Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Katie Uva speaks to Sara Hughes about her recent book, Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The book examines how each of these cities have set climate change mitigation goals and how each city’s ability to achieve those goals has evolved over the past decade.
Read MoreBy Vaughn Scribner
The Tavern on the Green restaurant is an icon of New York City. Nestled in the seemingly-rustic, yet carefully-planned confines of Central Park, the building began life in 1870 as a shelter for the park’s grazing sheep.[1] In 1934, park officials transformed the building into a restaurant. Since then, various families bought into the business, and made renovations like a dance floor, glass-enclosed Crystal Room, and a new patio.[2] Beyond offering a diverse array of cocktails, main courses, and appetizers, however, much of the restaurant’s enduring popularity owes itself to setting: the Tavern on the Green is a carefully-crafted combination of urban and rural life; a “hybrid” space where customers feel like they’re escaping the gray, crowded confines of the city, but still have access to the entertainment and sociability for which New York City is famed.[3] But the Tavern on the Green does not just represent fantasy, or a New York that “never was.” On the contrary, the Tavern on the Green harkens back to the second half of the eighteenth-century, when New York City’s residents fostered an urban culture predicated upon a thriving network of taverns and green spaces which offered residents the hospitalities of city life within a bucolic, relaxing, and intentionally-constructed “natural” environment.
Read MoreBy Lucie Levine
On March 19, 1913, at the offices of the New York State Public Service Commission, in the New York Tribune Building at Nassau Street and Park Row, a group of city administrators and transit tycoons signed the “Dual Contracts,” a landmark deal between the City of New York, and the IRT and BRT subway companies, to vastly expand the city’s subway network. The Dual System was the largest single public works initiative in American history up to that time. It doubled the size of the subway network and tripled its capacity, made possible the development of the outer boroughs, and allowed for the unprecedented growth of an unparalleled city.
Read MoreReviewed by Donald Mitchell
Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, crowds started gathering in Union Square, the closest big public space to Lower Manhattan’s “exclusion zone.” People brought candles and photographs, flowers and flags. They came to mourn and to commune, turning the square into “a shrine and memorial, layered with photos, handwritten messages, schoolchildren’s drawing, expressions of sympathy and sorrow from flight attendants who had been spared the luck of the draw,” as Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin later wrote.[1] Quiet and dedicated mostly to mourning in the first days, Union Square soon also became a place of debate and discussion: what should America’s response be to the attacks? Why invade Afghanistan? How to understand America’s geopolitical role in the world?
Read MoreReviewed by Daniel Cumming
In the pantheon of towering urban developers in the post-WWII era, few figures have shaped our collective consciousness more than Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Whether you read Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker or Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, whether you lived in the freeway path cleaved for the Cross Bronx Expressway or kept “eyes on the street” in Greenwich Village, most New Yorkers have been in some way exposed to the competing ideologies overpower and place embodied by Moses and Jacobs. You may have even picked a side in the morality tale that has become standard fare in accounts of urban renewal.
Read MoreBy Lawrence R. Samuel
Walk east a few blocks from Grand Central Station along 42nd Street, take the stairs near the Church of the Covenant and voila!—you’ve entered another world. Tudor City—the five-acre faux medieval village, albeit with high-rise apartment buildings—is on the far east side of midtown Manhattan between First and Second Avenues and 40th and 43rd Streets, right around the corner from the United Nations. Tudor City is not just the architectural masterpiece created by real estate developer Fred F. French and the first residential skyscraper complex in the world; it’s a unique community that has played a significant role in the history of New York City over nearly the past century. The story of the “city within a city,” as it quickly became known, tells us much about life in Manhattan since the late 1920s, when the development came into being.
Read MoreViolette’s important book opens a new chapter on urban housing in architectural history and helps the reader understand a whole set of buildings—indeed, whole swathes of the cityscapes of both New York and Boston—that are prominently visible but often overlooked. Amplifying elite architects’ and reformers’ disdain for so-called tenement “skin-builders,” architectural historians have studied in detail bourgeois design but have paid much less attention to buildings built by and for the working class. The Decorated Tenement helps to correct the historical record, treating the immigrant-built tenement commensurate with its prominence in the two cities. It is a timely book for that, even if the author does not explicitly make the connection to today’s immigration debates.
Read MoreThe power to shape the built environment on a metropolitan scale is inevitably shared, contested, and compromised, especially in a city-region as large, diverse, and fragmented as New York has been for the last two centuries. Despite the fervent wishes of more than a few of its leading citizens, the city has never been friendly ground for would-be visionaries seeking to brusquely mold the city’s form to suit their wills—the tech mogul Jeff Bezos being only the latest to find himself chagrined by Gotham’s aversion to imperious planners.
Read MoreMadison Square Garden was among the premier places to see and be seen in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. As Suzanne Hinman amply documents in her new book, this palace of popular entertainment was truly a modern wonder of architecture and spectacle. Like the old Penn Station (another McKim, Mead and White building that sadly no longer graces the city’s streets) the Garden helped define the aesthetic and social landscapes of New York in the years around 1900.
Read MoreFrank Lloyd Wright didn’t care for cities. In his 1954 manifesto The Natural House, he advised prospective homebuilders looking for land to “go as far out as you can get . . . way out into the country—what you regard as ‘too far’—and when others follow, as they will (if procreation keeps up), move on.”
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