Noble, and Tower Records, which share
pride of place with a vast Sony multiplex. All that's needed to
make those blocks into a perfect suburban mall is a roof over Broadway.
The New Suburbanization would seem to be more a matter of class
than geography. You need to be able to afford a car to play Mamaroneck-in-Manhattan,
and shopping at Banana Republic isn't cheap, be it on the conceptual
mall of Broadway or in the real ones in New Jersey. But no one needs
a car to get to the Kmart on Astor Place or 34th Street, or to Old
Navy or Bed Bath & Beyond, which have turned the old Ladies' Mile
district on Sixth Avenue into a retail powerhouse. Throughout its
reign the Giuliani administration made it easier for vast national
retail establishments--the so-called big box stores like Staples
and Toys 'R' Us--to establish a greater presence in the city.
Well, what of it? Places like that are often cheaper and more convenient
than local stores, sometimes offer more variety, and inevitably
offer a kind of glittery, sleek sex appeal that a little shop on
Second Avenue, or a bodega on Ninth Avenue, can't touch. There is
a reason that small towns and their old-fashioned Main Streets fall
prey to Wal-Marts--they did not just happen because unsophisticated
mayors succumbed to the lure of tax dollars. If people didn't want
to shop in such places, there would be no tax dollars to be gained.
Who in his right mind would rather shop in a cramped, run-down supermarket
on Columbus Avenue when you can have
 something
approaching suburban splendor? There is an exhilaration to space,
cleanliness, and vast quantities of goods that makes a Manhattanite
who first encounters them feel like a person who has just arrived
from a Third World country. Anyone who thinks this is a simple matter
of city culture good, suburban culture bad has a lot to learn about
what people want in their daily lives.
Curiously, at the same time the city is becoming more suburban,
the suburbs are becoming more citylike. Back in the days when arugula
was to be found only at Balducci's and lattes at little Cafes in
the Village, food in the suburbs meant white bread. Now, with gourmet
food shops everywhere and Starbucks having made its way even to
the local mall, no bridges or tunnels need be crossed to satisfy
more sophisticated cravings. Indeed, these cravings are now mainstream.
Everything is available everywhere. And it's not just food. The
New York Times reported that a woman in Scarsdale built a successful
transportation business shuttling children from school to lessons
and sports activities; it seems suburban mothers are now too busy
to handle this sort of chore themselves. The notion of hiring someone
to shuttle your children about is precisely the kind of thing that
would have driven suburban mothers to sneer at Manhattan pretension
a few years ago. In the age of ambiguous city-suburban identity,
it plays just fine.
That the more troubling aspects of city life--crime, drugs, and violence
in the schools--are often present in the suburbs
muddles the distinction even further. So does the fact that the
city is cleaner and safer than it used to be. (Does anybody even
remember the squeegee men, who once seemed the bane of city existence?)
For all the benefits this blurring of city and suburban identity
may confer upon city people, who are liberated from supermarkets
that feel like subway stations, and on suburbanites,
 who
don't have to travel to Dean & DeLuca to find real espresso beans,
there is a price to the blending of city and suburb. The loss is
the uniqueness of New York. There was always a sense that city life
was a matter of trade-offs, that you suffered through certain difficulties,
even indignities, because you were in a place whose singularity
gave it a kind of nobility. Yes, New York was inconvenient--but it
was powerful and magnificent and far too sure of itself ever to
want to look like any other place. You came here for life to be
different.
But that makes the whole issue seem sentimental, as if it were merely
a matter of losing Nedick's for McDonald's, or worrying that the
uniform taste of the Pottery Barn will drive out the eccentric shops
of the East Village. Actually, those are really just lifestyle issues.
What is troubling about the New Suburbanization goes deeper than
that. (In fact, on the lifestyle quotient, the suburbanized city
wins. It's pleasanter, it's easier, and there's no upside in trying
to convince affluent Manhattanites to give up their Land Cruisers.)
The real question is what kind of physical place a more suburbanized
city becomes, and what kind of community that physical place creates.
Suburbs historically haven't placed a high value on the public realm,
in large part because the very idea of suburbia has always been
to elevate the notion of private space--the single-family detached
house, the yard, the automobile. Most suburbs now have even less
truly public space than they once did. It's the older, villagelike
suburbs that have parks,
not the newer ones. And not only are malls taking the place of streets
in the commercial life of many small towns, the privatization of
the public realm has advanced even more dramatically with the huge
rise in the number of gated, guarded suburban communities--places
where even the streets are technically private. These communities
exist to exclude, whereas cities traditionally existed to include,
or at least had the effect of inclusion.
We have stopped valuing the street, which is the essential building
block of any real city. It's understandable. Real streets are hard
to control; they are by definition where everyone crosses paths
and where the fundamental urban idea--that the city exists to create
a maximum number of opportunities for encounter--realizes itself
most fully. Put it all inside a big box and you may be safe from
one kind of disruption, but you are equally safe from the stimulation
and serendipity that makes a city what it is. And you have a recipe
for the kind of disengagement and alienation that characterizes
so many communities victimized by suburban sprawl.
Now in both city and suburb, expressions of urbanity--defined as
the making of public places where people come together for commercial
and civic purposes--increasingly occur in enclosed
 private
places: shopping malls; "festival marketplaces," which straddle
the urban/suburban models; atrium hotel lobbies, which in some cities
have become virtual town squares; multiplex cinemas, which often
contain a dozen theaters and exist at significant civic scale; and
office building gallerias and arcades. But there is a huge difference
between the Rockefeller Plaza skating rink, which feels like a public
place, and the Trump Tower shopping atrium, which in spite of its
pretension to urban sophistication is a sterilized retreat from
city streets.
That's the essence of the new urban paradigm--a kind of airbrushed
urbanity that blends a whiff of urban sophistication with the separated,
privatized space of suburbia. It's the model that gave us so-called
edge cities like Post Oak, in Houston; Buckhead, in Atlanta; and
Tysons Corner, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C.--and it is now
seeping into the middle of Manhattan.
This new urban paradigm doesn't just join the city and the suburbs--it
also takes something from the ubiquitous theme park. In his brilliant
1965 essay "You Have to Pay for the Public Life," the architect
Charles Moore observed that Disneyland was the only place in which
southern Californians could have anything even remotely resembling
a conventional urban experience. By allowing urban experience to
take place in a safe and entertaining environment, Disneyland made
the very notion of urbanity attractive. Moore was prescient: now
the theme park has virtually taken over the landscape, a mutation
running amok over both city and suburbia. The private realm--protected
from the randomness and difficulty and challenge of real urban life
on the streets--has given people everywhere the opportunity to play
at urban life without getting their hands messed up in it. The triumph
of the theme park as the new urban form has made its way most of
all into retail life, where malls have taken over from the streets,
parks, and squares. But it has also become part of art museums,
where marketing art as entertainment has become part and parcel
of the way business is done--and Cafes and stores and events are
sometimes more significant to the experience than looking at the
art. We see it in science museums, where IMAX screens make dazzling,
entertaining images the central attraction. We see it in megastores,
such as the Barnes & Noble superstores with Cafes that have become
gathering places--the public places of the new urbanism.
Is
this public-private mix a healthy development? Well, better to have
a bookstore taking over the functions of a public square than to
have no public square at all. Better to have an art museum behaving
as an entertainment center than no art museum at all. In the age
of virtual reality, when cyberspace so often seems to threaten the
continued existence of physical space, there is a temptation to
be grateful that anything at all is happening in the realm of the
real. Then what is the problem? Isn't it simply a matter of urban
form evolving to respond to new needs and technologies? Of course
that's part of it. But to leave it at that--to say that the new model
of urban form, in which a suburbanized private space morphs into
something quasi-urban, is acceptable--is to deny an essential truth
about great and even not-so-great cities. They are deeply, profoundly,
and utterly public. In a real city we accept messiness as part of
the deal. Unevenness, disarray, complexity, a mixture of people
and things, and a certain amount of chaos are all part of the price
we pay for the extraordinary creative energy that emanates from
cities; for the presence of public space that can be described as
true common ground; for that elusive, difficult-to-define quality
called authentic experience.
There
is a profound desire almost everywhere now to combine the comforts
of middle-class suburban life with at least some of the excitement
and entertainment that cities have traditionally provided, which
is why the suburbs are feeling more citylike at the same time that
New York is feeling more suburban. The horrifying prospect is that
the two will eventually meet--that the suburbanizing city and the
urbanizing suburbs will someday become indistinguishable, one homogeneous
mass of middle-class sensibility awash in creature comforts and
lifestyles that, however different their physical trappings may
be, are essentially the same. Once you're inside a Barnes & Noble
in Great Neck, does it feel any different from the one on the Upper
East Side? Does the fact that someone gets into an elevator on West
End Avenue before he climbs into his Saab to drive to the hockey
rink make the life he leads as different as it once was from that
of the man who starts the same kind of trip by walking down his
driveway? I am not entirely sure that it does. I like to tell myself
that it will take much more than Starbucks to make Scarsdale feel
like the Upper West Side, and that the parade of Volvos and Jeeps
heading into Chelsea Piers can't by itself turn the city into Scarsdale.
But some days it is very hard to be sure. |
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