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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
An Introduction  Delays at O'Hare. (Scott Olson/Getty Images via The New York Times) Bad news for the airline industry today. American Airlines cancels 1,094 flights, causing by-now-familiar airport havoc so the FAA can inspect questionable wiring. Getting new planes to help in situations like these will be harder than everybody thought. And earlier this week, three U.S. airlines, Skybus, A.T.A. and Aloha, cancelled all of their flights, permanently. On top of that, Oasis Hong Kong Airlines shut down today as well. Of all today's stories of stranded passengers, this one stood out: At La Guardia Airport in New York, Yoree Koh, arrived and like thousands of other across the country found her American flight, to Chicago, canceled. Ms. Koh, 25, had planned to attend an orientation for the graduate journalism program at Northwestern University that she will attend, and to look for apartments.Ms. Koh, get your week back. Allow me to introduce you to the Lake Shore Limited. Lake Shore Limited, Ms. Koh.  The Lake Shore Limited at Cold Spring, N.Y. (David Sommer / RRPictureArchives.net) Instead of trying her luck at the airport the next day, she should have gotten to Penn Station by 4 p.m. and for $80 been at Chicago by 9:45 a.m. Sadly, at that time, she'll still be in New York, on line.- Posted at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments: 0 | Post a Comment |  
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 America's Thriving Passenger Railroads  The Long Island Rail Road is the busiest passenger railroad in the United States. (Photo by David Wong / RailPictures.net) The American Public Transportation Association released its 2007 ridership statistics last week. The regional railroad statistics (pdf) show the numbers behind a booming industry. Overall, ridership is up 5.4% year-over-year, and up 11.3% over five years. Two fledgling new passenger railroads have come into being in the Sunbelt in the last five years: Rail Runner Express in Albuquerque and Music City Star in Nashville. A third, FrontRunner in Salt Lake City, is scheduled to begin operations in April. The nation's busiest passenger railroad, the Long Island Rail Road, recently reported its busiest year since 1949. And its cousin across the Sound, Metro-North, recently reported its busiest year in its 25-year history. Here is a table summarizing the APTA data and Amtrak monthly data.
A few observations. First, the numbers show how New York, and more broadly the Northeast, totally dominate regional passenger railroads in the United States. The No. 1 and No. 2 railroads are both run by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and together they provide 40.6% of all railroad trips in the Lower 48, not counting intercity service provided by Amtrak (which, by the way is reporting its own record ridership). Once you add in NJ Transit, the three railroads serving New York City provide 56.9% of all regional railroad trips per year, a figure that has held steady over the past five years. The following table breaks down the statistics by region:
Since railroads use a tiny fraction of the fuel per person that automobiles do, I think this data shows that the northeast will be better prepared than any other region to provide mobility to its residents in the event of increased gasoline prices. All of us northeasterners should be grateful for the sound stewardship and continued operation of assets handed down to us by previous generations. A last thought: It's funny to me that outside New York and Connecticut, nobody wants to call their railroad a railroad. It's as if everyone got together, as all the new services came on line in the 1990s and 2000s, to focus-group their branding. They must have decided that the word "railroad" is considered too old fashioned. Hence, you have a variety of other names, a snappy one-word "brand," or a name that uses the word "express" or the abbreviated, "rail." That said, the two services that do use railroad in their name (and in the case of the nearly 175-year-old LIRR, the even more archaic "rail road"), just happen to be the two busiest services. Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere.  Albuquerque's Rail Runner Express began operations in 2006. (Photo by Stephen Noyes / RRPictureArchives.net.) Labels: commuter rail, LIRR, Metro-North, railroads, regional rail, transportation - Posted at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments: 0 | Post a Comment |
Saturday, January 19, 2008 'Your Warranty Has Expired' I received a telephone call this morning. On the other end was the automated voice of a woman speaking in an urgent yet authoritative tone. "She" said something along the lines of: Attention! The warranty on your automobile has expired. We have sent you several warnings in the mail but you have refused to respond. Press 1 to renew your warranty.I got really nervous for a second. It wasn't hard to believe that I hadn't replied to junk-mail, since I tend to let that stuff pile up. Then I remembered something. I don't own an automobile. Whatever company is sending out these calls is lying. They have no idea if your automobile warranty has expired, and they don't care. They almost certainly haven't even mailed you anything. But they are calling thousands of people telling them they have. All this business needs is some percentage of the people they call to press 1 and inquire about automobile warranties. The company doesn't even need to pay someone to sit at the phone making calls. This shameful practice makes a mockery of respectable capitalism in which a benevolent entrepreneur earns an honest dollar by having an idea and tapping into a human need. I would have pressed 1 and tried to ascertain who was making these fraudulent calls, but I had picked up the call on a rotary phone.- Posted at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments: 2 | Post a Comment |
Sunday, September 02, 2007 Urban and Suburban Sidewalks  Here's a photograph of a bookstore in downtown Manhattan, or more precisely, the sidewalk in front of a bookstore. Every morning, employees from the store drag out racks of bargain books. The goal, of course, is to catch the attention of people walking by and get them to come into the store, look around and buy a more expensive book. And as you can see from the photo above, this probably works pretty well. There is a tremendous amount of pedestrian traffic on that block with people going to South Street Seaport and the many offices, apartments and stores in the area. So people who are walking past with no intention of shopping for books often serendipitously find themselves browsing inside this cavernous store. The rack feeds off of, and reinforces, the urban milieu that Jane Jacobs called an intricate sidewalk ballet. The diverse mix of offices, stores, restaurants and apartments all draw people out to the sidewalk at different times and for different reasons. And "In cities," she wrote, "liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life." People have taken Jane Jacob's words to heart in many places, including many parts of suburbia that are in need of a good sprucing up. Below is a satelite image of the suburban shopping plaza where I bought my first copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was always easy to find parking here, and the parking never cost anything.  Unfortunately, a result of the 20th century planning orthodoxy of single-use zoning, the plaza isn't connected to anything other than retail. There are no apartments nearby, nor offices. Just stores. If you happen to live in the house on the adjacent property to the south, there's a fence preventing you from walking over. On the western wall of the plaza there are three stores: a small liquor store, a pharmacy that takes up a little more space, and the bookstore where I made my purchase, a giant place that takes up three quarters of the frontage. Between these stores and their parking lot is a raised concrete platform that you might be able to call "a sidewalk." But it's really just a border zone, a vestage of the city. There's no reason to be on it unless you are going into one of the stores, and you wouldn't be there unless you drove. The bookstore so dominates the plaza that there's no reason to be on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore unless you're going to the bookstore. But funny enough, certain urban habits have been adopted out here, where they fail to stimulate the same sidewalk milieu. Just like in downtown Manhattan, every day, employees of this bookstore put out a cart of bargain books. As if someone would just happen to be wandering past! Below, the results of single-use zoning, auto-only transportation planning and wishful thinking:  Labels: Jane Jacobs, pedestrian life, sidewalks, suburban planning - Posted at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments: 3 | Post a Comment |
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 A South Bronx Neighborhood Rebuilds  The Melrose neighborhood in the Bronx is coming to life as empty lots and vacant buildings are being replaced by mid-rise, transit-oriented, environmentally friendly and highly sought-after apartment buildings. As the months tick by, the urban fabric is being restored, and it is a wonderful thing to see. Above, the second, third, and last buildings on the block of East 161st Street between Elton and Melrose Avenues have been preserved while the empty lots and a few buildings have been transformed, below, into affordable housing for low-income working households. Financed by the New York City Housing Development Corporation, these buildings were built by a partnership involving Nos Quedamos/We Stay, which worked hard to avert "urban renewal" and prepare a human-scaled master plan for the neighborhood.  Labels: Bronx, housing, Melrose, revitalization - Posted at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments: 8 | Post a Comment |
Thursday, May 03, 2007 Green States for Transportation  States with senators co-sponsoring of S.294, the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act. Light green = 1 senator co-sponsoring; Dark green = 2 senators co-sponsoring. The states above have senators who have signed on as co-sponsors of s.294, a bill that would provide five years worth of funding to Amtrak, the nation's most environmentally friendly form of inter-city travel. This is important because the bill would put an end to the yearly Amtrak appropriations battles in Washington, where every year the Bush Administration trys to get us to burn more oil driving and flying between places by reducing Amtrak's operating budget to zero. Here's the same map, broken down by party.  Light blue = 1 Democratic co-sponsor Dark blue = 2 Democratic co-sponsors Purple = 1 Democratic and 1 Republican co-sponsor Light red = 1 Republican co-sponsor Dark red = 2 Republican co-sponsors Labels: Amtrak - Posted at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments: 2 | Post a Comment |
Friday, January 05, 2007 The Restoration of Beekman Street  The block of Beekman Street between William and Nassau Streets in Downtown Manhattan has for a long time had that half-abandoned look you find in many dying cities, with parking lots being the predominant land use amid stately older buildings that managed to survive the wrecking ball. That is changing, thanks to a continuing desire of people to do live, work, shop and recreate downtown. Both of the parking lots you see in the photo above are being converted to uses for people. The smaller lot at the left is at the southwest corner of William and Beekman Streets. This week, all the cars were booted and workers began dismantling the metal car-lifts that the parking lot had been using.  I haven't been able to figure out what's going on here, but the workers also removed the parking lot's sign as you can see in the right of the photo, indicating that something new is coming in here and we're hopefully not just looking at a fancier parking lot. Does anyone know what's going to be built at this site? Across the street, construction is underway for what will be a 75-story mixed-use tower being built by Forest City Ratner and designed by Frank Gehry. It will have about 70 floors of apartments, five floors for a school and ground floor retail space. Think of the acres of woodland or farms that will not become culs-de-sac because of this tower, and you can see why an environmentalist should support tall buildings in Manhattan even as neighbors say it is "destroying the neighborhood." I posted the picture below on the Wired New York forum (scroll to end) back in October when the first indications that construction was starting on the long-discussed tower. The construction has continued and now the site is a big dirt pit awaiting pile driving.  - Posted at 10:11 PM |
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Sunday, December 17, 2006 Overheard at the Checkout Counter At my local bookstore and presented here without further comment: A woman working the register, speaking to two others: "The Explorer is registered in my name because Uncle Danny has a little DUI problem. [Chuckles.] I'm a 19-year-old female in New York State and the insurance is still expensive!"- Posted at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments: 1 | Post a Comment |
Sunday, December 10, 2006 Win-Win-Win  The scaffolding is off at Fultonhaus, 119 Fulton Street at Dutch Street in Lower Manhattan's Financial District. This is an example of what might be called small-scale upfill development, and it embodies many principles that Jane Jacobs described as being beneficial for a city neighborhood.Here the developer added six stories to an 87-year-old building, nearly doubling it size while converting the lower floors from obsolete commercial space into condominium apartments. The history of the building itself shows the versatility of a simple lowrise structure, part of a row of buildings that edge right up to the streetwall. According to the Department of Buildings BIS website, it was built as a factory and warehouse in 1919 and converted into retail showrooms in 1967. Now it is being transformed again, into residences. The benefits, or "wins" from this latest conversion are many. Win 1: This building helps densify an already dense transit core of the city, encouraging people to travel via the nearby subway rather than sprawling outward into auto-dependent suburbs. There will be 19 apartments in this building. That represents an entire cul-de-sac's worth of farmland or forest saved from the bulldozer! Win 2: This building will bring more residents to a business district after hours, giving it more of a 24-hour daily lifecycle, which subtly enhances safety to the neighborhood and rewards local business owners for locating downtown. As important as these two wins are, they stem from any form of downtown residential development. What makes this building particularly special is its relative small scale. Win 3: The project exemplifies Jacobs' concept of "gradual money." I have no idea how much money the conversion of and addition to this building cost. It might have been quite a lot. But it is not as much as if they tore down a number of similar-sized buildings, consolidated the lots and built a much bigger building. Jacobs wrote of the need to supply neighborhoods with a continual supply of investment, a trickle of money as opposed to an occasional bucket-load of "cataclysmic money" that often resulted in the disastrous tearing down of many buildings to put up one, as was done in the "urban renewal" years of public housing projects. The result of small-scale rehabilitation and construction is what Jacobs termed a healthy city neighborhood, an "ever-normal granary" that is forever rejuvenating itself: All city building that retains staying power after its novelty has gone, and that preserves the freedom of the streets and upholds citizens' self-management, requires that its locality be able to adapt, keep up to date, keep interesting, keep convenient, and this in turn requires a myriad of gradual, constant, close-grained changes.Win 4: Historic architecture preserved. Even without consolidating lots, the developer here could have torn down the existing building and built a new all-glass one with economies of scale. But here, he chose to retain the old building, with its beautiful masonry architecture, which reinforces the historic urban fabric rather than obliterating it. It is great to see such positive development taking place in the heart of the city.- Posted at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments: 1 | Post a Comment |
Sunday, November 19, 2006 Cool New Blog Alert: City Seen  Brooklyn hasn't gotten its fair share of digital ink here at Starts & Fits. For that, take a look at City Seen. This blog uncovers the stories behind various building projects, and promises to cover local neighborhood development — in other words, exactly the stuff that Starts & Fits loves! In the inaugural posts, the 'Seen covers stalled building projects in Greenpoint, at at 271 and 279 Driggs Avenue and at 55 Eckford Street (in photo above). What's going on over there?- Posted at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments: 0 | Post a Comment |
Monday, September 11, 2006 A Clone Outgrows Its Parent  Since everyone's attention is at Ground Zero today, I thought it would be fitting to look at the residential tower rising at 10 Barclay Street, just north of the site and towering next to the Woolworth Building. As The Sun has noted, this bad boy is going up fast. Here is another photo:  Think that's a shot of 10 Barclay? Nope. That's the Grand Tier at 1930 Broadway, a building between 64th and 65th Streets that the developer of 10 Barclay, Glenwood Management, completed about a year or two ago. Here's a picture with more of it:  From these early indications, 10 Barclay Street is going to look identical to the Grand Tier. Not surprisingly, they were designed by the same firm, Costas Kondylis & Partners. Here are a couple of close ups of 10 Barclay, so you can really see it:   And finally, another overall view.  Regardless of its similarities to a (rather boring)* building uptown, it's great to see construction of a building that will bring 396 apartments to revitalize this part of the city. *Boring, yes, but I do like the way 1930's base maintains the street wall for the first six floors and provides good neighborhood retail. - 6-12 Barclay Street & More - Costas Kondylis [Wired New York Forum] - 1930 Broadway [Wired New York Forum]- Posted at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments: 1 | Post a Comment |
Wednesday, August 09, 2006 The Urban Naturalist Futurebird has been running an interesting series called The Urban Naturalist. She is trying to raise awareness of the ways in which cities are socially and environmentally more natural than suburban living, despite their leafy greenery. Here is the latest entry, A Palace With Many Rooms.  Suburban living embodies the compartmentalized, modernist understanding of man and nature. When we consider a suburban dwelling, we often see it in isolation from its social, physical, and environmental surroundings. Each house is a world unto itself complete with the symbolic markers of "nature" and the creature comforts of "civilization." Suburban living minimizes random encounters with other people and with nature. All aspects of life occur in private whenever possible (including transportation.) Despite the superficial trappings of greenery, the suburban environment is sealed of from nature, both in its wild and urban incarnations.  Urban living cannot be understood without seeing each urban dwelling as larger than the private spaces of apartments. The urban living space is integrated with the public realm in the same way that rural living is (ideally) integrated harmoniously with green nature. The city is like a palace with many rooms, but in this palace the rooms are shared with other people. Here are the entries in the series so far: July 19: Intro to the Urban Naturalist July 26: Reconnecting With Nature July 27: The Living History of a City July 28: Sacred Places July 31: Passing Through Aug. 2: Naming Places Aug. 7: A Palace With Many Rooms- Posted at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments: 1 | Post a Comment |
Tuesday, July 11, 2006 Where I'll Be For a While I'm going to be doing some blogging for StreetsBlog, a website where we hope to draw attention to land use and transportation issues, and ways to increase urban livability and decrease traffic congestion and automobile dependence. My posts on this site will probably decrease in frequency at least for the time being. But stuff that I would have posted here you can now find over at StreetsBlog. Come on over and join us!- Posted at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments: 1 | Post a Comment |
Monday, June 26, 2006 Contested Streets Premier Everyone who cares about New York City should watch Contested Streets, which premiers on Tuesday and compares the public environment of New York with those of London, Paris and Copenhagen. I will give the movie the full review it deserves at a later point. For now, I'll just say that this is a movie that was put together by people with a broad vision for how New York's streetscape should be significantly transformed and a many-layered theoretical underpinning on why it ought to be. In thinking about what could be, they are not bound by what is. Two images from the film:  Trafalgar Square transformed from a traffic nightmare into an enjoyable public space that attracts people to the city.  The logical result of decades of planning for the car above all else. - New Film Shows Route to Livable, Gridlock-Free Streets [TransAlt]- Posted at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments: 0 | Post a Comment |
Monday, June 19, 2006 New Hope in the Bronx  The building pictured above, a block south of Crotona Park in the Bronx, is one of those rarest of buildings that has the same address on two streets: It is located at 1500 Boston Road and 1500 Louis Nine Boulevard. Neat as that may be, though, this building is more remarkable for a reason that becomes apparent when you notice that the modest cornice and detailing end abruptly at two unfinished facades. It is as if the building was once just a piece of a greater whole. Indeed, it was.  No. 1500, known as New Hope Plaza, survived the 1970s in the very epicenter of Bronx disinvestment. By the end of the decade, arson and abandonment had taken every one of its neighbors, and No. 1500 was the only building standing on its block.From the mid-1910s through the mid-1960s, the eleven-block area you see in the map at right was a bustling neighborhood of businesses and five-story walkup apartment houses southeast of Crotona Park. "With a density of well over 500 units per acre, it was a vibrant neighborhood, consisting primarily of New Law tenements built after 1901," wrote Richard Plunz in A History of Housing in New York City (Columbia University Press, 1990, and the source of this map and the next). Three thousand people lived in 51 apartment buildings on the two blocks at the center of the neighborhood. Today, only one of those buildings remains standing, No. 1500, built in 1915, at the corner of Boston Road and what was then Wilkins Avenue.  Then came the destruction wrought by the arson and abandonment of the 1970s that came not long after Interstate highways began offering their promise of the benefits of the city and the country at the same time. This left a lot of rubble-strewn empty lots in the neighborhood. Not content simply to bring people to suburbia, planners also set about to bring suburbia to the people. Charlotte Street, where President Carter and Candidate Reagan famously stopped to promise to rebuild, was rebuilt by Ed Logue as a subdivision of detached single-family dwellings that offered housing for a relative handful of people at an enormous cost of valuable urban land.No. 1500 once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with its neighbors, but now it looms over them as a lonely reminder of the once busy city neighborhood.  An aerial photo from local.live.com reproduced below shows the block where No. 1500 stands.  I'm not sure there is an image that better explains the spatial inefficiency of suburban development. New Hope Plaza at the corner has homes for some 100 people in 38 households (and three stores too), while the entire rest of the block has just 18 housing units, fewer than half the number in New Hope Plaza. Despite the 1980s efforts that produced Charlotte Gardens (or perhaps because of them), the need to produce affordable housing remains a major goal of the city and state governments. Their agencies, along with banks, developers, nonprofit community-based development organizations and the "intermediary organizations" that fund them are all under enormous pressure to satisfy a demand for affordable housing that never seems to slacken. Thankfully, in the decades since Charlotte Gardens was built, the prevailing wisdom of this group of organizations has come to acknowledge that the only way to solve the housing crunch is to build at a greater density. As a result, high-density apartment buildings are returning to the periphery of the Charlotte Gardens area, restoring a bit of that neighborhood that existed before. I've already written about a building called Urban Horizons II to be located just off the map above. Even closer, a big mixed-use building is nearing completion at 1490 Boston Road, just across the street from New Hope Plaza.  Designed by Hugo S. Subotovsky Architects, this red and tan brick building embodies a back-to-the-future understanding that the best and most useful built environment for the Bronx was the one that was being neglected and actively obliterated for much of the second half of the 20th century. No. 1490 shares many of the same characteristics as 90-year-old No. 1500: Six stories, a solid streetwall, ground floor retail. Even the rounded facade serves to compliment its neighbor.  1490 Boston Road will contain more than 9,000 square feet of ground floor retail space and 95 apartments (most of them two-bedroom units), all restricted to households earning no more than 60% of the New York City median income. It was financed in December 2004 with $9.5 million raised by the sale of tax-exempt bonds issued by the New York City Housing Development Corporation, underwritten by Bear Stearns and secured by KeyBank. The Housing Development Corp. lent an additional $4.18 million from its own budget to finance this building's construction, which is being developed by the Atlantic Development Group. There are still vacant lots in the Bronx that can be built upon, but if present trends continue or accelerate, there will come a time when the land underneath Charlotte Gardens is more valuable for what could be there than what is. Now that lots near Charlotte Street are being put to use for apartment buildings, what will become of Charlotte Gardens? Will it be a permanent reminder of shortsighted planning policies and low urban land values, or will it give way to a restored dense urban fabric? The zoning for the area, shown in the map below, makes these single-family detached houses a permanent fixture. In fact, if New Hope Plaza fell down in an earthquake, rebuilding it would be illegal.  As shown by the map, the area is zoned R1-2, which is almost the lowest density residential zone that exists in New York City. As described by the city's 1990 Zoning Handbook: R1 districts permit only single-family detached houses on lots at least 100 feet wide (in R1-1 zones) or 60 feet wide (in R1-2 zones). These zones limit population density by allowing only four to seven families per acre. Usually, the houses are on large landscaped lots. Many of these areas are far from public transportation. Most families in these districts own at least one car. One parking space is required for each dwelling unit.The R1-2 zone corresponds almost exactly to the area occupied by Charlotte Gardens, which is near the Freeman Street and 174th Street stops on the elevated subway line served by the 2 and 5 trains. The area all around it, including the site of 1490 Boston Road, is part of a much higher-density R7-1 zone, which corresponds with the density of the Charlotte Street area before its apartment buildings were razed. A 1980 article about New Hope Plaza describes it as having at one time been "an elegant building," and quotes a resident, Helen Steiner, as saying, "It used to have stained-glass windows, overstuffed furniture in the lobby and a chandelier." What good luck that it has survived into the 21st century. It's survival has provided 38 homes, 37 of which could not legally be replaced. How did the people responsible for this building manage to keep it up? The residents of 1500 Boston Road stayed in their building as many others were fleeing the neighborhood, and one big reason may be the tenacity of the building's superintendent, George Lascu, who in 1977 was 82 and toothless, and had lived in the building since 1937. "All the people here are just like a family," he told the Times in 1977, "my family." Because it still stood while other buildings were empty shells or reduced to rubble, this No. 1500 began attracting new residents. As the Times described it: There is little turnover in the multiracial apartment house. Those who have been there stay because the building is like an anchor in a sea of desolation; those who have come recently are also there because of the stability.Around 1980 even No. 1500 was abandoned by its owner, and it fell into city ownership. Tenants remained but lacked heat and hot water. Led by a 73-year-old grandmother named Alice Myers as well as Helen Steiner and Mary Jones, and with assistance from the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, the tenants organized and formed a cooperative to buy the building and get their utilities restored. In 1983, they rehabilitated the building with $25,000 from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and another $25,000 from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. That led to a grand reopening, which the Times covered this way: For four years it was Last Hope, the only building still standing, and still occupied, in a block of urban rubble in the South Bronx. With speeches, balloons and a marching band, Last Hope yesterday formally became New Hope Plaza and was welcomed as another sign of revitalization in a once-proud neighborhood.Twenty-three years later, one looks forward to the grand opening of New Hope Plaza's big new neighbor at 1490 Boston Road.  - For New Hope Plaza, a New Look [NYT 5/29/1983] - 3 Women Who Led Rescue of Building in South Bronx See Hopes Fulfilled [NYT 9/14/1983] - The Bronx's Green Housing Boom [S&F]- Posted at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments: 4 | Post a Comment |
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