Rich People in Ugly Buildings
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This story, about the New York apartment building, ran in Slate magazine. Because it is accompanied by slides, it is best to see it on Slate’s web site.
Category Archives: New York
How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?
The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.
There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.
Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.
I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.
Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.
Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.
But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?
I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.
New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.
But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.
Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.
I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.
A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.
But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.
Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.
Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.
The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.
As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.
There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.
The city is not inactive on the cycling front.
The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.
‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See here.
Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.
Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.
So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.
–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.
Atlas Is Still Shrugging – And Riding the Subway
First published in The New York Observer
March 25, 2002
by Alex Marshall
When I take the subway, and enter into that labyrinth of tunnels and tracks that transport some five million of us daily, I think about Atlas Shrugged, that mad, 1,200-page homage to money and markets written by Ayn Rand, the late Russian ‘migr’ accustomed to wearing an embroidered silver dollar sign on her black cape, and one-time guru to Alan Greenspan and other important money men.
The first way they relate is obvious: The subway system, like the mythical Atlas, supports our world. It created the New York we know and usually love, of skyscrapers leaping out of the ground, filled with people. The built environment we think of as New York City grew out of the subway and its capacity to bring millions of people more or less at the same time to the same place. While Manhattan’s grid existed before the subway system, its skyscrapers did not-nor did its amazing employment density, which was based on moving millions into the city daily.
The late, great World Trade Center provides a good example. What if the Port Authority had built the towers without the No. 1 line and the PATH train beneath it and the ferry nearby? How much parking would you have needed so all those people could drive into Manhattan?
Well, using the standard suburban-developer’s formula of one parking space for every 250 square feet of office space, you would need 56,000 parking spaces for the World Trade Center’s 14 million square feet. Which means you would need 560 acres of parking, or basically all of lower Manhattan, because you can only fit 100 parking spaces per acre. So basically, you would’ve had to convert everything below Canal Street, from Tribeca to the Staten Island ferry, into a parking lot for one building complex. Or you could build parking garages. If you built the garages with the same expansive 50,000-square-foot plates as the twin towers, you’d need two 190-story parking garages to sit beside the 110-story World Trade Center towers. You would also need a 50-lane freeway to get the people there and back.
Most people don’t understand transportation. They think we have these places – like Times Square or, say, a shopping mall outside Atlanta – and we figure out how to move around within and between them. Actually, it works just the opposite: We create ways to move around, and that creates places. The subway and train lines created the New York we love, the same way the interstate highways created the Atlanta suburban sprawl we hate.
New York is so different in its physical form because a subway, unlike a highway, can move many people quickly to more or less the same place. A highway moves 1,800 vehicles per lane per hour. A good subway can move 60,000 to 80,000 people per track per hour!
So we are creations, in a sense, of New York’s transit system. But, like the hard-working capitalists in Rand’s novel, the subway gets no respect and little attention. The casual rider doesn’t appreciate it; the feds feed it last, after lavishing money on Georgia interstates and mining subsidies to Utah.
So that’s one way the subway relates to Atlas Shrugged. The second way the subway relates is less obvious, but more crucial. It’s that Ayn Rand was wrong! In Atlas Shrugged, she details her theory that capitalists, like her hero, John Galt-those out to make a buck-create all the value in the world, and the rest of us are just freeloaders. To Ayn Rand and all her libertarian, neoconservative soul brothers at the Cato and Manhattan institutes, the people who create value and prosperity in this world are the Mike Bloombergs and the Bill Gateses. Government is at best a necessary evil, there just to tidy up the manly work done by the capitalists.
Now this makes sense to sophomores in college and John Tierney on the Metro page of The Times, but it’s just flat wrong. The world we live in rests on a vast system of publicly funded (and usually publicly built) infrastructure. Sure, people start companies and do neat stuff. But they use workers who receive public education, and they get places on highways, planes and subways that government has either built or massively subsidized. The free market doesn’t create infrastructure, at least not very well. John Galt and the other capitalists in Atlas Shrugged depend on government to build a transportation infrastructure for them, educate their workers, and create a legal system that allows them to buy and sell. Government creates the infrastructure of capitalism: physical, intellectual and legal.
This is true in New York most of all. It’s no accident that New York, symbol of free-wheeling capitalism, has the most extensive and elaborate mass-transit system and social-welfare state. Compared to the rest of the country, New York is Sweden.
So who is this Atlas that’s carrying the world? It’s us, the taxpayers. And where does that leave us? In the hands of the politicians. The good news is that there are signs that Mayor Bloomberg gets it: He’s talked respectfully not only of the transit system, but of the parks, water mains and other systems that make our city work.
If we wanted to make this city even better, then the easiest way would be to pour money into the subway system first, and then the commuter rail, ferries and Amtrak. They are like blood lines to vital organs. A wish list would include the Second Avenue subway and bureaucratic changes like making the MetroCard common currency on all trains, ferries and buses, no matter what state they originate from.
But we shouldn’t just make the transit system more efficient; we should make it beautiful. It’s a sign of the hostility with which we regard public infrastructure that most of it looks like the underside of a kitchen sink. A few years back, I rode the new No. 14 subway line in Paris to the Biblioth’que Nationale, those giant glass bookends that sit over a cool subterranean complex. The subway fit right into this Schrager-like aesthetic. The platforms were separated from the open tracks by a wall of glass. When the train pulled in, its doors lined up with these glass walls, and the two opened together. It had other nice touches. The stations were actually works of architecture, both inside and out.
Our subways could be like that: marvels of both engineering and aesthetics. The Second Avenue subway line, which would take people from the Bronx all the way to lower Manhattan, could be a showcase of the best in design and architecture.
Even when factoring in the better economy and increasing population of New York, more people than expected have ridden the subways and buses in the last 15 years. Why? Probably because the subway cars are no longer covered with graffiti, the stations rarely smell of urine and the M.T.A. has spruced up the stations with new flooring, tiles and railings. That’s been wonderful, but it’s just a first step.
As we contemplate our post-9/11 future, we can choose to make our city a better place in ways that are both sensible and efficient. We don’t have to be like the late Ms. Rand; we can take the subway.
The New Penn Station: When Will It Arrive?
The new Pennsylvania Station was originally due to open its doors this year, but the only noticeable progress has been the building’s renaming for its late benefactor, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. So what’s going on?
While months and even years have passed with little progress, the press has been largely silent. One exception to this was a recent piece in the New York Observer, in which the senator’s daughter, Maura Moynihan, announced the creation of The Citizens Committee for Moynihan Station. She feared the project would not happen without more public attention.
Some background: The late Senator, a believer in the power of great architecture and great transportation infrastructure, managed to obtain a big appropriation of money to convert the grand old Beaux-Arts James A. Farley U.S. Post Office on 33rd St. between 8th and 9th avenues into a new above-ground train station. It would augment and help open up the underground rabbit warren that is the present day station, which sits underneath Madison Square Garden and some office towers. The present day Penn Station would become largely for the commuter railways, while Amtrak passengers would use the above-ground station on the other side of Eighth Avenue.
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill has designed the new station, and the plans look great, with a dramatic steel and glass atrium breaking out of the middle of the block-long building. The effective Empire State Development Corporation, through its subsidiary Moynihan Station Development Corporation, is overseeing the project. Under the current plans, it will own the building and lease it out to tenants, including Amtrak and the Post Office, which will retain use of a portion.
“This project is happening, it’s moving forward,” said Charles Stump, vice president at the Moynihan Station Development Corporation. “Anytime you have a huge transaction, there are a lot of details to be worked out.”
Nevertheless, Stump acknowledged that a number of difficulties were slowing the project down. Empire State Development Corporation and the Post Office have signed a letter of intent for the Post Office to sell the property to the state of New York for $230 million, and one $10 million payment has already been made, Stump said. But the actual sale has not happened. Holding it back are disagreements over who will pay for what in the new station.
“The Post Office doesn’t want to pay for certain things that they think we should be responsible for, as landlords, and we think they should be responsible for costs that are associated with them,” Stump said. “There are a lot of open issues that are still being discussed.”
Another difficulty involves Amtrak, which is supposed to be “the anchor tenant,” Stump said. Amtrak’s relatively new president, David Gunn, is focusing on nuts and bolts issues like track repair, and is apparently reluctant to pay some of the costs of moving into the new station. In an interview recently, Gunn seemed to indicate the new station was not a priority.
Stump said he was confident these issues would be resolved by the fall, and he said the corporation planned to hire a developer for the project by December. But civic leaders, political officials and editorial writers should not sit back and passively wait. They should focus attention on this project, lest it get caught in unending bureaucratic battles.
There are several reasons why a new central train station is vital for the city’s and region’s future.
Breathing Space
The new Moynihan Station will not add more track capacity and if anything, it underscores the need for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson. But to anyone who has ever attempted to thread up and down the narrow staircases and escalators at the present Penn Station, onto or from narrow platforms, it will not be news that the present Penn Station is uncomfortable and unpleasant due to its tortuous internal circulation patterns. The numerous choke points show just how little thought was put into the station’s construction, in the aftermath of the destruction of the old Pennsylvania station in the mid 1960s.
The new Moynihan Station will resolve many of these problems by clearly separating commuter rail and inter-city train travel, allowing passengers of all sorts to move in a less congested and more coherent environment. This is no small thing.
The Far West Side
Relocating the region’s central inter-city train station and commuter rail station one avenue over to the West will boost the prospects of successfully developing the Far West Side. Although other transit projects are necessary to this redevelopment plan, a new central train station one avenue over will be a great portal to the West Side, significantly boosting the prospects of the development of the Far West Side.
Beyond Beauty
Vincent Scully, the esteemed architecture critic, famously wrote that with the old Pennsylvania station, “One entered the city like a god.” With its replacement, “One scuttles in now like a rat.” So very true. And it highlights the fact that the new Moynihan station would again give the nation a grand gateway into New York City, something the city has lacked for decades, and of which we could all be proud.
But we should not let this lead us to believe that these are simply questions of aesthetics, without practical importance. Ultimately, how something looks and feel affects how and whether people will use it. Under David Gunn’s leadership at NYC Transit, we saw that when stations are clean and more attractive, people used the subways more, surpassing planners’ projections.
A similar transformation can happen with train travel. There is clearly a need for good and better inter-city train travel in many parts of the country, but particularly the Northeast. Around 40 percent of Amtrak’s total passengers travel through Penn Station. But even people who are accustomed to the present underground maze find it a confusing and oppressive experience. The new Moynihan Station would be a way of not only introducing people to a great city in an appropriate manner, but to increasing the appeal of train travel. While I applaud Gunn’s focus on the basics, he should not overlook the importance of allowing passengers to move in a spacious and relaxed environment, and providing a new home to the nation’s central and busiest train station.
We should all keep our attention on the process to make sure it happens.
–Alex Marshall, Senior Fellow, Regional Plan Association
It’s Dangerous To Cycle in The City — That’s Too Bad
How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?
The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.
There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.
Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.
I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.
Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.
Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.
But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?
I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.
New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.
But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.
Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.
I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.
A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.
But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.
Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.
Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.
The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.
As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.
There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.
The city is not inactive on the cycling front.
The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.
‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.
Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.
Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.
So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.
–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.
How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?
The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.
There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.
Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.
I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.
Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.
Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.
But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?
I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.
New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.
But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.
Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.
I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.
A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.
But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.
Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.
Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.
The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.
As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.
There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.
The city is not inactive on the cycling front.
The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.
‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.
Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.
Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.
So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.
–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.
Coney Island: The Train is The Thing
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.
Parking Over People in Brooklyn
With a distinguished history and at least two and a half million people, Brooklyn likes to proclaim itself “a real city,” one that would be the nation’s second largest – well actually the fourth largest – if only it hadn’t merged with New York City in 1898.
How ironic and sad then, that the borough where I live often comports itself like a distant suburb of shopping malls and subdivisions, seeking to keep newcomers out while in contrast accommodating new automobiles as much as possible. While there are many ways the borough does this, in the interest of brevity this article will focus on only one of these: parking. I focus on Brooklyn here because its policies and situation are particularly poignant, but the argument applies to all boroughs and many parts of Manhattan.
Here’s the problem: New York City in its zoning codes essentially requires all new buildings, whether residential or commercial, to provide parking spaces for their denizens. The City basically has a sliding scale of parking requirements, with more parking required the less dense the zoning area is. Only in the Manhattan core is this requirement completely lifted. This policy has the most impact in places like Jackson Heights in Queens, or Crown Heights in Brooklyn, places that are at a crossroads and set to become either more urban or suburban in character as new development increases.
The parking requirement follows the theory that new buildings generate new demand for parking, and so the businesses should provide that parking. While this theory is flawed even in the suburbs, it’s particularly so in a dense urban city equipped with mass transit and good sidewalks.
What apparently most people don’t realize is that the more parking you provide, the more cars there will be on the street. Period. Parking breeds automobiles. By requiring the construction of parking, the city is essentially ordering that automobile use be subsidized. And by promoting parking construction, the city is helping break up the urban fabric and making its mass transit system, on which billions of public money is spent annually, less workable.
The city should scrap its parking requirements. An even better, more pro-active, policy would be to put a cap on the number of spaces a developer can provide. Essentially, this would impose a parking maximum on new construction, rather than a parking minimum, which is what we have now.
As a way of taming streets, controlling parking has a lot to be said for it. As Josh Brustein of Streetsblog.com pointed out recently in a three-part series on parking there, New York City does not need state authority to control parking. That’s not the case with more publicized efforts, worthy though they may be, like congestion pricing. New York City could substantially reduce traffic and make streets more pedestrian-friendly by implementing market-rate parking on the streets and implementing caps on the amount of new parking that can be constructed. As an additional agenda item, it could copy Copenhagen and start a policy of actively reducing the total number of parking spaces a few percentage points each year.
Absent policies such as these, we are likely to see a rise in hostility toward new residents. This is unfortunate. Although I am personally critical of many aspects of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, I was dismayed to read a recent op-ed by the novelist Jennifer Egan in The New York Times who, despite some excellent points, often sounded like the quintessentially suburban citizen as she criticized the project on the grounds that it would bring a rise in population to the borough, and thus more problems with traffic and parking. She apparently failed to see that if the state and city insisted that the project not provide parking, much of these problems would be eliminated.
The Atlantic Yards project is set to provide about 4,000 parking spaces, or the equivalent of a 40-story parking garage as big around as the World Trade Center. This includes a controversial “temporary” surface parking lot for about 1000 cars that would be in place for a decade or more. Since these spaces will be used multiple times, that means many thousands of additional cars on the streets of Brooklyn, and an urban fabric that has been torn rather than mended.
But with good policies and good urban design, the influx of new people into Brooklyn and other boroughs can improve, not degrade the overall quality of life. Unlike automobile-based suburbs, urban cities generally work better with more people in them. More people means more money for more public services, from mass transit to better sidewalks. While our streets are at capacity for cars, they have plenty of room for more pedestrians and cyclists. Our mass transit system, given decent funding, also can easily be stretched to accommodate newcomers, especially in the boroughs. Imagine if instead of requiring developers to build parking, we required them to fund the mass transit system that their residents would use?
The city needs to reevaluate its policies toward parking. Through this tool alone, the city could make the streets more livable and in the process make newcomers more welcome.
The Stock Transfer Tax: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back?
By Alex Marshall
May 2003
It sounds too good to be true. At a time when New York City and state are billions of dollars in the red, they could raise that and possibly more by reinstating a tax that is mostly paid by people living outside the state and country.
It’s called the Stock Transfer Tax. Until 1981, the state had one, and the city got the revenue.
Until it was phased out, it was raising $300 million a year for the city. Technically, it is still in place, only the proceeds are instantly rebated to the buyer of a stock. Now some people, including an Albany legislator, are considering bringing it back in a new form.
A lot has happened since 1981. The number of purchases on the stock market has grown exponentially. If the same tax were in place now, it would raise an amazing $11 billion in 2004, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office, which recently studied the issue.
Just how does this lucrative tax work? It’s a bit hard to understand, in this age of supposedly landless and nationless capital. But, even though shares of IBM or Apple may be bought by someone in Peru or Peoria, transactions still go through the New York or American stock exchanges, which are located in New York City, if the stock is listed through those houses. The buyer pays the relatively tiny tax, not the brokerage house. The old tax was set on a sliding scale, rising up to 5 cents per share, to a maximum of $350 per transaction. No one has suggested re-instating it at the old level, in part because the various fees that are associated with stock trading have all declined.
New York State Assemblyman Ronald Tocci of Westchester County has suggested reinstating it on a sliding scale, up to a penny per share. The Fiscal Policy Institute ran a scenario study of a half penny per share, with a $35 cap. The IBO, in its studies, put it at half the old rate, or approximately 2.5 cents per share on a sliding scale.
“I see it as a possible, viable alternative to a lot of other unpopular taxes,” Tocci said in an interview from Albany.
New York State first implemented the tax in 1907. In 1965, according to Frank Mauro of the Fiscal Policy Institute, which has studied the issue, the State agreed to give all the revenues to the City in exchange for the City giving up the revenue from a penny of its sales tax. In 1975, during the City’s budget crisis, the securities industry agreed to a 25 percent surcharge. And in 1979, in part because of lobbying by the industry, Gov. Carey agreed to phase it out.
“A good tax is one where the base is very broad, and the rates are very low,” Mauro said.
“Economists agree that all taxes have economic consequences. So to have the least interference, you should have the base very broad and the rates very low.” “It’s intriguing,” said Ed Cupoli, chief economist of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee in Albany. “But the legislature would be reluctant to do anything negative to the securities industry.” In theory, the tax raises enormous sums of money at a miniscule rate of taxation, which, not incidentally, is paid by people mostly living elsewhere.
For example, if a trader in South Dakota bought 100 shares of IBM for $80 a share, the current cost would be $8,000. A penny per share stock transfer tax, depending on the sliding scale, would add at most $1 to this transaction, or 1/8000 of the total cost. For a lower-priced stock, the fee would be lower because the tax would be lower. If someone bought 1000 shares, or $80,000 worth, the fee would be capped, perhaps at $35.
Such a tax would not be burdensome on any one individual. But because millions of shares of stocks are sold daily, it would generate enormous sums of money very quickly.
If this tax can generate so much money so easily, why aren’t our competitors doing it?
They are. In fact, most other stock exchanges have a transfer tax in place, and often at considerably higher rates. Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and others have such a tax, all at higher rates than what is being proposed here, according to J.W. Mason, a doctoral student in economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an article in City Limits Magazine in October 2002 (“Big Idea: Tax the Street”, www.citylimits.org.).
London, often said to be one of New York’s principal competitors, taxes stock sales at 0.5 percent of the price of a stock. This rate is many times higher than the New York tax. In the case of the 100 shares of IBM above, this would be $40, instead of $1.
If Tocci’s plan of a penny per share were put in place, it would probably raise more than $2 billion a year. If split between the city and state, this would be a significant source of new revenue for both.
There is a downside though. The worry is that if such a tax were reinstated, then the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange, the principal entities affected, would leave town to avoid it. If the traders traded in New Jersey, their customers would pay no tax.
Tocci and others argue that the stock exchanges would be unlikely to leave town to avoid a tiny tax that they themselves don’t even pay. Some of the other remedies being considered, such as a surcharge on the income tax of wealthy taxpayers, would hit their personal pocketbooks much more directly, Tocci said.
But others in the banking and budgeting business have been more critical.
“I think it’s dead on arrival in Albany,” said Rae Rosen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank. “An industry-specific tax might on balance do more harm than good, particularly for an industry that has the ability to move operations out of the city.” The tone of the limited IBO analysis is pessimistic. The IBO examined the issue as part of a larger report, “Budget Options for New York City,” (www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/). The section on the Stock Transfer Tax says: “The proposed STT half-restoration could reduce overall private sector employment in the city by as much as 80,000 and lower receipts from other city taxes by close to $650 million.” David Belkin, Senior Economist at IBO, says that there has been a general trend against such taxes.
“The industry people say the exchange will collapse,” Belkin said. “But even just assuming some decline, that in and of itself has an impact.
London and Hong Kong have one. But there is more competitive pressure. There is a big fight going on in London over their tax. The tax is worth considering. For one thing, other more onerous taxes raise relatively small amounts of money. In the IBO’s study, “Budget Options for New York City,” (http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/), controversial measures, such as a Luxury Apartment Rental Tax, would raise only an estimated $27 million a year. Other taxes, such as restoring the commuter tax, would raise only about $500 million, or far less than most versions of the stock transfer tax.
One indication that the tax could work is that there already is one in place. It’s what funds the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although Congress recently scheduled the tax to decrease in rate over the next few years, it now raises more than $2 billion a year. About $350 million of that goes to fund the SEC. The rest goes into the US Treasury.
Tocci and Mauro suggest one way to make the tax palatable to The Street is to give them some direct benefit. Some of the money could pay for a new stock exchange building, or for industry promotion. It should be remembered that in the 1970s, the industry agreed to a surcharge to help solve the city’s budget problems.
“It has to be part of a community effort, it has to be part of saving New York,” Mauro said.
“Doing this at a very low rate and raising money from all over the world would be better than raising taxes that would come directly from the New York economy.”
–First published in Spotlight on the Region, the bi-weekly newsletter of Regional Plan Association in New York City.