USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 42
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The creation of the Port of New York Authority in 1921, which evolved ut of concurrent measures by the New York and New Jersey legislatures 1 1917, the report of a commission in 1920, and empowering legislation ly the two states approved by the Federal Government, turned out to be che first large-scale attempt at unit planning for communications in the New York port area. Set up as a permanent body freed to a workable ex- sent from the hindrances incident to conflicting political subdivisions, the ePort Authority was itself a miracle forced by economic pressure and the Hlesigns of far-sighted men. It was commissioned to draw up, recommend and execute broad projects for the interstate port area; more than that, : could finance such projects by borrowing against "the security of the dyorks undertaken and their earning power."
Thus the Port Authority, given a more or less free hand in the kitchen, ras made responsible for the proof of the pudding. How well and to what xtent-in its visual aspects, at least-that proof has been supplied even me most indifferent visitor may see for himself. Like surgeons' clips, a dow of bridges and tunnels joins the New York and New Jersey water- fronts. The George Washington Bridge lifts across the Hudson from 178th street, Manhattan, to Fort Lee on the Palisades. The Lincoln Tunnel from Weehawken bores into Manhattan at midtown. (When the south tube, nding in a plaza between West Thirty-Eighth and Thirty-Ninth Streets, Manhattan, was officially opened on December 12, 1937, it had already een sanctified by the legend that its glass roof was intended to give trav- lers a good view of the fishes in the North River. )
The Holland Tunnel-named for its chief engineer, the late Clifford M. Holland, and opened in November, 1927-carries vehicular traffic between Canal Street in lower Manhattan and Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets in
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Jersey City. Of the three Staten Island links, the Bayonne Bridge, a sprun ity's bow, arches over the Kill van Kull from Port Richmond to Bayonne; the group aqueduct piers of the Goethals Bridge join Howland Hook with the Bayfiron way approach to Elizabeth; and the Outerbridge Crossing wades into th The Arthur Kill on legs as slender as a heron's, connecting the Amboy Roa devis north of Tottenville with Perth Amboy. The great Commerce Hall, which Zone takes up the block bounded by Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, Eighth an the Ninth Avenues, Manhattan, is also administered by the Port Authority. ] Build has become a major factor in the classification of less-than-carload freighthis for distribution through the port area. cent
These bridges, tunnels, terminals, with the articulated phases of th I commission's proposals for the future, are intended to tie into the large krat processes of the New York region. The revenues derived from them hav ligh long since proved their usefulness. In the main, the works already in opera ent ation stand as evidence of a high skill and probity in design functioning pase through an extraordinary range of construction, from the bold gangwazigg of the George Washington Bridge to the detail of the beacon pylons at th ind Weehawken plaza of the Lincoln Tunnel. These latter, designed by Aymazxar Embury II, show what may be one solution for the problem of a style ingeq modern functional decoration. Here, as in his Marine Parkway span andof a the bascule bridge over Flushing Creek, Embury makes use of associateqwer engineering forms for decoration intended to suggest the function of the object. Thus the upward lines of the slender gray-green steel light pylon fe in Weehawken, with their four wing flanges, are broken at intervals b'tigt enclosed sheaves of stainless metal discs that resemble the insulators orto high-tension towers. A narrow spiral stairway-this might as well havehi been a vertical ladder-corkscrews up through the center of each pylon toxx the floodlights clumped like hollyhock blooms at the tip of the stalk.
But the key factor in the Port Authority's effectiveness is precisely that for almost alone among the dozens of public and private groups which havetion set out at one time or another to put things straight on the map of New:so York, it was given executive powers and a relative autonomy of action ger Contrast this with Mayor James J. Walker's City Committee on Plan andYo Survey, to which more than 500 members-a metropolitan Who's Who-tu were appointed in 1926 and later. This group had no funds and no execu tive authority. Only the energy of the sub-committees in rustling up con.|to tributions for surveys and other work made possible the advisory reporter issued in 1928.
Two points mentioned in this report linked up with major events in they
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ty's planning history. The first recommended that some such regional roup as the Committee on the Regional Plan of New York and Its En- Ba rons should cooperate with a planning board to be established by the city. he other suggested that the zoning law should be further extended and Ro hi vised. This referred, of course, to the famous New York City Building one Resolution adopted on July 25, 1916. Founded on a broad report by anne Heights of Buildings Commission and prepared by a Commission on y. eig uilding Districts and Regulations appointed by the Board of Estimate, tis resolution broke the city up into use zones classified as business, resi- ential and unrestricted areas.
The limitation of building heights was one of its main objectives. Sky- rg rapers, coming up rank as unthinned plants, had choked off each other's ght and air. The most spectacular effect of the zoning resolution was evi- er ent almost at once in the new setback architecture: parallelepipeds, the in ase of each smaller than the one below it, rising in steps like the temple ggurats of Babylon. Tall buildings were permitted in the so-called two thund one-half times and two times districts. The Grand Central area, for xample, was set aside as a two times district. Above the street wall, it was equired that each building should set back one foot for each four feet f added height. Towers occupying not more than 25 percent of the plot rere unlimited in elevation.
th These regulations turned out to be highly beneficial in their degree, but odthe question as to what should be done about the skyscraper-that bold bignature of New York-had become a little academic in 1938, at least ao far as present building was concerned. Trading in architectural futures avgifted to communications projects, to group housing, even to the so-called taxpayers-small structures, for the most part pleasantly designed, of a ype that sprouted in the vicinity of upper Park and Madison Avenues, and atfor which the Greek fret became unaccountably a favorite mode of decora- vion. In any case, the original zoning regulations were, within their limits, ewo shrewdly drawn up, so legally sound, and in general so successfully nevised and administered that they not only improved the pattern of New ndYork but served as a model for large and small communities all over the United States.
To the extent that the new zoning rush did not merely set up makeshifts to replace the ampler necessity for regional and city plans (zoning in some rtexpensive suburbs even degenerated into a complicated system of residen- ial snobbery ) it was a clear advance. Even so, and more especially in New elYork City, the lack of any total perspective, of a general organizing scheme
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to which separate agencies might have recourse with a view to straighten. ing out overlaps and harmonizing disparate elements, had from the first led to miscarriages in intent and performance. From the hamstrung Ran dall Plan commission of 1811 to the largely decorative City Committee or Plan and Survey in 1926, the gains had been piecemeal, the losses whole sale.
But there were large-spirited men who understood what this disease o: fractionalism had cost in blood and crime and misery, in high taxes and rents and economic waste, in opportunities missed and the defeat of heart breaking effort, in the whole tone and texture of city society. For the mos part, these were men grimly experienced in what may be called the bio statics and biodynamics of the modern community. First among them wa the late Charles Dyer Norton-a name to rank with Unwin, Geddes and Henry Wright among the most distinguished in the planning science- who had worked with Daniel H. Burnham and served as chairman of th. 1907 Committee on Plan of Chicago. Struck by the potential magnificenc of a coordinated New York, he looked about him and found, as he said "a hundred citizens-teachers, architects, artists, engineers, bankers, mer chants, social workers, lawyers, editors-men and women whose name would be recognized from Maine to California as being specially exper in the subject of city planning. No American city is so rich in competer. personnel. None has so superb a situation or presents so great an oppos tunity for a noble city plan."
So the Committee on Plan of New York and Its Environs-"Plan" late became "Regional Plan" in the official title-was brought together in 192 as a private five-man body, with Charles D. Norton as chairman. Pre liminary surveys directed by Nelson P. Lewis and others staked the tre mendous claim. At the first public meeting, which took place on May Ic 1922, Norton announced the project. His eloquent and comprehensive v. sion, broad enough to conceive the full magnitude of a task which woul have disconcerted Swedenborg or Leonardo, was yet solid and prescient; came out of his experienced regard for the mass and multitude of phe nomena whose complex equilibrium, or lack of it, determines the fun tioning of a modern, first-rank city.
As this outline has suggested, the New York Regional Plan Committe appeared as part of a world renascence in city planning, forced to some ex tent by the cumulative demonstration of what Norton called "the hig cost of not planning." It inherited a considerable tradition. It could prof by the errors and advances in the recent Garden City and City Beautifi
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lovements-especially Burnham's 1907 Plan of Chicago, in itself gener- us and monumentally striking, but predicated too exclusively on an archi- ctural scheme of order. More significant, perhaps, were the techniques ewly available, techniques in statistical method (pioneered by the Belgian stronomer, Quetelet, early in the 19th century) in the correlation of data, 1 traffic control, zoning, highway construction and a dozen other fields. Norton and his co-workers honored the challenge. With one stroke they it away most of the fractionalism which had hampered previous planning forts, and sheared through the maze of economic, political and topo- raphic divisions to expose the broad intercommunity of the New York egion. This master stroke was the proposal that the committee should sur- ey the whole area within, very roughly, a 50-mile radius of City Hall, Manhattan, an area which would include, as Norton first envisaged it, "the tlantic Highlands and Princeton; the lovely Jersey hills back of Morris- own and Tuxedo; the incomparable Hudson as far as Newburgh; the Westchester lakes and ridges, to Bridgeport and beyond, and all of Long sland."
Consider the magnitude of this choice and the complexities it implied. was delimited in general by the known practicable commuting range, xtended to include recreation areas available to the metropolitan centers, oundaries of cities and towns at the periphery, and extensions of water- heds and waterways. Thus, by the very terms of its definition, the regional pproach was made in engineering rather than in social science terms. he ecologist R. D. Mckenzie, who regards the regional community as the basic economic and social unit of American civilization," has analyzed he typical "spatial pattern" of such a region.
It is organized about an axis. Its major elements are centers, routes and ms. "It is composed of a constellation of centers, the interrelationship of which may be described as that of dominance and subordination." The hain center provides "institutions and services which cater to the region s a whole and which integrate it with other regions. The subcenters"- nd this, functionally, is what distinguishes big-city neighborhoods and regional villages alike from the American small town of the 1880's- are seldom complete in their institutional or service structure; they de- end upon the main center for the more specialized and integrating func- ions."
Mckenzie's definition suggests very closely the basic interrelationships f the New York region. As defined by the committee, this region was a fuittle larger than the total area mapped in 24 contiguous United States
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Geological Survey quadrangles. At its points of greatest extension, it rai ·from Wappinger Town in Dutchess County, New York, south to Wal Township, New Jersey; and from Washington Township in Morri County, New Jersey, east to Montauk Point, Long Island, and Bridgeport Connecticut-some 40 miles into New Jersey, 60 miles into New Yor! State and Connecticut, and out to the tip of Long Island. On the circula map, the region looks like a tremendous clam pie with a broad untrimme flange along its northern and eastern rim. Nosing into the center, th great sea bass of Long Island-itself a considerable unit in the region- appears to have nibbled away the whole southeastern quadrant betwee: Sandy Hook and Bridgeport. A wide meandering crack from Newburg · to Manhattan is the Hudson River.
Burnham's Chicago Plan covered 200 square miles in what was esser. tially a single political division. The New York Regional Plan Committe marked out an area of 5,528 square miles in three states, administered b 436 local governmental authorities in 1925. This was a territory five time as large as Rhode Island, 250 times the size of Manhattan Island. Its popu lation and business center was the section of Manhattan south of Fifty Ninth Street, its focus of activity the whole Port of New York. Thu: geographically, it was composed of two sub-regions divided east and we: by the Hudson River and drawn together by the unit character of the por. The eastern sector comprised 2,232 square miles in New York State an 413 square miles in Connecticut; the western sector was made up of 2,32 square miles in New Jersey and 655 square miles, including Staten Island 57 square miles, in New York State. The whole region had a populatio of 8,979,055 in 1920 and the committee's factor of safety (allowance fo future expansion) was calculated on a population of 20,000,000 in 196.
When Norton died in 1923, Frederic A. Delano-as early as 1911, and Norton had shared their hopes for a comprehensive New York pla -became chairman of the committee. To the original group-Norton Delano, Alfred T. White (who died in 1921), Robert W. de Fores John M. Glenn and Dwight W. Morrow, late United States Ambassad( to Mexico-were subsequently added the names of Frank L. Polk, Heni James, Frederic B. Pratt, John H. Finley of the New York Times, Lawsof Purdy and George McAneny, the latter long prominent in city planning affairs. Thomas Adams, Associate Professor of City Planning at Harvar University, a professional of wide experience in England, Wales, Canac and the United States, was appointed General Director of Plans and Su veys. Among the specialists who worked with the committee at one time of
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nother or served on subcommittees were Raymond Unwin, Jacques Lam- ert, Frederick Law Olmsted the younger, Cass Gilbert, Harvey Wiley Corbett, William J. Wilgus, Daniel L. Turner, Frederick P. Keppel and robert M. Haig.
When the Regional Survey, intended to organize a body of basic ma- erials for the Plan itself, was first set up, "the quantity and variety of the etail that seemed to call for consideration were almost terrifying"- erhaps not too grim a word to describe the task of formulating a pre- minary harmony out of the chaos of the world's largest city. Terrifying r not, the work went forward, methodically and boldly, in the years be- rg ween 1922 and 1930. By 1927 the first of the Regional Survey reports ad been published. Thereafter, until 1931, these appeared at intervals sen te ntil the ten volumes (including two bound supplements to Volume I) ere complete. The two books of the Plan itself-The Graphic Regional lan in 1929, and The Building of the City in 1931-rounded out the riginal project at a total cost of $1,300,000. Robert L. Duffus published is admirable digest of Survey and Plan, Mastering a Metropolis, in 1930. f When the committee's work was finished, a permanent Regional Plan Association was organized to further the realization of its proposals and veo cooperate with other planning agencies. By the end of 1937, this asso- or iation had assembled an additional volume of bulletins covering planned anevelopment in the region since 193I.
32 ad Taken together, these 14 volumes made up the first wide-focus view of modern metropolitan region in terms of the "economic complements" of iodite, land use and circulation. Necessarily, in a city that marches back and fotorth upon itself as swiftly as New York does, a proportion of the data 6 the Survey Series was obsolescent almost before the books were haunched. But these appeared to have permanent value, not only in that lathey collated an immense statistical and conceptual background for the oregional Plan, but because they checked off that background within a estairly broad period, so that it might stand as a bench mark for the measure- dament of future trends and developments.
nrt This outline cannot hope to do more than suggest the content of the sofsurvey and the bone structure of the Plan itself. In the main, the Survey intended to corroborate the specialists' -- and to some extent the popular -- artriticisms of New York in the 1920's. Thus, in the three volumes devoted adlo an economic estimate, Robert Murray Haig and Roswell C. McCrea of jufColumbia University set up certain working hypotheses. The plan for any gity region must be at once a harmonious design and "a productive piece
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of economic machinery"-a "production good" rather than a "consump tion good." This, the analysts inferred as of 1927, must be its justificatio as an economic unit, its usefulness to the larger territory and the nation c which the city region is a part.
The planner must attempt to reduce the friction of space (the economi waste involved in excessive or ill-considered movement ) by an efficier. pattern of population (a population conveniently disposed in relation t its activities ). In order to find out approximately "where things 'belong,' he must have regard to the planning principles that govern selection c definite areas for special activities. But first he must consider which indus tries, and more especially which functions of industry (shipment, assembly management, storage), are most likely to be successful in exerting pressur for advantageous urban sites.
With these principles in mind, the economic survey found that managing administering, buying, selling, financing, risk-bearing, investigating an advising were among the city's preferential activities. Certain types of mar. ufacturing were already being pushed out toward the periphery; this wa part of a decentralizing movement not yet broad enough to be called trend. In the middle of the city, only the printing trade had gaine steadily in the period 1900-22. The financial cluster at the foot of Mar. hattan could outbid any other group in competition for sites and woul probably remain where it was.
Next in bidding power came the great consolidation of retail busines encamped between Thirty-Fourth and Fifty-Ninth Streets, Manhattan, 0: its historic march uptown; but there were no considerable factors to sug gest that this bloc would be likely to give up its strategic grouping in th neighborhood of Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station. Haig McCrea and others examined a score or more typical industries, large an small, using maps, text, scatter diagrams and statistics to indicate the rela tive position of each in the economic pattern of the New York region.
Much the same procedure was followed in the report covering growth and distribution of population and land values. The traffic study, edited b Harold M. Lewis and Ernest P. Goodrich, showed that the ratio of popu lation to motor vehicles in New York and its environs curved downwar from about 35 in 1916 to 7.6 in 1926; that in congested districts-certai! sections of Fifth Avenue, for example-the average traffic speed at pea loads sometimes fell to between 2.5 and 3.0 miles per hour; that buildin, heights and densities show a measurable correlation to street widths an
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apacities; and that physical planning is more effective than regulation in eparating through and local traffic.
As might have been expected, the volume on transit and transportation redged up some very similar specimens. For one thing, it pointed out hat rapid transit facilities usually predetermine the location of new centers f population rather than the reverse. (This was an old song-and-dance ) the land speculator, who had often been willing to pay well for in- ormation on subway or elevated extensions before these were publicly an- ounced.) In 1924-and it was heavier later-subway traffic from resi- ential districts during the morning rush hour jumped to between 380 and 84 percent of the average hourly movement. The survey calculated that as much as one-third of the total estimated railroad freight tonnage for both 935 and 1965 (the factor of safety limit) could make use of a cross- arbor railroad link.
The survey of public recreation concerned itself particularly with the tios of free open space to population and with discussion of the large reas available for development in the outlying sections of the region, par- cularly on Long Island and in northern New Jersey and New York State. 'he discussion of Buildings: Their Uses and the Spaces About Them, an admirably thorough set of monographs by Thomas Adams, Edward M. assett and others, emphasized the complexity of factors-land prices, affic, open spaces, rapid transit, control of amenities, building densities, ousing, interplay between urban and suburban land use, zoning, coordi- ated regulation-which must be pulled into some sort of intricate balance the physical plant of the region was to achieve even "minimum stand- rds for health, safety and general welfare." The final volume of the Re- ional Survey, Physical Conditions and Public Services, assembled and cor- elated the soundest available data on the geography and climate of the egion, on water supply, sewage and refuse disposal, oil pollution, power, eat and light, food supply, building materials, hospitals and prisons.
Anyone who takes the trouble to look up a copy of Charles Scott Land- 's' 1929 sub-surface map of Manhattan, on which subway lines in use or rojected are shown against the original hills, swamps, watercourses and lade land, will get a striking sense of what happened to the island's earth etween the Randall Plan of 18II and the year in which the first volume f the Regional Plan was published. The two dates set a term, an elastic entury in the main borough's turbulent career. They pointed up the ex- aordinary density, expansion, multiplication and diversity of factors which
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had vitally confused the process-pattern of the city. As a consequence, th need for and achievement of the Regional Plan stood out boldly.
Armed with the lessons of the Survey, the Graphic Regional Plan d vided its proposals, for convenient presentation, into two main categorie: ways of communication and land uses. The first embraced a trunk line rai road system, suburban rapid transit lines, improvement in the utilizatic of waterways, a coordinated regional highway pattern and a chain of a terminals. Under the heading of land uses, the Plan made a primary di tinction between close development areas, including industrial, busine and residential sections, and open development areas, broken down int parks, water supply reservations, bridle paths and hiking trails, airport open military reservations, and tracts available for private estates, woo lands, pasturage and farming. A third class-extremely important in region that includes some 1,800 miles of waterfront-was set aside fi water areas and the treatment of their shores, subsumed under three head areas of water considered as open spaces, beaches, and projects for the er ployment of submerged land in central areas.
The railroad, rapid transit and highway systems proposed for the regio were all modifications of a single basic diagram: the metropolitan loop open grid pattern. This was a broad central rectangle, criss-crossed by fo: internal routes each way. Its boundary was formed by the beveled corne of the metropolitan loop proper. Radial routes spread out from it, inte sected by two main exterior circumferential roads. Applied to a styliza map of New York City and environs, this scheme showed Manhattan at the eastern section of Hudson County, New Jersey, at the main center the grid. The Newark district and the western areas of Brooklyn ai Queens formed two secondary centers within the loop.
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