In New York, history battles growth

If there is one phrase that has become common currency, and therefore most debased the world over, it is “sustainable growth.” Policymakers across the world use it to justify change that is often seen to serve narrow specialist interests — or, as is often the case in India, to legitimise rhetoric that serves no one.

When the New York University with its campus in downtown Manhattan prepared ‘NYU 2031’ for “sustainable growth”, many New Yorkers saw it as a threat to the city’s historic locations.

The Sexton plan, the most ambitious of the expansion projects of the university so far and named after John Sexton, the current President of NYU, specifically involves the construction of four new high-rises by demolishing old student and faculty apartments. This would gobble up some of the preciously dwindling public spaces in the historic Greenwich village, that includes the Washington Square Park and other public parks nearby on Bleecker Street.

The NYU has been on an expanding spree for quite a few years. And, since its city campus skirts Greenwich Village, the Sexton plan has elicited a storm of protests.

Those vociferously against the expansion of the “corporation” are not just ordinary New Yorkers — who will have to cope with all the discomfort in zoning regulations and traffic snarls that the construction will involve in a narrow part of the island — but a large number of NYU faculty.

Historical/heritage preservation societies that claim the landscape will change forever and for the worse, have focused on the popular Silver Towers on Bleecker street made famous by Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album cover.

The complex of apartments owned by NYU encloses a public park that houses a statue by Picasso. Despite the approval by the official Landmarks Preservation Committee of the NYC, protests still continue.

So persistent has been the opposition to the NYU that even eminent writers and alumni such as E.L. Doctorow and Peter Carey have come together in slamming the Sexton Plan; last month they joined other New York-based writers and architects and critics in contributions to a privately circulated volume called While we were Sleeping: NYU and the destruction of New York .

Early resistance

New York has been no stranger to protests against planned urban renewal or business opportunities posing as “sustainable growth.”

The Museum of the City of New York showcased till recently the “Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011”, commemorating the bicentenary of the first experiment in urban planning in modern times.

Located on Fifth Avenue 103rd Street in what was once the ‘millionaire’s row’, now also called the ‘Museum Mile’, the museum includes original documents, rare photographs and surveyor maps (and correspondences since 1811) of the unique layout of downtown New York — sliced into avenues and streets so precisely that it would be difficult to get lost in Manhattan.

The exhibition suggests, however cursorily, the tensions and furious, if inchoate, resistance that marked and marred attempts at civic reconstruction — the passage of New York from a pastoral-urban town to a modern metropolis.

The Commissioners’ Plan, 1811, was a mind-boggling scheme for growth in a city that had seen its population grow dramatically.

It envisaged the division of Manhattan right up to where Columbia University is located near 121st Street into blocks crisscrossed by streets and avenues, each block a precise size.

This meant levelling the craggy rocky hills — Manhattan means “island of hills” — surveying, then clearing, the farm houses, pastures and common lands and, once this had been done, selling the surveyed “lots” for real-estate building.

It wasn’t easy. Technical difficulties apart, New York’s first round of urban angst at what was seen as a trespass on a way of life began then: Commissioners were stoned, driven off farm houses and the process took its own time.

As late as 1840 Edgar Allan Poe renting a room at the Brennan farm on the intersection of 84thStreet and Broadway, where he is reported to have worked on The Raven , recorded his own protest with despair: “These magnificent places are doomed. The Spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath.”

Bottom-Up resistance

Monumental in scale and ambition, the grid set the precedent for two conflicting visions of what made New York a dynamic city.

Viewed from the top, from boardrooms and other corridors of power in City Hall, New York’s landscape was to remain transient, malleable to commerce’s whims and urges, the mecca for the glass skyscraper; viewed from the bottom-up, for resident New Yorkers, their inherited urban scene acquired a permanence (sketched by historical memory lit up by and renewed in the public parks like Washington Square Park and winding neighbourhoods) that sheltered and inspired Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, as much as street theatre artists and acrobats scrapping a living with profound dignity from tourist “donations”.

That conflict of visions reached its apogee and defining moment in the 1960s — personified by the massive urban renewal plans of Commissioner Robert Moses calling for super-expressways and massive towers, and that of Jane Jacobs, writer-activist, resident of Greenwich Village whose grassroots movement to save neighbourhoods from the impersonality of Moses’ big-ticket projects have kept New York’s artistic and creative pull alive and ticking to the present day.

That drama is almost being re-enacted. The grandiosity of New York University’s plans and of those meant to turn the city into a “luxury” Gotham confronts a bottom-up opposition invoking shared history and a heritage of localities.

Late last month, the City Council, the law-making body of NYC, unanimously approved the NYU’s modified expansion plan, to the dismay of the oppositionists.

Two weeks ago, “rent-stabilised” tenants of Washington Square Village filed a lawsuit with the State Supreme Court to stop NYU’s modification of public parks. The battle is not over, it seems.

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