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Wondering how a lifelong New Yorker could know what more typical American cities need, Oculus talked with the author of The American City, What Works, What Doesn’t (New York: McGraw-Hill, 477 pages, 500 black-and-white illustrations, 8 1/2 x 11, $59.95 cloth). It turns out that Alexander Garvin has been teaching courses on the city since 1967, worked and studied architecture in Paris as a young man, and has been traveling the world looking at cities ever since. Most of the photographs in the book are his own.

Garvin has worked on cities in almost every capacity. Beginning as a community advocate in Bushwick, he worked as a reformer at the New York Urban Coalition. He went on to become director of housing and community development for the New York City Planning Department under Donald Elliott during the Lindsay administration. There he proposed turning off urban renewal and refocusing on housing rehabilitation, then wrote the executive order establishing the city’s Neighborhood Preservation Program.

As Deputy Housing Commissioner under Mayor Beame and Roger Starr, Garvin was in charge of all rehab and neighborhood preservation, and was able to implement the shift away from new construction and gut renovation to renovating older tenanted buildings. During the fiscal crisis, he restructured the J51 program and secured legislation to declare conversions, rent-stabilized apartments, and co-ops eligible for loans, making whole areas of the city attractive to developers. When Congress created block grants with the Community Development Act of 1974, he helped the city generate private money without public investment, through participation loans with banks. When young Bob Wagner became chairman of the Planning Commission in the Koch administration, Garvin became director of comprehensive planning. Then he went into the real estate business, with no money, when the prime was at 21 percent. Starting with a coop conversion project in Queens, he ended up managing nearly 1,000 apartments. He still owns some. Two years ago, he reentered city government as a member of the Planning Commission.—J.M.

Oculus: Tony Hiss gave a sense of the scope of your book when he called it an “Encyclopedia Urbanica” in The New York Times Book Review (February 4, 1996). But I think what you’re saying is that making cities is not so much a matter of knowing a lot as it is of tying it all together.

Alexander Garvin: One of things that troubles me is that if you talk to designers, they speak a language that developers don’t understand. Developers speak a language politicians don’t understand. Politicians speak a language bureaucrats don’t understand. I have tried in my career and in the book to be understandable to all those people.

Oculus: Was doing all the different things you have done in your career intentional?

AG: It was purely accidental. I was sure I was going to be an architect. I went to Yale with that intention.

Oculus: You did go to Yale School of Architecture?

AG: I went first to Yale College, and in my senior year, my college roommate gave me a Christmas present that changed my life, a book that had just come out, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When I got to architecture school, I started studying planning. Then I went to work for Philip Johnson.

Oculus: As an architect?

AG: I wanted to work for the man I thought was the best architect in New York. I got a job with him, and I started teaching at Yale, simultaneously. But I never went to the licensing exam. I had a commission for a building in Pennsylvania jointly with Peter Millard. When we got to the point of working drawings, he asked me if I would manage the process, and I said, “I’ll think about it.” The next week I came back and said, “You know, a man who says, ‘I’ll think about’ doing working drawings for a building that he’s the codesigner of, doesn’t want to be an architect.” But I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

Oculus: So you drifted into city government? But you were still teaching at Yale.

AG: That’s the one constant in my life. I’ve taught probably a dozen different courses, but one undergraduate course, “The Study of the City,” all the way through. Then six years ago, Tom Beebe, the dean of the architecture school, asked me to teach a course for architects on real estate and planning. I had to introduce the most design-oriented group of students to what is a community board, a floor-area ratio, a capitalization rate, and mortgage loan coverage, which they had no idea had any relationship to what they were doing.

Oculus: This is the cookbook, kids.

AG: This is what your clients want. You’re going to have to go to a community board next week and make a presentation. How do you do that? In the beginning, it was like pulling teeth, but this year the students went to the dean and said they wanted another semester. So I have about a third of the class actually taking a second semester of this stuff, and focusing on a neighborhood right near you, the Flatiron.

Oculus: It is really the place that’s changed the most in New York in the last five years.

AG: That’s exactly why I picked it. It’s changing in front of your eyes, and it will continue to. We have just rezoned a whole section of it, you know.

Oculus: How did you come back to city government?

AG: During all these years of teaching, I acquired protégés. At this point, there are people all over the country working as real estate lawyers, public officials, in environmental protection, historic preservation, all sorts of things. I had two that I spent more time on than anything. One is a man named Con Howe, who eventually became the planning director of the city of Los Angeles. The other one is Joe Rose. When he became the chairman of the Planning Commission and a vacant seat opened up, he asked me be on it. I hadn’t been in government in 15 years. Of course once you’ve been bitten, you’ve been bitten.

Oculus: How is it different now?

AG: First, we have a different city charter. The Planning Commission now has 13 members. It has people appointed by the borough presidents and the city advocate. And it has different powers than it had before. It’s more a quasi-legislature at the moment. The second is Joe Rose. Joe is slowly rezoning half the city of New York — things that should have been done years ago.... And it helps also that the mayor is somebody who wants to do things because it’s the right thing to do, not just to placate some interest group.

Oculus: One important point in your book is that a successful project doesn’t always have a desirable affect on the city as a whole. You list six ingredients for success — market, location, design, financing, entrepreneurship, and time. Do you mean timing?

AG: I see time in a variety of different ways. The time that you spend in a place. For example, going from a parked car to the department store destination in a shopping center. Second is the entire 24-hour period, seven days a week. Think of going to Houston at six o’clock on a Friday afternoon and spending the next two days in that city when the downtown is completely dead. Then imagine going to Lincoln Center at the same time and what is going to happen over the next two days. The third is when you’re making something happen, there are critical periods of time. The great thing that the urban renewal program did was to have the government own properties while the planning was being done, approvals were being obtained. Nobody had to pay the taxes; nobody had to take the risk. When everything was completed, it was transferred to a developer. Then there is the timing of the development process itself. Look at Westway. When it started out, everybody wanted it, and by the time it ripened, it seemed wrong. People’s tastes change. What they think is good changes. It often makes me think that maybe we should be designing buildings that are easy to adapt.

Oculus: That was what was valid about Mies’s idea of universal space.

AG: But the extraordinary thing is when you go to see his work, the box itself is exquisite. The spaces in between are the right dimensions. Send somebody first to the Seagram Building and then down 53rd Street to the CBS Building. You would think, given the photographs, that both of them are towers that come down flush to a plaza. But Mies’s building doesn’t. It has got bustles behind. It is on a sloping site. It has a garage, a loading dock, and two restaurants, all clustered around in a way that still allows that generous plaza in front. At CBS, they tried to squeeze the restaurant into the corset on the ground floor. It doesn’t fit, because it’s a shaft that comes down to a sunken plaza. When I first saw the building from Sixth Avenue, I went directly to the front door and found it was a window for the bank. They have parking for five executives underground, in a separate box. The loading dock isn’t anywhere near the sunken plaza. It’s also to the side. As you notice, I am still an architect at heart.

Oculus: Let’s close with the greatest opportunity in the country today.

AG: The most pressing thing is to preserve the tremendous investment we have in our cities, and there’s an easy way to do it. In the 1930s, when we had disinvestment and a banking crisis, the federal government invented FHA and Fannie May to buy the mortgages. It worked for the suburbs. What we need is mortgage insurance for residents of old buildings that are already there. None of the current HUD programs work that way. It would cost us no money and wouldn’t require any subsidy. Our rate of home ownership in this country would soar.

Oculus: What about New York? What are the opportunities here?

AG: I think New York has one tremendous asset that we need to develop more, and that is the waterfront. But it will take some money. There are huge areas that we could still acquire, such as the Queens waterfront between the Queensborough and Triborough bridges. Reclaiming the waterfront and providing public access to it could make a real difference.