{"id":3146,"date":"2020-04-22T12:16:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-22T16:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/essexcrossdev.wpengine.com\/?p=3146"},"modified":"2020-06-18T10:17:19","modified_gmt":"2020-06-18T14:17:19","slug":"what-does-a-good-megadevelopment-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/?p=3146","title":{"rendered":"What does a good megadevelopment look like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The<\/span>The<\/span><\/span> first of my recent conversations about megadevelopments<\/a> with Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), took place in early February, when the world was a different place. There was a new coronavirus<\/a> out there, but for New Yorkers, it was still largely an abstraction; a bad thing happening in some other part of the world. He and I conversed the old-fashioned way, in person, at his office just north of Union Square.<\/p>\n

At the time, the project I\u2019d hoped to discuss with him was off-limits. His firm had been hired in 2018 to create the masterplan for Sunnyside Yard<\/a>, a 180-acre site in Queens that\u2019s currently home to one of the country\u2019s busiest rail yards. A mile and a half long, and owned jointly by Amtrak, the MTA, and General Motors, it sits in the middle of a rapidly changing section of the borough. It is the designated site of New York City\u2019s next monster development, a behemoth of urban density built on decks above the train tracks. Chakrabarti, one of contemporary architecture\u2019s great talkers, had been asked by the city\u2019s Economic Development Corporation not to say a word because the official plan\u2014like all big plans in New York City, a contentious one\u2014was still under wraps.<\/p>\n

When that plan was finally unveiled<\/a> on March 3, it outlined a bountiful project, so idealistic that it was almost unbelievable. Here\u2019s a capsule description from a press release: \u201c12,000 new 100 percent affordable residential units, 60 acres of open public space, a new Sunnyside Station that connects Western Queens to the Greater New York region, 10 schools, 2 libraries, over 30 childcare centers, 5 health care facilities, and 5 million square feet of new commercial and manufacturing space that will enable middle-class job creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

About a week later, on the same day that President Donald Trump announced a travel ban<\/a> in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, Chakrabarti and I had a second conversation, this one on the phone, about the details of the Sunnyside plan and how it might be executed. We also chatted about how the coronavirus was beginning to touch our lives, forcing us to cancel travel plans, but it still mostly felt like an inconvenience.<\/p>\n

On April 1, we spoke again. By this time, New York City was largely shut down<\/a>. Most people were either out of a job<\/a> or working from home<\/a>. We\u2019d begun to realize that the city was going to experience the full force of the pandemic, much like Italy, with overloaded hospitals full of dying patients. Someone I knew personally had died from the disease. I wasn\u2019t sure that it still made any sense to write about megadevelopments.<\/p>\n

Given the circumstances, what was striking in this conversation was Chakrabarti\u2019s optimism. While others, notably eminent suburbanist Joel Kotkin, were predicting that the virus would bring about \u201cthe end of New York,\u201d<\/a> Chakrabarti argued that the city always \u201ccomes roaring back.\u201d His position is that the pandemic could actually be a catalyst<\/em> for the construction of Sunnyside Yards.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is part of why you do master planning,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t know something like this is going to happen. But it tees things up for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

I began to contemplate the future of New York City at a moment when it wasn\u2019t entirely clear there\u2019d be one. I understand that Chakrabarti\u2019s upbeat assessment is, in a way, as self-serving as Kotkin\u2019s death wish; it\u2019s an integral part of who he is professionally. But optimism, unrealistic as it might seem, is also on my agenda. As we slog through this catastrophic fourth year of the Trump presidency, I\u2019ve become convinced that the best response to a destructive, short-sighted administration is a compelling, nuanced, well-defined vision. Imagining a better future with as much detail as possible is both an exercise in sanity and<\/em> a necessary political strategy. Being against something is good; being for something is better.<\/p>\n

My intention, when I first started working on this story months ago, was to make a case for the good megadevelopment, to locate the exemplary version of what we used to call urban renewal. I had hoped to make the argument that it\u2019s possible to build consensus about what this city should be, and, based on that, create a neighborhood that is well-integrated into the surrounding city, providing homes, workplaces, and shopping for ordinary New Yorkers, not just tourists and billionaires.<\/p>\n

\n

Counterintuitively, it was Hudson Yards<\/a>, with its isolation from Manhattan\u2019s street grid, its glittering shopping mall, and its apartments for the pied-\u00e0-terre class\u2014a place that does everything wrong<\/a>, urbanistically speaking\u2014that made me start thinking that it might be possible to build a megadevelopment that makes New York a better city. For me, Hudson Yards is the lens through which almost every other development in New York City, new or old, looks good\u2014or, at least, better.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, the Domino development on the Williamsburg waterfront: One afternoon, I found myself drawn to One South First, the 45-story CookFox-designed mixed-use tower, which has more pizzazz than the stubbornly generic towers that have sprung up along the East River. I was happily ignorant of the fact that the building\u2019s thick white concrete window frames were supposed to evoke sugar crystals; I only knew that I liked the way they looked: sculpted, with a handmade appearance.<\/p>\n

Or look at Essex Crossing<\/a>, the long overdue buildout of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. It sits on 20 acres south of Delancey and east of Essex Streets that were condemned, emptied of low-income residents, and bulldozed in the 1960s. The planned urban renewal never came and the depopulated blocks remained parking lots until 2015. Now, Essex Crossing nests comfortably within New York City\u2019s grid; there are no superblocks or barriers that might limit access to the site. But the key distinction for me is that the ground floor of the complex\u2019s flagship building is anchored by the Essex Market, the same public market that had occupied a series of buildings on the opposite side of Delancey Street since 1940. It has a mezzanine level, where tables overlook the streets and long dining counters offer views of the maze of food stalls and shops below. It\u2019s a comfortable, unpretentious, genuinely public gathering place\u2014like a park, but indoors.<\/p>\n

I embarked on my series of conversations with Chakrabarti in part because he had been deeply involved with the design of Domino and had a hand in Essex Crossing while a principal at SHoP Architects. More recently, his own firm has been working on several megadevelopments in New York City and elsewhere (Newark, East Palo Alto, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Karrie Jacobs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3331,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"flexlayout_gb_metabox":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,1,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essex-market","category-press","category-retail"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexcrossingnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}