Some articles...
Aug. 27th, 2006 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Been a while since I've done this!
On the probably rebuilding of New Orleans
Outlines Emerge for a Shaken New Orleans
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 26 — At one edge of this city’s future are the extravagant visions of its boosters. Awash in federal cash, the New Orleans they dream of will be an arts-infused mecca for youthful risk-takers, a boomtown where entrepreneurs can repair to cool French Quarter bars in ancient buildings after a hard day of deal making.
At the other extreme are the gloomy predictions of the pessimists. New Orleans will be Detroit, they say, a sickly urban wasteland abandoned by the middle class. A moldering core will be surrounded by miles of vacant houses, with wide-open neighborhoods roamed by drug dealers and other criminals. The new New Orleans will be merely a grim amplification of its present unpromising self, the pessimists say.
Somewhere between these unrealistic visions lies a glimpse of the city’s real future a year after Hurricane Katrina, say many planners, demographers and others here who have been deeply involved in rebuilding. Like a half-completed drawing in a child’s coloring book, the picture is starting to fill in. There are shadows and firmer outlines, a few promising, some of them menacing.
New Orleans will almost certainly be smaller than it was. Repopulation has slowed to a trickle, leaving the city with well under half its prestorm population of 460,000. It will probably have fewer poor people; its housing projects remain essentially closed, and many poorer neighborhoods are still devastated. With inexpensive housing scarce and not being built, partly because of the paralysis in recovery planning, it is easier for the middle class than the poor to return.
New Orleans, the demographers think, has begun to shrink back to its historic dimensions, the ones that existed before a post-World War II expansion through the back swamps, and the ones that visitors know best. Life in the smaller city will be concentrated in the mostly middle-class districts closer to the Mississippi River that bounced back after the storm. Some of these districts were unaffected by flooding; already they bustle with commerce.
No area is officially off the table for redevelopment. But the silence and emptiness of outlying neighborhoods near Lake Pontchartrain and in east New Orleans appear to be harbingers of the future.
“I think people will get discouraged, and some of those areas will not be rebuilt,” said Pres Kabacoff, a leading developer here.
Within these more concentrated neighborhoods, it will be somewhat whiter, though still mostly black over all. The electorate was 57 percent black in last spring’s mayoral runoff; before the storm it was typically in the low 60’s.
Neighborhoods ruined now will probably shrivel further, planning experts say.
The Lower Ninth Ward, still a barren wasteland, is unlikely to be rebuilt anytime soon, if at all. Gentilly, a classic 1920’s and 30’s New Orleans neighborhood of Arts and Crafts-style stucco houses with wide overhanging eaves, is coming back only fitfully, with a few trailers visible in front yards of once-flooded houses. Tremé, with its 19th-century Creole cottages and shotgun houses, across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, is being reclaimed, but abandonment alternates with revival, as is the case throughout the city.
These uncertain indicators yield to a more hopeful one: a wave of citizen activism in the wake of the storm that is chipping away at some of this city’s unhealthy institutions. It has already toppled some of the old structures that helped cement prestorm New Orleans in poverty and despair.
The schools, a dysfunctional catastrophe before the storm, have been removed from the control of a corrupt district office; just under two-thirds are now in the hands of parents and community activists as charter schools. (Students not admitted to charters, however, will have to attend a state-run school district rife with problems.)
The City Council is under the influence of impatient newcomers pledging reform and pushing for tighter ethics. They are threatening to dismantle a feudal means of resolving everyday planning disputes, long discarded elsewhere. The crippling fiscal structure, long a hurdle to raising adequate revenue in this impoverished city, is under assault. Voters will soon decide whether to throw out the balkanized system of seven district property assessors.
‘There’s a Lot of Uncertainty’
With government a light or invisible presence since the storm, citizens have taken matters into their own hands, whether to overhaul institutions, clean streets or resurrect the city’s parks. If there is to be a new New Orleans, its seeds are to be found in this low-intensity citizens’ revolution that has some people here credibly claiming to find promise among the ruins.
“There was a wall against ideas in New Orleans for years,” said William Borah, a veteran civic activist who helped defeat a proposed riverfront expressway here in the mid-1960’s. “That wall has been broken down.”
Still, under present conditions, hope requires faith. “Over all, it’s scary,” said Tim Williamson of the Idea Village, a local nonprofit organization that supports small business. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
Oppressed by the midsummer heat, this city is now traversing a bleak trough: the planners are still squabbling a year after the storm, forests of uncut weeds grow in the medians, and measurable progress is difficult to detect. St. Charles Avenue on a summer evening has an eerily empty feel; one plausible recent population count, based on Postal Service data, put the figure at 171,000, well below City Hall’s claim of 250,000. The population is thought to be roughly what it was around 1880.
From the living zone near the river, a trip north of any distance is sobering: blocks of sagging houses not so much empty as dead, and heaps of rubble and garbage with dogs and rats among them. At odd intervals, the occasional householder can be spotted on a porch, looking out with a furrowed brow, trying to make a go of it in the ruins.
New Orleans now, often rudderless, filthy and still deeply scarred by the storm, is hemorrhaging some of the people it can least afford to lose. In the professional classes, nearly half the doctors and three-fourths of the psychiatrists have left, the largest synagogue says its congregation is down by more than 10 percent, and a big local moving company reports a “mass evacuation.”
Tens of thousands in the African-American working-class backbone remain unable to return. They have been replaced by hundreds of Hispanic workers who have done much of the heavy lifting in the reconstruction, and live in rough conditions. In the meantime, the only thriving industry is the back-street drug trade, pessimists note.
The outside world is scared by New Orleans. Banks, for instance, are insisting on unusually high collateral in real estate deals, and for good reason, given a homicide rate that is double its prehurricane level and no guarantee that neighborhoods will return to life. Basic services — water, electricity, garbage pickup — are intermittent.
“Look at what we’re getting in terms of services,” said Janet Howard, of the Bureau of Governmental Research, an independent nonprofit group in New Orleans. “It’s basically a nonfunctioning city.”
City Hall, meanwhile, has settled back into its habitual easygoing rhythms; a well-placed insider there reported, with alarm, no sense of urgency among its officials. Mayor C. Ray Nagin was recently set to attend an opening at a French Quarter gallery of an exhibit of photographs — of himself, taken by his personal photographer. A public outcry this month forced him to cancel plans for a fireworks display and a “comedy show” to commemorate Hurricane Katrina’s first anniversary tomorrow.
Lacking a Master Plan
With little direction from the top, long-term planning for the city’s future remains incoherent. A year after the storm, there are no plans for large-scale infrastructure and redevelopment in the city. One group of official planners took the step of attacking a second group in a full-page advertisement in The Times-Picayune this month, even warning citizens to stay away from its rivals.
The absence of a plan has forced developers, who might otherwise be building housing for the displaced, to the sidelines. “The developers, they want to know what the plan is,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
The latest notion, after earlier false or incomplete starts, is to turn planning over to the citizens, allowing neighborhoods to choose from a list of planners, with the hope that at the end it can all be folded into one giant framework. It was pushed by state officials holding the redevelopment purse strings who grew impatient this summer with the city’s abortive planning efforts.
In the neighborhoods, New Orleanians are skeptical. “Why does it seem that every time someone swoops in to help us, it winds up being a mess?” asked Jenel Hazlett, of the Northwest Carrollton Civic Association, a neighborhood group. “They keep moving the players around, and we as citizens keep getting jerked around.”
Like others, Ms. Hazlett professes bewilderment at a planning process, now stretching out for nearly a year, that involves an ever-shifting cast of characters, embraces and then swiftly rejects differing visions, and calls for repeated consultations with the citizens — and still produces no plan.
The longer the city is without a master plan, the shakier the fate of the ruined neighborhoods, some planners say. The need will become even greater in a few days, when $7.5 billion in federal housing aid begins putting up to $150,000 in the hands of thousands of homeowners hoping to rebuild.
“It is highly probable that there would be many neighborhoods, with block after block of one or two houses restored, surrounded by vacant abandoned houses, no police stations, no services, low water pressure, an unsafe and unhealthy environment,” said John McIlwain, a senior planner at the Urban Land Institute, the Washington research group whose early plan for a shrunken city was rejected by the politicians here.
Publicly, Mr. Nagin insists the city will come back stronger than ever, saying its repopulation is ahead of schedule even while more cautious demographers suggest it is lagging. Rejecting the idea that New Orleans must shrink, he says City Hall will not dictate where citizens can live.
“You can’t wait on government,” Mr. Nagin said at a news conference here this week. “You have to figure out a way to partner with your neighbors.”
Mr. Nagin has endorsed the current version of the planning process, in which neighborhoods map out their own future — so far only a tiny handful of the city’s 73 districts have done so — and the individual plans eventually merge into a larger one. This week the mayor blamed unnamed “powers that be” for a flow of recovery dollars he deemed “painfully slow.”
A Fervor for Change
The one constant is the determination of people to rebuild. For good and ill, it has been demonstrated over and over since the earliest days after the catastrophe. It was present last month at a meeting of citizens in Broadmoor, packed into a church for the unveiling of the neighborhood’s reconstruction plan.
“Nobody is going to tell Broadmoor what to do except the people who live and work in Broadmoor!” one organizer, Harold Roark, said to great applause. Yet the citizens had to walk past piles of fly-covered garbage bags spilling out their contents just to enter the building.
The mix of reaching and realism was typical of present-day New Orleans. Crime, blight, abandonment: none of it was ignored. At the same time there was a call for “an educational and cultural corridor” in the neighborhood’s heart, a scene about as easy to imagine in that battered district as Versailles in the middle of the grimy 4200 block of South Galvez Street in the Broadmoor neighborhood.
Yet reaching high is critical to the collective survival strategy being worked out here. It is a way of pushing beyond the often grim quotidian reality. The psychology was evident in the grass-roots-driven insurgency that put a handful of self-proclaimed reformers on the seven-member City Council in last spring’s elections. Three incumbents were defeated.
Two newcomers, in particular, have already stirred things up, asking probing questions during sleepy Council meetings where rhetoric has traditionally predominated over substance. Shelley Midura, a former Foreign Service officer, has pushed for an inspector general and a board of ethics in City Hall, to combat endemic corruption. A majority appears to be in favor.
Stacy Head, a youthful lawyer also elected this spring, has been as high-profile in her central New Orleans district as the woman she defeated was invisible. (The incumbent she defeated, a protégé of the scandal-plagued Representative William J. Jefferson, is herself under federal investigation.) Ms. Head is now a ubiquitous presence in the city, asking questions of citizens and, unusually for a New Orleans politician, appearing at crime scenes, fires and community meetings.
A big test will come soon when the Council considers overhauling the day-to-day planning process, taking most decisions out of political hands — their own — and putting them under the purview of professional planners. That change was accomplished a century ago in most other places. But the old system has held on in New Orleans, with serious implications for orderly reconstruction of the ruined neighborhoods and equitable preservation of those that are not.
“I don’t want this power,” Ms. Head said. “This is horrible. I don’t like that responsibility. I think it should lie with the planners.”
Ms. Midura said she intended to champion the proposal, made by the Bureau of Governmental Research, and so far had not heard opposition to it.
Mr. Borah, the citizen activist, said, “Unless you get that right, nothing else is going to work.”
For years, a similar argument has been made about the disastrous public schools here, the worst performing in a state of underachievers, relentlessly preyed on by a corrupt district office. Hurricane Katrina upended the school landscape. Of 56 schools set to open this summer — there were 128 before the storm — 34 will be self-governing charter schools, a development that has given hope to parents and principals for the first time in years.
Parents and teachers throughout New Orleans worked feverishly to get a handful of schools up and running earlier this year; at the charters, parents control the money, taking charge of contracts, an area ripe for abuse when they were under school district control. Beneath the stagnant surface of daily life here, so discouraging to residents and astonishing to visitors, there is unmistakable pressure for change.
“I see more movement in a positive direction than I had seen for many years before Katrina,” said Una Anderson, executive director of the New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative, which is focused on housing, and long a reform member of the school board.
Whether this movement will be enough to stave off the pessimists’ grim perspective is uncertain. Repeatedly, observers in and out of the city said the present juncture was critical to the city’s future. If the ferment stops, if the hopes of citizens dry up, the outlook for New Orleans could be dire indeed.
About a Hasidic area in Orange County, and its growth
Reverberations of a Baby Boom
By FERNANDA SANTOS
KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y., Aug. 22 — As the administrator of this village in southern Orange County, Gedalye Szegedin knows that much of his job revolves around a simple equation: the number of girls who get married is roughly equal to the number of new homes this community will need to accommodate its rapid growth.
Last year, Mr. Szegedin oversaw the construction of 200 houses and apartments, mostly on the outer-lying lots along the eastern edge of this 1.1-square-mile community, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave about 60 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. By the end of this year, he said, the village will most likely have 300 new homes.
“There are three religious tenets that drive our growth: our women don’t use birth control, they get married young and after they get married, they stay in Kiryas Joel and start a family,” Mr. Szegedin said.
“Our growth comes simply from the fact that our families have a lot of babies,” he added, “and we need to build homes to respond to the needs of our community.”
But developable land is a finite resource here, and not much of it is left. And as Kiryas Joel pushes up against its borders, nearby neighbors in the towns of Blooming Grove and Woodbury are moving aggressively to prevent the community from expanding by incorporating into villages of their own.
“We still have huge tracts of open land in Woodbury, and we want to keep it that way,” said Woodbury’s supervisor, John P. Burke, who grew up in the Bronx and moved to Orange County in 1969.
“We want to make sure that no outside community is able to completely transform the character and the look of our town,” he said. “If we need a village to do that, so be it.”
Kiryas Joel’s population leaped to 18,300 last year from 13,100 in 2000 and 7,400 in 1990, making it one of the fastest growing places in the state, according to the most recent estimates by the Census Bureau. For two years, developers and local officials have been searching for private parcels in surrounding communities, hoping to expand the village through annexation for the third time since it was incorporated in 1977 as an offshoot of the Satmar Hasidic sect of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
After its incorporation, most of the growth was driven by migration from New York City. But now, new arrivals are mostly babies and grooms coming to marry one of the local women.
Worried residents in Blooming Grove, which lies northwest of here, and Woodbury, which lies east, have voted overwhelmingly in the past two months to approve the creation of two new villages. State law allows villages to be established within towns and to set their own zoning regulations, and area officials say the new villages would be able to restrict the multifamily, high-density building that predominates in Kiryas Joel.
Many of the families in those towns also fled the crowded streets of New York City, moving here for the cleaner air, the safer communities and the open spaces, where the closest neighbor may not be so close.
“We’re hard-working people who decided to move up here to pay less taxes and enjoy the quietness of country,” said Garry Dugan, a retired New York City detective and the president of the South Blooming Grove Homeowners Association, the group that began the drive to create one of the villages.
“It’s a shame that it has come to us and them, but we feel like we had to form a village for no reason other than preserving our quality of life,” said Mr. Dugan, who has lived in Blooming Grove for 26 years. “This has nothing to do with their religion.”
It is not the first time that Kiryas Joel and its neighbors have clashed.
Over the years, there have been disputes — over a water pipeline Kiryas Joel sought to build, for example, and whether the state should pay for a school system for its disabled students. There was also an argument in 1986 when 600 Kiryas Joel boys refused to board school buses driven by women. (The drivers are now all men.)
The Satmar Hasidim share what they call a deep mystical connection to Kiryas Joel. They were led here by their founder, the Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, who saw in it the ideal place for his followers to raise large families away from the influences of the outside world. Hence the name of the village, which means Town of Joel.
About 3,000 families live here, many of them in boxy wood-frame homes built close to one another, with up to a dozen apartments stacked in four floors.
The village has no parks or public playgrounds, so children play with their colorful plastic toys on small front yards.
A network of sidewalks twirl across the village, so the women, who do not drive, are able to walk to the clinic and supermarket. Baby strollers seem to be everywhere: in the lobbies of buildings, on sidewalks, outside the stores.
“This is a great place to raise our children; it’s easy to keep them away from the distractions of the city,” said Judith Greenfeld, 34, whose family moved here from Williamsburg two decades ago.
All but 3 of her 12 siblings live here.
Mrs. Greenfeld and her husband, Joseph, 35, have five children, three boys and two girls, ages 3 to 13. The median age is 15, compared with 35 for the nation, according to the 2000 census. The village has one of the lowest median ages among communities nationwide with more than 5,000 residents.
The Greenfelds live on a dead-end street, in a third-floor apartment across from a girls’ school. Like most families here, they speak more Yiddish than English and have no radio, computer or television at home. Mr. Greenfeld owns a tile shop in Monroe, just outside the village borders.
His wife helps him run the business, which makes her a rare exception among Kiryas Joel’s women, who are married soon after they graduate from high school, work until they give birth to their second child and then become stay-at-home mothers. The men, meanwhile, board yellow school buses every morning and ride to New York City, to jobs in the diamond district or at B & H, the photo and video store near Herald Square.
Because of the sheer size of the families (the average household here has six people, but it is not uncommon for couples to have 8 or 10 children), and because a vast majority of households subsist on only one salary, 62 percent of the local families live below poverty level and rely heavily on public assistance, which is another sore point among those who live in neighboring communities.
“We just don’t understand why they have to keep pushing their expansionist ideas on us,” said Charles J. Bohan, who is the supervisor of the Town of Blooming Grove and a resident of the new village, named South Blooming Grove.
On Sept. 21, South Blooming Grove will hold its first election for mayor and for a four-member board of trustees. The state must still certify the results of the vote to create the village in Woodbury before elections there can be held.
Mr. Szegedin, Kiryas Joel’s administrator, said his community was not deterred.
"We have several different developers that want to sell land to Kiryas Joel, but if they can’t do it, we can build up,” he said. “We can change our zoning code to allow high-rise apartments. The creation of these villages are not going to stop the growth in the village of Kiryas Joel."
Mrs. Greenfeld agreed.
“People don’t understand the conception of our people, of our religion,” she said. “There’s no government or land or any other authority that can stop us from having babies,” she said while her husband put out a plate of cheese blintzes, strawberries and sour cream.
“If there’s not enough land, families will double up. There’s always going to be room for the new families,” Mrs. Greenfeld said. “And if I have to slice up my apartment in two, I’ll do it, without doubt or hesitation.”
And, finally, one on designing secure places that aren't scarily so.
Cityscape of fear
American architecture is still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Critics and architects say that security now trumps design, as barricades and mall-like plazas are sucking the soul out of urban life.
By Farhad Manjoo
Aug. 22, 2006 | Within a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts set up a half dozen massive concrete freeway separators in a stately line across Josie Robertson Plaza, the complex's main outdoor entryway. The security barricades, unsightly white slabs known as Jersey barriers, were intended to protect the center's performance halls from a speeding truck bomb. Perhaps only the most unusually cultured of terrorists would want to hit Lincoln Center, which sits five miles north of ground zero on the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- but in the tense aftermath of the attacks, no precaution seemed too much. Lincoln Center groundskeepers thoughtfully topped the Jersey barriers with colorful potted plants, a rehabilitation technique along the lines of pinning a tiara on Medusa. Almost five years have passed since the attacks. The barriers remain in place.
To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you'll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. Outside Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal, garish purple planters menace rush-hour pedestrian traffic. The gigantic planters have abandoned all horticultural ambition, many of them blooming with nothing more than trash and untilled dirt. "French barriers," steel-grate barricades meant for controlling crowds, ring many landmark sites -- including San Francisco's Transamerica Building -- like beefy bodyguards protecting starlets. Then there are the bollards, the cylindrical vehicle-blocking posts that are so pervasive you wonder if they've mastered asexual reproduction. In Washington, bollards surround everything. Not since Confederate Gen. Jubal Early attacked the city in 1864 has the nation's capital felt so under siege.
It's not just the barriers, it's also the buildings. Since 9/11, risk consultants working for police departments, federal agencies and insurance companies have wrested control over many new construction plans. "There's a sense that security experts are acting as the associate architects on every project built today," says Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New Yorker. Consultants tend to encourage architectural bulk at the expense of grace. As a prime example, Goldberger points to the Freedom Tower, the skyscraper at the center of the proposed new Trade Center site. After the New York Police Department determined that an early design was vulnerable to truck bombs, the building's architect, David Childs, of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was forced to move the structure far back from the street, and to turn its lower 20 stories into a windowless reinforced concrete pedestal covered in glass. "It's a pretty grim piece of architecture," Goldberger says of the tower. "It doesn't advertise freedom to the world, it advertises fear."
Goldberger's assessment jibes with designers' larger worry over what we're losing in cities changed by 9/11. Security measures, they say, are undoing the many pleasures and functions of urban life. You don't need to have studied Jane Jacobs to understand that what's best about a city is often to be found on or just off sidewalks, in the dense, chaotic and free interplay between people and buildings. This may sound high-minded and theoretical. But by pushing people tightly together in small spaces, cities naturally increase the possibility of social intercourse. Merely strolling down a sidewalk in New York requires and instills more tolerance for other people than you're likely to need or learn during a year of life in an Atlanta exurb. Cultural theorist Marshall Berman, author of "On the Town," and other books on New York, adds that after 9/11, "the bonds of civil society were strenghthened in New York." He believes that now, in an era of low crime, New York feels more united than at any time in the recent past.
But others fear that security measures may be inhibiting urban connections. Setting buildings far back from the street, placing them atop concrete blast shields, crowding sidewalks with barricades, constantly screening people as they enter or exit buildings, electronically surveilling them at every waking moment -- these measures push us apart and foster our fears and suspicions. The effect is physical as well as psychic. Goldberger points out that you used to be able to walk around Manhattan, both on the sidewalks and through the lobbies of large buildings, without showing any credentials. Today that's nearly impossible because entering nearly every building requires passing through a security checkpoint. The checkpoint culture weighs on the soul, reminding us at every point that we live in a dangerous time, and that anyone we see might seek to do us harm.
Many progressive architects argue that this is not how it has to be, and they've come up with thoughtful designs that accommodate legitimate security concerns without giving in to our worst nightmares. "Architecture has always elevated our society in times of distress, and always spoken to a sense of great social optimism," says Tim Christ, an architect at the Santa Monica firm Morphosis, which has won acclaim for the way it has balanced safety and beauty in its public projects, including the enormous new federal building in San Francisco. In New York, in particular, select firms are striving to incorporate the new security mandates into their designs in innovative ways. But conquering fear is difficult, and architects, whose creations will remain on the planet for decades to come, are divided on whether they can succeed. The 9/11 attacks put our cities on the front lines of a new war. Can we keep them from looking like battlefields?
Jersey barriers have no natural business on city sidewalks. That's not just because they're ugly -- they also do nothing to halt attacks. The barriers, which were designed as lane separators by New Jersey's state Highway Authority in 1955, are intended to be placed on roads parallel to the direction in which cars are traveling. A vehicle that nudges too close to the barrier will ride up its tapered edge and slide back onto the road, suffering minimal damage. But placed the opposite way -- in front of a building to protect against oncoming attack -- a Jersey barrier is no match for a fast car or truck. In crash tests, speeding vehicles that hit the barriers at obtuse angles simply knock them over or vault over them straight at the target.
In their rush to beef up security after 9/11, however, few building operators thought much about the aesthetic or practical shortcomings of such barriers. There was no time for such high-minded introspection -- buildings needed to install something quickly, and Jersey barriers were all they had. Betsy Vorce, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, says that no one at Lincoln Center considers the plant-topped barriers to be a statement of the center's design sensibility. As part of an overall renovation, the complex is currently looking for a permanent replacement for the Jersey barriers, but it hadn't given much thought to design of the barricades until recently. In an emergency, Vorce points out, "security is the paramount consideration."
But in a never-ending war, it's never quite clear when the emergency is over. After the 9/11 attacks, especially in New York and Washington, there wasn't exactly a moment in time when people could decide that the situation was now finally safe and that the barriers could come down. So they stayed up, and not just at Lincoln Center.
In the days after 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange, about a half-mile south of the World Trade Center, decided to limit vehicular traffic on the streets that run past the building. Officials blocked off the seven intersections surrounding the Exchange using a jury-rigged combination of Jersey barriers, traffic cones, bright fences and sandbag-laden pickup trucks. The barricade system looked ad hoc and temporary, like checkpoints you might see in war-torn cities in the Middle East. But the system wasn't temporary at all. It stayed in place for four years.
Living and working in a militarized cityscape is a toxic affair. The blocked-off intersections surrounding the Stock Exchange suggested a city that had barricaded itself inside its own worst fears. In 2004, business tenants in the Financial District began threatening to leave because their employees had grown weary of the indignity of spending time in such a dreary wasteland. "It wasn't just the perception but the reality that this place was a target that had everbody on edge," says Noah Pfefferblit, president of Wall Street Rising, a nonprofit neighborhood group in lower Manhattan. Residents no longer wanted to be constantly reminded of the dangers they faced "by seeing a visually overwhelming security presence." City planning authorities finally stepped in to save the Financial District; they selected a TriBeCa firm called Rogers Marvel to come up with a new way to protect the area.
I took a walk through the district on a recent sweltering weekday afternoon. The Stock Exchange continues to block vehicles at its surrounding intersections, but instead of idling pickups, the streets are now populated with giant sculptural boulders called NoGos. The NoGos, designed by Rogers Marvel, are blocks of heavy concrete covered in multifaceted boxes of shimmering bronze. They resemble a comic-book artist's take on a barricade, a playful and handsome gem whose actual purpose -- keeping a speeding truck laden with explosives from getting anywhere near the Stock Exchange -- is invisible to the public. In fact, people have found many uses for the barricades. At 2-and-a-half feet tall, a NoGo makes an ideal seat. Suited Wall Street types crowd about the NoGos at lunchtime and kids climb and stretch on them as if they were a downtown jungle gym.
Like other architects who've been working to design better ways of securing public sites, Jonathan Marvel is wary of providing many details about his firm's projects. But he is keen to discuss why, after 9/11, he became interested in working on security infrastructure. He says that as he looked out on the streets of New York in the months after the attacks, he began to sense that architects weren't being consulted about this newly crucial aspect to urban design. "Everybody within the design community is distressed by what's happening," Marvel says. "To navigate public space you have to meet a new threshold that wasn't there before. Everywhere is like the airport now -- the barriers, the lining up, the undressing. At the airport all that is an unfortunate necessity, but when you have to do it in a building, that's when -- as a designer and as a citizen -- I find it unacceptable."
Marvel describes today's increasingly barricaded streetscape as "a throwback to the Middle Ages, where there was a moat and drawbridge separating one side of society from the other." If Marvel was in business back then, he might have turned the moat into a fountain. His philosophy entails creating security devices whose true function isn't clear from their form, devices that, like those NoGos, also fill some other public purpose.
In Battery Park City, just across West Street from ground zero, and home to the World Financial Center, Marvel's firm reduced the threat of truck bombs simply by redesigning the streets surrounding the targeted buildings. On North End Avenue, the main thoroughfare leading to the WFC buildings, the firm proposed subtly raising parts of the roadbed and inserting sharp turns at strategic locations on the road. Not only did the new configuration force vehicles approaching the buildings to slow down -- which is important because a fast truck bomb can cause a lot more damage than a slow one -- reshaping the street also created a pedestrian walkway and a small park in the area.
Just outside the World Financial Center buildings, Rogers Marvel designed what the firm calls a Tiger Trap, a sidewalk plaza built on top of the kind of collapsible concrete used to stop runaway planes at airports. The concrete is strong enough for pedestrians to walk on but it crumbles under the weight of a truck. In tests, a Tiger Trap has stopped a 15,000 pound vehicle going at 50 miles per hour. But that capacity will remain completely invisible to people who visit the site.
In design circles, such innovative security efforts have gained prominence, and public agencies that wield the greatest influence in urban design -- such as the planning authorities in New York and Washington and the General Services Administration, which builds federal office buildings -- have begun to encourage permanent and elegant architectural responses to security threats.
In 2001, the National Capital Planning Commission rejected several bulky plans to protect the Washington Monument, including one proposal to surround the site with a ring of almost 400 bollards. Instead, the commission -- which had thrown up Jersey barriers at the monument after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, another temporary measure that had become permanent -- chose a brilliantly invisible plan by the Philadelphia landscape architecture firm Olin Partnership.
Olin proposed using an 18th century fortification called a ha-ha, a long, low wall sunken inside a trench used by European gardeners to keep animals corralled without visible fencing. Olin designed a series of granite ha-has along the pathways leading to the monument; the simple system, which keeps the site safe from vehicles in a way that's friendly to people, was installed in 2005.
"If we are going to remain a social culture, we have to allow people to live in an environment that is physically safe but isn't replete with physical barriers," says David Rubin, a partner at Olin. "There's a growing demand for that sophistication."
Others aren't so sanguine. Vishaan Chakrabarti, former director of the Manhattan office of New York Department of City Planning, says one problem with invisible security installations is that they often don't satisfy security consultants. "A lot of security folks are trained to believe that a place needs to look secure," Chakrabarti says. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of security infrastructure is that sometimes appearance can be more important than actual strength. A Tiger Trap is more effective at blocking a truck bomber than a Jersey barrier -- but a Jersey barrier looks more menacing. "Especially if you're a private entity, what you're trying to do is make your place look secure so the bad guys go next door," Chakrabarti explains. "The problem is the design and planning community is trying to make the stuff invisible -- they're trying to say, 'Let's make the NoGos as small as possible.' The security people might say, 'All right, technically, scientifically, that smaller thing may protect against the same level of threat as something bigger -- but it doesn't look as defensive.'"
Even sites that have been designed to cleverly address security, Chakrabarti says, are victims of security creep, a culture in which security officials keep putting up more NoGos, or increasing the perimeters around buildings, long after the designers have had their say. "What's difficult is that these things sort of require constant monitoring," Chakrabarti says. New emergencies throw any design asunder. In New York, "there was a big push for Jersey barriers during the Republican Convention," says Rick Adler, the founder of RSA Protective Technologies, a firm that designs perimeter security systems. "It was like half of the push after 9/11. People just put up anything they could."
For those who argue that security experts now trump architects in urban design decisions, the plans for the Freedom Tower constitute Exhibit A. Critics have long derided the design as too bland for the charged site, an uninspired mingling of the visions of two very different architects -- Skidmore's David Childs, whom the developer Larry Silverstein selected to work on the site, and Daniel Libeskind, who won a competition to become the master planer for ground zero. But it was in June 2005, when Childs unveiled a plan to satisfy the New York Police Department's assessment that a previous design was too vulnerable to truck bombs, that the critical clamor rose to fever pitch.
To minimize the building's vulnerability to street-side explosion, Childs moved it away from its surrounding roads and sidewalks. The building will be set back an average of about 90 feet from West Street, the busiest thoroughfare running past the site. Childs also changed the manner in which the tower meets the ground, converting the previous designs' inviting entryway into a 200-foot-tall podium constructed of reinforced concrete. The concrete base would serve as a blast shield surrounding the lobby; there would be some openings to let in light at its higher edges, but it would primarily be unadorned of windows. Tenants would work high up above the lobby, far out of a truck bomber's way. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times' architecture critic, wrote that the plan represented "exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world."
Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, told me that he thinks much of the criticism was premature. The concrete base the firm unveiled in 2005 was never supposed to be the final plan; architects had always meant to dress the Freedom Tower's pedestal in something more attractive. A few months ago, they did just that, proposing to clad the building in panels of glass prisms that would shimmer in sunlight. The laminated glass would also be safe for occupants -- in the event of a blast, it would shatter into tiny harmless pieces, much like a car's windshield.
Galioto believes the new glass-clad base will make the Freedom Tower both exceedingly safe and habitable. He says the design shows that the terrorist attacks haven't changed architecture so much as they changed "the practice of architecture." The best architects, he says, will find ways to create beauty within the new constraints. As an example, he points to the new Seven World Trade Center, also designed by his colleague David Childs.
Tower 7 does seem to stand as a monument to the possibility of realizing grace in a grim world. The original 47-story granite-and-glass building that stood across Vesey Street from the Trade Towers disappeared into the ground at 5:21 p.m. on 9/11. The new tower, which opened in May, is an elegant glass parallelogram that now dominates ground zero. Like the Freedom Tower, 7 also sits atop an enormous concrete vault (it's not there for blast resistance but because it houses a Con Edison substation that powers much of Lower Manhattan). But from the street, the concrete isn't visible. Childs has covered the base with handsome stainless steel panels designed by the celebrated TriBeCa designer James Carpenter. Carpenter also designed the tower's exterior glass cladding, which surrounds its office space from the eighth story to the top. He chose glass that's low in iron and coated with an anti-reflective material that keeps out radiant heat; the glass is so transparent that at certain hours, when the sun hangs low on the horizon, Tower 7's walls seem to disappear, and you can see through entire floors of the building.
But what's most striking about 7, considering its location, is its pronounced ordinariness. Inside, the building has been outfitted with a thick concrete core to protect its elevators and stairwells in the case of attack. Compared to the previous WTC towers, it's got wider stairwells for emergency egress, and its floors are protected by a much thicker layer of fireproofing. Its designers call it the "safest office building in America." But from the outside, you can't tell any of this. "One of the best things about it is that it looks like many other elegant, sophisticated glass office buildings rather than like something different," says Goldberger. "I think it's a very nice building."
But Tower 7 doesn't eliminate all of Goldberger's concerns about the site, or about the way urban design has been corrupted by security. He concedes that Childs' new plan to surround the Freedom Tower's base in glass mitigates the harshness of the concrete pedestal, but he points out that it "doesn't deal with one of the key problems of all those designs, which is that they're set back so far from the street that the whole nature of a civilized street life is all wiped away."
Many designers and planners agree that the practice of setting new buildings back from the street is one of the most troubling security impositions. In "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs told of the "intricate sidewalk ballet" that characterized the stretch of Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, where she lived in the 1960s. The ballet involved locksmiths, shopkeepers, butchers, longshoremen, teenagers, tailors, toddlers -- people of all stripes whose everyday interactions on the packed street, she argued, provoked a sense of "casual public trust" in the community. Today's security installations reduce our chance encounters on the street and risk breaking our casual public bonds.
"Cities basically operate off their street life, and if buildings become just big blank walls because people are afraid of the street, it's fundamentally contradictory to what cities are all about," Chakrabarti says. He adds: "You look at the charts that a lot of security people use and they'll say, 'The building has to be X-hundred feet from the street.' You start thinking about that en masse and what you're talking about is the suburbs. That kind of thinking, when it starts becoming cumulative, could really endanger something that we really want and need, which is a dense urban environment."
Architects, like many artists, are by nature a contemplative and slightly anxious lot, and some are given to exaggeration over the actual practical difficulties imposed by post-9/11 security measures; where you or I might see only a line of ugly Jersey barriers or buildings inhospitably far away from the street, a designer will see the seeds of civic destruction. It is, in other words, possible to get carried away in this analysis, and Chakrabarti, for one, understands that setting back some new buildings in the city isn't going to turn New York into a suburb. Moreover, in the case of the World Trade Center site, setbacks won't be anything new. As Goldberger has pointed out, 16 acres of lower Manhattan in 1968 were destroyed to create the "superblock" upon which the original World Trade Center was set. Ground zero's new design will restore the streets eliminated then -- therefore we might see more street-side interaction in the new design because it adds streets to the map.
A few designers even point out that moving buildings away from streets can make for a nice addition to cities. Barbara Nadel, a New York architect who edited a volume called "Building Security: Handbook for Architectural Planning and Design," says that if they're designed cleverly, plazas built in the spaces created by set-back buildings might become useful open areas in otherwise too densely packed metropolises. Right now in many cities, she says, "there's not enough open space where you can sit down and have a lunch or take in the sun." When you push a building away from the sidewalk, you create precisely such an area.
In renderings showing a street view of the future Freedom Tower, the building's concrete base is surrounded by a large plaza topped with trees, steps and a fountain. If you're working in downtown New York one day 10 years from now, the steps might be a nice place to stop and have a burrito. On the other hand, you can see in this picture the cause of architects' fears. The plaza is surrounded by a line of vehicle-blocking posts that resemble tombstones, and you've got to climb a mountain of stairs to get to the building, barricaded against the street.
And this illustrates the main flaw in using architecture as a tool to fight terrorism -- we're building structures that may last forever but are frozen around our present-day fears. Architecture is an art form of anticipation, the challenge of building structures that will continue to be meaningful and useful in the decades and centuries to come. Truck bombs, on the other hand, are an acutely modern phenomenon. "There's a tendency right now to design out of fear of the last generation of terrorism," Goldberger argues. "The reality is terrorists are very smart, they're way ahead of us. And yet we're still worrying about truck bombs and giving up so much of what is important to us."
Certainly we can make buildings that are easier to escape from during disaster, or that are less vulnerable to total collapse, Chakrabarti says. But architecture is ultimately a weak defense against terrorism. "As soon as you get into the notion of people flying planes into buildings," he says, "you're talking about a scale of madness against which architecture should not be the line of defense."
On the probably rebuilding of New Orleans
Outlines Emerge for a Shaken New Orleans
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 26 — At one edge of this city’s future are the extravagant visions of its boosters. Awash in federal cash, the New Orleans they dream of will be an arts-infused mecca for youthful risk-takers, a boomtown where entrepreneurs can repair to cool French Quarter bars in ancient buildings after a hard day of deal making.
At the other extreme are the gloomy predictions of the pessimists. New Orleans will be Detroit, they say, a sickly urban wasteland abandoned by the middle class. A moldering core will be surrounded by miles of vacant houses, with wide-open neighborhoods roamed by drug dealers and other criminals. The new New Orleans will be merely a grim amplification of its present unpromising self, the pessimists say.
Somewhere between these unrealistic visions lies a glimpse of the city’s real future a year after Hurricane Katrina, say many planners, demographers and others here who have been deeply involved in rebuilding. Like a half-completed drawing in a child’s coloring book, the picture is starting to fill in. There are shadows and firmer outlines, a few promising, some of them menacing.
New Orleans will almost certainly be smaller than it was. Repopulation has slowed to a trickle, leaving the city with well under half its prestorm population of 460,000. It will probably have fewer poor people; its housing projects remain essentially closed, and many poorer neighborhoods are still devastated. With inexpensive housing scarce and not being built, partly because of the paralysis in recovery planning, it is easier for the middle class than the poor to return.
New Orleans, the demographers think, has begun to shrink back to its historic dimensions, the ones that existed before a post-World War II expansion through the back swamps, and the ones that visitors know best. Life in the smaller city will be concentrated in the mostly middle-class districts closer to the Mississippi River that bounced back after the storm. Some of these districts were unaffected by flooding; already they bustle with commerce.
No area is officially off the table for redevelopment. But the silence and emptiness of outlying neighborhoods near Lake Pontchartrain and in east New Orleans appear to be harbingers of the future.
“I think people will get discouraged, and some of those areas will not be rebuilt,” said Pres Kabacoff, a leading developer here.
Within these more concentrated neighborhoods, it will be somewhat whiter, though still mostly black over all. The electorate was 57 percent black in last spring’s mayoral runoff; before the storm it was typically in the low 60’s.
Neighborhoods ruined now will probably shrivel further, planning experts say.
The Lower Ninth Ward, still a barren wasteland, is unlikely to be rebuilt anytime soon, if at all. Gentilly, a classic 1920’s and 30’s New Orleans neighborhood of Arts and Crafts-style stucco houses with wide overhanging eaves, is coming back only fitfully, with a few trailers visible in front yards of once-flooded houses. Tremé, with its 19th-century Creole cottages and shotgun houses, across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, is being reclaimed, but abandonment alternates with revival, as is the case throughout the city.
These uncertain indicators yield to a more hopeful one: a wave of citizen activism in the wake of the storm that is chipping away at some of this city’s unhealthy institutions. It has already toppled some of the old structures that helped cement prestorm New Orleans in poverty and despair.
The schools, a dysfunctional catastrophe before the storm, have been removed from the control of a corrupt district office; just under two-thirds are now in the hands of parents and community activists as charter schools. (Students not admitted to charters, however, will have to attend a state-run school district rife with problems.)
The City Council is under the influence of impatient newcomers pledging reform and pushing for tighter ethics. They are threatening to dismantle a feudal means of resolving everyday planning disputes, long discarded elsewhere. The crippling fiscal structure, long a hurdle to raising adequate revenue in this impoverished city, is under assault. Voters will soon decide whether to throw out the balkanized system of seven district property assessors.
‘There’s a Lot of Uncertainty’
With government a light or invisible presence since the storm, citizens have taken matters into their own hands, whether to overhaul institutions, clean streets or resurrect the city’s parks. If there is to be a new New Orleans, its seeds are to be found in this low-intensity citizens’ revolution that has some people here credibly claiming to find promise among the ruins.
“There was a wall against ideas in New Orleans for years,” said William Borah, a veteran civic activist who helped defeat a proposed riverfront expressway here in the mid-1960’s. “That wall has been broken down.”
Still, under present conditions, hope requires faith. “Over all, it’s scary,” said Tim Williamson of the Idea Village, a local nonprofit organization that supports small business. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
Oppressed by the midsummer heat, this city is now traversing a bleak trough: the planners are still squabbling a year after the storm, forests of uncut weeds grow in the medians, and measurable progress is difficult to detect. St. Charles Avenue on a summer evening has an eerily empty feel; one plausible recent population count, based on Postal Service data, put the figure at 171,000, well below City Hall’s claim of 250,000. The population is thought to be roughly what it was around 1880.
From the living zone near the river, a trip north of any distance is sobering: blocks of sagging houses not so much empty as dead, and heaps of rubble and garbage with dogs and rats among them. At odd intervals, the occasional householder can be spotted on a porch, looking out with a furrowed brow, trying to make a go of it in the ruins.
New Orleans now, often rudderless, filthy and still deeply scarred by the storm, is hemorrhaging some of the people it can least afford to lose. In the professional classes, nearly half the doctors and three-fourths of the psychiatrists have left, the largest synagogue says its congregation is down by more than 10 percent, and a big local moving company reports a “mass evacuation.”
Tens of thousands in the African-American working-class backbone remain unable to return. They have been replaced by hundreds of Hispanic workers who have done much of the heavy lifting in the reconstruction, and live in rough conditions. In the meantime, the only thriving industry is the back-street drug trade, pessimists note.
The outside world is scared by New Orleans. Banks, for instance, are insisting on unusually high collateral in real estate deals, and for good reason, given a homicide rate that is double its prehurricane level and no guarantee that neighborhoods will return to life. Basic services — water, electricity, garbage pickup — are intermittent.
“Look at what we’re getting in terms of services,” said Janet Howard, of the Bureau of Governmental Research, an independent nonprofit group in New Orleans. “It’s basically a nonfunctioning city.”
City Hall, meanwhile, has settled back into its habitual easygoing rhythms; a well-placed insider there reported, with alarm, no sense of urgency among its officials. Mayor C. Ray Nagin was recently set to attend an opening at a French Quarter gallery of an exhibit of photographs — of himself, taken by his personal photographer. A public outcry this month forced him to cancel plans for a fireworks display and a “comedy show” to commemorate Hurricane Katrina’s first anniversary tomorrow.
Lacking a Master Plan
With little direction from the top, long-term planning for the city’s future remains incoherent. A year after the storm, there are no plans for large-scale infrastructure and redevelopment in the city. One group of official planners took the step of attacking a second group in a full-page advertisement in The Times-Picayune this month, even warning citizens to stay away from its rivals.
The absence of a plan has forced developers, who might otherwise be building housing for the displaced, to the sidelines. “The developers, they want to know what the plan is,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
The latest notion, after earlier false or incomplete starts, is to turn planning over to the citizens, allowing neighborhoods to choose from a list of planners, with the hope that at the end it can all be folded into one giant framework. It was pushed by state officials holding the redevelopment purse strings who grew impatient this summer with the city’s abortive planning efforts.
In the neighborhoods, New Orleanians are skeptical. “Why does it seem that every time someone swoops in to help us, it winds up being a mess?” asked Jenel Hazlett, of the Northwest Carrollton Civic Association, a neighborhood group. “They keep moving the players around, and we as citizens keep getting jerked around.”
Like others, Ms. Hazlett professes bewilderment at a planning process, now stretching out for nearly a year, that involves an ever-shifting cast of characters, embraces and then swiftly rejects differing visions, and calls for repeated consultations with the citizens — and still produces no plan.
The longer the city is without a master plan, the shakier the fate of the ruined neighborhoods, some planners say. The need will become even greater in a few days, when $7.5 billion in federal housing aid begins putting up to $150,000 in the hands of thousands of homeowners hoping to rebuild.
“It is highly probable that there would be many neighborhoods, with block after block of one or two houses restored, surrounded by vacant abandoned houses, no police stations, no services, low water pressure, an unsafe and unhealthy environment,” said John McIlwain, a senior planner at the Urban Land Institute, the Washington research group whose early plan for a shrunken city was rejected by the politicians here.
Publicly, Mr. Nagin insists the city will come back stronger than ever, saying its repopulation is ahead of schedule even while more cautious demographers suggest it is lagging. Rejecting the idea that New Orleans must shrink, he says City Hall will not dictate where citizens can live.
“You can’t wait on government,” Mr. Nagin said at a news conference here this week. “You have to figure out a way to partner with your neighbors.”
Mr. Nagin has endorsed the current version of the planning process, in which neighborhoods map out their own future — so far only a tiny handful of the city’s 73 districts have done so — and the individual plans eventually merge into a larger one. This week the mayor blamed unnamed “powers that be” for a flow of recovery dollars he deemed “painfully slow.”
A Fervor for Change
The one constant is the determination of people to rebuild. For good and ill, it has been demonstrated over and over since the earliest days after the catastrophe. It was present last month at a meeting of citizens in Broadmoor, packed into a church for the unveiling of the neighborhood’s reconstruction plan.
“Nobody is going to tell Broadmoor what to do except the people who live and work in Broadmoor!” one organizer, Harold Roark, said to great applause. Yet the citizens had to walk past piles of fly-covered garbage bags spilling out their contents just to enter the building.
The mix of reaching and realism was typical of present-day New Orleans. Crime, blight, abandonment: none of it was ignored. At the same time there was a call for “an educational and cultural corridor” in the neighborhood’s heart, a scene about as easy to imagine in that battered district as Versailles in the middle of the grimy 4200 block of South Galvez Street in the Broadmoor neighborhood.
Yet reaching high is critical to the collective survival strategy being worked out here. It is a way of pushing beyond the often grim quotidian reality. The psychology was evident in the grass-roots-driven insurgency that put a handful of self-proclaimed reformers on the seven-member City Council in last spring’s elections. Three incumbents were defeated.
Two newcomers, in particular, have already stirred things up, asking probing questions during sleepy Council meetings where rhetoric has traditionally predominated over substance. Shelley Midura, a former Foreign Service officer, has pushed for an inspector general and a board of ethics in City Hall, to combat endemic corruption. A majority appears to be in favor.
Stacy Head, a youthful lawyer also elected this spring, has been as high-profile in her central New Orleans district as the woman she defeated was invisible. (The incumbent she defeated, a protégé of the scandal-plagued Representative William J. Jefferson, is herself under federal investigation.) Ms. Head is now a ubiquitous presence in the city, asking questions of citizens and, unusually for a New Orleans politician, appearing at crime scenes, fires and community meetings.
A big test will come soon when the Council considers overhauling the day-to-day planning process, taking most decisions out of political hands — their own — and putting them under the purview of professional planners. That change was accomplished a century ago in most other places. But the old system has held on in New Orleans, with serious implications for orderly reconstruction of the ruined neighborhoods and equitable preservation of those that are not.
“I don’t want this power,” Ms. Head said. “This is horrible. I don’t like that responsibility. I think it should lie with the planners.”
Ms. Midura said she intended to champion the proposal, made by the Bureau of Governmental Research, and so far had not heard opposition to it.
Mr. Borah, the citizen activist, said, “Unless you get that right, nothing else is going to work.”
For years, a similar argument has been made about the disastrous public schools here, the worst performing in a state of underachievers, relentlessly preyed on by a corrupt district office. Hurricane Katrina upended the school landscape. Of 56 schools set to open this summer — there were 128 before the storm — 34 will be self-governing charter schools, a development that has given hope to parents and principals for the first time in years.
Parents and teachers throughout New Orleans worked feverishly to get a handful of schools up and running earlier this year; at the charters, parents control the money, taking charge of contracts, an area ripe for abuse when they were under school district control. Beneath the stagnant surface of daily life here, so discouraging to residents and astonishing to visitors, there is unmistakable pressure for change.
“I see more movement in a positive direction than I had seen for many years before Katrina,” said Una Anderson, executive director of the New Orleans Neighborhood Development Collaborative, which is focused on housing, and long a reform member of the school board.
Whether this movement will be enough to stave off the pessimists’ grim perspective is uncertain. Repeatedly, observers in and out of the city said the present juncture was critical to the city’s future. If the ferment stops, if the hopes of citizens dry up, the outlook for New Orleans could be dire indeed.
About a Hasidic area in Orange County, and its growth
Reverberations of a Baby Boom
By FERNANDA SANTOS
KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y., Aug. 22 — As the administrator of this village in southern Orange County, Gedalye Szegedin knows that much of his job revolves around a simple equation: the number of girls who get married is roughly equal to the number of new homes this community will need to accommodate its rapid growth.
Last year, Mr. Szegedin oversaw the construction of 200 houses and apartments, mostly on the outer-lying lots along the eastern edge of this 1.1-square-mile community, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave about 60 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. By the end of this year, he said, the village will most likely have 300 new homes.
“There are three religious tenets that drive our growth: our women don’t use birth control, they get married young and after they get married, they stay in Kiryas Joel and start a family,” Mr. Szegedin said.
“Our growth comes simply from the fact that our families have a lot of babies,” he added, “and we need to build homes to respond to the needs of our community.”
But developable land is a finite resource here, and not much of it is left. And as Kiryas Joel pushes up against its borders, nearby neighbors in the towns of Blooming Grove and Woodbury are moving aggressively to prevent the community from expanding by incorporating into villages of their own.
“We still have huge tracts of open land in Woodbury, and we want to keep it that way,” said Woodbury’s supervisor, John P. Burke, who grew up in the Bronx and moved to Orange County in 1969.
“We want to make sure that no outside community is able to completely transform the character and the look of our town,” he said. “If we need a village to do that, so be it.”
Kiryas Joel’s population leaped to 18,300 last year from 13,100 in 2000 and 7,400 in 1990, making it one of the fastest growing places in the state, according to the most recent estimates by the Census Bureau. For two years, developers and local officials have been searching for private parcels in surrounding communities, hoping to expand the village through annexation for the third time since it was incorporated in 1977 as an offshoot of the Satmar Hasidic sect of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
After its incorporation, most of the growth was driven by migration from New York City. But now, new arrivals are mostly babies and grooms coming to marry one of the local women.
Worried residents in Blooming Grove, which lies northwest of here, and Woodbury, which lies east, have voted overwhelmingly in the past two months to approve the creation of two new villages. State law allows villages to be established within towns and to set their own zoning regulations, and area officials say the new villages would be able to restrict the multifamily, high-density building that predominates in Kiryas Joel.
Many of the families in those towns also fled the crowded streets of New York City, moving here for the cleaner air, the safer communities and the open spaces, where the closest neighbor may not be so close.
“We’re hard-working people who decided to move up here to pay less taxes and enjoy the quietness of country,” said Garry Dugan, a retired New York City detective and the president of the South Blooming Grove Homeowners Association, the group that began the drive to create one of the villages.
“It’s a shame that it has come to us and them, but we feel like we had to form a village for no reason other than preserving our quality of life,” said Mr. Dugan, who has lived in Blooming Grove for 26 years. “This has nothing to do with their religion.”
It is not the first time that Kiryas Joel and its neighbors have clashed.
Over the years, there have been disputes — over a water pipeline Kiryas Joel sought to build, for example, and whether the state should pay for a school system for its disabled students. There was also an argument in 1986 when 600 Kiryas Joel boys refused to board school buses driven by women. (The drivers are now all men.)
The Satmar Hasidim share what they call a deep mystical connection to Kiryas Joel. They were led here by their founder, the Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, who saw in it the ideal place for his followers to raise large families away from the influences of the outside world. Hence the name of the village, which means Town of Joel.
About 3,000 families live here, many of them in boxy wood-frame homes built close to one another, with up to a dozen apartments stacked in four floors.
The village has no parks or public playgrounds, so children play with their colorful plastic toys on small front yards.
A network of sidewalks twirl across the village, so the women, who do not drive, are able to walk to the clinic and supermarket. Baby strollers seem to be everywhere: in the lobbies of buildings, on sidewalks, outside the stores.
“This is a great place to raise our children; it’s easy to keep them away from the distractions of the city,” said Judith Greenfeld, 34, whose family moved here from Williamsburg two decades ago.
All but 3 of her 12 siblings live here.
Mrs. Greenfeld and her husband, Joseph, 35, have five children, three boys and two girls, ages 3 to 13. The median age is 15, compared with 35 for the nation, according to the 2000 census. The village has one of the lowest median ages among communities nationwide with more than 5,000 residents.
The Greenfelds live on a dead-end street, in a third-floor apartment across from a girls’ school. Like most families here, they speak more Yiddish than English and have no radio, computer or television at home. Mr. Greenfeld owns a tile shop in Monroe, just outside the village borders.
His wife helps him run the business, which makes her a rare exception among Kiryas Joel’s women, who are married soon after they graduate from high school, work until they give birth to their second child and then become stay-at-home mothers. The men, meanwhile, board yellow school buses every morning and ride to New York City, to jobs in the diamond district or at B & H, the photo and video store near Herald Square.
Because of the sheer size of the families (the average household here has six people, but it is not uncommon for couples to have 8 or 10 children), and because a vast majority of households subsist on only one salary, 62 percent of the local families live below poverty level and rely heavily on public assistance, which is another sore point among those who live in neighboring communities.
“We just don’t understand why they have to keep pushing their expansionist ideas on us,” said Charles J. Bohan, who is the supervisor of the Town of Blooming Grove and a resident of the new village, named South Blooming Grove.
On Sept. 21, South Blooming Grove will hold its first election for mayor and for a four-member board of trustees. The state must still certify the results of the vote to create the village in Woodbury before elections there can be held.
Mr. Szegedin, Kiryas Joel’s administrator, said his community was not deterred.
"We have several different developers that want to sell land to Kiryas Joel, but if they can’t do it, we can build up,” he said. “We can change our zoning code to allow high-rise apartments. The creation of these villages are not going to stop the growth in the village of Kiryas Joel."
Mrs. Greenfeld agreed.
“People don’t understand the conception of our people, of our religion,” she said. “There’s no government or land or any other authority that can stop us from having babies,” she said while her husband put out a plate of cheese blintzes, strawberries and sour cream.
“If there’s not enough land, families will double up. There’s always going to be room for the new families,” Mrs. Greenfeld said. “And if I have to slice up my apartment in two, I’ll do it, without doubt or hesitation.”
And, finally, one on designing secure places that aren't scarily so.
Cityscape of fear
American architecture is still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Critics and architects say that security now trumps design, as barricades and mall-like plazas are sucking the soul out of urban life.
By Farhad Manjoo
Aug. 22, 2006 | Within a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts set up a half dozen massive concrete freeway separators in a stately line across Josie Robertson Plaza, the complex's main outdoor entryway. The security barricades, unsightly white slabs known as Jersey barriers, were intended to protect the center's performance halls from a speeding truck bomb. Perhaps only the most unusually cultured of terrorists would want to hit Lincoln Center, which sits five miles north of ground zero on the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- but in the tense aftermath of the attacks, no precaution seemed too much. Lincoln Center groundskeepers thoughtfully topped the Jersey barriers with colorful potted plants, a rehabilitation technique along the lines of pinning a tiara on Medusa. Almost five years have passed since the attacks. The barriers remain in place.
To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you'll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. Outside Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal, garish purple planters menace rush-hour pedestrian traffic. The gigantic planters have abandoned all horticultural ambition, many of them blooming with nothing more than trash and untilled dirt. "French barriers," steel-grate barricades meant for controlling crowds, ring many landmark sites -- including San Francisco's Transamerica Building -- like beefy bodyguards protecting starlets. Then there are the bollards, the cylindrical vehicle-blocking posts that are so pervasive you wonder if they've mastered asexual reproduction. In Washington, bollards surround everything. Not since Confederate Gen. Jubal Early attacked the city in 1864 has the nation's capital felt so under siege.
It's not just the barriers, it's also the buildings. Since 9/11, risk consultants working for police departments, federal agencies and insurance companies have wrested control over many new construction plans. "There's a sense that security experts are acting as the associate architects on every project built today," says Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New Yorker. Consultants tend to encourage architectural bulk at the expense of grace. As a prime example, Goldberger points to the Freedom Tower, the skyscraper at the center of the proposed new Trade Center site. After the New York Police Department determined that an early design was vulnerable to truck bombs, the building's architect, David Childs, of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was forced to move the structure far back from the street, and to turn its lower 20 stories into a windowless reinforced concrete pedestal covered in glass. "It's a pretty grim piece of architecture," Goldberger says of the tower. "It doesn't advertise freedom to the world, it advertises fear."
Goldberger's assessment jibes with designers' larger worry over what we're losing in cities changed by 9/11. Security measures, they say, are undoing the many pleasures and functions of urban life. You don't need to have studied Jane Jacobs to understand that what's best about a city is often to be found on or just off sidewalks, in the dense, chaotic and free interplay between people and buildings. This may sound high-minded and theoretical. But by pushing people tightly together in small spaces, cities naturally increase the possibility of social intercourse. Merely strolling down a sidewalk in New York requires and instills more tolerance for other people than you're likely to need or learn during a year of life in an Atlanta exurb. Cultural theorist Marshall Berman, author of "On the Town," and other books on New York, adds that after 9/11, "the bonds of civil society were strenghthened in New York." He believes that now, in an era of low crime, New York feels more united than at any time in the recent past.
But others fear that security measures may be inhibiting urban connections. Setting buildings far back from the street, placing them atop concrete blast shields, crowding sidewalks with barricades, constantly screening people as they enter or exit buildings, electronically surveilling them at every waking moment -- these measures push us apart and foster our fears and suspicions. The effect is physical as well as psychic. Goldberger points out that you used to be able to walk around Manhattan, both on the sidewalks and through the lobbies of large buildings, without showing any credentials. Today that's nearly impossible because entering nearly every building requires passing through a security checkpoint. The checkpoint culture weighs on the soul, reminding us at every point that we live in a dangerous time, and that anyone we see might seek to do us harm.
Many progressive architects argue that this is not how it has to be, and they've come up with thoughtful designs that accommodate legitimate security concerns without giving in to our worst nightmares. "Architecture has always elevated our society in times of distress, and always spoken to a sense of great social optimism," says Tim Christ, an architect at the Santa Monica firm Morphosis, which has won acclaim for the way it has balanced safety and beauty in its public projects, including the enormous new federal building in San Francisco. In New York, in particular, select firms are striving to incorporate the new security mandates into their designs in innovative ways. But conquering fear is difficult, and architects, whose creations will remain on the planet for decades to come, are divided on whether they can succeed. The 9/11 attacks put our cities on the front lines of a new war. Can we keep them from looking like battlefields?
Jersey barriers have no natural business on city sidewalks. That's not just because they're ugly -- they also do nothing to halt attacks. The barriers, which were designed as lane separators by New Jersey's state Highway Authority in 1955, are intended to be placed on roads parallel to the direction in which cars are traveling. A vehicle that nudges too close to the barrier will ride up its tapered edge and slide back onto the road, suffering minimal damage. But placed the opposite way -- in front of a building to protect against oncoming attack -- a Jersey barrier is no match for a fast car or truck. In crash tests, speeding vehicles that hit the barriers at obtuse angles simply knock them over or vault over them straight at the target.
In their rush to beef up security after 9/11, however, few building operators thought much about the aesthetic or practical shortcomings of such barriers. There was no time for such high-minded introspection -- buildings needed to install something quickly, and Jersey barriers were all they had. Betsy Vorce, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, says that no one at Lincoln Center considers the plant-topped barriers to be a statement of the center's design sensibility. As part of an overall renovation, the complex is currently looking for a permanent replacement for the Jersey barriers, but it hadn't given much thought to design of the barricades until recently. In an emergency, Vorce points out, "security is the paramount consideration."
But in a never-ending war, it's never quite clear when the emergency is over. After the 9/11 attacks, especially in New York and Washington, there wasn't exactly a moment in time when people could decide that the situation was now finally safe and that the barriers could come down. So they stayed up, and not just at Lincoln Center.
In the days after 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange, about a half-mile south of the World Trade Center, decided to limit vehicular traffic on the streets that run past the building. Officials blocked off the seven intersections surrounding the Exchange using a jury-rigged combination of Jersey barriers, traffic cones, bright fences and sandbag-laden pickup trucks. The barricade system looked ad hoc and temporary, like checkpoints you might see in war-torn cities in the Middle East. But the system wasn't temporary at all. It stayed in place for four years.
Living and working in a militarized cityscape is a toxic affair. The blocked-off intersections surrounding the Stock Exchange suggested a city that had barricaded itself inside its own worst fears. In 2004, business tenants in the Financial District began threatening to leave because their employees had grown weary of the indignity of spending time in such a dreary wasteland. "It wasn't just the perception but the reality that this place was a target that had everbody on edge," says Noah Pfefferblit, president of Wall Street Rising, a nonprofit neighborhood group in lower Manhattan. Residents no longer wanted to be constantly reminded of the dangers they faced "by seeing a visually overwhelming security presence." City planning authorities finally stepped in to save the Financial District; they selected a TriBeCa firm called Rogers Marvel to come up with a new way to protect the area.
I took a walk through the district on a recent sweltering weekday afternoon. The Stock Exchange continues to block vehicles at its surrounding intersections, but instead of idling pickups, the streets are now populated with giant sculptural boulders called NoGos. The NoGos, designed by Rogers Marvel, are blocks of heavy concrete covered in multifaceted boxes of shimmering bronze. They resemble a comic-book artist's take on a barricade, a playful and handsome gem whose actual purpose -- keeping a speeding truck laden with explosives from getting anywhere near the Stock Exchange -- is invisible to the public. In fact, people have found many uses for the barricades. At 2-and-a-half feet tall, a NoGo makes an ideal seat. Suited Wall Street types crowd about the NoGos at lunchtime and kids climb and stretch on them as if they were a downtown jungle gym.
Like other architects who've been working to design better ways of securing public sites, Jonathan Marvel is wary of providing many details about his firm's projects. But he is keen to discuss why, after 9/11, he became interested in working on security infrastructure. He says that as he looked out on the streets of New York in the months after the attacks, he began to sense that architects weren't being consulted about this newly crucial aspect to urban design. "Everybody within the design community is distressed by what's happening," Marvel says. "To navigate public space you have to meet a new threshold that wasn't there before. Everywhere is like the airport now -- the barriers, the lining up, the undressing. At the airport all that is an unfortunate necessity, but when you have to do it in a building, that's when -- as a designer and as a citizen -- I find it unacceptable."
Marvel describes today's increasingly barricaded streetscape as "a throwback to the Middle Ages, where there was a moat and drawbridge separating one side of society from the other." If Marvel was in business back then, he might have turned the moat into a fountain. His philosophy entails creating security devices whose true function isn't clear from their form, devices that, like those NoGos, also fill some other public purpose.
In Battery Park City, just across West Street from ground zero, and home to the World Financial Center, Marvel's firm reduced the threat of truck bombs simply by redesigning the streets surrounding the targeted buildings. On North End Avenue, the main thoroughfare leading to the WFC buildings, the firm proposed subtly raising parts of the roadbed and inserting sharp turns at strategic locations on the road. Not only did the new configuration force vehicles approaching the buildings to slow down -- which is important because a fast truck bomb can cause a lot more damage than a slow one -- reshaping the street also created a pedestrian walkway and a small park in the area.
Just outside the World Financial Center buildings, Rogers Marvel designed what the firm calls a Tiger Trap, a sidewalk plaza built on top of the kind of collapsible concrete used to stop runaway planes at airports. The concrete is strong enough for pedestrians to walk on but it crumbles under the weight of a truck. In tests, a Tiger Trap has stopped a 15,000 pound vehicle going at 50 miles per hour. But that capacity will remain completely invisible to people who visit the site.
In design circles, such innovative security efforts have gained prominence, and public agencies that wield the greatest influence in urban design -- such as the planning authorities in New York and Washington and the General Services Administration, which builds federal office buildings -- have begun to encourage permanent and elegant architectural responses to security threats.
In 2001, the National Capital Planning Commission rejected several bulky plans to protect the Washington Monument, including one proposal to surround the site with a ring of almost 400 bollards. Instead, the commission -- which had thrown up Jersey barriers at the monument after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, another temporary measure that had become permanent -- chose a brilliantly invisible plan by the Philadelphia landscape architecture firm Olin Partnership.
Olin proposed using an 18th century fortification called a ha-ha, a long, low wall sunken inside a trench used by European gardeners to keep animals corralled without visible fencing. Olin designed a series of granite ha-has along the pathways leading to the monument; the simple system, which keeps the site safe from vehicles in a way that's friendly to people, was installed in 2005.
"If we are going to remain a social culture, we have to allow people to live in an environment that is physically safe but isn't replete with physical barriers," says David Rubin, a partner at Olin. "There's a growing demand for that sophistication."
Others aren't so sanguine. Vishaan Chakrabarti, former director of the Manhattan office of New York Department of City Planning, says one problem with invisible security installations is that they often don't satisfy security consultants. "A lot of security folks are trained to believe that a place needs to look secure," Chakrabarti says. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of security infrastructure is that sometimes appearance can be more important than actual strength. A Tiger Trap is more effective at blocking a truck bomber than a Jersey barrier -- but a Jersey barrier looks more menacing. "Especially if you're a private entity, what you're trying to do is make your place look secure so the bad guys go next door," Chakrabarti explains. "The problem is the design and planning community is trying to make the stuff invisible -- they're trying to say, 'Let's make the NoGos as small as possible.' The security people might say, 'All right, technically, scientifically, that smaller thing may protect against the same level of threat as something bigger -- but it doesn't look as defensive.'"
Even sites that have been designed to cleverly address security, Chakrabarti says, are victims of security creep, a culture in which security officials keep putting up more NoGos, or increasing the perimeters around buildings, long after the designers have had their say. "What's difficult is that these things sort of require constant monitoring," Chakrabarti says. New emergencies throw any design asunder. In New York, "there was a big push for Jersey barriers during the Republican Convention," says Rick Adler, the founder of RSA Protective Technologies, a firm that designs perimeter security systems. "It was like half of the push after 9/11. People just put up anything they could."
For those who argue that security experts now trump architects in urban design decisions, the plans for the Freedom Tower constitute Exhibit A. Critics have long derided the design as too bland for the charged site, an uninspired mingling of the visions of two very different architects -- Skidmore's David Childs, whom the developer Larry Silverstein selected to work on the site, and Daniel Libeskind, who won a competition to become the master planer for ground zero. But it was in June 2005, when Childs unveiled a plan to satisfy the New York Police Department's assessment that a previous design was too vulnerable to truck bombs, that the critical clamor rose to fever pitch.
To minimize the building's vulnerability to street-side explosion, Childs moved it away from its surrounding roads and sidewalks. The building will be set back an average of about 90 feet from West Street, the busiest thoroughfare running past the site. Childs also changed the manner in which the tower meets the ground, converting the previous designs' inviting entryway into a 200-foot-tall podium constructed of reinforced concrete. The concrete base would serve as a blast shield surrounding the lobby; there would be some openings to let in light at its higher edges, but it would primarily be unadorned of windows. Tenants would work high up above the lobby, far out of a truck bomber's way. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times' architecture critic, wrote that the plan represented "exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world."
Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, told me that he thinks much of the criticism was premature. The concrete base the firm unveiled in 2005 was never supposed to be the final plan; architects had always meant to dress the Freedom Tower's pedestal in something more attractive. A few months ago, they did just that, proposing to clad the building in panels of glass prisms that would shimmer in sunlight. The laminated glass would also be safe for occupants -- in the event of a blast, it would shatter into tiny harmless pieces, much like a car's windshield.
Galioto believes the new glass-clad base will make the Freedom Tower both exceedingly safe and habitable. He says the design shows that the terrorist attacks haven't changed architecture so much as they changed "the practice of architecture." The best architects, he says, will find ways to create beauty within the new constraints. As an example, he points to the new Seven World Trade Center, also designed by his colleague David Childs.
Tower 7 does seem to stand as a monument to the possibility of realizing grace in a grim world. The original 47-story granite-and-glass building that stood across Vesey Street from the Trade Towers disappeared into the ground at 5:21 p.m. on 9/11. The new tower, which opened in May, is an elegant glass parallelogram that now dominates ground zero. Like the Freedom Tower, 7 also sits atop an enormous concrete vault (it's not there for blast resistance but because it houses a Con Edison substation that powers much of Lower Manhattan). But from the street, the concrete isn't visible. Childs has covered the base with handsome stainless steel panels designed by the celebrated TriBeCa designer James Carpenter. Carpenter also designed the tower's exterior glass cladding, which surrounds its office space from the eighth story to the top. He chose glass that's low in iron and coated with an anti-reflective material that keeps out radiant heat; the glass is so transparent that at certain hours, when the sun hangs low on the horizon, Tower 7's walls seem to disappear, and you can see through entire floors of the building.
But what's most striking about 7, considering its location, is its pronounced ordinariness. Inside, the building has been outfitted with a thick concrete core to protect its elevators and stairwells in the case of attack. Compared to the previous WTC towers, it's got wider stairwells for emergency egress, and its floors are protected by a much thicker layer of fireproofing. Its designers call it the "safest office building in America." But from the outside, you can't tell any of this. "One of the best things about it is that it looks like many other elegant, sophisticated glass office buildings rather than like something different," says Goldberger. "I think it's a very nice building."
But Tower 7 doesn't eliminate all of Goldberger's concerns about the site, or about the way urban design has been corrupted by security. He concedes that Childs' new plan to surround the Freedom Tower's base in glass mitigates the harshness of the concrete pedestal, but he points out that it "doesn't deal with one of the key problems of all those designs, which is that they're set back so far from the street that the whole nature of a civilized street life is all wiped away."
Many designers and planners agree that the practice of setting new buildings back from the street is one of the most troubling security impositions. In "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs told of the "intricate sidewalk ballet" that characterized the stretch of Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, where she lived in the 1960s. The ballet involved locksmiths, shopkeepers, butchers, longshoremen, teenagers, tailors, toddlers -- people of all stripes whose everyday interactions on the packed street, she argued, provoked a sense of "casual public trust" in the community. Today's security installations reduce our chance encounters on the street and risk breaking our casual public bonds.
"Cities basically operate off their street life, and if buildings become just big blank walls because people are afraid of the street, it's fundamentally contradictory to what cities are all about," Chakrabarti says. He adds: "You look at the charts that a lot of security people use and they'll say, 'The building has to be X-hundred feet from the street.' You start thinking about that en masse and what you're talking about is the suburbs. That kind of thinking, when it starts becoming cumulative, could really endanger something that we really want and need, which is a dense urban environment."
Architects, like many artists, are by nature a contemplative and slightly anxious lot, and some are given to exaggeration over the actual practical difficulties imposed by post-9/11 security measures; where you or I might see only a line of ugly Jersey barriers or buildings inhospitably far away from the street, a designer will see the seeds of civic destruction. It is, in other words, possible to get carried away in this analysis, and Chakrabarti, for one, understands that setting back some new buildings in the city isn't going to turn New York into a suburb. Moreover, in the case of the World Trade Center site, setbacks won't be anything new. As Goldberger has pointed out, 16 acres of lower Manhattan in 1968 were destroyed to create the "superblock" upon which the original World Trade Center was set. Ground zero's new design will restore the streets eliminated then -- therefore we might see more street-side interaction in the new design because it adds streets to the map.
A few designers even point out that moving buildings away from streets can make for a nice addition to cities. Barbara Nadel, a New York architect who edited a volume called "Building Security: Handbook for Architectural Planning and Design," says that if they're designed cleverly, plazas built in the spaces created by set-back buildings might become useful open areas in otherwise too densely packed metropolises. Right now in many cities, she says, "there's not enough open space where you can sit down and have a lunch or take in the sun." When you push a building away from the sidewalk, you create precisely such an area.
In renderings showing a street view of the future Freedom Tower, the building's concrete base is surrounded by a large plaza topped with trees, steps and a fountain. If you're working in downtown New York one day 10 years from now, the steps might be a nice place to stop and have a burrito. On the other hand, you can see in this picture the cause of architects' fears. The plaza is surrounded by a line of vehicle-blocking posts that resemble tombstones, and you've got to climb a mountain of stairs to get to the building, barricaded against the street.
And this illustrates the main flaw in using architecture as a tool to fight terrorism -- we're building structures that may last forever but are frozen around our present-day fears. Architecture is an art form of anticipation, the challenge of building structures that will continue to be meaningful and useful in the decades and centuries to come. Truck bombs, on the other hand, are an acutely modern phenomenon. "There's a tendency right now to design out of fear of the last generation of terrorism," Goldberger argues. "The reality is terrorists are very smart, they're way ahead of us. And yet we're still worrying about truck bombs and giving up so much of what is important to us."
Certainly we can make buildings that are easier to escape from during disaster, or that are less vulnerable to total collapse, Chakrabarti says. But architecture is ultimately a weak defense against terrorism. "As soon as you get into the notion of people flying planes into buildings," he says, "you're talking about a scale of madness against which architecture should not be the line of defense."
