The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (2013)
Starting in 2008, the City of New York set out to establish and revitalize public plazas across the five boroughs in order to "transform underused streets into vibrant social public spaces." These are their stories.
Bogardus Plaza
Manhattan
Daniel had fallen in love with the city. Each month, he would email friends back home with his latest “Rules of Gotham.”
Rule #9: “Don’t eat in a Grade Pending restaurant – unless it’s soup dumplings and you’ve heard good things on the blogs.”
Rule #14: “Play chess in Bryant Park if you want to get lectured, play chess in Washington Square if you want to get beat.”
Daniel was a voracious consumer of all different kinds of city news. He read the Times and Gothamist. He was on urban think tank listservs. He subscribed to whatever magazines were still afloat.
The Wall Street Journal made him gag – but he picked up the new metropolitan section whenever he could.
He refused to read the free morning dailies that littered the subway. He very proudly walked to the newsstand each morning for the Daily News or the Post.
Rule #6: “Ignore what the media elites tell you. The tabloids are legit – and actually cover the outer boroughs.”
He got his Bronx politics from Juan Gonzalez. He got his midtown real estate from Steve Cuozzo. And he longed for the days when Mike Lupica just wrote about sports.
“They can be sensationalist and self-promoting and sometimes just plain unfair – but give me a time capsule and I’m going to fill it with the tabs. Because they all tell a story of this city,” he wrote, in dramatic fashion, to a college friend back home.
Then, one day in May, it was Daniel’s story in the tabloids, and Daniel’s photo on the cover.
* * *
His two crutches leaned against the chair. There was a copy of the Post cover from May on the table. Daniel sat across from a young man who looked to be about his age – mid-twenties.
The young man, notebook in hand, was a reporter for one of the new city blogs devoted to bike and pedestrian life. “I want to tell your story – from your own mouth,” he’d said to Daniel by phone.
They were sitting in Bogardus Plaza, just off Chambers Street, one of those many gateways from the civic center of New York into the ritzy enclave of Tribeca.
“Undergrad I was a Latin major. Can you believe that?” Daniel said. “Then I got smart and did a two-year Master’s in urban planning. I was hoping to, you know, change the world one overdeveloped block at a time.”
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There was a docking station for Citibikes down the block. From his vantage point, the bikes fanned out like a row of blue teeth, with a few missing spaces in between.
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The blogger followed his gaze and asked, “What comes to mind when you look at the bikes?”
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Daniel said, “I never liked art. I’m not a real humanities person. So if you ask me what beauty looks like – I’m not about to throw out Monet or anything. I mean, to me, beauty is what’s right over there. A bike share – a new glistening experiment for the public.”
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“Was the crash your first time on a Citibike?”
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“Nah, it was my third,” Daniel said. “I hadn’t signed up for the full-year membership, but I bought day passes. The first time I went across the Brooklyn Bridge. Obvious, right?”
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He continued: “The second time I started up in the 50s, took it once around the park look and back to the same spot. Not sure why they haven’t installed any dock stations uptown just yet.”
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“Tell me about the third time,” said the blogger.
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“Well this time I started in Chelsea. They’ve got these great new bike lanes on the avenues. I biked down 9th for about 20 blocks – really impressed with the turning signals and all. And, for the most part, there weren’t that many people blocking the lanes. A tourist taking a photo every once in a while. Or a New Yorker in a hurry, you know.”
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He took a sip of coffee – paper cup, with that blue-and-white “Greek” design wrapped around it.
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“So then I went east and up 8th Avenue. I took it slowly, didn’t have anywhere to be. They don’t have dedicated signals or lanes on 8th just yet. Gets dicey, I remember, up around the Port Authority.”
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“Fucking mad house with the taxis,” the blogger chimed in.
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“Yeah, but I made it through there just fine. I’m past 42nd, then three more blocks. I have a green light through 45th and out of the corner of my eye there’s a big green delivery truck heading toward me. I remember the moment right before impact and then nothing.”
The blogger filled in the details – as if Daniel needed to hear them again. “He was blocking the box, had a lot of traffic coming up the avenue at him, and thought he could accelerate into the next block, no problem.”
Daniel recovered consciousness the next day. He had five broken bones, lost his spleen, and had two very concerned parents at his bedside.
“I’m gonna sue the bastards, all of them,” was the very first thing his step-father said. There were no consoling words, no flowers, no “how many fingers am I holding up.”
Daniel blacked out as a bicyclist, he woke up a litigant – and a political football that just got snapped into the hands of the New York Post.
There was a Post photographer on 45th, helping to profile a new restaurant, when Daniel got hit. He took the photo within seconds of the accident. All in one shot: the crooked leg, a lot of blood, a mangled bike, and – in the very corner of the shot – the green delivery truck speeding away.
The next morning, the Post runs the photo on its cover, with a giant headline reading: “Blood Sport: First Bike Scare – More to Come.” The morning after that, Daniel is relegated to page two, but this time there’s an exclusive interview with his step-father.
The third morning, like clockwork, is the City Hall press conference – featuring two Queens councilmen, a state assemblyman running for borough president in the Bronx, and three community board chairs they were able to recruit from the remaining boroughs.
New York politicking has a language unto itself – and these officials knew how to speak it. They did not call for abolition of bikeshare. Instead, they called for removal of “problematic” docking stations, and a moratorium on new ones. They drafted all kinds of city and state legislation intended to throw a wrench into the bike share program.
Daniel turned on NY1 in his hospital room that day, and it brought tears to his eyes. The anchor read almost verbatim from the press release: “Elected officials fight to protect young tourists from city bike experimentation.”
Now I’m a tourist, Daniel thought to himself. It didn’t matter that he’d logged a full year in New York, working two and three jobs at a time, or that he’d lived in old tenement units in three different boroughs.
It didn’t matter that he’d crossed six bridges on foot, that he’d paddled the Harlem River and the Gowanus Canal, or that he was reading Caro’s “The Power Broker” at a quick and pre-determined pace – the way others might train for a marathon.
Daniel, the excited urban planner, the author of so many “Rules of Gotham,” was getting spit out of his own city. He felt emasculated. The politicians and the tabloids had appointed themselves to “protect” him from the place he wanted to call home. He’d become a lab rat in the bike experiment they desperately wanted to fail.
He wrote a mass email to friends back home: “This place feels – maybe it always felt – like a giant carousel that spins faster and faster, and there’s nothing to hold onto. There’s a centrifugal force that pulls you to the edge, that wants to fling you off – for not investing big, or acting well, or learning quickly – or just not being strong enough.”
He ended the email on a somber note, with a new Rule #44: “When you land at JFK, maybe the thing to do is head east, to Long Island; they have nice strip malls there.”
* * *
“What I want people to know is that I’m not a poster boy,” Daniel said to the blogger. “I’m the wrong mangled body to rally around if you want to end bike share. I like biking. I like bike share. I’m going to do it again and again, once I’m done with these crutches.”
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The blogger smiled. It was a 400-word piece, nothing more, and he just got his money quote. “You live around here?” he asked.
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“Here in Tribeca?” Daniel said. “Nah, could never afford it.”
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“Then why’d you want to meet here? I never even heard of this plaza,” the blogger said. The sun was starting to set. He closed his notebook. He peeked down at a text message on his phone.
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“I used to come here, get a bagel from Zucker’s, and read a bit. It’s nice the way they closed the block, put some chairs in. You know they named the plaza after this guy James Bogardus – we learned about him once in grad school.”
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“Oh yeah, what’d he do?”
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“He did a lot with cast-iron buildings – figured out how to make it easier to construct them,” Daniel said. “You know, you walk into Soho and there’s cast-iron everywhere – he even designed some of those buildings.”
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Ignoring the end of the interview, Daniel kept talking: “I like the idea of someone making a mark on the city. Someone like Bogardus – it’s like he created his own graphic novel. And we still walk through it.”
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“Do you want to make a mark on the city?” the blogger asked.
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“I already made a mark on the pavement,” Daniel laughed.
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The blogger re-opened his notebook. “Seriously, what’s the city mean to you now?”
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Daniel said, “It’s funny, you read so many stories about this city, and the second you get cast in one of them, you want to run like hell.
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Daniel put his finger on the tabloid cover. “Still, in some odd way, it’s nice to have some record of having existed at all in this city.”
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He added: “A hundred years from now, they’ll be some historian who researches all this crap – and maybe he digs up my name. Maybe he digs up this article. I mean they don’t do me justice and they blow things way out of proportion. But that’s what a good New York story is all about, right?"
​​
* * *
Albee Square
Plaza
Brooklyn
Carmen stretched out on the tiered benches of the new Albee Square.
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As a teenager, she spent hours in this area with friends. It was an outdoor shopping mall that doubled as a playground. Back then, life hinged on new clothes and big sneakers – and the snubs and slights that grew into schoolyard battles.
But things were changing. The rest of hip New York was creeping into Fulton Mall. There was a Shake Shack near Borough Hall, and – right behind her – a vast open lot that would soon grow into a glittery new housing complex.
You could hardly recognize the place anymore. Carmen could hardly recognize herself; she figured she was becoming an urban cliché. She worked a nine-to-six job at a department store, and – in her free time – spilled lots of over-priced coffee on her laptop at the café.
And now, in a public plaza, waiting for an online date to manifest himself in person. He’d suggested the taco stand here in Albee Square as their first meeting. She thought: this guy was cheap, or a hipster.
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She worried about race, as she always did when meeting a white guy. Was he color blind? Would he ever bring a Puerto Rican girl home to his parents? What did he notice first on the website – her interests, her values, or the caramel color of her skin?
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Carmen wasn’t all Puerto Rican. Her father was a white playwrite who exited stage-left when she was ten years old. She grew up in Sunset Park with her mother, and had lived at home while attending Hunter.
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She saved up enough money and moved into a two-bedroom apartment, with Craigslist roommates, in Fort Greene. It was a neighborhood where you could sit on the stoop and contemplate race or music or fusion gourmet cooking.
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She was starting to establish her future self. But, deep down, this was also about proving something to her long-lost father. That she too could live among writers and artists. That she too could explore New York – the hallowed halls, the dirty underbelly – without disappearing into it all like he did.
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She knew for sure he would have criticized her job. Carmen was assistant manager in the wedding registry department at Macy’s. She spent the first half of her day monitoring online sales and communicating with vendors. She spent the second half of her day handing out the registry guns to engaged couples who came to the store in person.
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“Remember, no clothing or furniture,” she reminded the couples. “You can only put homeware on your registry.”
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Every day brought a steady stream of late-twenty-somethings tagging massive amounts of double-boil pots and designer woks and stainless steel tortilla makers. How ironic she thought: all of this in a city where few people cook and nobody has room to store anything in their apartment.
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* * *
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An older African American man, with a grey mustache, walked up with a paper bag in hand.
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“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked.
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“Of course, no problem at all,” said Carmen.
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He took his lunch out of the bag – a carefully wrapped sandwich and green apple. He made the kind of audible hints – a quick yawn, a murmur of delight when his food was laid out – to suggest he was interested in conversation.
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Carmen took the cue. “Beautiful day out,” she said.
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“The start of Spring. It affords me a lot more time to sit here outside.”
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“Do you come often?” she asked.
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“I do. I come every day to marvel at my bank.”
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She laughed. “Your bank?”
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“I worked here for three decades as a teller. Came to think of it as my own.”
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It was a giant classical structure, with columns that lined the façade. Carmen used to think it was a government building, until one day years ago when she took note of “The Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn” engraved above.
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“Just got changed to an HSBC branch, no?”
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“It’s been a lot of different banks now. But each time it changed, I would apply for a job with the newest one,” he said. “My wife – rest her soul – always had the church. But this was my temple.”
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He continued: “You know, it was first called Dime because, back in the 1800s, you could open an account for ten cents. This place was like the #4 train – mixing a lot of rich folks with all the strivers still trying to save their way to the top.”
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“What’s it like inside?” she asked.
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“Peaceful, powerful. Kind of place that makes you feel confident in handing over your hard-earned cash,” he said. “There’s a rotunda in the middle, circled by columns, with that great big dome on top. Very striking stuff – you should take a peak one day when it’s open.”
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“But I work in Manhattan during the week,” she said.
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“That’s wonderful," he said. "A gainfully employed young woman. And what, may I ask, do you work on?”
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“I help people pick out gifts for their weddings – and then get the word out to their friends and family.”
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His eyes lit up. “A wedding registry. My daughter and son-in-law did one of those … and they made out like bandits. Do you enjoy it?”
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Carmen’s stock answer – especially when friends in Fort Greene were asking – was that managing registries turned her into a some kind of corporate sociologist. She would notice how higher prices actually increased consumer demand. Or how couples tagging gifts in the summer would tend toward grills, picnicware and other outdoor items – as if they were going to live out their married life in only warm weather. But did she enjoy it?
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“The truth is,” she finally replied, “I hate the job when I’m single – and I’m single right now.”
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She paused to consider how much she wanted to share with the old man, but kept on: “We live in this city where, you know, being single is practically our motto. And it gets broadcast on TV and in the movies.”
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“But you come up to Macy’s 8th floor,” she continued, “and it’s like every woman in the city has a ring on her finger.”
The remark hung in the air. They stared at the façade of the bank.
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He started chuckling to himself. “I walked into Macy’s one time. This was many years ago with my wife. And we had to walk through the perfume section to get to where we were going. Well, I had a real sensitive nose – and too little to eat that day – and there were just a whole lot of smells at once. Next thing I knew I passed out – right there in the middle of Macy’s.”
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“What happened?” Carmen asked, imagining the scene. “Were you out for long? Did anyone help?”
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“I came to in a few seconds. There were a number of sales clerks standing around me. One of them turned to my wife, handed her a bottle of perfume, and said, ‘Honey, buy this one and he’ll swoon like that every day.’”
They laughed.
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“There’s never a bad time to make a sale at Macy’s,” Carmen said. “I love that story.”
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“We had a lot of great moments like that,” he said. “But, yes, I understand it can be an imposing place to be all day – especially when you have so many things on your mind.”
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She readied herself for another small confession. “Sometimes, in the registry area, I get thinking that I can figure out which couples are going to last – and which ones will divorce. Like there’s some kind of calculation to make, just based on the way they interact.”
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“Do you think it might be true?” he asked.
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“Doubtful,” she smiled. “But something about it makes me feel better. I’m there with a big computer, and a whole lot of numbers on the screen, and it gives you this odd sense of power.”
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She continued, “The other day we had this engaged couple come in. I overheard them talking to each other. He was some kind of political science guy – and he was going on and on about this NSA whistleblower. You know who I’m talking about?”
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“Snowden, in Russia,” he said.
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“That’s him. So he’s telling his fiancee about just how much data the government is holding on all of us, and this could destroy our democracy and all.”
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She now sat upright on the bench, pretending to be at her work desk. “And there I am, with this computer in front of me, and I’m thinking: Snowden’s not the guy you have to worry about. It’s me. I mean the second that girl started signing up for wedding websites, and telling her friends on Facebook – her data’s probably leaked out to every department store and bridal boutique in the Northeast.”
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“You know, when I retired, I started getting all this mail about cheap condos in Florida. And I loved reading them. Seems to me getting data stolen could be convenient every once in a while.”
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He winked and took a bit of his sandwich.
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Carmen looked around the plaza, and couldn’t help but smile.
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There was no sign yet of her online date. A mother was seated near the taco stand with her young son – who lost half the contents of the taco with each bite.
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There were some teenagers doing skateboard tricks, and others, with hats turned to one side, who spilled in and out of the clothing shops.
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She briefly wondered about her own data points – and what they might reveal.
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But then she leaned back, resting on her elbows, turning her face to the sun – and felt at that moment pleasantly disconnected from the rest of the world.
​
* * *
Courthouse Plaza
Bronx
Thomas Banks chewed his pen. He was working on a Friday crossword in the Times, and he’d filled in just four clues in the past half-hour.
He always enjoyed the confines of the crossword grid. Fifteen squares by fifteen squares, every day – save the bigger one on Sunday.
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There were rules that you followed and – every once in a while – in a very clever puzzle – rules that you broke.
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Thomas never filled in a clue unless he was sure of it. All the other possible answers floated around in his head – in that quiet calculator of his.
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“You should use a pencil and just guess more,” his wife once said. “It’ll make it a lot easier to finish.”
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“I don’t like the taste of a pencil,” he replied with a smirk.
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Today, Thomas was sitting in the middle of a plaza on the south side of the Bronx County Courthouse. He shared a park bench with an older woman, who was knitting. Some teenagers were skateboarding down the middle of the plaza.
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It was a clear but humid morning in early July and – from the likes of it – he guessed the temperature would hit 90 by mid-day.
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His back was hurting against the park bench and beads of sweat trickled down his polo shirt.
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Thomas could feel it happening again. Vulnerable and self-conscious, he sensed that all eyes were upon him.
A regular ball of nerves he’d become since the big retirement.
What if they recognize me? What if they notice how little progress I’ve made? It’ll wind up in the local news: former Assemblyman Banks spends his days staring blankly at crosswords he can’t complete. Maybe I should have been using a pencil all along.
* * *
Thomas was half black and half Jewish. His father – this was 40 years ago now – used to say: “You could get elected borough president with that kind of bloodline.”
Thomas won his first assembly election in the early 80s but each margin of victory since then was narrower than the last. Times were changing – the Bronx was changing.
He never allowed himself to lose, however. He had some innate charisma – leftover from his mother. He also invested campaign funds on a public speaking coach, and later a hairpiece.
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Every time they tried to knock him out of the seat, he fought back. He learned Spanish when they redistricted in more Puerto Rican voters. He moved apartments when they drew the lines around the family home. He even took a fact-finding trip to West Africa (local reporter in tow) when the Senegalese population started to boom.
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That wasn’t the whole story, Thomas knew. There were times he was forced to vote the wrong way in Albany – because there was an election on the line back home. There were times when he forgot to call back the housing advocates, and took a meeting instead with the real estate board.
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He cut the corners you were allowed to cut. Others were more brash and reckless and downright greedy, and they caught hell for it.
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He witnessed too many scandals over the years – and more than once he’d actually visited former colleagues serving time upstate.
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The public wasn’t happy – had little reason to be happy. Thomas logged hundreds of hours standing at subway stations and collecting petitions over the years, and there were folks who would refuse to shake a politician’s hand no matter what.
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In the past, there had always been something regal about public service. People reserved a small place in their heart for a crusading hero, even if he never fully materialized.
There was a kind of pedestal for public officials. It wasn’t all that high, and sometimes you fell off, but it was there.
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Unfortunately, that pedestal had started to recede and now it was nearly gone. Maybe that’s why Thomas decided not to run for re-election last year. There was nothing left to stand on.
It wasn’t that politicians were any more sinister than in the past. It was that human weakness was now exposed like never before – on Twitter and every other social platform Thomas couldn’t quite comprehend.
Thomas’s colleagues wanted so desperately to connect with the public – and promptly forgot why they’d taken such pains to remain private in the first place.
* * *
Thomas studied economics at Fordham. It was the 1960s and, unlike many of his classmates in the program, he was developing a social consciousness.
He graduated and took an abysmally low-paying job with an organization that provided health care to new immigrants in the borough.
His father, Jacob, a noted Bronx real estate developer, wouldn’t speak to him for a week.
But his mother, Mabel, embraced the decision, if quietly. She was born poor to one of the first African American families in Highbridge. When she was nine years old, there was a knock on the door of their bottom-floor tenement unit. She opened the door and found several white men in their early twenties. Two of them carried shotguns, casually, against the shoulder.
“We built the High Bridge. We dug them subways. We own these streets,” one of them said.
Mabel’s mother came to the door, and stepped in front of her daughter. She was a short, stocky, and confident woman. Mabel could detect a slight tremble in the woman’s hands. But not in her voice.
“The young men I’m looking at right now didn’t build a thing. You’re searching for jobs and trying to make your way just like the rest of us,” she told them. “But you better leave my family alone while you’re doing so.”
She closed the door and they never knocked again.
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Mabel was a sharp student and secured a scholarship to New Paltz. She later taught in the Bronx, and worked her way up the ranks of the Board of Education. She ended up marrying her landlord – a young Jewish man who refused to see all the red flags in the local real estate market.
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“As long as the Yankees keep winning – how can you go wrong?” Jacob would say to his investors.
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Jacob and Mabel staked their careers and their reputations on being fiercely loyal to the community. They joined the precinct council, sat on local non-profit boards, and advised neighborhood politicians.
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But even Jacob and Mabel cut corners. They kept their address on the Grand Concourse – and talked about it as though it were home – but moved the family out to Coop City. Mabel came twice a week to water the flowers, check for mail, and make sure nobody took the welcome mat.
* * *
Thomas folded the newspaper and readied himself for the walk home.
The area looked so much cleaner now. Less litter, less graffiti. The pedestrian plaza where he stood used to be a mess of badly parked cars – including his own car with the official plates.
He turned to look at the Courthouse. It was a misnomer to call the place a Courthouse – now that it was mostly occupied by city planners and budget analysts.
The judges and clerks and stenographers had long ago been herded off to the next giant judicial complex.
Thomas thought back to his father and the real estate business that ultimately went bust. The old man would have been better off building courts and jails – always a bumper crop in this borough.
Thomas, in fact, had convened one of his first big political events in front of the Courthouse back in the mid-1980s.
It was a protest, of all things, directed at the author Tom Wolfe, who had just published “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Thomas carried his own podium and microphone to the top of the steps. He’d spent a week spreading the word and, with help from allies in the faith community, hundreds of residents were now gathered below him.
He stood in front of the Courthouse, flanked by community leaders. The building’s marble façade hadn’t been power-washed in years. A character in Wolfe’s novel described the Courthouse as the “island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor and Sargasso Sea of the Bronx.”
Thomas had been unsettled by page 50, outraged by 100, and had already dispatched letters to the publisher and several local papers by the time he finished the book.
His voice boomed that day. “We are not two-dimensional characters in some book. We are not teeming masses with small hearts and no dreams. We are not Fort Apache. We are not the ends of the Earth.”
The crowd roared.
“We are the Bronx,” he shouted directly into one of the television cameras. “We are the Bronx. We deserve respect – and we deserve better schools and cleaner streets and higher wages.”
The speech propelled him into a few days of political stardom. There was coverage on the local ABC and CBS affiliates. An AP story got picked up by newspapers in Oakland and St. Louis. The book review section of the Washington Post made mention of Thomas in a profile on Tom Wolfe.
With the exception of one columnist – who suggested the anti-Bonfire protest was like a scene right out of the novel itself – the coverage was mostly positive. And Thomas and his wife collected most of the clips in a scrapbook still sitting in their living room.
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That night, she’d asked him, “How did it feel to be up there? With all those people watching and all the cameras turned on?”
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“To be honest, I can’t remember,” he said. It was a blur. He was swept away by anger, pride, and some ambition too.
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There was no end game. There was no piece of legislation ready to pass. No list of demands for City Hall.
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It was his own declaration. His love letter to the Bronx. This was a borough that embraced his family – sometimes squeezed a little too hard – and they weren’t going to leave. He wasn’t going to leave.
* * *
More than 30 years had passed since his press conference on the Courthouse steps. Thomas had friends who’d passed away, moved to Long Island or Florida – or reclaimed a family plot back in Puerto Rico.
The real estate market was heating up – and his father was rolling in his grave.
Down the hill from the Courthouse was the new Yankee Stadium – it looked exactly like the old one. Only more imposing, and more expensive.
More than 30 years and so much had changed. He was greyer and fatter – no longer a politician – and there were things he accomplished – and many things that he didn’t. But he was still here – the Bronx was still home.
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* * *