Monthly Archives: September 2007

Greater Norfolk: Why Not?

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By Alex Marshall
For Port Folio Magazine

Now I’ve just cut my own throat, Mayor Paul Fraim said sheepishly.

The Norfolk leader’s fearful verdict was a good example of the dangers and contradictions associated with endorsing what might be the biggest bugaboo of local political thought: regional government.

Whatever you choose to call it, Hampton Roads, Greater Norfolk, Norfolk-Virginia Beach, what would happen if we actually had an elected regional government? Is that something we could work toward, and if so how?

When I first raised the idea with Fraim, he was firm. Nothing doing, he said. The people weren’t behind it, and “the surest way to kill an idea was to wrap it into a plan for regional government.” No way.

Having said this, he then proceeded to talk about how how the very structure of government in Tidewater hurt us, how if the area was going to compete effectively and operate efficiently, it had to act as one city, deciding where it was going in a coherent fashion.

“We have a truly regional economy, a regional work force, but inside of that region, we have real winners and losers depending on where certain tax producers are located, and where the lines are drawn,” Fraim said.

History has rendered an unfavorable verdict on the state’s policies that keep cities small, divided and humble.

“You have to ask yourself, where are the great cities in Virginia? What public policy has combined to keep cities small and regions fractured? Why wasn’t Norfolk a Baltimore? It should have been. Why wasn’t Richmond one of the great cites of the South?”

If we don’t manage to act as a region to shape important policies, we inevitably are less able to grow coherently, both physically and economically, Fraim said.

“How do you form a strategic agenda for a region that is broken down into 16 different localities? Where are we going, and who is going to take us there. You not only have a number of local governments, but they are completely independent.”

Having thus argued himself into a corner, Fraim found himself saying, “As unpleasant as it seems, consolidation might be the easiest route.” Having just heard himself endorse the very idea he said he could not 15 minutes previously, Fraim then muttered despairingly about “cutting my own throat” and pleaded that his picture not be put on the cover.

Regional government is both the Promised Land and the Vietnam of local politics. Lots and lots of people say the idea make sense. But they also agree it will never happen and avoid the subject like a land-war in Asia.

But if the idea makes sense, why not consider it? The Berlin Wall was toppled. We put a man on the moon. Ended welfare as we know it. Why not start talking about some of elected regional government.

This could take several forms. We could keep the old governments but create a new regional one that took care of some duties, like land-use and transportation. Or we could merge the existing ones, or some of them. The point is to end up a mayor and council that run the region and whom the people elect.

With this in mind, we went around and asked a variety of leaders, mostly elected, to touch this third rail of local politics. Would they support regional government in theory? If so why, and if not, why not?

BIGGER IS BETTER The strongest argument for an elected regional government was that the region needed to act more as one in investment decisions and making strategic choices: where to build roads or rail lines; how to build good universities; setting coherent regional growth policies and economic game plans.

A lot of the region’s leaders supported working toward a kind of government where these decisions could be made and the leaders held accountable.

“That’s why we don’t have a major league franchise, that’s why we don’t have the road connections to the outside world, that’s why we don’t have consensus on light rail,” Norfolk Councilman Randy Wright said. “Until we resolve our minor differerencs, we can’t see the big picture. In theory, I would support” some sort of elected regional government.

Big companies like Ford or IBM have a board of directors that sets overall policy, even as different divisions of the company work on separate projects, noted Chesapeake Councilman Gene Waters. What Hampton Roads might need is an elected board of directors that can set policy on things like road networks, or regional growth policy, Waters said.

“There is no one governing body that makes those decisions,” Waters said. “We have like 102 city councilmen in Hampton Roads, and it’s very difficult to get those to come up with a decision.”

But if it makes sense, it also was a steep slope to climb, even supporters agreed.

“I think it’s the only way, but before that happens, we’ll have to have a lot of funerals,” Norfolk councilman Herbert Collins said. “Everyone likes their own fiefdoms. We would have more clout, more to offer, we could combine some things, and cut down the duplication. But I can’t see a way to get there from here.”

“Personally, I think it’s got to come,” Portsmouth Mayor James Holley said. “It may not be in my time. But we will never experience the growth and development until we are all in lock step and acting in concert.”

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL The argument that opponents of regional government grabbed most quickly was that, no matter how it we structured, any regional governance would put government another step away from the people, and make it both bigger and more remote.

“If I’m invited to speak at a Kiwanis club now, I can do that,” said Newport News Mayor Joe Frank. “If I were mayor of Hampton Roads, I couldn’t, because there are too many Kiwanis clubs. Most people don’t think that bigger government is better government.”

Mayor Meyera Oberndorf got in a good jab when she hinted that regional government might just make it easier for the Powers That Be to run things their way — without consulting with the people. I heard echoes of Henry Howell: There’s more that goes around in the dark beside Santa Claus.

“To the people who want everything to be run in the fashion that they think is appropriate, it would probably be tidier and easier for them to run things with a regional government,” Oberndorf said.

“Local government is close to the people it serves. Once it gets further and further away, there is this feeling of isolation.”

But you couldn’t you also make a good counter argument: That a regional government would in some ways bring government closer to the people. Right now, a lot of important things are handled by a series of unelected regional bodies: The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, Tidewater Regional Transit, PENTRAN, SIPSA — the list and acronyms go on.

Right now, if I’m angry at traffic on I-244, or don’t like my bus service, it’s very difficult to find an elected leader I can vote for or against that will in any way influence those things. Bodies like TRT or The Planning District Commission tend to be governed by councils made of representatives from more than a dozen different municipalities. My one or two representatives from my city have a minute voice in the total scheme of things.

With a regional government, these bodies would presumably report to a mayor and his or her council. A regional mayor could campaign on something like ending the HOV lanes. And if he or she didn’t make it happen, we could vote him or her out.

BIGGER IS MORE EFFICIENT If Small is Beautiful, it might also be more expensive, says another line of argument in support of regional government. It costs money to have a dozen municipal repair shops, for example. Del. Bob Purkey of Virginia Beach argues that moving toward a regional government would fit the Republican philosophy of less government and more efficient government. “Each city has their own inventory of very expensive road maintenance equipment,” Purkey said. “Think of the efficiencies that could happen in sharing it, these huge pieces of equipment that must be housed and maintained.”

Purkey enters what is traditionally thought of as dangerous ground politically when he speaks of eliminating the elected constitutional offices, like sheriff, clerk of court, treasurer and commissioner of revenue, Purkey said. Just forcing the merger of treasurer and commissioner of revenue might save $10 million a year, Purkey said, enough for one more new elementary school annually.

While citizens might not jump at the thought of regional governance, they will jump at you when asked for tax increases, Purkey said. Eventually, this reluctance to raise taxes will force government to start merging services.

“I’m suggesting that we are just scratching the surface on a number of cooperative” ventures that could be done, Purkey said. “You have a lot of regional fiefdoms. It really comes down to turf protection.”

Chesapeake Councilman Waters had similar thoughts. Setting a regional growth plan not only builds a more coherent region physically, Waters said, but it would save money. Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk have had to build schools while Norfolk and Portsmouth close them down.

“You have old ones rotting away, and new ones being built,” Waters said.

Having many different cities all planning development separately doesn’t work well either, Waters said. For example, you have Virginia Beach planning commercial growth around the proposed Southeastern Expressway corridor while Chesapeake, less active in the policy, plans for residential growth.

Fraim and others buy this argument, but say efficiencies in government are really just a nice extra to the more important goal of gaining more coherent direction, identity and policy as a region.

“Where are we going, and who is going to take us there?” Fraim said. “That’s more important than economies of scale. You can save money with one police chief, but there are a lot of bigger issues that regionalism means.”

Mayor Dana Dickens of Suffolk sounded a similar note. Although as one of the smaller cities, Suffolk would be a smaller voice in a larger whole, Dickens had no qualms considering some sort of regional governance. He told the old tale about the father who instructed his sons on the merits of working together by having them try to break a bunch of sticks lashed together into one bundle. Together, the sticks could not be broken; separately, they broke easily.

“The point of the story is what I feel about the region,” Dickens said. “The more together we are, the stronger we are. If that takes us to a regional government, so be it.”

Dickens had the most concrete example of actual regional action: His city and Portsmouth are close to announcing agreement on joint construction of a library. Although it would be placed in Churchland in Portsmouth, it would also be used heavily by residents in adjacent Suffolk neighborhoods, and so Suffolk may help fund it.

CITIES VERSUS SUBURBS Look at everyone’s comments and you see some trends. Those favoring regional government said the area would be more able to meet the big challenges that determine a region’s fate. Other backers said it would be more efficient. Those opposing said it would add another layer of government and remove government from the people.

But the way the supporters and opponents lined up showed another argument going on underneath the surface, one more about money. In general, supporters of regional governments tended to come from the inner cities. Firm opponents were usually suburban.

Why is this?

Well, whatever else it would do, a regional government would almost certainly share the wealth. Right now, the suburbs get a disproportionate share of the region’s money. Their residents get most of the salaries on the jobs located in the inner cities.

In the short run, that looks like a pretty good deal for the suburbs, so why change? Even though Chesapeake and Virginia Beach have more growth problems, they also have more shopping malls, dentists and other taxpayers that help balance the books.

You can see this imbalance when you compare Virginia Beach and Norfolk. If Virginia Beach raises its real-estate tax one cent, it raises an additional $2 million. But if Norfolk raises its real-estate tax one cent, it raises a little less than $700,000. Virginia Beach has a population less than twice that of Norfolk. But it has a tax base three times as large. That explains why tax rates tend to be higher in the inner cities.

In the long run, this imbalance in wealth hurts the whole region, including Virginia Beach, say many experts. David Rusk has proved pretty conclusively in several books that areas as a whole do better when they spread the common problems and costs over a wider area. Regions that have “inelastic” boundaries and remain divided suffer.

But like a rich woman not wanting to admit that she was having second thoughts about her potential groom’s wallet, that topic went generally unmentioned.

With the exception of Councilman Louis Jones from Virginia Beach. Under my prodding, he had no qualms saying he felt no responsibility for the fate of the inner cities.

“It should not be the responsibility of the suburbs to carry the tax burdens of the inner city,” Jones said. “The inner city needs to handle its affairs in a way that they can handle their own tax burdens.”

GETTING THERE Okay, some leaders are willing to at least entertain the idea of regional governance. Is there any way to get there from here?

Here’s a fantasy scenario: Next year, a bill comes before the General Assembly in Richmond. It merges the governments of Hampton Roads into one entity, or creates a new entity that keeps the old governments but delegates some regional responsibilities to a new one. The House and the Senate pass it. The governor signs it. It’s done.

It might be that simple. Legally, we are creations of the state. Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News and all the other cities exist only because Richmond says they do. Although the actions of the General Assembly are set by the constitution, it’s actually not required for the local governments to endorse the idea of a regional government. If Richmond wanted to thrust a regional government upon us, it probably could.

In Toronto a few years ago, the provincial government merged Toronto with several surrounding suburban localities. Toronto didn’t want to do it. The suburbs didn’t want to do it. But the province, whose conservative leader had campaigned on greater efficiencies in government, said We Don’t Care What You Think, and did it anyway.

For better and for worse, local governments in the United States tend to be more independent and less linked in a clear hierarchy of decision-making and policy to a state or national government.

Del. Tom Moss of Norfolk, and Speaker of The House, said the idea of a regional government has been discussed since he began in politics around 1960. There was even a commission that studied it. But he said politics make it all but impossible.

“If you had one city council, who would be on it?” Moss said. “Would they be elected at large? Who would be the chief of police? The logistics are overwhelming.”

As for sweeping action by the General Assembly, it might require a change in the constitution first, and even if not, would not happen for political reasons, Moss said. The state would not act against the wishes of the localities.

“To say you are going to have one central government is almost impossible politically,” Moss said.

Sen. Ken Stolle of Virginia Beach said there wasn’t much chance of Richmond ever imposing regional government on Hampton Roads.

“Everyone would have to agree that is where they were going,” Stolle said. The General Assembly would not impose a government on the localities.

By the same token, the state also is not hostile to the idea, Stolle said.

“I have heard the argument that the state does not want to give the localities the ability to act like a region because it threatens their authority. I couldn’t disagree more. If Norfolk and Virginia Beach got together and agreed to cooperate in some way, I would probably support it.”

Fraim of Norfolk said he could see a future where two or three governments “with common interests” might decide to consolidate. If this works well, others might clamor to join up. He thought this scenario more likely than the entire region agreeing on a plan for a regional government.

This was an intriguing idea. Imagine if Virginia Beach and Norfolk decided to merge. Think of the powerhouse of a city that would be created. Chesapeake might soon clamor to join up, and then others as well.

Around the country, most defacto regional governments happen either through annexation or by the conversion of county governments into effective city governments.

States with very liberal annexation laws, like North Carolina or Texas, end up with very large cities that swallow large amounts of land area. Houston is technically the fourth largest city because its liberal annexation laws, even though it is the 10th largest metropolitan area.

Of course, Virginia has neither liberal annexation laws, and its counties are legally separate from its cities. The latter doesn’t affect Hampton Roads much because its counties converted themselves into “cities” some time ago.

In the here and now, the best hope for regional governance is for the individual cities to keep cooperating on specific missions and services, said Jimmy Eason, president of The Hampton Roads Partnership and former mayor of Hampton.

Eason shied away like a skittish horse at the mention of actual regional government.

“The idea of consolidated government would be so negative to the majority of people,” said Eason. “There is such an inherent suspicion of big government. And there is a real fear of losing identity.”

What the partnership, which is actually working to address these issues, proposes is that the separate cities work together more on areas of common interests: this could even end up sharing services, like libraries or police. The cities already cooperate on a great number of things, Eason said. The failure of cooperation on things like light rail or the Southeastern Expressway overshadow some very real achievements.

If the merger of Pentran and TRT comes off, Eason said, this will be a real achievement. If consolidation of cities does come, it would only be after already having got most of the way there in smaller steps, he said. Eason’s scenario holds out the hope that we could perhaps get there from here. Say we consolidate libraries. Then maybe police. Then we cooperate on setting growth plans. Maybe eventually, it might not be so hard to actually form a coherent regional government, or for two cities to merge their governments.

Let’s never say never. Change really is possible. The future is unpredictable and exciting. Whether we call it Greater Norfolk or Hampton Roads, it’s pretty clear that we rise and fall together.

Don’t Let Kirn Library Fly Away

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Monday, August 16, 1999
COLUMN FOR: The Virginian-Pilot
BY ALEX MARSHALL

At the end of the movie Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman pleads with Humphrey Bogart to stay with him, and to let her husband, the courageous underground leader Victor Lazlow, fly off by himself.

As the prop plane beats it propellers against the air, Bogart, playing tough guy “Rick,” looks down at her and says, no way.

“You’ll regret it,” he tells her in his sandpaper-and-velvet growl. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

That’s how I feel about tearing down Kirn library in Norfolk. That if we do it, we’ll regret it, and soon, and for the rest of our lives. (Imagine Bogart saying these words, in that accent that I now realize sounds vaguely like President John Kennedy mixed with Marlon Brando.)

Huh, you might ask? “I didn’t even know they were thinking about tearing down Kirn.”

Well “they” are. A study committee has recommended building a new central library elsewhere downtown. Even more important, city council members are eying Kirn as a potential spot for a new upscale hotel. Under this plan, the city would sell off the property, perhaps using the funds for a new library.

Sure, any such events may be far off. But I’m talking about it now, because I know how things work in Norfolk. By the time the process gets around to public hearings and comment periods, plans will set and difficult to change. If “we” want to keep Kirn, we need to start talking about it now.

Beauty is a funny thing. It reflects, I think more and more, the relationship one has with an object, as much as the object’s inherent characteristics in space and on the ground.

Kirn was built in 1960-1962, financed in part by a grant from the Kirn family. Built as part of the urban renewal process that was then tearing apart the city, this sleek masterpiece of glass, steel and marble rose on its site on City Hall Avenue, now directly across from the MacArthur Mall. It was Norfolk’s first real central library. In replaced the beautiful, but small Carnegie-funded library on Freemason Street, whose building still stands, but which unfortunately the city no longer owns. The architectural firm of Lublin McGaughy designed Kirn; contractor Paul Tishman built it.

Forty years later, Kirn has lost the aura of modernity, speed and style with which, like a hot new sports car parked on a corner, it used to greet passerbys. Its three stories and a mezzanine now seem small and short against the bulk of the MacArthur Center, and height of the main street towers. Kirn is now often unnoticed, always under-used.

But look twice at Kirn. Look three times. Notice the way the tall marble planks stretch up its sides. Notice the abundance of steel and glass. Notice how proudly it sits on its corner, directly addressing the street.

For an even better viewpoint, stand inside Kirn on the mezzanine level. Notice how you can see right into the street because Kirn’s “walls” are actually entire sheets of glass. Notice the luxurious floating marble stairs that lead you gently to the mezzanine. Notice how the building is literally stuffed with the black-streaked marble, around you at every turn.

And then I think it will hit you. Kirn is beautiful. An example of 1960s modernism at its best, all steel and glass, an open building, revealing its structure and interior to the world like someone with nothing to hide.

Historic preservation, I’m realizing, is not just about nostalgia. It’s about recognizing that different eras have different strengths. We could not replicate a Kirn library today, because building trades have changed, technology has moved on, and the eyes of present-day designers are different. Because of this, it makes sense to keep the best of every era, because we are keeping something that can’t be replicated, a language that, if erased, will no longer be spoken.

I love libraries. And it shames me that Norfolk has so long neglected theirs. When I was a boy growing up in Virginia Beach, visiting Kirn was something special. That’s no longer true.

But there is nothing wrong with Kirn that a strong wind of fresh cash couldn’t fix. A wind that swept old books off shelves, that expanded the public parts of the library into neglected corners and floors, a wind that made every corner glisten with love, attention and staffing.

Sure, a great central library might eventually need more room. But with the demolition of the old Board of Trade building, Kirn possesses an entire city block. This is as much room as San Francisco’s new downtown library. When time to expand, an addition can be built on the land now used for a few parking spaces. In fact, I hear there are dormant plans around for just that. Kirn could even go upward, building additional stories on top of the ones that exist

What Norfolk doesn’t need is another new mega structure, flanked by a giant parking box, isolated from the rest of the city. It needs buildings like Kirn, that fit into the streetscape, and that are intimately part of the fabric of downtown life, and the city’s history.

Don’t write an unhappy ending to this movie. Think once, twice, three times, before doing something that we may someday regret, “and soon,” and for the rest of our lives. Let’s stand by Kirn, as it has so nobly stood by us.

Coney Island: The Train is The Thing

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by Alex Marshall
Metropolis Magazine
August/September issue, 2001

Today’s Quiz: What magnificent hall of marble, iron and glass, built about 1900, was torn down in the mid 1960s, robbing New York of one of the best examples of Beaux-arts architecture in the city if not the world?

No, not Penn Station. The Pavilion of Fun!!!!!! Of course! That magnificent hall inside Steeplechase Park on Coney Island that sheltered park goers on a rainy day. It was our Crystal Palace. And Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, tore it down in 1966 to build some condos that didn’t materialize.

The Pavilion of Fun was just one of the many glories that Coney Island, that strip of land on the outer reaches of Brooklyn, has housed in its 150 years of fame. Like some citadel city that has been sacked and burned repeatedly, the sands of Coney Island hold the traces or at least the memories of castles, ancient empires that have rose and fell, rose and fell. I imagine some future archeologist digging in its soil in centuries hence, finding the remnants of the Elephant Hotel, or Lilliputia, the city of midgets.

“At Coney Island, where the abiding talent is for the exaggerated and the superlative, the changes have been so violent and complete as to obliterate, each time, the memory of what was there before,” said Edo McCullough, the nephew of George C. Tilyou, who founded Steeplechase and built the Pavilion of Fun. “On one shorefront lot at Coney, for example, there has been in succession an untidy tangle of bathhouses, a vast casino, an arena in which were fought three world’s championships heavyweight prizefights, the most beautiful outdoor amusement park in the world, a freak show, a parking lot, and ‘- today — New York City’s brand-new aquarium.”

McCullough wrote this in 1957, before his uncle’s park and the Pavilion of Fun were torn down, before most of the cereal-box ranks of Corbusier-inspired apartments had replaced the low-rise bungalows and duplexes, before its amusement park district had shrunk to a few blocks.

Now, Coney Island is changing again. The city of New York has built on the boardwalk and beach a cute little single-A ballpark for a cute single-A farm team of the mighty Mets, the Brooklyn Cyclones. Housing a mere 6,500 people, it allows ball fans to watch the sand, the ocean and a rising young star belt a fat one all at the same time. Even more significant, although less hyped, is the complete rebuilding of the Coney Island subway station, where four separate lines terminate, and which once routinely dumped out a million people into Coney Island’s downtown on a hot summer’s day. Costing $250 million ‘ six times the $40 million cost of the ballpark’ the new subway station, to be completed in 2005, will have an airy canopy of steel and glass over a new building, platforms and tracks. The city is also spending $30 million to spruce up the boardwalk, build public bathrooms, and other beach-front details; $30 million on youth athletic facilities, and $10 million on old-style urban housing and retail along Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney Island’s principal urban thoroughfare.

The ballpark and all this new infrastructure may revive Coney Island. But in what style will be the island’s newest incarnation? Coney Island, once a clear urban grid of streets fed by subways, is now a patchwork-quilt of auto-oriented development built around parking lots and highways ‘ like a recent Home Depot that went up –mixed with old-style urban streets built around subways lines. Will new development be oriented around the sidewalks and the subway station, or around the parking lot and the highways? No one knows. Despite about $350 million in city spending, there is no master plan as to where and in what form development should go.

Ken Fisher, a Brooklyn city councilman and candidate for borough president, said there was no master plan, but there were plans to set up a non-profit development corporation to direct investment. Fisher uses the Times Square analogy, as do many believers in Coney Island’s potential revival. At some point, like the old-porn saturated Times Square, the dilapidated Coney Island will reach the tipping point, and new investment will flood in, Fisher said.

‘Everyone cherishes Coney Island’s past,’ Fisher said. ‘But they also can’t wait for its future.’

THE PAST
The history of Coney Island, like the history of all places, is a history of transportation. This barren strip of beach, never really an island but ‘a clitoral appendage at the mouth of New York’s natural harbor’ in Rem Koolhaas’s vivid words in Delirious New York, was ignored for two and a half centuries. Then about 1850, steamships began visiting the island from Manhattan, which prompted the development of several luxury hotels. In the 1870s, railroad lines were extended there, and then the hordes began. By the early 1900s Coney Island had three huge amusement parks ‘ Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland ‘ plus hundreds of other individual attractions, often illicit — that lined the streets. At one time, Coney Island had three horse tracks, plus numerous casinos. Coney Island was dubbed ‘Sodomy by the Sea.’ This period, from roughly 1870 to World War I, has obsessed novelists and other writers. It is the subject of Kevin Baker’s surrealistic 1999 novel, ‘Dreamland,’ named after the amusement park that burned down in 1911. You could go to Coney Island and visit China, Arabia, Africa and Hell. See a building catch fire. Ride mechanical horses around a full-size track. You could visit man-made mountains, lagoons and German villages. See human premature babies on display in an incubator. And oh yes, visit the moon, at Luna Park.

Between 1915 and 1919, the subway lines to Coney Island were completed. Soon, the traffic on an average summer Sunday went from 100,000 a day to 1 million. Ironically, the hordes had a morally cleansing effect on the island. Coney Island went from being ‘a city of sin,’ to being a family-oriented, safe resort. The casinos, whores and more extravagant displays of weirdness disappeared. It was a resort version of ‘eyes on the street.’ Sin could not survive under the gaze of such vast hordes. In the place of sin, you rode with your date on the Cyclone Roller coaster, built in 1927, or the Wonder Wheel, built in 1928. Both are still in business. A 1988 report by the Landmarks Preservation Commission smugly informs us that ‘most of these rides succeeded because they combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy.’

During the depression and World War II, with gasoline being rationed, Coney Island thrived. A nickel subway ride got you to the beach. But the post-war, frenzied embrace of new highways and new cars killed Coney Island.

Like Robert McNamara, Robert Moses seems to be ubiquitous in histories of the 1950s and 1960s, accumulating blame for every urban tragedy. You can throw in the death of Coney Island. It was Moses, the all powerful parks commissioner, who built Jones beach and Jones parkway, which siphoned off customers from Coney. In actual numbers, more people continued to visit Coney Island. But the people with money had cars, and they went to Jones Beach. ‘He put the kibosh on us,’ said Charles Tesoriero of Moses, former president of Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, in 1965 in ‘Another Time, Another World,’ an oral history taken down by Michael Paul Onorato, ‘No markers on the belt Parkway, no exit signs; it just by-passed us.’ Moses also got control of the beachfront, and encouraged bland parks to replace frenzied amusements. Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, said that for Moses, ‘Coney Island becomes ‘ again ‘ a testing ground for strategies intended ultimately for Manhattan.’

The combination of freeways, parks and projects almost urban renewed the old Coney Island out of existence. Luna Park, the second great amusement park, burned down in 1944. In 1946 on its site, the first high-rise housing project went up. Over the next three decades, into the early 1970s, vast ranks of tall towers, some of them housing projects, some of them middle class, were built on Coney Island. The city rips out many if not most of the traditional streets of low-rise apartments and homes.

Today, Coney Island has a fading resort strip, remnants of an old-style urban neighborhood, and ranks of high rise apartments, most of them low-income housing. It is this jumbled mix that the various improvements, if they prove to be that, will act upon.

THE BALLPARK
The sweaty fat man in the pink T-shirt and baseball cap walked into the construction trailer beside the Brooklyn Cyclone stadium, then on the verge of completion. ‘You got any merchandise?’ he asked, using the cognoscenti word for souvenirs. ‘I was hoping to get some merchandise before it all got sold out. You got pennants? Pins?’ Kevin O’Shea had come all the way from Staten Island, the other side of the city, just to buy souvenirs. He already had tickets. ‘It’s about time,’ O’Shea said about the new stadium. ‘I’ve been meaning to come over here.’ It is this kind of rabid fan intensity ‘ a remnant of the time when Brooklyn had the mighty Dodgers ‘ that has helped the new team sell out most of their season’s 247,000 seats for the season before a pitch had been thrown. Tickets cost a reasonable $6 to $10 a seat.

Even without the nostalgia for pro baseball in Brooklyn again, the appeal of the ballpark is easy to understand. It combines beach and baseball in a Zen-like, all-is-one experience. Sitting in the stands, you can see the blue ocean, white sand, the boardwalk filled with strolling people, the nearby amusement rides, and a baseball game, with just a few swivels of the head.

John Ingram, the lead architect on the stadium from Jack L. Gordon Architects in New York, said he did everything he could to bring the beach, the boardwalk and the resort ambiance into the stadium. While most arenas work to create a sense of enclosure, the Coney Island does the opposite. The bland, glass-fronted skyboxes were stacked in a pyramid behind home plate, rather than strung out along left and right fields, which would have obscured views. The bathrooms were placed at ground level to the sides, rather than near the outfield. The stadium has an entrance directly off the boardwalk. You can walk the hard-wood planks of the seaside boardwalk, turn, and walk directly to the stadium on a pathway made of identical wood, also laid diagonally, without changing elevation.

At night, the ballpark has a different dynamic. Rather than blend with the sun and sand, it merges with the lights of the amusement park nearby, and the general festive air of Coney Island at night. It does this principally though lighting. Surrounding the stadium are giant lollipop lights, each 120 feet high and topped with 30-foot circular neon lights. At night, these red, green and blue lights mesh with multi-colored lights put under the skyboxes, creating an enclosure of lights. When someone hits a home run, the lollipop lights spin in circles, mixing with the bright flashing lights from the amusement park a block away.

‘We were trying to get some of the colorful overlays of light and graphics that were associated with old Coney Island experience,’ Ingram said. But he said they rejected having an historical look to the ballpark. ‘This is Coney Island now. We are its future. We are the fresh new look on the block.’

The stadium’s 1,200-space parking lot, (it has another 900 spaces off site), are put to the side of the stadium, and are not visible from the stands. Although the minimizing of the parking visually is admirable, a larger question is why is the city spending money on parking, while also spending money to rebuild a subway station that sits a block from the park, and can handle a million people a day? No doubt the owner of the Brooklyn Cyclones want parking, but it may not be in the long-term interest of Coney Island. The old-new resort can develop more intensely as a subway oriented resort, rather than an automobile one.

THE SUBWAY
In 1997, Bilbao in Spain opened its new Guggenheim museum. Designed by Frank Gehry, its shiny, fluid, dramatic presence seemed to single-handedly revive this fading, Basque industrial city. Less noticed though, was that the $100 million museum was the capstone of a $1.2 billion urban redevelopment program, which included a new subway line, a refurbished train and streetcar system, a waterfront development plan, and a new airport. The shiny Guggenheim was simply the shiny bauble on top of a serious mound of infrastructure, which would do more in the long run to bring more jobs and residents to Bilbao.

In similar fashion, the Coney Island ballpark is the shiny bauble on top of some serious infrastructure work, which includes the $250 million subway station renovation, the construction of an urban row of shops and apartments called Mermaid Commons, and various beachfront improvements. While the ballpark got its picture in The New Yorker, the new subway facility is more important. Four separate lines ‘ The B, D, F, and N ‘ terminate at Coney Island, giving it immense capacity. Like Grand Central Station, the Coney Island stop was built with ramps instead of stairs, better to handle the vast crowds. As you stand in the station’s swelling mouth, where four ramps from four platforms from eight tracks exit, you can quickly visualize the crowds from past days. The ramps look like cattle chutes.

The new facility includes a new building, new tracks and platforms, new foundations for the elevated station, new signaling and a dramatic overhead canopy that will stretch across the open-air platforms. Despite the ambitious design, the project’s biggest challenge was figuring out a way to do the work and negotiating with the community about the work, said project officials. Originally, the job was going to take eight years, said Mike Kyriacou, design manager on the project with New York City Transit. But he and his staff figured out a way to do it in 42 months, although it means shutting some lines down for years at a time.

‘We had to go to the community, and say ‘We have to have you suffer for a while,’ Kyriacou said.

The present station is a wreck of crumbling concrete and rusted metal. It’s a sad testimony to the low priority given to maintenance in public infrastructure. ‘You go there, and you say, ‘Why the hell do we have such a thing?’ Kyriacou said. ‘The condition of the existing facility is so dilapidated. It’s looks like a place that no one has ever touched.’

The most visually striking component of the new station will be a gull-wing glass and steel canopy, equipped with solar photovoltaic grid to generate electricity. This will stretch across the four platforms, and because the eight tracks are elevated, should be visible from a considerable distance. Underneath the canopy will be new tracks, platforms, pilings and station. The solar system will produce the most electricity ‘ 150 kilowatts — on a hot summer day, precisely when air conditioners around the city are draining the centralized power system of Con Ed. Below the canopy and platforms will be a new, three-story, 34,000-square foot building that will replace the existing, crumbling one-story station. This station will include not only space for about 300 daily transit workers, but a new district 34 Police Station. The new station will manage to keep the mosaic fa’ade of the old station, which is landmarked. It will be removed, cleaned and rebuilt.

Andrew Berger, an architect at di Domenico + Partners in New York who designed the new three-story building, said he believed the new station would help renew Coney Island.

‘It’s all part of a bigger picture, which is that if you build it, they will come,’ Berger said. ”It’s a real opportunity to not only knit together an improved transit facility and police station, but hopefully leave a positive statement about future development opportunities out in Coney island.’

The renovation of the Coney Island’Stillwell Avenue stop should spur new development the same way a new highway creates more shopping malls and subdivisions. Of course, the $250 million renovation will not be creating more capacity. But appearances are important. Visitors and residents of Coney Island in a few years will enter a new, three-story building, lined with stores inside and out, then walk or roll up gently sloping ramps to wait for a train under a futuristic glass and steel canopy. Manhattan is infinitely more enticing, now that riding its subway is not about enduring graffiti, crime and crumbling stations.

In addition to the subway, there is about $70 million in other city-funded projects planned. They include the $10 million ‘Mermaid Commons’ of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Through a public-private partnership, the agency is building a series of infill buildings along 13 blocks of Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney Island’s principal urban streets. The project includes an entire block of three-story row houses, with retail below and apartments above, each selling for $274,000. The plan is to sell these to moderate income families, who will live on one floor, run a retail store, and rent out one apartment to another family.
ONWARD AND UPWARD
Standing on the Coney Island boardwalk at sunset, you see an amazing parade of people pass by: an Hasidic Jew in a black hat and long coat; some pudgy Latin children and their pudgy mother; a white haired man in a shirt and tie, speaking Russian to his grown son in blue jeans. Off to one side of the boardwalk in a park, a group of mostly Latins and blacks play handball.

Coney Island has always been a melting pot. The late novelist Joseph Heller, in his memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, writes of the poor but thriving community of Jews, Italians and other ethnic groups of his youth in the 1920s. With a ballpark, a subway station, a renovated beach front — and most importantly, a rising economy in the New York region ‘ more people and money will come to Coney Island, and blend into the existing soup.

But many people are skeptical that better days are ever ahead. David Barstow of The New York Times, in a story June 9, 2000, spoke of how ‘the old-timers and tourists and politicians cling like rust to the distant fantasy that Coney Island will be what it once was, as if the great cultural and demographic tides that built and then laid waste to the place were merely boardwalk phantasms.’ He goes on to call the place, ‘a clich’ of seedy decay,’ and ‘charmless.’

But Barstow did not mention the plan to renovate the subway, apparently only aware of the new ballpark. Probably what threatens Coney Island now is getting too rich. If New York transit adds better express service to Manhattan, the island could be a half hour away from Wall Street. And as an amusement park, Coney Island is still not bad. Sitting in a rocking car on top of The Wonder Wheel, you can see the ball park and then, the elevated subway line that glides between the housing towers nearby. From this vantage point, the train looks like just another amusement park ride, perhaps one to try after the roller coaster. I suspect that more people will try that ride, in coming years, and come to Coney Island.

Alex Marshall, the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken, lives in New York City and is a frequent contributor to Metropolis Magazine.

Cities Back From The Edge

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New Life For Downtown Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz

There are two ways to try to revive an old downtown, says Roberta Brandes Gratz. Only one of them works.

The first way is to spend a lot of money, taxpayer money, on stadiums, aquariums, science centers and mammoth public-private partnerships like enclosed shopping malls. (Sound familiar?)

The other way is to look carefully at what is already there, and to nurture its revitalization. Avoid big projects. Find ways to plant small businesses and new residents into old buildings and streets as if you were injecting favorable spores into a vat of cheese.

Guess which method Gratz likes best?

You got it. The second way. She calls it “urban husbandry,” which gets at the organic, fertile nature of the process.

The first method Gratz contemptuously labels “Project Planning.” She says it results in awkward cities that are never weaned off the public teat and lack grass roots stability.

Gratz has been writing about cities for more than 30 years, starting with 15 years as a reporter in the 1960s and 1970s for The New York Post. She is the author of the groundbreaking book, The Living City, (Simon and Schuster 1989), which first detailed her theory of “thinking small in a big way.” Her new book elaborates on that thesis.

In its 350 or so pages, Gratz shows the excesses and failures of Project Planning, and the successes of Urban Husbandry. She says again and again, as if trying to teach a dense student through repetition, that there is no formula for urban revival and that cities fail when they start looking for one. Instead, cities need to look carefully at their individual strengths, weaknesses and personalities.

She spends time in her long-time home, New York, reviewing old acknowledged failures, like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, as well as newer ones like the aborted attempt to revive Times Square with mega skyscrapers. She has a chapter on “The SoHo syndrome,” detailing how the district in lower Manhattan revived itself not only without city help, but expressly against city plans for a 10-lane freeway through the area.

But the best part of the book is where Gratz spotlights cities that have received less attention. She visits Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, and shows how they revived an old movie theater. She spends a lot time in Mansfield, Ohio. She goes into most of the decision points on downtowns — courthouses, libraries and farmers markets — and shows how they can help or hurt a downtown. She does a very good job talking of the transportation decisions that either rebuild, or pull apart, an older city.

If there is a flaw in her book, it’s that she does not show as clearly how a downtown’s growth, or lack of it, fits into the overall growth of a region. Although Gratz has a chapter on “Undoing Sprawl,” she may not quite see how limiting new residential and business growth in the outer suburbs leads to an eventual re-emergence of the same in the center city.

She speaks of Hampton Roads several times. She says Virginia Beach is an example of a city damaged by traffic engineers, and quotes from a 1991 Virginian-Pilot story by “Alex Marshall, a perceptive urban issues reporter” about the difficulty in crossing Lynnhaven Parkway on foot. But she pays more attention to Norfolk.

Gratz has watched Norfolk’s strategy of rebuilding downtown through the Waterside festival marketplace, the Marriott Hotel and convention center, the Tides ballpark, Nauticus and most recently, the MacArthur Center shopping mall. It’s obvious that Norfolk falls into her category of a “project planner” city, with the big mall being a prime example.

“Too many [cities] are still going the anti-urban, anti-place route of the enclosed shopping mall,” Gratz says. “In Norfolk, Virginia, a SoHo-like district was showing signs of renewed life and slowly but naturally attracting new business and people. Instead of nurturing this revival, building on and adding to its momentum, the city followed the conventional Project Planning route of the enclosed mall.”

Actually, you can debate whether Norfolk has a SoHo-like district, and whether it was reviving. The old warehouses along the waterfront that might have become a SoHo were torn down long ago. And business revitalization along Granby Street was not going very far on its own. But Gratz is correct in that the city has pinned its hopes on the mall and other big projects, with what she says are bad results.

Is she right about Norfolk and its mall? Yes and no. Norfolk has a horrible track record of destroying old buildings and streets. It has not put enough energy into the small-scale rebuilding Gratz highlights. In a perfect world, Norfolk’s downtown would be rebuilt with smaller streets and stores that rely on a renewed, regional mass transit system.

But in our imperfect world, the giant MacArthur Center, even with its fortress-like design, is better than a blank, 20-acre parking lot. The mall, if successful, will provide downtown with a retail base and help the city as a whole. It would be nice, however, if city officials would do more to nurture the more authentic type of downtown Gratz and so many others love.

*Cities Back From The Edge: New Life For Downtown Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mint Preservation Press. John Wiley & Sons. New York 1998

A Sweet Neighborhood In San Antonio: King William

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
SEPT. 5, 1996
Metropolis Magazine.

The fat man in the Budweiser T-shirt and shorts gawking up at the Moorish inspired arches of the front porch of the palatial home was one sign of why life in this elegant neighborhood is not always easy. Despite his admiral interest in historical homes, the man and his companions were not the easiest sight on a Saturday morning if you had just climbed out of bed.

And keep in mind the Budweiser man was one of the good tourists, or at least uncontroversial ones. He was on foot, not in a belching tour bus.

King William is a sweet honey of a neighborhood, a tasty blend of elegant mansions, decrepit Victorians and more non-descript homes nestled down amid the scarred landscape of freeways and vacant lots on the edge of San Antonio’s downtown. A slum at one time, it was rediscovered in the late 60s and 70s. Since then, many of its palatial mansions have been renovated, and their residents live in harmony with the more middle-class denizens that reside in the smaller homes and apartments there.

The neighborhood, built largely between 1850 and 1890, was developed by successful German immigrants who swept into this part of Texas in the 19th century. The Germans were a strong influence in the part of the state. An old photo from the 19th century San Antonio shows a sign warning people to walk their horses across a bridge. It’s written in three languages – English, German and Spanish.

What’s nice about King William is that it’s still very diverse. A guy living an an apartment with a battered car, is down the street from the stockbroker in the mega-mansion. Plenty of homes still need renovating. As I talked with one woman in lovely restored mansion, I watched an old man across the street, wearing a white T-shirt, and sitting on the front porch of a house with peeling paint. He and the house looked equally old and near collapse. Despite its beauty, King William might be just another inner-city, gentrified neighborhood were it not for its position on the edge of San Antonio’s tourist machinery. Both a convention city and a historic tourist town, San Antonio receives some 10 million visitors a year who trot through The Alamo, wander the River Walk, and increasingly, make their way to King William to look at the houses.

This is a mixed blessing. It is one shared by many historic neighborhoods that are in cities like Charleston, Alexandria, and Savannah. The tourism helps keep the city as a whole healthy, and also justifies historic preservation in dollars and cents. But for people living in the neighborhood, it can be a hassle.

Tourism was not on the minds of those who homesteaded the neighborhood back in the late 1960s and early 70s. The godfather of this movement is Walter Mathis. When his home elsewhere in town was put in the bullseye of a freeway’s path, Mathis moved into King William in 1968, bought a crumbling mansion, and then – he says he wanted to assure himself of having good neighbors – bought 14 other homes.

“Everyone thought I was craze to do gown there, because the neighborhood was so terrible,” Mathis said. “People were parking cars in the front yards, and the big houses were all broken up.”

Mathis, an investment banker, says he had 16 men working 18 months to renovate his mansion. On most of the other homes, he had the foundations repaired, put on new tin roofs, and then sold them as is to young couples eager to renovate the homes themselves. Like many people who subsequently moved in, they then spent years or even a decade or more slowly renovating their homes, a la This Old House.

The tourism debate has developed over the last few years. It has centered on two items of tourism: bed and breakfasts, and tour buses.

Of the two, the tour buses are clearly obnoxious. In King William, the full-sized city buses glide through the neighborhood at a crawl in the middle of the street, forcing regular drivers behind them to wait or try to squeeze around them. According to residents, they often sit and idle their engines after they have disgorged their passengers for a stroll. Sometimes they stack up, two or three at once. My visit to the neighborhood was not during the high-tourist season, but I could tell they are obnoxious as hell.

“I’ve had times when right in front of my house, I’ve had two buses and one trolley parked, and I didn’t feel I could work in my bathing suit or shorts on a hot day, because people are staring at me,” said Karen Van Nort, who lives in a palatial residence on King William street, the main drag for tour buses. ”

The bed and breakfasts are the flip-side of the coin, arguably more of a blesssing than a curse. There are roughly a dozen, formal B&Bs in the neighborhood now. They have little opportunity for friction with their neighbors. Despite ample street-parking in the neighborhood, all B&Bs must provide off-street parking. Their overnight guests are seldom seen. Their ownly advertising are tiny wooden signs placed usually on the front porch. Most important, their presence has helped renovate a variety of homes that otherwise might sit crumbling. These 19th century homes are often difficult to work economically for a contemporary household. The Yellow Rose bed and breakfast where I stayed was a 10-room apartment complex before Jennifer and Eric Tice bought it a few years ago and renovated it into a five-room bed and breakfast.

The debate over B&Bs and tour buses was at a high simmer a few years ago, but appears to have quieted. A city committee has proposed, and the neighborhood has accepted, a new ordinance that limits the number of B&Bs to no more than 20 percent of the homes on any one block. The B&B operators are comfortable with this, as are the homeowners. At the moment, only one block is at this level. I couldn’t find anyone during my visit who complained about bed and breakfasts.

“They are my neighbors like anyone else,” said Karen Van Tort, after complaining bitterly of the tour buses. “They take care of their homes. I dont see any big advertising. I see it as more of a positive. I certainly don’t see it as a problem.”

The tour buses are another story. Although some limits have already been set – they are not supposed to cruise before 11 a.m. or after 6 p.m., they still bother some people. The problem is more difficult in that they generally only bother one street – King William – where most of the mega-mansions are clustered.

What many there want is to create a parking lot on the edge of the neighborhood, where the buses could park and then its occupants disembark and walk on foot through the neighborhood. Failing that, they want limits on the size of the buses, and the number that can go through at any onetime. A committee is studying the issue now. It’s using as its model, among others, the ordinances in place in Charleston which not only set limits on buses but on horse drawn carriages.

That tourism is both a problem and a blessing there can be no doubt. Last year, (November 1995), the Historic Anapolis Foundation held a seminar entitled “Living with Success: Managing Residential Life and Tourism in Historic Communities. Among its participants were San Antonio, Newport, Charleston, Santa Fe and Savannah. The report’s conclusions were common-sensical – there must be a balance between tourism and the indigenous life of the neighborhood – but no less true because of this.

What comes across when looking at tourism is that there is often a tension between long-term and short-term gain. If King William is overrun with tour buses, or San Antonio’s River Walk is overrun with chain restaurants, they will both lose some of the charm that makes them successful. But in the short run, the profits from such ventures – should we say predatory ventures? – are tempting.

But neighborhoods also have to guard against being too picky. Urban neighborhoods are meant to have a variety of uses, from a small coffeeshop, to a dentist’s office, to a bed and breakfast. As long as size and scale is managed, uses should not be worried about. Even in King William, most people had nothing to complain about, when I asked of how tourism affected them.

The original homesteader Mathis takes a fairly sanguine attitude toward the tourism fuss, even though a view of his home with the two carved lions out front is one of the prime targets for tour buses.

“Personally, the tour buses don’t bother me because I work all day and I don’t see them,” Mathis said. “Most of the bed and breakfasts are well-run businesses and are very attractive.”