Privatization of Public Space

Privatization of Public Space
This is my MA thesis on Privatization of Public Space.

Three other documents are contained in this paper inlcuding: Battery Park City , Los
Angeles Gated Communities and the Mall of America.
The bibliography is also available at the end.
This document contains approximately 20,000 words and should be downloaded.
Frederique Krupa
Spring 1993
The Privatization of Public Space
The State of the Public Realm
Richard Sennett chronicled the erosion of public life from a sociological standpoint in The
Fall of Public Man. Psychology, he felt, was the source of the problem because of its
overwhelming emphasis only on the "internal" and the personal. Psychology helped
encourage society to become obsessed with private development and minimized the
importance of social rituals like politeness and consideration, often seen as stodgy,
insignificant and artificial. Ultimately, activity in the public realm has come to be
considered a duty with few psychological benefits.1
This trend towards privatization has transformed the forums for public life; cities have
become a series of racially and economically segregated private enclaves. Using case
studies of Battery Park City in New York, gated communities in Los Angeles and the Mall
of America outside of Minneapolis, this thesis deals with topics that are diverse not only in
location but in critical ideas. However, all deal with the insulation of housing
developments for the privileged and middle classes. Beyond the restriction of some
personal freedom for the sake of security, some fundamental aspects of democracy are at
stake, such as the right to free speech and assembly and representation.
Terms such as public and private are laden with ambiguous associations and moral
connotations that are difficult to avoid. For our purposes, the public realm is the bond of
an unrelated crowd as opposed to the private realm's bond between family and friends.2
Accordingly, public space is the forum in which public life is acted out. Certain public
spaces like Battery Park City are public because they are the physical and financial
property of the state, in this case property of the New York State Battery Park City
Authority. Blurring this distinction, some public spaces appear like traditional public
spaces but are privately owned, like the Mall of America and the streets of the private
gated communities. In those instances, the public is allowed in at the discretion of the
land's owner. In the mall, the public is invited to experience the public space as potential
consumers.
...
http://www.translucency.com/frede/pps.html (1 de 42)23/10/2007 01:17:50 a.m.
The balance between the public and private realm has shifted historically. The emphasis
on the public realm culminated in the 18th century with the rise of the bourgeoisie in
London and Paris. The experiences to be learned in public life were thought to be crucial
for individual development. The cosmopolitan became the quintessential public man.3 The
social rules were much different for men than women. The public realm for women was
closely linked to immorality and corruption; whereas, the public realm's immorality was
liberating for men.4 With the onset of the Industrial Revolution and political changes in
the 19th century, the idealized bourgeois family became a shelter from the troubling
changes of the new economic and social order, but the public realm of the ancient regime
continued to co-exist with privatizing influences throughout the 19th century.5
The current situation in the United States is not unlike that of late 19th century Europe.
Our political, social and economic situation is perhaps more complex because of our postindustrial, post-modern society's status in a global economy that threatens our world
dominance. The eclipse of the American empire is in certain ways similar to the slow fall
of the British empire in the frantic insecurity it produced among its citizens. Now that a
dull forty-hour a week job is no guarantee of a house and two cars, people are protecting
their personal possessions, disregarding the welfare of others.
The swing to political and social conservatism is not only an indication of citizens'
uncertainty, but a loss of faith in the welfare state. The problems of the disenfranchised
have grown burdensome to taxpayers because social programs -- ill-conceived and underfunded -- appear to have failed. People are more concerned with their personal special
interests in government expenditure, leaving overall social welfare behind. The war on
poverty of the 1960's has transformed itself into a war on the poor.
As the largest concentrations of the disenfranchised are located in urban areas, ignoring
them has become increasingly easier for those that took advantage of the government
sponsored suburban exodus through mortgage tax credits, gas subsidies, highway
construction and federal and state mortgage guarantees. Cities are becoming so
economically and racially segregated that it is now possible for marketing companies to
target specific types of demographic groups based on zip codes alone.6 For those affluent
citizens that have chosen to remain or even come back to the city, an increasingly
popular solution has been to create semi-public communities like Battery Park City or
gated communities that exclude undesirables not just in buildings but in neighborhoods.
Tactics in the three case studies include using public funds for private developments,
selling public property and services to private groups, using exclusionary zoning
regulations and, when all else fails, fortifying the architecture itself. Decisions like those
mentioned previously form the public space and are controlled by public policies that
encourage privatization.
...
The influence of the mass media on privatization of the public space is a more recent
dilemma. The access to 24-hour news - often over-hyping violence for better ratings and the popularity of graphic and voyeuristic "true crime" programs like 911 and Cops
anaesthetizes viewers to "real" atrocities while inciting paranoia regarding the perceived
moral degeneration of the public. The city as represented in the news and "true crime"
series appears to be inhabited mostly by degenerates, rapists, murderers and drugdealing, Uzi-carrying minority gang-members. A viewer's typical desire is to militarize the
home against the hostile public, whether the threat is real or not.
Ironically, the printed media curtailed the power of the ancient regime in the 18th
Century by questioning its authority in unsigned pamphlets put out by the likes of John
Wilkes.7 The mass media has since become a tool to shape public opinion, whether for
marketing or political ends. During the Gulf War, the State Department carefully
controlled the press' access to information by physically barring them from combat area.
In this manner, they were able to dictate the public's perception of the war -- highlighting
America's technological wizardry and making lethal combat palatable to the American
viewing public. Even though most viewers still did not understand the factors involved in
the war, Bush experienced his highest surge in popularity ratings. Such an effort to
distract the public from a recession, crumbling infrastructures and pressing social
concerns could make Orwell's 1984 pale in comparison. By isolating and manipulating
citizens and denying them the forums for the expression of their discontentment, the
population becomes easier to control through the influence of the media.
...
If the vast dead urban spaces of modernist urban renewal did much to discredit
modernism in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, the movement's original socialist
concerns did not translate well in the 1930's trans-Atlantic crossing. Instead, modernism
became an image for corporate headquarters and recreational homes of the privileged
class. By discrediting all aspects of the movement, concern for the public realm was
discarded as well. No longer was the betterment of society or even the betterment of the
social environment important. The new private communities strive hard to counteract
modernism's sterility, yet fail to contribute to the public realm much more than token
amenities and meaningless art, usually in return for zoning bonuses.
Perhaps more important than the loss of social ideals is the loss of basic democratic
rights. Beyond losing the "freedom of the city," in its anonymity and tolerance, the
privatization of traditional public spaces such as streets in gated Los Angeles communities
or the town center in the Mall of America severely limit free speech and assembly. Where
could a revolution occur now that the privately-owned mall has become the substitute
town center for most people? The Supreme Court upheld a decision in 1972 giving mall
owners the right to limit access to their private property if someone or some activity was
considered detrimental to consumption.8
Could protests in the semi-deserted streets of a town or vast plazas of city hall attract
attention in a car-based culture? Limiting the impact of such protests neuters the voices
of individuals in society, isolating people, making them more docile and easier to control.
By creating private communities, freedom of movement, a principle this country was
founded on, is limited. The real limit is on pedestrians, which in car-based communities
means the disenfranchised.
...
Private communities for the privileged class are not a new phenomenon. Tuxedo Park in
Upstate New York and part of Montrose in Houston are 19th century prototypes. These
communities were planned by well-connected entrepreneurs on privately-owned,
undeveloped land to create exclusive suburbs of mansions. However uncosmopolitan such
developments may be, the construction of the homes, streets and sewers were paid for
privately.
Battery Park City, LA's gated communities and the Mall of America all cross the traditional
financial boundaries of public and private space. Battery Park City is essentially an
exclusive luxury community built on publicly owned land, with publicly-funded

construction of streets and utilities. Although the streets are technically public, the main
pedestrian entrances to the development, via two covered footbridges spanning the tenlane West Side Highway, function as the city gates into the development. The more
popular North Bridge leads from the Customs house of the World Trade Center into the
World Financial Center's Winter Garden, a luxury shopping mall masquerading as a public
space that serves to filter the poor and homeless out of the immaculate parks and
esplanade.
As for the security-fixated gated communities in Los Angeles, neighborhoods such as
Hidden Hills in the San Fernando Valley and Bradbury in the San Gabriel Valley are former
public communities that have been bought back by their residents -- more specifically by
Homeowners Associations (HA). As part of the Lakewood Plan in the 1950s, HAs buy back
the streets and other public facilities like parks, hire private security forces and lease the
county's greatly discounted, subsidized maintenance and sanitation services. The county
receives revenues for pre-existing infrastructure and for services that it would have to
otherwise provide, and the residents get to control who is allowed past the gates. In
contrast, minorities are also subject to living in gated communities, quarantined by
barricades courtesy of the Los Angeles Police Department, with curfews and assembly
limitations for minority youths, all in the name of gang control.
Built in a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Minneapolis, the Mall of America
recently opened to the public. At 4.2 million square feet, it is billed as the largest
shopping mall in the United States. With Phase One completed, the four anchor stores,
350 shops, 100 restaurants and nightclubs and Knott's Camp Snoopy, a seven-acre
theme park complete with a four-story rollercoaster and flume ride, cover 78 acres. Two
seven-story parking garages provides covered parking for 12,000 cars. Phase Two calls
for the addition of housing and hotels, creating a 24-hour edge city, minus the business
district. Though not intended for the mall's 10,000 employees, housing at the mall poses
troubling questions about the desires of the middle class.
Considering the threat of losing individual rights, has the public realm become so
unbearable that someone would want to live in a mall or theme park, where all activities
are centered exclusively around consumption?
Chapter 1 Endnotes
1. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, pg. 3-16.

2. The first written use of the word public in English occurred in 1470 by Malory. In
French, the word appeared in the middle of the 17th Century. Sennett, Ibid., pg. 3 and 16.
3. Cosmopolite, meaning a man who is comfortable in his dealings with diversity and the
unfamiliar, appeared in writing in 1738. Sennett, Ibid., pg. 17.
4. Sennett, Ibid., pg. 23.
5. Sennett, Ibid., pg. 19.
6. The Claritas Corporation identifies 40 different clusters based on zip codes. Statistics
are kept as to the merchandise consumed by each of these groups, as well as political
affiliations, income levels, home values and educational levels. Michael J. Weiss, The
Clustering of America, pg. 1-28.
7. Sennett, Ibid., pg. 99-104.
8. Lloyd Corp. Vs. Tanner, 1972. William Kowinski, The Malling of America, pg. 356.
Battery Park City: Luring Back The Upper-Middle Class
Situated on the southern tip of Manhattan, just minutes from Wall Street, Battery Park
City has become a paradigm for mixed-use urban renewal developments. When it is
finally complete at the end of the decade, over 14,000 housing units and six million
square feet of office and commercial space will have been constructed on the 92-acre
landfill site.1 Excavations for the World Trade Center, part of the 1960's downtown
construction boom, contributed 25 acres, creating low-cost land for the city on top of
decaying Hudson River piers. The Port Authority also saved money by not having to
transport and dispose of the excavated material. The rest of the fill was dredged up from
the bottom of New York harbor. The creation of this new land cost the state $200
million.2 In the late 1960's, Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, both
proponents of large public works projects, found themselves with prime, undeveloped real
estate. From its inception, Battery Park City was viewed as a money-making venture, a
residential haven for the downtown professionals who might otherwise choose to live in
New Jersey or Westchester. New York like many other cities was feeling the effects of the
national trend of suburbanization, encouraged by federal policies such as mortgage tax
credits and extensive highway construction. A concerted effort was needed to bring
professionals and their social service-paying tax dollars back to the urban center.
While Battery Park City went through several design stages, one concept never changed:
the middle-class would not come back the city unless they were assured of a secure high
standard of living. In other words, the middle class would not put up with the social
problems of the disenfranchised. Therefore, the state believed that the development
should remain exclusive. This way it would provide not only an increased tax base but
also contribute money to finance low-income housing elsewhere. Conveniently, this
elsewhere happened to be in Harlem and the Bronx, where it was argued that housing
money would go further in rehabilitating abandoned buildings than constructing new
units. Another justification was that if there were subsidized housing in Battery Park City,
there would be fewer market rate housing, limiting the revenues generated by a more
affluent population.3
While new construction costs more than rehab, the rejection of real mixed-income
housing is an unfortunate reflection on current housing policy. Battery Park City has
grown into an exclusive community while housing for the poor has been limited to only
the most undesirable, crime-plagued locations. Ultimately, the question is not whether
the housing in Battery Park City is good or bad, it is a question of who should have access
to good quality housing and a nicely maintained neighborhood. Is it appropriate for the
city spend its limited land and financial resources on a small privileged segment of the
population already well served in the New York housing market? Is it really necessary to
build the low income housing outside of Battery Park City? Or has the final conclusion -isolated communities that once limited the integration of the underprivileged with the rest
of the city -- become an ideal development?
...
In 1962, the 20 collapsing Hudson piers lead the New York City Department of Marine and
Aviation to propose reconstructing a 100-acre-truck dock to lure the shipping industry
back to New York. They hired consultants to create a revitalization plan that would map
out the area's development potential until the year 2000. The consultants suggested quite
a different scenario, an exclusive Miesian development built on top of the terminals.4 Ever
since the 1600's, they argued, the development pattern for lower Manhattan has
continually expanded out into the harbor, and this was the natural way to develop. The
plan's mix of shipping and housing was not warmly received, but building over the piers
appealed to Governor Rockefeller, since this was a way of creating a large number of new
housing units without destroying an established neighborhood. With Robert Moses's
Lincoln Center project and Penn Station's destruction still fresh in the minds of many New
Yorkers, the ill-effects of urban renewal were being hotly contested, and community
groups were organizing themselves against intrusive "slum clearance" projects devised by
various government agencies.5 Another Battery Park City plan was devised by Wallace K.
Harrison in 1966 at the instigation of the governor, but Harrison's modernist towers in the
park were not well received either because its uninspired design was quickly losing
popularity.
At the same time, Mayor Lindsay also proposed a plan designed by Conklin and Rossant,
and a battle between opposing forces ensued. With Charles Urdstat at the helm, the state
created the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) in 1968 to have a bonding authority of its
own -- separate from the financial status of the municipal government -- to finance its
projects.6 Philip Johnson was brought in to mediate between warring factions of
government, and the first official 1969 master plan was issued by the BPCA board
composed of Conklin, Rossant and David Wallace. Although homelessness was nowhere
near as prevalent as it is today, the resulting design created an enclave for the rich with
more architectural innovations than social ones. One noteworthy element of the 1969
plan was raising the elevation of Battery Park City's ground plane to the level of the World
Trade Center, covering the West Side Highway. A precursor to the failed Westway
project,7 this would have helped Battery Park City integrate with the rest of the urban
fabric.
The city retained rights to the land under the river, thereby controlling the planning rights
of the landfill via the City Planning Commission. It was impossible for the BPCA to do
anything without first consulting City Planning. The hostile nature between City Planning
and the state agencies resulted in a 105-page charter that took nearly five years to
complete. By this time, the local real estate market was glutted, with 30 million square
feet of unleased commercial space available in downtown alone.8 In 1974, on the eve of
the city's fiscal crisis, the BPCA bonds failed to sell, and the project was put on hold.
Financed by the state with $200 million in "moral-obligation" bonds that did not require
voter approval, the landfill was the only part of the project advancing. But, with its
complicated infrastructure requirements, the landfill was not finished until 1977.
With the disappointing progress of Battery Park City in 1979, Governor Hugh Carey
altered the BPCA's 3-person board of directors by adding two able executive officers of
the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), William Hassett, chairman
and David Kahan, president. The UDC had the power to cut through bureaucratic red tape
like local zoning ordinance and basic democracy that make construction so difficult in the
city.9 So the BPCA became part of the UDC. David Kahan brought in the New York firm of
Cooper Eckstut to redesign a more attractive master plan, making the project more
salable. Under pressure from BPCA's impending default on the $200 million state bonds,
Stan Eckstut produced a new master plan in less than 90 days to get the state
legislature's approval. To make the plan feasible, Eckstut attempted to make Battery Park
City more attractive to investment and more responsive to current urban planning
approaches. Formally, he integrated Battery Park City into the city by aligning the site
with the existing downtown street grid. He also emulated desirable neighborhoods like
Gramercy Park and Central Park West. A gentle veneer of diversity, controlled through
materials, setbacks, curb cuts, color schemes and lobby entrance guidelines, created an
instant nostalgia for New York's kinder, gentler past. Diversity was encouraged by
allowing private developers to develop smaller parcels incrementally rather than having
the city or the state build it all themselves. Since creating luxury housing with public
money was not a very popular selling point, the project was devised to generate a profit
that would finance the low and moderate income elsewhere. Incorporating nearly all of
the Cooper Eckstut report, the Battery Park City plan was approved by Governor Carey,
Mayor Ed Koch and Kahan in 1979.
Part of the plan called for the New York City to relinquish its ownership of the land by
letting the UDC condemn it. The city would exchange all its planning and financial controls
for one dollar. The city would also receive all future profits and tax-equivalency payments
and regain ownership of the land once BPCA bonds and state advances were repaid. This
structure allowed BPCA to capture its own revenue stream for the administration and
maintenance of the project. BPCA promised the city $400 million in bonds secured by the
revenue for affordable housing and $1 billion in excess revenue put into the general fund
by the end of this century. BPCA leases parcels of land out to developers who then
construct and own their buildings. Building and condominium owners do not pay property
taxes; instead, they are charged "payments in lieu of taxes" tabulated by the BPCA based
on the city tax rates. The BPCA then pays the city whatever profit is left after all
maintenance and administrative costs and debt service have been met. In 1991 alone,
BPCA generated a $37 million PILOT check for the city.10
...
If New York is to remain the center of the global marketplace, it has to attract the
headquarters of multinational corporations and the educated and professional workers
that work for them, which Robert Reich calls "the symbolic analysts."11 Battery Park City
can be seen as a prototypical development for these symbolic analysts with their high
paying jobs. While 75% of the units in Battery Park City are studios and 1 bedrooms
which reflect the expected residency of two-income childless couples, rent for studios
range between $850-$1200, one bedrooms average $1500 and two bedrooms average
$2400. Condominiums range from $98,000 to $1.1 million. The residents must also pay
additional "civic facilities payments," $200 for a condo owner and $50 for a renter, for full
time security and ground maintenance staff.12
Currently, Battery Park City contains a resident population of 7,500 and a working
population of 25,000 spread over 23 buildings. Begun in 1981, the commercial core is the
grandly named World Financial Center, made up of four postmodern reflective-glass and
thermal-granite towers and the glass-enclosed, barrel-vaulted Winter Garden, a 3.5 acre
public plaza and luxury shopping mall. The project was awarded to the Canadian
megadeveloper Olympia & York, who financed, built and currently owns the $2 billion
project. Cesar Pelli won the limited competition to design it. Merrill Lynch moved into two
of the towers, leasing 60% of the 6 million square foot complex. American Express and
DOW Jones took the majority of the other two towers. Outside the Winter Garden is a
large plaza with art installations by Scott Burton and Siah Armajani and a marina for 26
yachts at least 80 to 150 feet long.13 Berths can be leased for a minimum of seven years
at a cost of $1.5 million; this comes to roughly $200,000 a year or $600 a day. 30% of
Battery Park City is set aside for open space, including the plazas, parks and 1.2 mile
waterfront esplanade.14
The southern residential sector is made up of three clusters that were developed over
nearly two decades. The oldest -- the only "pod" built from the 1969 plan -- is Gateway
Plaza (1980), finally finished in 1983 with 1712 housing units in three 34-story buildings
and three 8-story buildings on a 5-acre site. They are considered the "project" of the
development because of their brutal modernist design.15 To the south, Rector Place
contains 2,200 units in 12 building that follow the design guidelines of the Cooper Eckstut
plan.16 Six separate developers hired their own prominent architects such as Charles
Moore, Davis, Brody & Associates and Stewart Polshek & Partners. Begun in 1984, Rector
Place and the one-acre Rector Park were all ready by 1987. On the southern tip, the
incomplete Battery Place contains 2,800 units in three buildings,17 each created by a
separate development team. Battery Place will be the location for the Museum of Jewish
Heritage though financial difficulty has put that project on hold. Battery Park City will
perhaps be connected to Battery Park, much to the chagrin of the Battery Park City
Owners Association, by extending the esplanade through South Park. They fear the "...
derelicts, all the homeless, all the undesirable-all the problems of Battery Park.." would
wind up in their park.18 "We don't want hawkers selling counterfeit watches and Tshirts," stated BPC Owners Association President Marie Crouch. Although this is a public
park, they feel that since they pay a maintenance fee to the Battery Park City Parks
Corporation, they have the right to decide what happens to the park. The controversial 3acre $12 million park is set to begin construction in 1994.19
To the north of the World Financial Center, the infrastructure for the residential sector is
still being built and ideas are still being kicked around. The zoning and mapping,
completed in 1987, lead the BPCA and the Board of Education to open a new Stuyvesant
High School in 1992, financed and built by BPCA at a cost of $150 million and maintained
by the Board of Education.20 Once located near Stuyvesant Park, the school's enrollment
is based on entrance exams and is widely considered one of the best public schools in the
nation. A special $6 million bridge had to be constructed for the 3,000 students who
would have to cross the dangerous West Side Highway.21 In addition, the $16 million, 8acre waterfront Hudson River Park opened in June of 1992 after three years of
construction.22 Meanwhile, New York's economic downturn has lead the BPCA to
construct two baseball fields on the rest of the undeveloped lots until the development
prospects improve. A proposal to create 100 affordable units -- for families making $4050,000 -- in a 300 unit building with larger 3 bedroom apartments caused such an outcry
from the Battery Park City Owners Association. Fearing falling property values if the
community lost its exclusivity, the plan has been progressing very slowly.23 Apparently,
middle-class renters have an easier time. A Moderate Housing Initiative tax-abatement
program is available for Battery Park City's rental buildings if they subsidize 20% of the
apartments for moderate income tenants. This deal is great for landlords at times when
the luxury housing market is soft. Generally, the participating tenants are young collegeeducated full-time employees making $27-32, 000 a year.23B
The $4 billion development, mostly financed by private capital, has since generated
substantial returns for the city. The $200 million state-provided seed money for Battery
Park City was completely repaid with interest by 1987.24 The government now expected
the BPCA to generate revenues. In 1986, Mayor Koch announced his $4.2 billion, ten year
housing plan to generate 250,000 affordable housing units for New Yorkers.25 Battery
Park City was meant to play an integral part in funding this undertaking. Since the BPCA
had a separate credit rating from the city, much better in fact, it could use its blue-chip
rating to issue bonds on behalf of the city that would in turn be used to create low and
moderate income housing on city-owned land. The Housing New York Program was
developed under the auspices of the New York City Housing Development Corporation to
oversee bond issues backed by the BPCA.26 Recently, however, Olympia & York's
bankruptcy has affected the BPCA's bond rating and has forced it out of the lucrative
short-term bond market.26A
...
Though the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970's was precipitated by a combination of
mismanagement and withdrawal of federal subsidies, the city also lost 300,000
manufacturing jobs, 800,000 residents and experienced drastic abandonment of
properties from landlords who could no longer generate profit to meet their tax
obligations.27 Landlords frequently set fire to their buildings in order to collect the last bit
of profit from the fire insurance before abandoning the buildings to the city. The city of
New York found itself in possession of huge swaths of land in the Bronx, Harlem and the
Lower East Side. Most of the housing that came into the city's possession were
deteriorated, abandoned tenement shells. (The problem became so bad that many fire
insurance companies refused to cover properties in New York City, until the state's
Insurance Regulatory Commission finally stepped in.)
The New York State Municipal Assistance Corporation -- an association of banks that have
helped finance the city's debts for major profit -- and the Emergency Financial Control
Board -- comprised of the governor, mayor, comptroller and 3 corporate executives that
oversaw the rest of the city's financial affairs, including all labor contracts -- restructured
the city's finances under the assumption that free market forces can allocate money more
efficiently than government agencies.28 During this time, the Urban Development
Corporation was established to override local land-use ordinances and to bring in private
sector investment.29 Privatizing public services, controlled under local jurisdictions, would
use city tax revenues more efficiently and streamline the municipal government. Wealthy
communities such as Business Improvement Districts (BID) and the Upper East Side, now
pay for the maintenance of their own neighborhoods. Poor jurisdictions have
correspondingly suffered, as they are less likely to be able to afford private street
cleaning or private security when faced with more pressing social problems like drugs and
crime. Gaps in educational spending are even more drastic; wealthier neighborhoods
spend twice as much on the average per student and teacher's salary than their less
fortunate neighbors.30 The city's privatization and financial restructuring benefited New
York's private sector and banks but did little for its social agenda.
Though Battery Park City was intended to provide apartments at the upper end of the
spectrum so that less expensive apartments would become available, the trickle down
theory did not pan out. The trickle-down theory of economics broadened the gap between
the rich and poor. As William Tabb explained,"this effort to bring back the world of laissezfaire, in which social responsibility is reduced to private charity...is not unique to New
York City: on the contrary, the shift to neoconservative reprivatization that is proceeding
rapidly under the Reagan administration is...merely the New York scenario writ large."31
...
Of the $400 million in bonds promised by the BPCA in 1987, only $210 million have been
sold by Housing New York, established as a subsidiary of the New York City Housing
Development Corporation to oversee the bonds issued by BPCA for affordable housing.
From this money, 1620 affordable housing units have been rehabilitated in the Bronx and
Harlem. Scatter site housing rehabilitates individual abandoned buildings in a defined area
rather than entire blocks. Most of the Bronx housing is located between 1415-1585
Townsend Avenue and 1424-1635 Walton Avenue. In Harlem, the housing is located
between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard from 139th to 144th Street.
Of these units, 30% are reserved for homeless and doubled-up families ($0-5,000 a
year), 40% for very low income ($5-10,000), 20% for low income ($10-15,000) and 10%
for moderate income ($15-25,000).32
The renovated housing stock in Harlem consists of handsome six-story apartment
buildings, with clean facades, new windows, secure entryways and wheelchair ramps.
Harlem is blessed by well-constructed, generously-proportioned apartment buildings,
originally built for white bourgeois families that could afford better housing. After the Civil
War, poor blacks from the south moved to New York City, and Harlem experienced a
drastic white-flight in the late-19th century. Due to segregation, African-Americans had
limited housing opportunities and were limited to residing in certain neighborhoods, even
if less expensive housing was available in white neighborhoods. Homes and apartment
buildings were often subdivided to accommodate the increasing population. In the 1920's,
Harlem enjoyed a thriving cultural scene and growing black middle-class.
Now, the majority of Harlem's businesses seem to consist of check cashing places, liquor
stores and bodegas. Still one of the poorest communities in New York City -- only certain
sections of the Bronx are poorer --- Harlem now appears as unintegrated as the Jim
Crowe days. While the citywide median household income is $30,000, the median
household income in Central Harlem is $13,000, and 23.3% of the households report
incomes of less than $5000 a year.33B Within a mile from the Upper East Side (with the
city's highest per capita income), an imaginary boundary line exists at 95th Street where
in a few short blocks the faces on the street go from black to white. Battery Park City's
median household income, on the other hand, was estimated at $110,000.33C
Unfortunately, new housing is not the only thing needed to rebuild these neighborhoods.
All the money provided for low-income housing might ultimately serve no benefit,
because -- although money is made available for construction -- the economic and social
conditions that generated these slums are left unattended.33 The segregation of income
only serves to reinforce the nature of the slums even as it generates money for lowincome housing. Without access and proximity to a prospering middle class, these
neighborhoods will not be able to support legitimate businesses and generate enough
revenue to become self-sustaining. By economically and socially polarizing these
neighborhoods even further, Battery Park City becomes more of an enclave for the wellto-do (with ever more restrictive rulings demanded by the BPC Owner's Association, to be
sure), and the slum of Harlem and the Bronx become harder to turn into viable
communities.
...
The Battery Park City redesign is arguably more successful than the proposed modernist
super-blocks because it has successfully simulated diversity and integration. Rather than
being diverse through generations of building codes, styles, materials and construction
techniques, the buildings still have a homogenous brand-new feel to them. In reality,
buildings underneath the skin are really no different from overscaled modern high-rises.
Considering the expensive rents, the apartments are surprisingly average and ungenerous
in space.
For all the talk of integrating Battery Park City into the urban fabric, it has continued to
offer only limited access and relative isolation. Ironically, its failure to integrate has come
to be seen as a bonus by its residents. Its stern public face, seen from downtown only
hints at the splendid parks and esplanade beyond the lawns protected by chain linkfences and the massive World Financial Center. While the rest of the city is plagued by
homelessness resulting from loss of affordable housing in the boom economy as well as
the clearing of state psychiatric institutions, Battery Park City has remained relatively free
of the homeless -- though the streets, parks and esplanade are all technically public. The
reason might lie in the restrictive access available to pedestrians. Only three roads lead
into the two-mile long development. Over the West Side Highway, the 22-second crossing
signal restricts those impeded by old age or shopping carts.
The current pedestrian entrances are via two covered bridges, each 200 feet long and 40
feet wide, called North and South Bridge. South Bridge connects the appropriately named
South Gatehouse to an unmarked structure on the sidewalk of Liberty Street and is closed
in the evening and on weekends. North Bridge connects the World Trade Center and the
Customs House to the World Financial Center and Winter Garden via a maze of climate
controlled corridors and revolving doors. Once in the Winter Garden, one is presented
with the enormous barrel-vaulted, palm-treed interior complete with a lavish marble and
granite semi-circular staircase. Allowing public access to the Winter Garden is perceived
as a privilege and a great "public amenity."
Aligning Battery Park City's main entrances through the World Financial Center is an
interesting statement on our society's prerogative concerning the global financial world.
By entering through the World Trade Center --hopefully avoiding the overcrowded and
boisterous low-end shopping arcade and transportation node -- one is lead along a
concourse with rows of television monitors declaring future events at the Winter Garden.
(Polka bands, Third World music or the occasional classical recital, perhaps?) These
uncontroversial public art programs are organized by BPCA and are considered charitable
to the public realm.34 As they often require local participation to some degree, these
programs are a gesture of goodwill on the part of the sponsoring multinational
corporations such as tenants of the World Financial Center that do not have any real
loyalty to one location.
At the end of the tube, revolving doors control the stream of executives and secretaries
going in and out of the World Financial Center. Having finally arrived at the Winter
Garden, one can shop at the luxury boutiques that sell a wide variety of first-class,
international merchandise. By limiting the ease of access, the chances of having
undesirable wander in is also limited. The large security staff, dressed in inconspicuous
navy blue blazers but sporting 2-way radios, are spread throughout the World Financial
Center. The homeless and the underprivileged are made to feel like outcasts in a society
of achievers.35
Should this not be sufficient to safeguard Battery Park City, the doormen and the staff
that clean and maintain the parks pretty much cover the rest. Battery Park City's Parks
Corporation collect maintenance fees from the residents to assure that the parks remain
spotless. The recently completed $18 million Hudson River Park has a maintenance
budget of $1 million a year.36 Traditional public parks, littered with broken glass, already
understaffed and facing budget cuts, should be so lucky. Such notions only reinforce the
belief in the superiority of the private sector. As for security, the doormen are paid for
keeping undesirables out of the buildings. On the street, private security (which employs
2.6% of the American workforce) patrols the neighborhood 24-hours a day.37 Curiously,
these services are rendered mostly by young minority males. By buying the services that
guarantee a measure of cleanliness and security, the symbolic analysts pay for the
improvement of their own situation and those of other resident symbolic analysts. The
rest of the city, in turn, is left behind.
...
While Battery Park City's mechanism for financial growth is very impressive, isolating the
poor, in many regards the most vulnerable members of society, in drug and crime ridden
communities helps to reinforce a cycle of poverty. It is also a convenient way to keep
them out of sight. Perhaps integrating a wider mix of income levels in Battery Park City,
serving fewer families if necessary, might serve a working-poor family better than giving
them a new apartment in a desolate war zone. Correspondingly, the poor neighborhoods
could also use a few more middle income residents to boost the commercial opportunities
of a larger segment of the city, rather than in just a few privileged communities.
Privatization of public services and local financial control foster development patterns that
are so uneven in New York City that small focused segments thrive while the rest of the
city is left to fend for itself.
While Battery Park City may provide a safe, clean community that is popular amongst the
upper-middle class, the repercussions of denying the pressing needs of the rest of the city
is even more dangerous. Already, Battery Park City is hailed as a model community to
bring back the urgently needed upper-middle class to the urban center. What this type of
plan ignores is the need of a well-designed environment for everyone. By blessing this
type of development for the public realm, we reinforce an illusion of public space. In
reality, we turn our backs on the rest of the city and reinforce the idea that it is okay to
just look out for our own demographic group. The public realm is not just for a small
segment of the population; it is for the entire city. By allowing the symbolic analysts to
ignore their social obligations for the more charming private realm, we aggravate a social
problem that will not go away by itself.
Chapter 2 Endnotes
1. Battery Park City Authority literature.

2. Lu Ratunil, "After Years of Being Down;" Manhattan Spirit, April 7, 1993.
3. Abraham Biderman, Commissioner of HPD, in a Letter to the Editor, New York Observer
on Feb. 13, 1989.
4. Part of the Lower Manhattan Plan, from Battery Park City Authority press literature.
5. Robert Caro, The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; New York,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
6. Brendan Gill, "The Skyline," The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 1990.
7. Michael McCauliff, "Green Grass, Red Tape," Downtown Express.

8. Gill, ibid.
9. The statement about the UDC existing to overcome basic democracy is by David
Kahan.
10. Glenn Thrush, "Battery Park City 2000," Downtown Express, July 27, 1992.
11. Symbolic Analysts solve, identify and broker "problems" and are the successful
segment in the global marketplace. The Inperson Server and the Routine Producer, which
makes up 80% of the population, are in fact getting poorer. Robert Reich, Work of
Nations, pg. 268-282.
12. Lauren Ramsby, "Quiet Enclave on the Edge of Manhattan," New York Observer,
Sept., 20, 1993.
13.Chris Oliver, "Megabuck Marina," New York Post, March 22,1989.
14. Figures for this paragraph come the Battery Park City Authority literature.
15. Gateway plaza plaza is constantly derided in articles that deal with the planning of the
residential sector. See Gill, ibid. and Greg Sargent, "White Collar Colony," Downtown
Express, Dec. 7, 1992.
16. These guidelines include using Caledonia granite for the curbs and seating walls,
Belgian block cobble strips, fences of wrought iron pickets with cast iron spears and
bluestone walkways. Rector Park design statement from Battery Park City Authority
literature.
17. Figures for this paragraph come the Battery Park City Authority literature.
18. Jere Hester, "Not in My Garden," Downtown Express, Dec. 9, 1991.
19. Another controversy over South Park was Jennifer Bartlett's attitude toward designing
something impractical and terribly expensive. The commission for the park was finally
taken off their hands after Governor Cuomo decided it should be redesigned from scratch.
See Herbert Muschamp, "Sprucing Up the Site," New York Times, Jan. 7, 1993.
20. Emil, David; New York Times Editorial; March 28, 1992.
21. Karrie Jacobs, "Little Utopias", Metropolis, Sept. 1992, pg. 86.
22. See Alison Simko' "Hudson River Park Opens," Downtown Express, May 25, 1992 and
Karrie Jacobs, ibid., pg. 86.
23. Terry Golway, "Irked in BPC by Affordable Housing," New York Observer, March 29,
1993, pg. A1.
23B. Interview with a Moderate Housing Initiative tenant.
24. Cover page of the Battery Park City Authority 1987/88 Annual Report.
25 Gill, ibid. and Battery Park City Authority 1987/88 Annual Report.
26. See the Battery Park City Authority 1987/88 Annual Report and Thrush, ibid.
26A. Thrush, ibid.
27. See Jack Newfield, City for Sale, New York, Perennial Library, 1989.
28. William Tabb The Long Default, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1982, pg, 1-21.
29. Tabb, ibid., pg. 21-31.
30. Reich, Work of Nations, pg. 268-274.
31. Tabb, ibid., pg. 15.
32. Figures obtained from Mary McConnel at Housing New York.
33. Camillo Jose Vergara photographed the gradual degeneration and abandonment of
hundreds of buildings in slums over several years to show the futility of Koch's Housing
Initiative, from "The New Urban Landscape," a show at the Storefront for Art and
Architecture in the fall of 1991.
33B. 1990 Census figures in New York City Department of City Planning, Socioeconomic
Profiles,March 1993.
33C. From Jerry Chelsow, "A New Neighborhood Along The Hudson," New York Times,
Dec. 26, 1993, Real Estate, Pg. 3
34. Anita Contini, who runs the art programs for the Winter Garden, was once part of
Creative Time, a non-profit organization known controversial art in the public realm. From
Hannah Morris's case study.
35. M. Christine Boyer, "City of Illusion," Design Book Review, Winter 1992.
36. Jacobs, ibid., pg. 86.
37. Reich, ibid.,pg. 269.
Los Angeles: Buying the Concept of Security
Los Angeles's walled communities provide professionals from the real estate,
entertainment and technology industries with an escape from the problems of the
disenfranchised that lie beyond their well protected enclaves -- with tall gates, private
security forces and 24-hour a day electronic surveillance. Los Angeles's form originated
around the idealized concept of the detached single family home, made possible by the
automobile. LA has become America's archetypal decentralized metropolis. Now the
second largest city in the United States, LA's 3.4 million people sprawl evenly over 70
square miles, an area roughly a quarter larger than New York City with half New York
City's population. Eighty two different language groups make LA in certain respects an
even more cosmopolitan gateway city than New York City, which only has 55 language
groups.1
In the 1980s, LA replaced New York City as the most popular point of entry for
immigrants, shifting the demographics from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population to
one that is 40 percent Hispanic, 37 percent Caucasian, 13 percent African-American and
10 percent Asian and other races.2 The social polarization also shifted in the Reagan Era
with affluent households (making over $50,000) nearly tripling from 9 percent to 26
percent, while the poor population (making under $15,000) increased from 30 percent to
40 percent. Correspondingly, the middle class was reduced by nearly half, from 61
percent to 32 percent.3 Protecting the lifestyles and property values of the upper and
middle classes by keeping out undesirables has lead to increasing privatization -- and
militarization -- of entire neighborhoods, while increasingly repressive actions by the
infamous Los Angeles Police Department4 serve to keep the poor in their place.
...
Los Angeles's most dramatic growth occurred only in the last seventy years, developing
with the automobile culture and the growth of the national highway system. LA resulted
with today's familiar low-density amorphous developments of single family homes. But
until the 1920s, LA had developed in much the same way as other cities, growing up
around Henry Huntington's "Pacific Electric" mass transit system that first opened in
1901. The mass transit system, once the largest in the world, operated over 1,114 miles
of tracks and carried an average of a quarter-million passengers a day.5 Though the city
was decentralized from the start, downtown Los Angeles prospered enormously as a
transit hub, creating a traditionally dominant urban center. Henry Huntington wisely
purchased large areas of land around his tracks and prospered enormously from the
suburban housing developments that he built around the lines. Other developers had to
pay him subsidies to get crucial rail links that would guarantee successful developments.6
By the 1920s, the automobiles began crowding out the streetcars downtown. Commutes
became unbearably long and the cost of home ownership around the streetcar lines
became prohibitively expensive. Automobiles and additional street infrastructure were
seen as a means of curtailing limits to the expansion of the suburbia. The paradigm of the
single family house was upheld by would-be homeowners and the civic elite whose
enormous wealth was largely derived from real estate speculation -- from selling each
homeowner a plot of land, a house and a mortgage. The oil industry and corporations
such as Firestone Rubber had strong interest in the dominance of the automobile over
mass transit. With no resistance from civic leaders, a bond act was overwhelmingly
approved in 1926 to build an extensive street and freeway infrastructure, and a mass
transit rehabilitation proposal was easily defeated.7 By allowing the mass transit system
to slowly decay, Los Angeles essentially sacrificed its downtown.
In response to the Depression in the 1930s, homeowners threatened with foreclosures on
their high-interest, short-term mortgages were assisted by Roosevelt's 1933 Home
Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). The HOLC refinanced over a million mortgages into
what has become the industry standard: the self-amortizing (paying off both the interest
and the principal) thirty-year mortgage. The rationalization of mortgages was at the
center of the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA). FHA mortgages financed and insured up to 90 percent of a home's
value, suddenly making homeownership accessible to over 50 percent of the population.
More importantly, developers could borrow FHA funds, as well as funds from the
burgeoning savings and loans, to comfortably complete entire projects, including street
construction. This master-community-builder approach was a major factor of Los
Angeles's enormous development after the Second World War.8 As Robert Fishman put it,
"The growth of Los Angeles was not only explosively rapid; it was also virtually
unhampered by previous traditions and settlements. The city was surrounded by
seemingly unlimited land, supported by a massive influx of people and capital, and led by
an elite wholly committed to suburban expansion."9
Unlike traditional cities, class division in Los Angeles has never depended on proximity to
its urban center as much as in other cities. Instead, class divisions are based on altitude.
The less fortunate live in the flatland, named the Plains of Id by Reyner Banham,10 while
those more fortunate locate themselves in the hills for purer air and better vantage
points. Development in the foothills west of the meandering Los Angeles River (converted
to a concrete-lined storm sewer by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s) began in
the 1920s as affluent, planned communities. If a cliched aspect of LA's good life exists -conjured up in the movies that originated there -- it is based on the image of these well
publicized communities: Beverly Hills, Westwood, Brentwood, Bel Air, Santa Monica,
Hollywood and Silver Lake. Developed by Alphonso Bell in the 1910s, Bel Air, one of the
original gated communities, was so exclusive that Bell refused to sell homes to "movie
people", (i.e. Jews).11 Built on the 3,300-acre Hamel and Denkel Ranch after a failed oilfinding mission, the 1913 master planned community of Beverly Hills, designed by New
York architect Wilbur Cook, was incorporated as a separate city by the Rodeo Land and
Water Company before any construction even took place.12 Beverly Hills became the
preferred residence for those in the entertainment industry because of its proximity to the
studios in seedier Hollywood.
...
When explosive growth of the decentralized metropolis threatened the very qualities that
were being sold as the rights of homeownership -- secure property values and lowdensity unspoiled open space -- voluntary homeowners associations and later, the
homeowner-led slow-growth movements coalesced. Los Angeles's homeowners
associations (HAs) began in 1916 with the Los Felix Improvement Association which
created the concept of deed restrictions for new planned communities. Los Angeles
pioneered deed restrictions and zoning for expensive single-family homes, with racial and
social exclusion clauses and minimum costs and sizes for construction of new homes.13
The creation of HAs, which Mike Davis refers to as the White Wall, put 95 percent of the
available housing out of the reach of Asian and African-Americans in the 1920s.14
Although the United States Supreme Court finally ruled against racist deed restrictions in
1948, the Gary case of 1919, established by the California Supreme Court, allowed the
HAs to file suits against non-white homeowners, including film stars like Hattie MacDaniel.
Should "trespassing" minority homeowners attempt to defend their homes, Ku Klux Klantype vigilantism prevailed.15
Because incorporating a small group of people as a separate city for the benefits of highly
restrictive zoning was an undertaking only the most wealthy could afford, most middle
class communities located themselves in county areas that were undertaxed and
unincorporated. The Lakewood planned community, modeled after Levittown but twice
the size, was threatened by annexation to Long Beach in the 1950s. The developers,
Weingart, Boyar and Taper, devised the "Lakewood Plan" to incorporate it without the
traditional vital-service costs of creating a separate city. Los Angeles County allowed
Lakewood to lease its fire, police, sanitation, library and maintenance services at cut-rate
prices, subsidized by the county's funds for the services. The communities retained their
zoning privileges, while their services were subsidized by county taxpayers. To offset the
loss of real estate taxes, the county gets money for existing infrastructure and for
services that would normally have to be provided.
The 1956 Bradley-Burns Act allowed local governments to collect a one percent sales tax
for their own use, so the new minimal cities with their new decentralized shopping malls
were able to finance their city government without increasing property taxes. The 26
county-subsidized minimal cities that appeared between 1954 and 1960 also encouraged
suburban separatism and local control - by zoning out service-intensive low-income
renting populations. The resulting suburban exodus left the older parts of the city with
little tax base for the predominantly poor population. The 1980 Census showed that while
the county was 13 percent African-American, 53 of its 82 cities, 30 of which were
Lakewood Plan incorporators, had African-American populations of one percent or less.16
If the first forty years of Los Angeles's history focused on the creation of "Bourgeois
Utopias," as Robert Fishman calls racially and economically segregated suburban
communities, the last thirty years have revolved around their defense. When the foothill's
drawing points threatened them with overdevelopment, homeowner-led slow-growth
movements entered the political arena. Unlike its counterpart in Northern California, the
slow-growth movement was not rooted in environmentalism but rather the protection of
property values and land-use control. If environmental concerns came into discussion at
all, it was because the residents regarded the open space of their sprawling subdivision as
important as Yosemite Park. Drastic real estate inflation made buying a house in the
foothills just about impossible for anyone but the most well-to-do. The Federation of
Hillside and Canyon Homeowners, founded in the gated colony of Bel Air in the 1950s,
affiliated a dozen other communities to make sure that NIMBY development went
elsewhere. When the gated community of Hidden Hills -- whose residents include Frankie
Avalon, Bob Eubanks and Neil Diamond -- was threatened with a Superior Court Order to
provide 48 units of senior citizen housing outside the gates, they complained that the old
people would attract drugs and crime.17 The Federation has since grown to over 50
affiliations and, with its massive financial and legal powers, took on an even broader role
than HAs ever could.18
In West LA, gates are erected around established neighborhoods of single-family
bungalows. Depending on the HA's social class, the neighborhood fortification can vary
from chain link fences and automatic gates -- prone to frequent malfunction -- for the
middle class, to iron gates, masonry walls and full-time security guards for more
prosperous communities. Each individual home often has a fence demarcating its
property, so if an HA has a tight budget, gates can be erected between different enclosed
properties to cut off the street to pedestrians and vehicles. Older gated communities have
the aesthetic advantage of having developed gradually. While certain neighborhoods
contain modest looking homes, many have been substantially altered and expanded,
adding variety to the "public" street. The inflated land values for minuscule homes on
small lots have also created more streetscape diversity by encouraging the construction
of large new postmodern homes. Styles range from Santa Fe to Deconstruction. Color
schemes for the older homes are more varied than the monotonous new gated
communities being built by developers in the San Fernando Valley. It might even appear
that style in LA is reserved for westsiders. Generally, only truly privileged members of
society can afford to move into homes on the westside, much less tear one down and
rebuild a new one, so the rest are forced to move farther and farther inland.
Aside from the riots of 1943, 1965 and 1992, few Westsiders really noticed the flourishing
minority communities, as the pleasantly insulated affluent communities and autotopic
lifestyles made entire sections of Los Angeles easily invisible. The slow, orange Regional
Transit Department (RTD) buses, serving only those too old or too poor to drive, provide
transportation for the immigrant workers that tend the households of the Foothills
residents and serve as a reminder that the city really runs on cheap immigrant labor. The
large, empty, unshaded sidewalks and precariously timed traffic signals lead David Rieff
to comment, "The impression is inescapable that the advertisements you see on benches
all over the Westside for Jewish funeral chapels are really a message aimed at anyone
foolish enough to expect to survive as a walker in Los Angeles."19
...
If the minorities are kept at bay, anxious property owners can thank the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD). Not only do they harass minorities that dare to trespass into
bastions of privilege,20 they also quarantine poor neighborhoods in the name of war on
drugs and gang control. While the New York City Police Dept has 27,000 officers for a
population of seven million, LAPD has only 8300 officers serving an area 25 percent larger
than New York and half as populated.21 In the 1920s, the LAPD developed mechanized
policing by using squad cars instead of beat cops. In the 1950s, the legendary Chief
Parker introduced the first police helicopter for aerial surveillance, further isolating the
police from the communities they serve. As Mike Davis said, "Dragnet's Sergeant Friday
precisely captured the Parkerized LAPD's quality of prudish alienation from a citizenry
composed of fools, degenerates and psychopaths."22
The enormous area and lack of manpower has lead the LAPD to respond (increasingly)
with tough paramilitary methods and high-tech weaponry. LAPD's 50 new French
Aerospatiale helicopters, equipped with sophisticated infra-red heat-detection cameras
and 30-million-candle-powered spotlights called "Nightsuns," and its fleet of Bell Jet
Rangers average 19-hour days of aerial surveillance over high-crime areas (i.e. poor
neighborhoods). Thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with large numbers
creating a large grid for ground-air synchronization. An entire SWAT team can be airlifted
to any region of the city, and can be seen frequently practicing their assaults on
downtown high-rises, much like the movie Blue Thunder. LAPD's links with the Southern
California aerospace/defense industry, has allowed them to acquire such technology as
NASA's $42 million state-of-the-art communication system, named ECCCS, allowing
access to vast databases on its citizens and guaranteeing secrecy of transmission.23 The
LAPD's seemingly unlimited funding for these projects results mostly from gang hysteria
and the ineffective war on drugs. Perhaps the LAPD's predilection for high-tech weapons
might be better spent increasing their manpower to get back in touch with their
communities.
...
Besides the physical and political disinvestment of ethnic Los Angeles, industrial
disinvestment by relocating plants in Asia or much farther inland has eradicated 75,000
manufacturing jobs that once supplied African-Americans with decent wages. Residential
and job growth in the 1980s happened to be in areas with African-American populations
of one percent or less. Losing in the competition for menial jobs to recent immigrants who
are seen as more docile and exploitable by employers, unemployed African-American
youths in Los Angeles County remained at around 45 percent throughout the 1980s.24 By
not replacing economic opportunities for jobs lost through foreign trade, minority youths
frequently turn to one of the only economies left in the area -- dealing cocaine and crack.
Following the classical capitalist principles of Adam Smith, young entrepreneurs -- loosely
organized into two color-coded supergangs, the Bloods and Crips immortalized in the
movie Colors -- sell their merchandise to the poor as well as the rich, accumulating
fineries, weapons and reputations in the process.25
Gang-related violence has received more than its share of news coverage, but it occurs
for the most part between rival gang members, averaging one homicide per day.26
Although the city attorney's office has recalculated the number of suspected gangmembers from 10,000 to 50,000, the media and "gang experts" sensationalized this
number up to around 100,000. As there are only about 100,000 African-Americans youths
in all of Los Angeles County, the numbers appear extremely inflated.27 The result is that
just about any minority teenager may be automatically suspected of being an Uzicarrying, "narco-terrorist" just for wearing colored shoelaces or using a hand signal.28
After a young woman was gunned down in posh Westwood in December of 1987, the
area's merchants demanded curfew ordinances and extra police protection, which made
the African-American community leaders demand the same for their neighborhood. The
LAPD was only happy to oblige. Since it had always been seen as an army of occupation,
it now had the community's blessing to utilize its macho tactics on minority youths whose
civil rights were suspended for this state of emergency. Any police misconduct was seen
as a lesser evil than the gangs,29 so operation HAMMER began with selective curfews
imposed on poor neighborhoods. Kids out past dusk would get police records (useful for
future gang-related monitoring) for behavior that their affluent counterparts took for
granted. Humiliatingly forcing children to "kiss the sidewalk" and processing them in
mobile booking units, the hyped anti-gang sweeps also provided the LAPD with thousands
of additional names and addresses of local teenagers, checked against their computerized
list of gang members. By 1990 a total of 50,000 "suspects" had been picked up in this
manner, 90 percent of whom were released without charges.
Since the sweeps proved worthless in stopping gang violence, Chief Gates created the
first "narcotic enforcement zone" in October of 1989 by sealing off 27 blocks around the
Pico-Union neighborhood with barricades and police checkpoints. As the Berlin Wall was
coming down in December, LAPD spread Operation Cul-de-Sac by barricading a large
section of Central Avenue in Southcentral, and a barrio in the Valley.30 The visible
barriers proved even less effective, so the judicial system established class and racially
biased statutes allowing for the eviction of entire families of people merely charged, not
convicted, for drug dealing, as well as "bad parent" clauses that allow parents of minors
to be charged. Five grams of crack ($125) yields a mandatory five year sentence, while it
takes 500 grams of "yuppie cocaine" ($50,000) to get a similar sentence. Gang
membership, not committing an actual crime, was now reason enough for conviction.31
How effective has this approach been? With juvenile crime rising by 12 percent annually,
one out of 12 teenagers will be arrested, half for felonies. With more young AfricanAmerican males in prison than in the entire University of California system, the
penitentiary system currently has 84,000 inmates crowded into spaces designed for
48,000. Ironically, the penal colonies around central Los Angeles are now a major source
of employment for minority males. Completely giving up on any hope of rehabilitation,
the war on drugs is estimated to bring the total number incarcerated to 145,000 by 1995.
The construction of prisons has become a new source of employment for celebrity
architects such as Robert A.M. Stern's Pasadena Police and Jail Facility and Welton
Becket's downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. Resembling a high-rise convention
center or high-tech hotel, the Metropolitan Detention Center holds up to 70 percent of
"the managerial elite of narco-terrorism" from the war on drugs.32
In the few platforms ever given to them, the articulate demands that gangs have made
call for jobs, housing, recreational facilities, better schools and control of local
institutions.33 While the LAPD budget neared $400 million in 1990, only $500,000 was
set aside for an alternative employment program for a hundred "high-risk" youths. Most
inner city employment training programs had already been dismantled during Governor
Reagan's administration. For the 250,000 low-income latch-key children, the Bradley
administration allocated only $30,000 for recreational equipment in 1987, encouraging
parks to operate as fee generating enterprises. Funded by their surrounding
neighborhoods, inner city parks are rapidly deteriorating, while parks in privileged
neighborhoods are becoming increasingly controlled through "locals-only" restrictions
designed to keep the poor families out.34 San Marino, one of the richest cities in the
country, closes its parks on weekends to make sure the neighboring Asian and Latin
communities are excluded. A plan is being considered to reopen the parks on Saturdays
only to residents (with proof of residence). Following in their footsteps, other upscale
communities are restricting parking to locals only; although, these communities tend to
have three-car garages.35
...
In post-liberal Los Angeles, awareness of this desperate situation is such that the defense
of the privileged and middle class neighborhoods has taken on a sudden urgency. The
desire of the ordinary middle class to live in socially insulated communities has created a
frenzy for security fencing around entire neighborhoods, emulating the luxury, fortressed
"minimal" cities that developed in the 1950s and 1960s, like Hidden Hills, Bradbury, Palos
Verdes Estates, Hidden Hills and Rancho Mirage. Older communities like Bradbury, with
900 residents and ten miles of private streets, are fully enclosed with guarded entry
points and served by public and private security services and are impossible to enter
without an invitation from a resident. The San Fernando Valley, completely open ten
years ago, now has over one hundred newly gated communities. The demand for more
security is nearly insatiable. Valley contractor Brian Weinstock remarked, "The demand is
there on a three-to-one basis for a gated community than not living in a gated
community."36 Forest City Enterprises, owners of the 1940s Park La Brea, have cut off
pedestrian access and surrounded the 176-acre gentrifying development on Wilshire's
Miracle Mile with security fencing.
Gated developments in the San Fernando Valley lack any of the architectural charm that
the West Side has built up over time. The stringency of new HA design codes seems to
discourage expansion or modification of the homes and fosters bland subdivisions such as
can be found on the outskirts of any major town. Housing designs are often moderncolonial hybrids and available in the several shades of grey or beige. Anything that might
deviate from the norm is considered a reselling hindrance, so everything is carefully
maintained in a perpetual banality. Neighborhoods are composed of a few housing types,
sometimes available in reverse plan to hopefully make homes appear more interesting.
Since the San Fernando Valley is expanding farther and farther into the desert, serious
environmental problems such as water shortages and smog are threatening these
developments. But nothing it seems can stop the idealization of the single family home,
and no price is too great, not even two-hour commutes, for peace of mind.
Needless to say, the homes of the rich are even more security centered, borrowing design
ideas from foreign embassies for terrorist-proof security rooms accessed through secret
doors. The concept of total residential security would not be complete without private
security companies such as Westec or Bel-Air Patrol. "Armed response" signs dot the
lawns of virtually all affluent subdivisions. HAs lease complete security packages,
including hardware, monitoring, patrols, personal escorts and armed responses. Demand
for security against the perceived threat of minority gangs has ironically provided minority
males with one of the few job opportunities left to them, besides becoming prison guards.
One of the fastest growing industries of the 1980s, private security guards comprised in
1990 twice the national labor average of 1970.37 In Los Angeles alone, the security
workforce has tripled in the last ten years, from 24,000 to 75,000. While working for
multinational conglomerates, security guards, often minority males, are paid minimal
wages depending on literacy, and applicants with prison records are not automatically
turned away under California's lax licensing practice. Michael Kaye, president of Westec, a
subsidiary of Japan's Secom Ltd and the leading Westside security firm, revealed, "We're
not a security guard company. We sell a concept of security."38
...
Whether these security measures fend off professional burglars is highly debatable, but
they do work remarkably well at alienating innocent passers-by, confronting them with
signs posting death threats. By establishing a siege mentality amongst middle and upper
classes, the real problems are essentially ignored. The 1992 riot was triggered by the
Rodney King verdict, but the pillaging carried out by the poor was really a response to
desperate economic situations. The sight of people running down the street with boxes of
diapers and foam mattresses illuminated the ironies of the situation. Unfortunately, the
ensuing rush to buy firearms showed nothing had really been learned.39 The trend to
privatize neighborhoods is not singular to Los Angeles, nor is its racial and economic
polarization. Los Angeles illustrates these principles perhaps on a greater scale than cities
such as Houston or Dallas, but unless these issues are confronted in a realistic manner,
periodic riots, repressive police actions, increasing gang violence and environmental
degradation promise to reduce the quality of life for all citizens.
Chapter 3 Endnotes
1. Robert Reinhold; "Groping for Ways to Break the Siege Mentality", New York Times,July
14, 1992, pg. D6, and David Rieff, Los Angeles, pg. 105.
2. Robert Reinhold, "Fate of Police Chief is Hotly Debated After Beating", New York Times,
March 14, 1991, pg. A14.
3. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, pg. 7.
4. I am referring to the March 3, 1991 incident of the videotaped vicious beating of
Rodney King by four police officers while 16 others looked on. All the policemen were
white; Rodney King was black. The acquittal of the police officers by an all-white jury in
Simi Valley resulted in five days of rioting in Los Angeles in May of 1992, resulting 58
deaths and millions of dollars in property damage. Numerous other incidents occurred
around the country. A federal investigation uncovered rampant racial discrimination
throughout the LAPD. See Seth Mydans, "Seven Minutes in Los Angeles: A Special
Report", New York Times, March 18, 1991, pg. A1 and "Riots in Los Angeles: Overview",
May 1, 1992, pg. A1. Also "After the Riots: 58 Riot Deaths, 50 Have Been Ruled
Homicide", New York Times, May 17, 1992, pg. A26. Also Robert Reinhold ,"Riots in Los
Angeles: The Blue Blue Line", New York Times, May 1, 1992, pg. A1.
5. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, pg. 159. For more information on the Pacific
Electric, see Spencer Crump; Ride the Big Red Cars; Los Angeles, Crest Publications,
1962.
6. Fishman, Ibid., pg. 159-60.
7. Fishman, Ibid., pg. 166, also David Brodsly; L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay;
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981, appendix and Crump, Ride the Big Red
Cars, pg. 165-70.
8. Fishman, Ibid, pg. 175 and Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, Chapter 11. Another less
mentioned aspect of L.A.'s growth during war was a result of 10 to 20 percent of all prime
defense contracts that were given to firms in Southern California. War production brought
in over a million workers -- many were African-Americans from the south looking for
better employment -- and accounted for 20 percent of the areas Gross National Product,
more than twice the amount of the more publicized entertainment industry. See Rieff, Los
Angeles, pg. 76.
9. Fishman, Ibid., pg. 158.
10. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles, pg. 161-179.
11. Fishman, Ibid., pg. 168. During the Depression, the policy was discarded.
12. Fishman, Ibid., pg. 168. The city was named after Beverly Farms in Massachusetts,
an exclusive resort town north of Boston.
13. Davis, City of Quartz, pg. 160-161. See also Marc Weiss, The Rise of Community
Builders: The American Real Estate Industry, New York, 1987, pg. 3-12.
14. Davis, Ibid, pg. 160-4. The Anti-African Housing Association, turning into the
University District Property Owner's Association, was established in 1922 to fight the
"Negro Invasion" of African-Americans and Asians attempting to buy homes outside the
over-crowded ghettos east of Budlong Avenue.
15. Davis, Ibid. 163 and 400-2. In the 1940s, a home was blown up by the KKK on 30th
St., whites rioted on 71st St. against home sales to African-Americans. In 1945, after
refusing to be bought out by the Fontana Chamber of Commerce, the entire Short family
was killed when their home exploded.
16. Davis, Ibid., pg. 165-69.
17. Other NIMBY disputes involve day-care centers, retirement homes, restaurants and
even Nancy Reagan's ill-fated drug treatment center. See Davis, Ibid., pg. 204 and 246.
18. Davis, Ibid., Pg. 169-73.
19. David Reiff, Los Angles, pg. 120. He also made the brilliant assertion that although
Westsiders consider jogging to be an important activity, yardwork is considered a waste
of time. See "The Stoicism of Maids", "Modern Times" and "Alien Nation".
20. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, pg. 284-5. Don Jackson, a black off-duty police officer
decided to expose the racism of police officers towards minorities, bringing a group of
young African-Americans into the Village. Although they carefully observed the law, the
group was forced to "kiss the concrete" and searched for drug and weapons. Despite
police identification, Jackson was arrested for disturbing the peace. Chief Gates claimed at
a press conference that Jackson provoked the incident to create a cheap publicity stunt.
Twenty-four minority teenagers were arrested for trying to play baseball in Will Rogers
State Park. They were kept face down for more than 90 minutes while the police
brutalized them, saying the Pacific Palisade park was for "rich white people only."
21. Timothy Egan, "Less Risk for Police Officers", New York Times, April 25, 1991, pg.
B10.
22. Davis, Ibid, pg. 251.
23. Davis, Ibid, pg. 250-3.
25. Davis, Ibid. pg. 309-13.
27. Davis, Ibid, pg. 270, 277 and 316. There are supposedly 230 African-American and
Latino gangs, with 81 additional Asian gangs.
28. The LAPD's high-publicity anti-gang sweeps, code-named HAMMER, began in 1987
and target "drug neighborhoods", picking up anyone suspected of being in gang based on
dress and gang hand signal. See Davis, pg. 271-7.
29. I am referring to the killing of Eulia Love in 1978, a widow who had defaulted on her
gas bill. She was shot twelve times for not allowing the utility workers on her property,
while wielding a two-inch pearing knife. Chief Gates explained the rash of minority deaths
due to chokeholds as, "We may be finding that in some Blacks when the chokehold is
applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people." As Part
of operation HAMMER, an unarmed boy was shot cowering behind a tree; he was
suspected of being a gang member. Eighty eight police officers from the Southwest
Division raided a house on Dalton street in Aug. 1988 and wielding guns, sledgehammer,
racial slurs and search warrants, proceeded to completely destroy the house. No wanted
gang members were found. The Red Cross offered disaster relief and temporary
assistance to the 32 residents, who had been forced to run a gauntlet of cops beating
them with fists and to whistle the theme from Andy Griffith Show. The city had to pay $3
million in fines. They at least did not have to be confronted by Nancy Reagan, who on
April 6, 1989, assisted the first designer drug raid, clocking in her first visit to
Southcentral Los Angeles after being a fifty year resident of the sunshine state. See
Davis, Ibid, pg. 271-3 and Seth Mydans, "Seven Minutes in Los Angeles: A Special
Report", New York Times, March 18, 1991, pg. A1. Nancy Reagan is also covered in David
Rieff's Los Angeles, pg. TK.
31. Davis, Ibid, pg. 283-8. Even though he was not at the scene of the crime and did not
know the murder would occur, a 20-year old Chinese man was sentenced to two life
terms for being an accessory to the murder of a federal agent. Having robbed a
McDonalds in Sunland with pellet guns, three young Latinos were killed by an elite LAPD
stake-out team, while the seriously injured fourth boy was charged with the murder of his
friends.
36. Davis, Ibid, pg. 245-50. See also Jim Carlton, "Walled In", Los Angeles Times, Oct. 8,
1989, pg. B1. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is also planning to wall off the base
of the Hollywood sign and installing video cameras and motion detectors.
37. Reich, Work of Nations, pg. 269. See also
38. Davis, Ibid, pg. 250. Rieff, Los Angeles, pg. 126. Linda Williams, "Safe and Sound",
Los Angeles Times, Aug. 29, 1988, pg. D5.
39. Timothy Egan; "Big Rise in the Sale of Guns"; New York Times, May 14, 1992, pg. A1.
Mall of America: The New Town Center
Situated on the former site of Bloomington's Metropolitan Stadium, in a suburban

community outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Mall of America is at 4.2 million square
feet the largest enclosed shopping mall in the United States.1 Phase one of the 78-acre
complex opened to the public on August 11, 1992. Four anchor stores, 350 boutiques and
its star attraction, a seven-acre enclosed amusement park named Knott's Camp Snoopy,
all vie for the consumer's attention. A fourth level contains entertainment facilities such
as movie theaters, restaurants and nightclubs, making the mall essentially a 24-hour
facility. Two well-lit seven-story parking garages and four surface parking lots provide
space for 12,500 cars; each space is no more than 300 feet from the nearest Mall of
America entrance -- a fact repeated frequently in the mall's literature -- easing the
consumer's fear of walking too far and of violent crimes in parking lots.2
Its developers, Melvin Simon and Associates of Indianapolis, Indiana, and-Triple Five
Corporation of Edmonton, Alberta, estimate the mall will attract 40 million visitors
annually, making it one of the Twin Cities's leading tourist destinations.3 Conveniently
located next to Highway 77 and I-494 -- within minutes of the Minneapolis/St. Paul
International Airport -- Mall of America's greeters, translators, Pepsi Pick-up Shuttle tram
system and courtesy phones seem to be an extension of the airport's antiseptic and
highly controlled environment. Meanwhile, the mall's sublevel contains the service routes,
loading docks, offices and an on-site police facility. With its security-fixation, the mall
perpetuates the airport analogy. The mall's impeccable, invisible maintenance occurs in
much the same way as it does at Disneyland, another popular fantasy town.
Phase two of the mall calls for the addition of hotels and residential towers, so people will
never have to leave the protective cocoon of the mall. Although other malls, such as
Trump Tower in New York City, already have housing incorporated in them, these urban
malls are planned from the start with housing to offset high property values. The Mall of
America is located in a white-collar low-density suburban area, so the addition of housing
would essentially create an edge city in and of itself.4 Besides the 10,000 people who
currently work at the mall,5 the increased density around such viable ventures frequently
spawns additional commercial developments. Capping several decades of suburban
growth, the Post Oaks Galleria, on Loop 610 outside of Houston, currently has more retail
space, high-rise apartments and hotels than downtown Houston and is third in the state
for total office space.6
By creating the ultimate consumer paradise, the architects of the project, which include
HGA/KKE of Minneapolis and the Jerde Partnership of Los Angeles, have made a private
city whose ideal citizen's sole purpose is to shop. The rest of society, which can legally be
barred from the mall, is invisible.7
Has public space become so terrible that people would want to live in a theme park/mall?
While the mall may try to provide the services of a town center, is it providing a genuine
public realm? Besides negative social, political and psychological implications, the impact
of such a project on future urban development is important at a time when central urban
districts are in serious trouble.
...
Five minutes north of the Mall of America in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina lies the
birthplace of mall culture, Southdale Mall. Developed by Austrian-born architect Victor
Gruen in 1953, Southdale was the first fully enclosed, two-story shopping mall containing
more than one major department store.8 Up until then, suburban shopping centers had
gradually evolved from one-level strip malls composed of one or, later, two department
stores with parking directly in front of each store. Southdale's success challenged the
prevalent belief that two competitive department stores in a development were bad for
business and that people were too lazy to walk away from their cars, much less climb
stairs to shop on a second level. Gruen simply synthesized the different shopping mall
trends while fulfilling modernist ideals by separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic and
enclosing the two-story open space. Gruen envisioned malls as an antidote to suburban
sprawl and to the psychological isolation that automobiles inflicted on the social fabric. In
the mall, people would interact without interference from automobiles, while open space
was simultaneously compressed and internalized for more efficient land use. Mall
exteriors became less important with the internalization of pedestrian space; the more
dramatic the transition from inside to outside the better. Outside was unpredictable,
uncomfortable and banal, while inside was constantly pleasant, animated and interesting.
By sealing off open spaces, the complete control of natural climate was achieved, creating
an artificial Eden that remains at a constant and perfect temperature. Although Gruen
originally enclosed Southdale because Minnesota only has about 126 days of outdoorshopping weather, the covered mall became the norm for even the best climates, such as
those in California and Florida.9
The cocoon-like structure helps suspend notions of time, to be better enveloped in "The
Retail Drama."10 Suspension of reality is similar to the goal of a Las Vegas casinos. Their
goal is to push consumption. Television helps this process by influencing the "needs" of
the audience and by priming them for the incongruities that are inherent in a mall's
jarring mixture of stores and amenities. Inside the mall, consumers are stimulated into
impulse purchases to fulfill unachievable gratification and constantly changing lifestyle
fantasies.11
...
If the Mall of America draws customers away from other malls like Southdale and from
downtown Minneapolis, Bloomington residents feel a certain sense of retribution.
Bloomington suffered a loss of prestige when the Minnesota Vikings franchise deserted
the Metropolitan Stadium for the Minneapolis Metrodome. Bloomington was left with a big
empty lot and an even larger loss of tax revenues. Town officials courted developers to
see what development possibilities might exist. With the success of the West Edmonton
Mall (WEM) fresh under their belt (currently the largest mall in the world at 5.3 million
square feet), the Ghermezian Brothers's Triple Five Corporation teamed up with Melvin
Simon and Associates, the second largest developer of U.S. shopping malls,12 to recreate
the successful formula in Bloomington.
With a surrounding population of four million, the Twin Cities has a potential customer
base four times larger than Edmonton. As a super regional mall, it is expected to draw
customers from as far as 300 miles away, even Canada and Japan. With visions of rising
land values and an increased tax base, the city officials quelled the initial "Maul the Mall"
protest with promises of 10,000 jobs. The protesters correctly feared traffic congestion
expected from the 200,000 weekend shoppers.13 But Rick Geshwiler, Bloomington's
director of planning, hyperbolically claimed Mall of America would be different: "It is the
next level of retailing. It's like the difference between a space station and a bus
station."14
With Bloomington's purchase of the stadium land and subsequent zoning changes, the
developers were granted the right to build a mall totaling 9.5 million square feet,
although only 4.2 million was to be built in the first stage. A ground breaking ceremony
on Flag Day, June 14, 1989, included a squadron of F-14 fighter planes and a band
playing the "1812 Overture." Initial construction was financed with $150 million of public
bonds, divided into $25.5 million for the site, $51.5 million for the construction of the
parking lots and $80 million for infrastructure. The rest of the $625 million construction
financing came from two Japanese banks, Mitsubishi and Mitsui, each contributing $200
million. Although the economy was heading into a recession, the mall's investment
potential was attractive enough to draw the New York-based pension fund Teachers
Insurance Annuity Association. They purchased a 55% stake in the Mall of America.15
To insure the mall's success by attracting the right department stores, the developers
offered extraordinary leases to the major tenants: Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Sears and
Nordstrom. The mixture of department stores covers a broad middle-class price range.
The brunt of the mall's cost is borne by the smaller specialty stores that line the corridors
between major department stores. The highly controlled mix of stores limits competition
between tenants and maintains an illusion of variety and uniqueness -- even though most
stores are part of international chains. Independent stores are considered higher risk and
therefore subject to higher rents; however, Mall of America's Entrepreneur Partnership
tenants -- which include Hologram Land, Minnesota!, Painted Tipi and Alamo Flags -- do
get free tips on management, store design and merchandising.16
But then again, all stores have to comply with rules set down by John Wheeler, Mall of
America's general manager. Every aspect of the mall is tightly controlled: hours that the
shops must stay open, design and placement of a stores's signs and sale banners, as well
as color schemes in window displays. All tenants must pay Merchant's Association dues
for the maintenance of the common areas, security, mall promotions and special
events.17
The developers shrewdly enlisted sixteen major corporations for the privilege of being
official Mall of America sponsors and marketing partners.18 These corporations pay Mall
of America's developers to receive an unprecedented degree of advertising within the
mall, to insure exclusive use of their products and, most importantly, to have potential
access to an enormous clientele. American Express is the "Official Grand Opening Credit
Card Partner;" approved applicants get $20 certificates valid at any Mall of America
merchant. Ford Motor Company, the "Official Automotive Sponsor", funded the Ford
Playhouse in Knott's Camp Snoopy. In return, Ford gets two permanent vehicle displays.
One of them is a bizarre interactive display that allows shoppers to star in their own Ford
videos. A shopper, once seated inside the car, can select an American scenic backdrop
flashed on a wall of monitors in front of the car. Enjoying a fantasy of traveling for the
world's goods available in the mall, he or she is actually sitting in an immobile car in a carfree, indoor space with pedestrians walking by. Should young people need other
diversions beside Knott's Camp Snoopy, Ford has organized the Ford Exploration
Association, a treasure hunt through the mall. Clues based on the diversity of American
geography are gathered via special viewfinders. Although children may not be the target
audience for Ford cars, on their paths through the mall, they just might make a few
impulse purchases along the way.
The level of corporate sponsorship reaches an even more absurd level with James River
Corporation, "The Official Paper Supplier." Their Brawny Paper Towels is the sponsor of
the Paul Bunyan Log Chute in Camp Snoopy. Appearing throughout the ride is "Brawny
Presents Paul Bunyan's Log Chute." If that does not get the message across, the Brawny
Man is painted onto the mural of the Log Chute cabin. Among others, Pepsi is the "Official
Soft Drink," Hormel is the "Official Hot Dog," and Holsum Foods is the "Exclusive Oil
Supplier."
...
Mall of America is a rather typical mall, only bigger. The mall's design follows the golden
rules of movement patterns that lead the consumer into the greatest number of stores.
The mall's entrances lead directly from the parking lots into department stores or into the
centers of corridors, escalators are placed far apart and benches and greenery
strategically block direct access across corridors. Every aspect of the mall encourages
consumerism; the amenities exist to draw people to the mall, to get them to spend more
money and to keep them shopping longer. An informal study by the mall's public relations
department indicates that their tactics are working. While the national average for a
shopping visit is roughly one hour and spending averages $32.00 per visit, they maintain
the average visit at Mall of America lasts three hours and results in $87.00 in sales per
visit.19 Another poll taken by the Minneapolis Star Tribune found that half of the state's
adults had visited the megamall within eight months of its opening.20
The mall's four main shopping corridors encircle Knott's Camp Snoopy, the seven-acre,
four-story skylit, central atrium. Each corridor has a different theme and mixture of stores
and amenities that cater to the type of clientele that may pass from one department store
to the next.
South Avenue, considered the most upscale corridor, links Macy's and Bloomingdale's and
is described as "an urban promenade reminiscent of the great shopping streets of
Europe."21 The peach, cream, green, grey and rust color scheme was chosen for its
urban qualities, as were the formal, rectilinear details, which seem inspired more by the
design of highway interchanges rather than a high-class European street like the Champs
Elysee. The Lego Imagination Center, designed by Norwalk, Connecticut-based Jeters,
Cook and Jepson, is a three-story fantasy Lego Factory containing giant models of clowns
and dinosaurs and, most importantly, a retail section for Lego toys and licensed clothing.
South Avenue's fourth level contains the "Theater District," more precisely a 14-screen
General Cinema multiplex.
West Market, linking Macy's and Nordstrom, caters to "young professionals." The
atmosphere is that of a refurbished marketplace, similar to reconstituted malls like South
Street Seaport in New York or Fanneuil Hall in Boston. Replete with rigidly regulated
kiosks, street vendors and eateries, the painted metal and glass roof allows natural light
to fill the enclosed space, while the architectural details made of painted metal with brass
accents appear to be for exterior use. At the center of West Market is Market Square, a
performance and exhibition area linking the West Parking and the amusement park. The
color palette consists of cool greys with peach and green accents. The storefronts aim for
an "international character" through the use of painted metal and wood, stone, tile, brass
and chrome. Stores like Williams-Sonoma, The Limited, Oshman's and Warner Bros.
Studio Store, are all part of international corporations whose products and stores are
profitable because they have a reputable, easy to identify, predictable image -- free of
any kink that may surprise or antagonize. Trying to reconcile an illusion of individuality or
site-specificity with multinational, nonsite-specific corporate identities is an oxymoronic
design feat.
North Garden is a winding recreation of Main Street, but now, it is both indoors and on
private property. As it links Nordstrom to Sears, it is the most low-end of the middle class
corridors, indulging mainstream tastes. The intention is for an "outdoor ambience," so
heavy landscaping and white trellised gazebos and balconies abound. Skylights may bring
in natural sunlight, but the overall effect is more 1950's indoor patio than "a park-like
setting."22 The design specifications for this section call for canvas awning overhangs,
plant covered balconies and wooden trellises. Storefronts have gabled portico entries,
multi-paned windows, raised wood panels and planters. Predominant colors are white and
green, with details in burgundy -- Mall of America's official color. Complementing the
outdoor feeling is a three-story hillside, Golf Mountain. It features two miniature golf
courses among rocks, landscapes and waterfalls. Golf Mountain' entrance is through the
third-floor Garden Terrace Food Court. The game path slopes down the hill, should one
worry that strenuous activity might actually be involved.
Closing the circular path is East Broadway, linking Sears to Bloomingdale's. Like the
Times Square area that it attempts to emulate, this is an area that mixes different stratas
of the middle-class. East Broadway carries the decor through with neon signs and hightech materials like chrome, glass and polished stone. The color of choice is blue, with
details in chrome, black, grey and gold. At the center of East Broadway, the Rotunda -like Market Square, a performance and exhibition area -- links the East Parking to the
main entrance of Knott's Camp Snoopy. The aim is for an "upbeat and contemporary
appeal," but one cannot help but find East Broadway lacking in comparison to the original
historic urban district. The mall's success depends precisely on filtering out those colorful
lowlifes and undesirables that are a major part of Times Square.
At the very heart of Mall of America is perhaps its most successful architectural element,
Knott's Camp Snoopy. The articulation of the columns and beams supporting enormous
skylights are reminiscent of vast, high-tech factories. The park compresses four theaters,
nine food places, seven boutiques and twenty-one rides and attractions on seven acres.
Costing anywhere between $1.00 to 2.50 per ride, the most memorable attractions are
the "Paul Bunyan Log Chute by Brawny" with a 40-foot drop and the "Pepsi Ripsaw"
rollercoaster reaching 60 feet at its peak. The mix of high-tech interior structure with the
summer-camp atmosphere created by the trees, log cabins, and vernacular sheds make a
surreal juxtaposition -- part childhood memory, part brave new world. As far as theme
parks go, Camp Snoopy is generally well planned. Besides providing a place to keep
children entertained while parents continue to spend more money, the primary purpose of
a theme park -- like the mall -- is to increase consumption by creating an illusion of
entertainment. Food places and shops surround all the park's exits, and there are no less
than eight automatic teller machines and six ticket vending booths evenly spread over the
seven acre park.
...
Malls have pretty much supplanted town centers as the "public realm" for most
Americans. Malls are the destination of choice especially for teenagers, senior citizens and
housewives because they are viewed as safer than the unhomogenized, unpredictable
streets of true public shopping districts. Reinforced by the mall's unarmed private security
force dressed to resemble real police officers, this perception of security within the mall is
one of the most important factors for consumers and merchants, even more important
apparently than freedom of speech and of assembly.
Even though malls now serve as the town center for a huge segment of the population,
they are not supplying forums for civic activity. The courts have repeatedly upheld the
view that a developer's domain is private and that anything hindering the mall's livelihood
can be expelled from the developer's property. Anything that might distract the patron
from consumption can be barred from the mall, including the homeless, large groups of
minority teenagers, charity organizations and political protesters. In the 1972 landmark
Supreme Court decision of Lloyd Corp. versus Tanner -- and again in the 1976 case of
union picketers versus another mall -- Justice Thurgood Marshall proclaimed in his
dissenting opinion: "Shopping center owners have assumed... the traditional role of the
state in its control of First Amendment forums."23 Now that malls were the new Main
Street, developers were quick to point out that they were supported solely by
consumerism, not by public funds and taxes. If the mall's business suffered from religious
and political fanatics, the free-speaking public would not bail them out.
The public responsibility versus private property dilemma is more complicated at Mall of
America. Perhaps some malls operate purely outside public expenditure, but in the Mall of
America, $150 million in public bonds put the wheels in motion, and the surrounding
infrastructure is still maintained by the city. Mall of America provides classrooms at
nominal rates for 500 elementary public school students, children of mall employees, paid
for by five surrounding school districts.24 Before shops open, the mall walking club allows
senior citizens to track their miles between 7:00 and 10:00 a.m. Mall of America sponsors
fashion shows, craft fairs and other innocuous, apolitical activities in the hopes of
attracting more shoppers. While Mall of America shies away from anything remotely
offensive, they did permit Salvation Army santas to solicit donations at Christmas time
from specially designated posts. They were even allowed to ring their bells.25
The addition of housing at the mall, currently still on the drawing board, would complicate
matters even further. Other malls with housing are in dense urban locations, with public
forums available immediately outside the buildings. Mall of America is immediately
surrounded by enormous parking lots and, beyond that, suburbia. There is no readily
available public meeting place besides shopping malls. The political implications of a lack
of public forum are similar to those of Los Angeles's car-based society. The lack of options
for petitioning and protesting leads to easier control, sedation and manipulation of
society. Rather than removing a potential audience in downtown public streets in a carbased society, developers deny free-speech's access to pedestrians in their private malls.
Although Mall of America's developers maintain that living there would be a desirable
proposition, the tragic situation is that they believe people would rather live in a sedating
fantasy world of a mall than in the public realm. Rights of free speech and assembly may
sometimes be unsettling, but they are more precious than false security. The public realm
may be uncomfortable at times for its messy reality, but Mike Davis's vision of mall life is
even more frightening:
"Ultimately, the aims of contemporary architecture and the police converge most
strikingly around the problem of crowd control. [Designers of malls] enclose the mass
that remains, directing its circulation with behaviorist ferocity. It is lured by visual stimuli
of all kinds, dulled by musak, sometimes even scented by invisible aromatizers. This
Skinnerian orchestration, if well conducted, produces a veritable commercial symphony of
of swarming, consuming monads moving from one cash point to another."26
Chapter 4 Endnotes
1. The largest mall in the world, at 5.2 million square feet, is the West Edmonton Mall,
whose developer the Triple Five Corp. is also the co-developer of Mall of America. The Del
Amo Mall in Los Angeles, at 3.0 million square feet, is the third place contestant. See
Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall", Variations on a Theme Park, New
York, Hill and Wang. 1992, pg. 3.
2. Although Mall of America's statistics vary wildly from one article to the next, the
numbers listed in this paragraph are from the Mall of America's opening press package.
See also John Voelecker, "At New Mega Mall, Security is Outta Sight", Metropolis, July/
Aug. 1992, pg. 14.
3. Mary Ann Galante, "Mixing Marts and Theme Parks", New York Times, June 14, 1989,
pg. B1.
4. The term edge city comes from Joel Garreau's book of the same title. He sets the
requirements as: has 5 million or more square feet of leaseable office space (which Mall
of America does not have yet, though nearby construction for relocating corporate
headquarters might just do the trick), 600,000 or more square feet of retail space, more
jobs than bedrooms, is perceived by the population as one place, and was nothing like a
city 30 years ago. See Garreau, Edge City, New York, Noonday Press, 1991, pg. 6-7.
5. See 2.
6. All refences to other malls in this paragraph can be found in Crawford, ibid., pg. 25.
See also E.B. Wallace, "Houston's Cluster and the Texas Urban Agenda", Texas Architect,
Sept./Oct. 1984, pg. 4.
7. I will go much further into this topic later in this chapter. See William Kowinski, The
Malling of America, New York, W. Morrow, 1985, pg. 354-9.
8. Southdale had two department stores and opened to the public three years later, in
1956. Gruen had already built several other pioneering malls, most notably Northland,
which was still open-air. Kowinski, ibid, pg. 115-119.
9. Crawford, ibid, pg. 22.
10. The term coined by the mall industry refers to the similarity between television and
the mall, except that the mall's "programs" are the indistinguishable from "advertising."
Kowinski, ibid., Chapter 8.
11. Crawford, ibid., pg. 12-13.
12. According to the press release.
13. The estimate given for the protestors, excluding the 86,000 Bloomington residents
was 84,000, see Wilkesron, "Megamall," New York Times, June 9, 1989, pg. A14. The
press release boasts an average of 90,000 weekday visitors and 200,000 weekend
visitors.
14. Wilkerson, ibid, pg. A14.
15. Trachtenberg, "Big Spenders," Wall Street Journal, Oct. 30, 1990, pg. A14.
16. According to the press release.
17. Jerry Jacobs, The Mall, Prosepect Heights, IL, Waveland Press, 1984, pg. 55.
18. All the information on official sponsors is from the press release.
19. From an interview with P.R. Manager Michele Biesiada. The polls were taken in August
and in April.
20. Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 6, 1993.
21. In the press release and in the Mall of America Magazine distibuted for its opening.
22. Ibid.
23. Chapter 37 of Kowinski, ibid, is an excellent source of legal history concerning freespeech and malls.
24. Rhonda Hillbery, "Report Cards, Credit Cards Vie at the Mall," Los Angeles Times, Dec.
26, 1991, pg. A5.
25. The Salvation Army has well-documented problems getting malls to even allow them
onto the premises to solicit contributions at Christmas time. See David Streitfeld "The
Malling of the Salvation Army," Washington Post, Nov. 28, 1989, pg. C5.
26. Davis, Fortress L.A., pg. 257.
Public Space and Public Policy
Battery Park City enjoys its physical isolation from New York's urban fabric by virtue of its
design and its political and financial organization. Municipal housing ideals are altered for
a privileged segment of society. Los Angeles gated communities, created by powerful
homeowners associations, enjoy political autonomy that grants them exclusionary zoning
rights while enjoying county-subsidized municipal services. The Mall of America is the
prototypical new town center minus the rights of free speech and assembly, where leisure
and consumption are inextricably bound.
The urban landscape is shaped by public policies formulated within our political system.
As demonstrated by Battery Park City, gated communities in Los Angeles and the Mall of
America, our public policies seem to encourage privatization of the public realm.
Exclusionary zoning, suburban separatism and privatizing municipal property and services
also encourage the socio-economic polarization of our cities, where true public spaces,
such as streets and parks, are the only spaces left to the disenfranchised. Without broadbase support, public space degenerates in the poor communities. Meanwhile, those with
better financial means pay for the maintenance of only their own small neighborhoods.1
At the other extreme, the shopping mall completely eradicates the public realm, while it
masquerades as the new town center. Though public space once meant that it was owned
by -- and accessible to -- the general public; public space is no longer easy to define.
There are now rules defining who owns it, who maintains it, who has access to it and who
does not.
...
The quality of public space depends on more than exciting formal elements and elegant
design solutions. Ultimately, underlying political, economic and social initiatives bear most
of the weight in designing public space -- even if architects and urban designers are
loathe to admit it. While Battery Park City may fulfill many of its various programs, its
public space is not necessarily successful simply because it is an enjoyable place to visit.
By making Battery Park City's main entrance through intimidating, austere office
complexes, it undemocraticly filters out the respectable public from the undesirable
public. The BPC Owners Association's territorial mindset negate any trace of civic duty.
Disguising the development as a great generator of low-income housing, albeit in the
Bronx and Harlem -- areas so economically devastated and crime-ridden that adding
more low-income housing there seems like a plan devised to maintain the homeless
service industry2 -- hides the fact that Battery Park City's wealthy residents work hard to
keep the undesirables out of their immaculate neighborhood, or at least kept well out of
sight.
While New York City has a large population of renters, Los Angeles idealizes the individual
homeowner. Foundations of homeownership-- believed to create better citizens, since
they have a financial stake in the well-being of the nation3 -- rely on the unquestioned
primacy of private property. A public street or park sold to a Homeowners Association
(HA) becomes private property, whose new owners have the right to restrict its access.
The Lakewood Plan allows middle-class HAs to zone out the undesirable renting
population4 while enjoying county-subsidized municipal services. The county gets money
for its infrastructure, which it has long since paid off, and for municipal services that it
would have to supply anyhow. The county justifies its loss of real estate taxes by the fact
that Los Angeles real estate taxes are artificially low (to encourage homeownership). HAs
erect gates around their compounds and hire private security guards to monitor the
movements of the now private community. On the other end of the spectrum, poor
communities find barriers rising around them, controlled by the Los Angeles Police
Department. The militarization of LA's public spaces and private communities reflects the
growing fear and antagonism between the racially and economically polarized
communities.
The Mall of America is the largest super-regional mall in the United States and, fitting
with its ambitious scale, attempts to provide the amenities of a traditional town such as
commercial space, schooling, childcare, recreational space, health services, transportation
and, soon, hotels and residential quarters. It does not entirely succeed on all points. After
all, the mall concept is still founded purely on consumerism. Everything else comes
second. The extras are pale versions of the originals and are provided only to lengthen a
shopping trip or increase a shopper's spending. The schoolrooms are for the children of
employees, providing the mall with young consumers as well. Camp Snoopy allows
parents to shop while their kids amuse themselves spending money in the seven-acre
theme park. The Pepsi Pickup Shuttle transportation system takes shoppers through the
78-acre mall, and for longer distances, vans connect them to the nearby airport and area
hotels. What is really missing from the mall, besides spontaneity and bad weather, is
access to free speech and the right of assembly. Now that the mall is the new town center
for most Americans, it still does not supply the public forum needed for civic activities. It
most likely never will, since this would complicate mall management and might possibly
infringe on the mall owner's commercial profits.
...
These postmodern developments show how privatization of the public realm occurs in an
urban city, suburban city and edge city. Battery Park City began tabula rasa with vacant
landfill in a dense urban environment. Gated communities in Los Angeles establish
themselves on the existing suburban landscape. Mall of America redeveloped a cleared
site, once home to the Metropolitan Stadium. But their similarities outweigh their
differences.
All the developments model themselves on real places. Battery Park City tries to be like
Riverside Drive and Gramercy Park. LA's gated communities are a cross between fortified
cities in feudal times and Levittown. Mall of America imitates Times Square, the Champs
Elysee and Main Street, all under one roof. They are all ambitious simulations that are
trying to capture and compress the character of places that have evolved over time. What
is missing is the authenticity of the place, or as Walter Benjamin would say, the aura of
the place.4B These simulated places were built over a very short time and are planned
around immediate financial gains. Nothing is left to chance, every aspect has been
detailed and controlled. The character of these places are therefore safe, predictable and
sterile.
Since financial profit -- in the form of municipal bonds, tax bases, property values and
consumerism -- is the primary purpose of these places, developments focus on the
benefits and pleasures of the privileged private citizens while trying to exclude the
disenfranchised. Even Greece -- the pinnacle of public civility -- limited democratic
representation only to free males, with women, children and slaves left in subjugation.
Now, a much larger portion of society makes up the public, including the underprivileged,
and a larger portion of the public now has the financial means to purchase goods and
services once limited to an elite segment of society. Traveling, dining out, buying luxury
products, leasing personal security guards and living in gated private communities are no
longer tokens of success and have become affordable for even the middle class.
The most serious result of privatizing the public realm is this elimination of potential
forums for protest and revolution. The more isolated the public becomes -- and the less
information the public has access to -- the easier it is to control and manipulate. Businessas-usual can prevail. While this may sound alarmist, this nation was founded on the belief
that democracy and the democratic process does not happen without informed public
input. The democratic process is not a natural tendency; it has to be learned and
practiced. Voting for a candidate every four years -- presenting his/her platform through
short-sound bites -- does not insure political, economic and social integrity. By denying
forums for unfettered social contact and expression of discontentment -- by privatizing
the public space or by allowing public space to become so degraded that no one wants to
inhabit it -- the possibility of practicing democracy is made much more difficult, and civic
life is made much less satisfying.
Civic centers, redesigned as vast empty plazas, have become irrelevant for a population
that drives through cities on high-speed freeways. Reaching out to a car-based society is
much harder when everyone is insulated in the safety of their cars. Any information that
reaches these people will come through the media. The media, however, has its own
interest in mind -- and those of its commercial sponsors -- and ought not be the only
source of information for the masses.5 Sexy news items sell better than mind-boggling
financial and political policies and tend to get more coverage. (Amy Fisher has captured
more of the public's attention than perpetrators of savings and loan crisis.) Complex
stories and ideas are reduced to sensationalistic three-minute sound-bites, allowing
unsavory or intricate issues to slip past the distracted audience's ever-shortening
attention span.
If free speech is to reach the public, it must be able to find the public. The public used to
be found in the cities and towns, but now it is more often in malls, which thrive because
the public realm has become too unpleasant -- with its increasing extremes of poverty
and wealth. The privileged have abandoned truly public spaces that cannot exclude the
disenfranchised, for a safer, cleaner semi-public realm like private gated communities and
shopping malls.
Cities are at the mercy of corporations and developers because they have the power,
organization and capital to dictate development in cash-hungry municipalities.
Corporations obtain special zoning allowances and tax-abatements by simply threatening
to relocate their headquarters to exurbia. Developers control the development of cities in
an economy where municipal governments no longer have the financial backing to fund
their own projects. We give owners of semi-private spaces -- such as malls, gated
communities and privatized "public" spaces such as Battery Park City -- the rights of
private property even if they profit at the public's expense. Limits to their powers should
be established.
Without investing in and maintaining public space, addressing the social problems of
poverty and rectifying our public policies, current trends will only get worse. Communities
will become more polarized, distrustful and antagonistic towards one another.
Experiencing the public realm will only become more difficult and unfulfilling, civic
activities will become increasingly futile, and the public will be easier to control and
manipulate.
Chapter 5 Endnotes
1. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, New York, Vintage Books, 1991.
2. Camillo Vergara, from "The New Urban Landscape" at the Storefront for Art and
Architecture in the fall of 1991.
3. The agrarian ideal originated with Thomas Jefferson. See Chapter 1 of Dianne
Ghirardo, Building New Communities, Princeton University Press, 1991.
4. Rental housing has ties to disenfranchised. According to page 15 of The State of the
Nation's Housing 1992, produced by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard
University, the median annual income of the renter ($18,000) is slightly more than half
the income of the average homeowner ($32,000), and homeownership is still the principal
mechanism for building wealth in this country. A homeowner has a net wealth of $78,000,
while a renter has a net wealth of only $2000. New York City, however, is the only
housing market that breaks the rules.
4B. Walter Benjamin, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations.
5. See Francis N. Wete "The New World Information Order and the U.S. Press" in Cynthia
Schneider, Global Television, New York, Wedge Press, 1988.
List of Illustrations
1A. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, New York, Vintage, 1990, pg. 259. All photos are by
Robert Morrow.
8A. Feliciano, "BPC's Brave New World," Architectural Digest, Nov. 1990, pg. 149.
9A. Postcard pamphlet from the BPCA.
11A. Pamphlet from BPCA.
12A. Postcard pamphlet from the BPCA and Douglas Lever, "BPC 2000,"Downtown
Express, July 20,1992.
13-15A. Photography by the author.
17A & B. Photography by the author.
18A & B. Photography by the author.
19A. Photography by the author.
23A. Davis, ibid., pg. 175.
24A. Charles Jencks, Heteropolis, New York, St. Martins Press, 1993, pg. 26-27.
24B. Davis, ibid., pg. 83.
25 A & B. Robert Fishman, Bourguois Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1987.
27A. Jencks, ibid., pg. 30-31.

27B. Davis, ibid., pg. 13.
29A. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies,New York, Verso, 1989, pg. 202 & 214.
29B.A. Davis, ibid., pg. 301.
31A &B. Davis, ibid., pg. 247 & 187.
37A. Christopher Faust, "The Mall of Them All," Design Quarterly, Spring 1993, pg. 24.
40A. Conceptual drawings of the mall, from the Mall of America press kit.
42A. Mall of America visitors map.
43A & B. design guidelines from the Mall of America press kit.
44A. Knott's Camp Snoopy visitors map.
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The State of the Public Realm