Eyes on the Street by Robert Kanigel

Author:Robert Kanigel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

A New York Herald Tribune writer observed that “although Mrs. Jacobs disowns impressing her ideas on the plan…[West Village Houses] meets most of her published objections to renewal plans in other neighborhoods.” You tear down most of the neighborhood so you can start over with a clean slate? No, said Jane, you pick and choose, preserving what’s worth preserving, razing only where necessary. You lavish on a neighborhood great buckets of what she called “cataclysmic” cash? No, she’d said in Death and Life, you keep things small. You tear down nineteenth-century tenements, put up modernist high-rises? No, any new buildings should respect the scale and flavor of the surrounding neighborhood. Most of all, you don’t kick anyone out of their houses: Not a single sparrow. “Revolutionary in its modesty,” Mary Perot Nichols, a Village Voice writer, called West Village Houses in 1969. It was surely that, in its conception and in how it turned out.

It was to include 475 dwelling units, which was not so small, as urban projects go. It included no efficiency, or “studio,” apartments—the Village had enough of those—but, rather, one- to three-bedroom units suitable for families. At which corner, or between which two streets, would West Village Houses go? There was no simple answer to that. Rather, forty-two individual buildings were to be arrayed on seven small sites, along six blocks of Washington Street from Morton to Bank—a Monopoly set of unassuming structures stuck into the corners of lots, replacing truck parking here, a rattletrap of an old factory there. The new housing would restore the balance between residential and commercial that had existed before the overhead rail track (which, farther north, became today’s High Line linear park) had gone in to serve the adjacent warehouse district. The architects devised three simple building plans and arranged them, in different combinations, to fit oddments of underused land, leaving room for gardens, courtyards, and plazas, first floors sometimes given over to small shops. No stretch of Washington Street would look just like any other, but no stretch of it, either, would look so different from the rest of the Village.

The plans called for five-story buildings, two apartments to a floor, with no elevators. “The dangers of unattended elevators to children—and adults—are already too well known to require retelling here,” said the blue brochure, referring to the new high-rise projects. West Village Houses would all be walk-ups. Walk-ups, like the one Nathan Glazer had grown up in on East 103rd Street in East Harlem. Or the one Jane and Betty had inhabited in Brooklyn Heights. West Village Houses was radical, in a nineteenth-century sort of way. Ranging up the avenues and down the crosstown streets of Manhattan and in swaths of the other boroughs as well, the walk-up was a veritable icon of old New York. Besides, you’d hear it argued, walk-ups were perfect for Greenwich Villagers, for whom “walking upstairs is considered a sound and healthy diversion.”

Were they serious?

The reaction to West Village Houses among city officials was

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