5 ARTICLES ABOUT

CITY
PREPARED BY:
AHMAD MUHAMMAD BIN MOHD HAFIZA @ MOHD HAFIZ
2 AL-BIRUNI / SET 4
 Sardine Life
What a century and a half of piled-up housing
reveals about us.

S tarting in the eighties, when the country more or less abandoned the pursuit of greater
equality and success was defined by fresh college graduates who coaxed the financial system into
dumping sudden millions in their laps, the apartment took yet another turn. Triumphant
traders—“Masters of the Universe,” in Tom Wolfe’s phrase—didn’t spend much time at home,
but in their few moments of leisure they wanted to gaze down on the city they had conquered.
The ultimate trophy was an imperial view.

For the next two decades, developers treated the apartment less as a private retreat than as a
belvedere—a platform for a vista. Clunky towers with floor-to-ceiling windows sprouted around
the city, their hurried construction, slapdash design, and astronomical prices justified by the
assumption that anyone who walked through the front door would make straight for the
windows. The city became a diorama of itself.

The ultimate expressions of the panoramic apartment, which required vertiginous height, very
fast elevators, and a perimeter of glass, are the penthouses atop Trump World Tower. This dark
bronze totem that Costas Kondylis designed on First Avenue for Donald Trump was the planet’s
tallest residential building (and the one most loathed by its neighbors) when it opened in 2001,
and it was not shy about its stature. The ceilings got higher near the top, so that the tower
appeared to be craning its neck, and the 72 floors were deceptively numbered up to 90. The
payoff was an Imax view of the skyline below and the weird sensation that the closest neighbors
were gulls, planes, and clouds.

Of course, that sort of solitude only lasts until the next set of neighbors climbs the beanstalk.
Already, Frank Gehry’s 867-foot rental tower at 8 Spruce Street has nudged past Trump World
Tower, and the hotel-condominium designed by Christian de Portzamparc and currently under
construction at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue will shoot above them both to 1,005 feet. The
push to refine the apartment began with assurances that a fifteenth-floor home could rival a
house set on a fifteen-foot stoop; today, a 150th-floor penthouse is not unthinkable.

Vertical living has behaved as promised: It multiplied the value of limited land, streamlined the
machinery of leisure, sheltered the masses, and concentrated entrepreneurial energy into a
compact urban zone. But the price of height is lightweight construction: glass walls, thin floors,
and plasterboard walls. The original barons of the Beresford would have found today’s condo
towers pretty flimsy castles in the sky. And yet New York has done such a thorough job of
glamorizing the high-rise apartment that a Manhattan pied-en-l’air has become a billionaire’s
accessory and an eternal object of desire. Developers have searched for ways to leverage that
lust—to reconcile the assembly-line efficiencies of the construction business with the quest for
ever-greater heights of pampering. Enter the preposterous amenity. Today, the most extreme
buildings compete to provide a Gilded Age menu of extras: swimming pools, gyms, spas, garages,
valet parking, concierge service, room service, housekeeping service, wireless service, rooftop
dog runs, party rooms, screening rooms, and so on. You can never be too rich or too comfortable.

In theory, the ultrahigh-rise should not be simply an instrument of extravagant living but a path
back to the egalitarian policies of the mid–twentieth century. In his recent book Triumph of the
City, the Harvard professor Edward Glaeser argues that New York’s vitality depends on people
being able to live here, that the only way to make apartments affordable is to erect more of them,
and that means rising higher and higher. If he’s right, then perhaps all the contradictory forces
of New York’s real-estate history can somehow be intertwined, and the next generation of
apartment buildings can somehow combine affordability with vintage grandeur, great height,
and the relentless pursuit of ease. That may seem like an implausible quartet of attributes, but
it’s precisely what the first middle-class alternatives to the tenement and the boardinghouse
offered 150 years ago.

Almost the entire trajectory of the New York apartment remains on the menu today. To choose
an apartment here is to select one particular vision of what New York life can be. The crowds
who troop around to open houses every Sunday are never just counting bathrooms and closets
or calculating mortgage payments. They’re wondering whether they want to join the centennial
parade of families who have occupied this particular enclosure, whether a refurbished tenement
speaks of hoary miseries or new excitement, whether the view out each window is one they want
to see every day, or whether they can see themselves in their prospective neighbors. To hunt for
an apartment is to decide which New York you belong in, and what specific droplet of the city’s
fickle soul has found its way into your veins.
 Start-Up City
Entrepreneurs are the heroes of New York’s past and
the key to its future.
Like the rest of America, New York City has been buffeted by the recession that
began in December 2007. This past August, the city’s unemployment rate stood at 9.6
percent, just over the national rate of 9.5. But New York’s economy will never
recover from the downturn by trying to compete with China’s labor costs or with
Houston’s housing costs. Nor can the city continue to rely on finance, which came to
dominate it over the last 40 years: as the sad history of Detroit illustrates, one-industry
towns rarely succeed in the long run. Rather, New York’s success will depend on its
ability to produce a steady stream of new products and ideas.
Indeed, studies have shown that all over the country, entrepreneurship—along with
January temperature and education—is one of the three great predictors of urban
success. But nowhere is that more the case than in Gotham, whose very history is a
tale of entrepreneurship. To survive, New York must continue to bring forth
innovators who will reinvent the city—with luck, making it more economically
diverse. If they succeed, it will change as much between 2010 and 2050 as it did
between 1970 and today.
Entrepreneurs have played a key role in every stage of New York’s development.
During the early nineteenth century, when waterways were the lifelines of commerce,
New York owed its expanding sea trade partly to natural advantages: a safe, centrally
located harbor and a deep river that cut far into the American hinterland. But those
advantages became important because of the vision and energy of entrepreneurs like
Jeremiah Thompson, the gambling Quaker. Thompson immigrated to New York at 17
to work in the American branch of his family’s wool business. By the 1820s, he had
established himself as America’s largest importer of English clothing, its largest
exporter of raw cotton, and its third-largest issuer of bills of exchange.
As a global trader, Thompson was acutely aware of the shortcomings of the
transatlantic ships of the time, which would stay in port until their hulls were filled
with goods. (Imagine showing up at LaGuardia and having to sit around until the
airline sold enough tickets to fill the entire flight to Frankfurt.) Thompson saw an
opening and created the Black Ball packet line, whose ships set sail on a scheduled
day every month, no matter how light their cargoes were. His innovation was a
gamble, since sometimes his ships sailed with relatively empty hulls, which meant
less income from the merchants who bought the space. But a virtuous circle developed:
fixed schedules attracted more cargo, and more cargo made ships sailing on fixed
schedules more profitable. Once Thompson was turning a profit, other packet lines,
like the Yellow Ball and Swallowtail lines, entered the market. An 1827 letter to
the New England Palladium described the significance of Thompson’s invention: “I
consider Commerce by lines of ships, on fixed days, an invention of the age nearly as
important as Steam Navigation and in its results as beneficial to New York, which has
chiefly adopted it, as the Grand [Erie] Canal.”
Thanks to such innovation, the city grew great during the first half of the nineteenth
century, its population rising from 33,000 in 1790 to 814,000 on the eve of the Civil
War. In 1821, New York’s exports, measured in dollars, were less than 10 percent
higher than Boston’s. By 1860, New York was exporting over 700 percent more than
the city on the Charles.
The surging harbor traffic was important to the city not only directly but also because
of the business that sprang up around the port. New York’s three largest nineteenth-
century industries—sugar refining, apparel manufacturing, and printing—all benefited
from the ships coming into the harbor. Again, the rise of these industries did reflect
the city’s innate advantages. Sugar refining thrived, for example, because New York
was the natural hub of the triangular trade that connected the northern colonies with
European manufacturers and markets and with southern sugar, tobacco, and cotton
farmers. Since so much sugar was already flowing into New York’s harbor, it made
sense to refine sugar nearby. By 1860, 18 of America’s 39 sugar refineries were in
New York.
But New York wouldn’t have become America’s sugar capital without risk-taking
entrepreneurs. In the mid-eighteenth century, Isaac Roosevelt, Franklin Delano’s
great-great-grandfather, started refining sugar near Wall Street. He was taking a
substantial risk—sugar refineries were big factories for their time—but his investment
paid off. Roosevelt later became president of the Bank of New York and a New York
state assemblyman. Some suggest that the Roosevelt interest in politics began because
Isaac didn’t like British sugar policies.
Roosevelt’s success foreshadowed the even more remarkable path of German
immigrant William Havemeyer. Havemeyer learned the sugar trade in London and
came to New York in 1799 to manage a sugar house on Pine Street, carrying a bill of
exchange drawn on Isaac Roosevelt’s sugar-refining son. Havemeyer eventually broke
away to form his own enormously successful firm, which his descendants would
rename Domino Sugar.
New York isn’t unusual in depending on its entrepreneurs. All over the country,
urban growth depends upon urban entrepreneurship—though measuring that
entrepreneurship is easier said than done. There are at least three plausible, widely
available statistical measures of entrepreneurial activity: average firm size, the entry
rate of new unaffiliated establishments, and the self-employment rate. Average firm
size distinguishes between places like Detroit, dominated by a few large employers,
and places like Brooklyn, with an abundance of smaller, nimbler firms. The smaller a
city’s average firm, the thinking goes, the more entrepreneurial the city. The entry rate
of new unaffiliated establishments, probably the most direct measure of
entrepreneurial activity, refers to the percentage of employees in a metropolitan area
who are working in new firms that don’t share ownership with preexisting ones. As
for the self-employment rate, it is a considerably less popular measure among
economists, since it doesn’t capture many important forms of entrepreneurship—
hedge-fund managers, for example, rarely work for themselves—and is swamped by
very modest entrepreneurs.
None of the three measures is a perfect barometer of that hard-to-define quantity that
we call entrepreneurship. But the good news is that all three usually move together.
That is, places with smaller firms tend to have a high entry rate of new unaffiliated
establishments, and they also tend to have high self-employment rates. The three
measures suggest that levels of entrepreneurship differ substantially across regions of
the country. For example, according to the 2000 census, average company size in
counties with more than 200,000 people ranged from fewer than ten people (in Pasco
County, Florida) to almost 30 (in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes
Boston).
What’s more interesting—in fact, remarkable—is how well these measures of
entrepreneurship predict the subsequent success of metropolitan areas. Between 1977
and 2007, the American counties with the smallest firms enjoyed employment growth
of 150 percent; employment growth in the counties with the biggest firms was one-
third of that (see the chart below). Similarly, as an area’s share of employment in
recently formed companies rose, employment growth rose as well. In both cases, the
impact on payroll growth was almost the same as the impact on employment growth.
Entrepreneurial cities are successful cities.
 My Endless New York
I CAME to New York University in 1987 on a whim. The Thatcherite assault
on British higher education was just beginning and even in Oxford the
prospects were grim. N.Y.U. appealed to me: by no means a recent
foundation — it was established in 1831 — it is nevertheless the junior of New
York City’s great universities. Less of a “city on a hill,” it is more open to new
directions: in contrast to the cloistered collegiate worlds of Oxbridge, it
brazenly advertises itself as a “global” university at the heart of a world city.

But just what is a “world city”? Mexico City, at 18 million people, or São Paulo
at near that, are unmanageable urban sprawls; they are not “world cities.”
Conversely, Paris — whose central districts have never exceeded three million
inhabitants — was the capital of the 19th century.

Is it a function of the number of visitors? In that case, Orlando, Fla., would be

a great metropolis. Being the capital of a country guarantees nothing: think of
Madrid or Washington (the Brasília of its time). It may not even be a matter
of wealth: within the foreseeable future Shanghai (14 million people) will
surely be among the richest places on earth; Singapore already is. Will they be
“world cities”?

I have lived in four such cities. London was the commercial and financial
center of the world from the defeat of Napoleon until the rise of Hitler; Paris,
its perennial competitor, was an international cultural magnet from the
building of Versailles through the death of Albert Camus. Vienna’s apogee
was perhaps the shortest: its rise and fall coincided with the last years of the
Hapsburg Empire, though in intensity it outshone them all. And then came
New York.

It has been my mixed fortune to experience these cities at twilight. In their

prime they were arrogant and self-assured. In decline, their minor virtues
come into focus: people spend less time telling you how fortunate you are to
be there. Even at the height of “Swinging London” there was something
brittle about the city’s self-promotion, as though it knew this was but an
Indian summer.

Today, the British capital is doubtless geographically central, its awful bling-
bloated airport one of the world’s busiest. And the city can boast the best
theater and a multicolored cosmopolitanism sadly lacking in years past. But it
all rests precariously on an unsustainable heap of other peoples’ money: the
capital of capital.

By the time I got to Paris, most people in the world had stopped speaking
French (something the French have been slow to acknowledge). Who now
would deliberately reconstruct their city — as the Romanians did in Bucharest
in the late 19th century — to become “the Paris of the East,” complete with
grand boulevards like the Calea Victoria? The French have a word for the
disposition to look insecurely inward, to be preoccupied with self-
interrogation: nombrilisme — “navel-gazing.” They have been doing it for
over a century.

I arrived in New York just in time to experience the bittersweet taste of loss.
In the arts the city led the world from 1945 through the 1970s. If you wanted
to experience modern painting, music or dance, you came to the New York of
Clement Greenberg, Leonard Bernstein and George Balanchine. Culture was
more than an object of consumption: people thronged to New York to
produce it too. Manhattan in those decades was the crossroads where original
minds lingered — drawing others in their wake. Nothing else came close.

Jewish New York too is past its peak. Who now cares what Dissent or
Commentary says to the world or each other? In 1977, Woody Allen could
count on a wide audience for a joke about the two magazines merging and
forming “Dissentary” (see “Annie Hall”). Today? A disproportionate amount
of the energy invested in these and certain other small journals goes to the
Israel question: perhaps the closest that Americans get to nombrilisme

The intellectual gangs of New York have folded their knives and gone home to
the suburbs — or else they fight it out in academic departments to the utter
indifference of the rest of humanity. The same, of course, is true of the self-
referential squabbles of the cultural elites of Russia or Argentina. But that is
one reason neither Moscow nor Buenos Aires matters on the world stage.
New York intellectuals once did, but most of them have gone the way of
Viennese cafe society: they have become a parody of themselves, their
institutions and controversies of predominantly local concern.

And yet, New York remains a world city. It is not the great American city —
that will always be Chicago. New York sits at the edge: like Istanbul or
Mumbai, it has a distinctive appeal that lies precisely in its cantankerous
relationship to the metropolitan territory beyond. It looks outward, and is
thus attractive to people who would not feel comfortable further inland. It has
never been American in the way that Paris is French: New York has always
been about something else as well.

Today I drop my cleaning off with Joseph the tailor and we exchange
Yiddishisms and reminiscences (his) of Jewish Russia. Two blocks south I
lunch at a place whose Florentine owner disdains credit cards and prepares
the best Tuscan food in New York. In a hurry, I can opt instead for a falafel
from the Israelis on the next block; I might do even better with the sizzling
lamb from the Arab at the corner.

Fifty yards away are my barbers: Giuseppe, Franco and Salvatore, all from
Sicily — their “English” echoing Chico Marx. They have been in Greenwich
Village forever but never really settled: how should they? They shout at one
another all day in Sicilian dialect, drowning out their main source of
entertainment and information: a 24-hour Italian-language radio station. On
my way home, I enjoy a mille-feuille from a surly Breton pâtissier who has
put his daughter through the London School of Economics, one exquisite
éclair at a time.

All this within two square blocks of my apartment — and I am neglecting the
Sikh newsstand, the Hungarian bakery and the Greek diner (actually
Albanian but we pretend otherwise). Three streets east and I have Little
Hapsburgia: Ukrainian restaurant, Uniate church, Polish grocery and, of
course, the long-established Jewish deli serving Eastern European staples
under kosher labels. All that is missing is a Viennese cafe — for this,
symptomatically, you must go uptown to the wealthy quarters of the city.

Such variety is doubtless available in London. But the cultures of

contemporary London are balkanized by district and income — Canary Wharf,
the financial hub, keeps its distance from the ethnic enclaves at the center.
Contrast Wall Street, within easy walking distance of my neighborhood. As
for Paris, it has its sequestered quarters where the grandchildren of Algerian
guest workers rub shoulders with Senegalese street vendors, while
Amsterdam has its Surinamese and Indonesian districts: but these are the
backwash of empire, what Europeans now refer to as the “immigrant
question.”

One must not romanticize. I am sure that most of my neighborhood traders

and artisans have never met and would have little to say to one another: at
night they return home to Queens or New Jersey. If I told Joseph and Sal they
had the good fortune to live in a “world city,” they would probably snort. But
they do — just as the barrow boys of early 20th-century Hoxton were citizens
of the same cosmopolitan London that Keynes memorialized in “The
Economic Consequences of the Peace,” even though they would have had no
idea what he was talking about.

We are experiencing the decline of the American age. But how does national
or imperial decay influence the lifecycle of a world city? Modern-day Berlin is
a cultural metropolis on the make, despite being the capital of a medium-
sized and rather self-absorbed nation. Meanwhile, Paris retained its allure for
nearly two centuries after the onset of French national decline.

New York — a city more at home in the world than in its home country — may
do better still. As a European, I feel more myself in New York than in the
European Union’s semi-detached British satellite, and I have Brazilian and
Arab friends here who share the sentiment.

To be sure, we all have our complaints. And while there is no other city where
I could imagine living, there are many places that, for different purposes, I
would rather be. But this too is a very New York sentiment. Chance made me
an American, but I chose to be a New Yorker. I probably always was.
 GET OUT OF TOWN
Has the celebration of cities gone too far?

ties, like children, bear such a heavy load of projection that their real
character can be hard to see. Depending on the tenor of the moment, they can
appear bleak, filthy, dangerous, and inhumane, or gloriously sophisticated,
varied, and exciting. These days, cities so dominate the world that you can use
them to demonstrate any truth you choose. What people think about them is
usually an expression of what they think about class, work, the way society is
organized, money and who gets it, and what’s really valuable.

Still, at every moment there is a prevailing consensus. In the United States

right now, after a long run of “urban crisis” (punctuated by periodic hopeful
reports of revitalization), cities are viewed positively again. The dramatic
reduction in violent crime in many big cities has brightened the picture; less
obvious, but probably more important, is a change in the way we think about
the suburbs, which still lurk in the background of everything said about urban
life in America. Cities and suburbs have started to seem less like fundamental
opposites, and more like points on a continuum.

It will help to define terms. A metropolitan area is a zone of contiguous

settlement—the expanse from the heart of downtown to where open land
begins. In the 2000 census, eighty per cent of Americans lived in
metropolitan areas with populations of more than a hundred thousand, which
explains why so much of the country is so lightly populated. (A graphic
designer named Shane Keaney recently calculated that if the entire American
population was as densely settled as that of Brooklyn it could fit into the state
of New Hampshire, leaving the forty-nine other states as open land.) A
suburb is the portion of a metropolitan area that lies outside the formal city
limits. During the first half of the twentieth century, vast numbers of
Americans moved to the cities; during the second half, vast numbers moved
to the suburbs. By 2000, the United States had become a majority-suburban
nation.

Twenty-five years ago, I moved from Austin, Texas, to New York. Austin
hadn’t yet achieved its current empyrean, SXSW-hosting status. But it was
clearly a city, not a town, even though almost nobody there lived in high-rise
apartment buildings and almost everybody drove to work. The city limits
stretched outward for miles in every direction, so that even many brand-new
subdivisions were, legally, in Austin. The people I knew who had consciously
rejected city life lived not in suburbs but at the end of rural dirt roads, and
even they were often still legally residents of Austin.

New York, on the other hand, was a Manichaean world in which the choice
between suburbs and city was seen as life-determining. Demographically,
New York as a metropolitan area became majority-suburban long before the
country did. But in 1986 the prevailing idea was that the suburbs were for the
privileged few and the cities for the poor, the bohemian, and the principled. A
few years earlier, the Post discovered that Michael Harrington, the author of
“The Other America,” had moved to Westchester County, and ran a
screaming headline about it: “socialist leader flees to larchmont.”

Besides being thought of as rich, the suburbs were seen through resonant
mid-century depictions offered by writers of fiction like John Cheever and
Richard Yates and by writers of nonfiction like William H. Whyte (“The
Organization Man”) and David Riesman (“The Lonely Crowd”). They were
conformist, anti-intellectual, homogeneous, antifeminist, alcoholic, and shot
through with anomie. Almost all my friends who had grown up in New York’s
suburbs had, sometime during adolescence, taken a solemn vow to leave as
soon as they had the opportunity and never return.

This vision has been worn down over time by a number of factors. Most
residents of American cities—including economic and cultural centers such as
Austin and Seattle and Minneapolis and Los Angeles—live in a manner that
reads to New Yorkers as suburban: single-family detached house with a yard
and a garage. So the city-suburb distinction has begun to seem a little
artificial. After all, cities in the Northeast and the Midwest have more suburbs
than cities in the South and the West because of where jurisdictional lines
happen to be drawn. Also, American cities generally, and New York in
particular, have more obviously taken on the economic form of European
cities like Paris and London: the city is for the rich (and the poor), and the
outer boroughs and many of the suburbs are for the ethnic working and
middle classes. That complicates the old picture of men in suits and fedoras
rushing to make the five-forty express to Scarsdale while the artists and
intellectuals stayed behind in Manhattan. Culturally, New York increasingly
operates on the farmers’-market model: artists, writers, musicians, and actors
can’t afford to live in the city center, so they come in only for encounters with
the commercial supporters of their work.
 Under the Elevated
A new report argues for development of New York’s
forgotten public spaces.
Not typically thought of as a city with above-ground trains, New York actually boasts
700 linear miles of elevated subway tracks, highways, and bridges—the equivalent of
four Central Parks of space. That includes four-and-a-half times as much elevated rail
as in Chicago—home of the famous “L” train. A report issued by the nonprofit Design
Trust for Public Space and the New York City Department of Transportation proposes
managing this underused space more effectively.
The “Under the Elevated” report notes that New York’s elevated infrastructure covers
a wide variety of existing spaces under a wide range of jurisdictions. This has made
these spaces hard to organize and make sense of. For example, an elevated subway
might be owned by the MTA, with the street running under it owned by the DOT.
Structural integrity, safety, and access for inspections and maintenance are potential
challenges to development of these spaces. That’s why the DOT stepped forward as a
lead agency, since it has an ownership interest in most of the sites and is
institutionally equipped to work with other agencies involved.
The report’s researchers created two “pop up” parks—one in the Bronx and one under
the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown. The Chinatown project included a community
bulletin board, a series of chalkboard panels allowing visitors to respond to questions
left by the design team, new lighting featuring red LED lights (considered a lucky
color in Chinese culture), and seating. The addition of seating was serendipitous, says
Neil Gagliardi, the DOT’s director of urban design. The team was surprised that
anyone would want to sit and linger in such a noisy location but decided to add chairs
when they noticed how popular the temporary seating was at the opening event. The
installation also had an unforeseen benefit. “It kept the graffiti away,” Galgliardi says.
The “Under the Elevated” project has attracted plenty of press attention, surprising
even its backers. People in cities as far away as Singapore have ordered copies of the
report. But it shouldn’t be surprising. The transformation of the derelict High Line
into a park was a massive success. A proposal similarly to transform Manhattan’s
abandoned Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal into a lavish underground park has
been profiled in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; backers have
shrewdly dubbed it the Lowline.
The city is moving forward with one of the Design Trust report’s key
recommendations by creating a DOT program to initiate projects and respond to ideas
from community groups. But officials are being cautious. The vision of “Under the
Elevated” isn’t necessarily about building one mind-blowing project. Rather, it’s
about fostering incremental improvements and better management. To the project
team’s credit, they recognized that, in some cases, the current use of a space may be
the best use. Storing city owned equipment beneath overpasses and bridges reduces
the need to consume valuable land elsewhere. Some spaces could simply find more
efficient use as “bioswales” for passive storm-water management. In a world where
too many cities prioritize the sexy over the workaday, it’s good to see New York
considering a full-spectrum approach in this program.
Like the High Line, “Under the Elevated” has the potential to influence how the world
views underused urban spaces. When New York does something innovative and
successful, it grabs the world’s attention. As writer Richard Layman put it, “Global
cities don’t just take, they give.” “Under the Elevated” has given us a new way of
thinking about how to make better use of the forgotten spaces under our elevated
transportation infrastructure.