Click here for a printable version

As the vice president for planning, design, and development at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) in 2002 and 2003, Alex Garvin had to juggle state and local politics and economics, plus deal with public emotions in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. It was not an easy task, and, as is all too evident today, not an easily resolved situation.  Although Garvin left a position that had placed him continually in the unremitting glare of the media spotlight, since then he has undertaken a number of other large redevelopment schemes and transformative urban plans. From 1996 to 2005, he was managing director of planning of NYC2012, New York City's committee for the 2012 Olympics bid. In 2004, his newly formed planning and consulting firm specializing in the public realm, Alex Garvin & Associates produced a report for the Georgia office of the Trust for Public Land.  It outlines a plan for creating Atlanta’s Beltline Emerald Necklace, 23 miles of parks, trail, and transit that will link 46 Atlanta neighborhoods.

Garvin is author of American City : What Works, What Doesn't (McGraw-Hill, 2002) and Parks, Recreation, and Open Space: A 21st-Century Agenda (American Planning Association, 2001). A lifelong New Yorker, Garvin served as both a New York City planning commissioner (1995-2004) and the city's deputy commissioner of housing (1974-78). He has t aught urban planning and management at Yale as an adjunct professor for almost 40 years and has been a consultant to the cities of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Charlotte; Toronto; Pittsburgh; St. Louis; Stamford, Connecticut; Palm Beach, Florida; and Memphis.

When Garvin recently talked with Record editor in chief Robert Ivy and contributing editor Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, he reflected on trends that he believes are changing America’s urban landscape, and on some of the results and lessons of his work for Atlanta's Beltline project, NYC2012, and the LMDC.

ARCHITECTURAL RECORD : We can't avoid beginning with the elephant in the living room in terms of your career – your work at Ground Zero, and specifically for the LMDC, where you were responsible for the design competition that led to the master plan by Daniel Libeskind. Today, everything seems to be in chaos there. Just as the Freedom Tower was finally breaking ground in June, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Anthony Coscia, announced that the tower would be in jeopardy if it couldn't attract at least a million square feet in leases by September. Could you foresee this mess?

Alex Garvin : There has always been a problem with staging the development on the site, since the process depends so much on the real estate market. As the developer of the Freedom Tower, the Port Authority needs to be sure it has the leases. That's reasonable. But I have no idea if it can get them. You can't conjecture on the outcome of something like Ground Zero if you're not in the middle of it.

AR: It doesn't look like that much is going on, though. Everything seems to be hitting the skids – the memorial may be redesigned and is over budget; the performing arts and museum spaces are floundering.

AG: I'm disappointed that the cultural institutions are being slowly killed off. And the design of the Freedom Tower has changed; most recently it looks like a concrete bunker set back from the street. If that stays, it's appalling. 

But look at what has happened down there. When I left, I hoped we would get a railroad station, and we will soon have one [the Transportation Hub], by [Santiago] Calatrava, at the World Trade Center site. I thought we could get Greenwich Street as a right of way, and that has happened. The damaged tower at 90 West Street, designed by Cass Gilbert in 1907, is moving ahead as a residential building, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's 7 WTC is finished. It seems that Larry Silverstein is now filling it.  The retail plan for Fulton Street is proceeding, with RFQs sent out by the city’s Economic Development Corporation. However, I do find that it is awful that the Deutsche Bank on Liberty Street is still standing because no one can figure out how to tear down this particular heavily contaminated structure.

AR : Would you ever consider returning to the LMDC? It still sounds like they could use some help down there.

AG : No. I've started my own business-with six people in my office. But I would be willing to be hired as consultant.

AR: Your office has been attracting a lot of work that involves the public realm. Yet any discussion of the public realm in America usually concludes that it's become a lost cause. How do you find the situation?

AG: There are several good signs. First, we have been reclaiming waterfronts for the public.  This has been going on for a quarter century-everything from renovating the C&O Canal in Washington, D.C. , to removing a highway along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, to creating the Tom McCall Waterfront Park there.

Furthermore, cities are increasingly investing in park systems, a practice abandoned during the last quarter of the 20th century. In New York, we added more than 1,400 acres during the years of the Giuliani administration [1993-2001] alone.

AR: Has the move back to the cities by the middle class increased the reinvestment in public space?

AG: This move back to the cities is the key issue needing attention in the 21^st century.  A growing part of our population consists of people over 50 for whom driving is not as convenient as walking – who find intensely packed, var ied neighborhoods friendlier than suburbs. Also we have a growing population of younger singles who need to meet people. That's easy to do in cities. And when these people come, they come with money. Gentrification is bringing reinvestment and demand for public space.  But gentrification also has terrible effects on people who can no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods where they work.  That's a major issue of the future.

AR: Where is the money for public space coming from?

AG : The Hudson River Park Trust in New York is typical.  It's a $I0 million joint venture of the state and the city, with a citizens' committee involved in its planning. It began with citizens demanding that the West Side Highway be something better than just a roadway.  Private entities, many modeled on New York City's Central Park Conservancy, have formed and created master plans in response to the postwar disinvestment in the public realm.

AR : Do you see this reclamation and expansion of public space as a nationwide trend, or only restricted to cities like New York, San Francisco , and Washington, D.C.?

AG:   This trend exists in cities across the country. My experience at the moment in Atlanta is a good example. I worked with the Path Foundation – which promotes bicycle riding – and  a number of remarkable park advocacy groups. The back-to-the city movement spurred me to propose the creation of 2,500 acres of open space, including 1,400 acres of new green space and parks, to the Trust for Public Land, a national land conservation group. The Beltline Emerald Necklace, loosely modeled on Olmsted's Emerald Necklace in Boston, transforms a 23-mile loop of an old rail corridor into a trail and bikeway along with a light rail system that will link to MARTA at three new stations and at an existing one. In addition, the plan calls for building new housing on 530 acres. The Beltline is the biggest addition to an urban park system in the country, and it will reach into Atlanta's most economically starved area, west and south of downtown, dramatically enhancing the lives of people who have been excluded from recreation facilities.

AR: Is this project going ahead?

AG: Mayor Shirley Franklin has endorsed the plan and created the Beltline Partnership. In December of 2005, the City Council approved a tax increment district to generate from $1 billion to $2 billion in bond revenues over 25 years to help pay for this project.  Then in April, the mayor endorsed acquiring the Bellwood Quarry for the park, which, at 579 acres, will make it the largest park in Atlanta. We are working with the Beltline Partnership on a conceptual design and feasibility study for the quarry.

AR : You've compared the Beltline concept to Olmsted's Boston park plan of the 1870s. What's so new or different about Atlanta?

AG: It's the first time ever that a park system, a transit line, a trail, and bike path have been rolled into one. We have light rail going up in many cities – San Diego, Portland, Denver, Minneapolis. The conversion of rails to trails has been under way in more than 1,000 cities around the country, but never on this scale, and never where it encircles an entire city within 1.5 miles of downtown and midtown. A student at Georgia Tech originally conceived the idea for a transit loop here in his master's thesis in 1999. The Beltline, once developed, will reorient Atlanta from a city framed by highways to a city framed by a magnificent public realm. It will allow people to live and work in Atlanta without getting on choked highways.

AR:  That leads us to the problem of sprawl: Did you really say that sprawl is not a huge issue anymore?

AG: It's not the burning issue. It's almost beginning to reach the limits of what we can serve with our highway systems.  And there's not much support for building new highways. We're going to need to reinvest in existing neighborhoods. And that is what my plan for Atlanta's Beltline Emerald Necklace does. It provides a public realm around which the population can grow.

AR:  On another note, New York City lost its bid for the Olympics, but did the effort have lasting consequences?

AG: The park we planned for Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood is going forward, as is the building of 4,500 apartments in what would have been the Olympic Village in Queens West. Other important things came out of the Olympics, most important, a change of psychology in the city. When I started working for a New York bid, people were sick and tired of redevelopment, of Robert Moses's ideas. We came out with a plan that said, “You can do things within the existing framework of the city without wiping it out." Our plan placed all the properties within walking distance of the subway, so we could move half a million spectators each day without their setting foot in automobile traffic. Second, the Bloomberg administration took many of the lessons of what we did and ran with them, including the idea of redeveloping the Hudson Yards on the West Side and rezoning the area, extending the Number 7 subway line, and expanding the Javits Convention Center. The refocus of Midtown westward also became city policy in large measure because of work we had done.

AR:  These projects are long-term, but the politicians who underwrite them usually last only eight years. Isn't this a problem?

AG: You get continuity from the permanent government, which everyone forgets about. Tupper Thomas has been in charge of the Prospect Park Alliance in Brooklyn since 1980, and Robert Moses, New York's park commissioner from 1934 to 1960, was an appointed official. We have a lot of very dedicated people in government who don't get the credit they're due.

AR: Are there trends you picked up on when planning the Olympics?

AG: Yes, one is that sports facilities don't have to be enormous monuments. Coors' Field in Denver and Jacobs Field in Cleveland represent something other than the enormous sports stadium in the middle of a green field. And when it comes to cultural centers that generate activity, I think Cincinnati shows the way. Just look at the Aronoff Center for the arts designed by Cesar Pelli in 1995, and across the street Zaha Hadid's new Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Arts [RECORD, August 2003, page 86]. And they didn't build a garage. People park in existing downtown garages that would otherwise be empty at night and on weekends.

AR: We can see how a cultural center, however you define the term, could provide a steady stream of visitors, but a sports center?

AG: You have to distinguish among different kinds. A baseball stadium operates 200 days a year, a football stadium, nine or 10 days a year, but you can turn a football stadium into something that is more than a nine-day affair. Arenas can host concerts and other kinds of events. In cities like Atlanta and New York, we're putting stadiums on rail yards. Why? Because when you create a huge stadium, you take out everything that was there and kill that portion of the city. But if you start with a vacuum, you bring in customers. I think when we allow the owner of the sports team to determine what it's going to be and where it's going to go, we run into problems. When the community is involved, we tend to make better choices.

AR: You have consistently introduced high-profile architecture into large-scale planning projects in a way that we have not seen in traditional planning.

AG:   I don't want to produce something that's not high quality, and the public wants architecture that will be an asset to their community. Thom Mayne's mixed-use project at Queens West centers on a 43-acre park.  It started as a gathering place for Olympic athletes, but in fact it's a new way of doing a whole neighborhood.

AR: You stress what Mayne's project will do rather than how it will look. Conversations about employing top designers often focus on their celebrity value and its ability to attract public attention and investment.

AG: Yes, and in the plan for the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, I think people have been mesmerized by the wrong thing, by the "wedge of light" instead of the piazza in front of the Calatrava's new transportation hub. In Lower Manhattan, known for its dark canyons, we created a public square. That is a major bit of planning. To capture the public's imagination, a high-profile architect needs to grab onto ideas that resonate with the public.

AR:   Speaking of ideas the public likes, what do you think about the ones that the Congress for New Urbanism has espoused? Are we making many new places that achieve urban amenity?

AG: Yes. It is absolutely happening, but it's not necessarily coming from the New Urbanists. I admire Duany Plater-Zyberk, but its small-town vision is not appropriate to high density.  You need very high densities to support public transit and transit-centered suburban development. My favorite two communities are in suburban Columbus , Ohio . They are New Albany and Easton. Both have residences mixed with retail at high-density levels. New Albany, designed by Jaq Robertson [of

Cooper Robertson & Partners], is 35 percent open space.  Unlike other golf course communities, it has a roadway for running and bicycling, so that the public realm is enhanced by the golf course. It's a cul de sac, but what a charming one, and it's doing very well. Easton is the Wexlers trying to create a town square.

AR:   What advice do you have for young planners or architects working on large urban projects?

AG: Since the 1960s, planners have moved away from the physical aspects of design toward policy. But we elect public officials to make policy. The planner has to be able to provide expertise that the mayor and local council members don't have. When you want to fit the stadium in here or the velodrome there, you need to do the design work that goes with it. I believe architecture and planning must be interrelated.

Architects have naive, if any, notions of politics. If you want to see a truly effective public presentation, watch Hugh Hardy. He can have everybody eating out of his hand. That's politics, but politics also means understanding why the governor or the council member views things a certain way. The major problem is that both architects and planners think in terms of projects – not of the city as a whole or of how that project can benefit the surrounding community.

We don't have enough good planning or good architecture, and that troubles me, but who would have thought that Atlanta would adopt an anti-sprawl plan in the form of a park system? Who would have thought the Port Authority would hire Santiago Calatrava? Those are real results. We need this in every city in the country.