By then, newcomers were being enticed by another plum almost as juicy as the one offered to landlords in the previous decade. New residents of the Financial District were eligible for generous federally funded rent subsidies, depending on how close their dwellings were to the World Trade Center site and how long they committed to stay. In addition, the city issued $1.6 billion in tax-free bonds for new residential construction. With conversions and the rental boom in full swing, the development of new condos also took off, and the neighborhood acquired a set of tall glass condominium buildings, put up seemingly anywhere a developer could obtain land. By 2007, every building on the south side of Wall Street, with the sole exception of the New York Stock Exchange, had become a residence.
At that time, developers were touting the Financial District as the fastest-growing neighborhood in North America. This is hard to verify, but in percentage terms, it may have been true. At one point, there were sixty residential buildings simultaneously being either built or converted from commercial status. This included the seventy-five-story 8 Spruce Street, formerly Beekman Tower, a short distance from the World Trade Center site, a glass-and-titanium building designed by Frank Gehry that laid claim to being the tallest residential structure in the western hemisphere. It includes, in addition to the residences, a public elementary school with one hundred thousand square feet of space.
Then something else happened, the economic wounds from which will take longer to heal than those of 2001. The meltdown that began in earnest with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008, and continued with a parade of financial industry insolvencies and the erosion of credit for new construction or rehabilitation, brought the condo boom of lower Manhattan to a virtually complete halt.
Developers of condominium buildings completed before September 2008 found it all but impossible to sell their units; work on projects that were in construction that fall largely ceased. The inability of developers to obtain credit was matched by the laying off of thousands of workers in the financial industry. Had money been found to complete the unfinished condos, it’s not clear whether there would have been an adequate supply of buyers with enough confidence in the near-term economic climate to purchase them. By the summer of 2009, official city estimates reported 10,445 unsold Manhattan condo units, a large proportion of them in the Financial District, and perhaps another 7,000 “shadow” units in the borough not officially for sale but essentially unmarketable. When an existing condo did sell, the average time between listing and closing was more than six months. Some developers were making unsold units available for short-term stays, essentially turning them into hotels, which is generally against the law.
Yet it’s important to consider not only what happened to the lower Manhattan residential market in the deepest recession months, but also what did not happen. While condos languished unsold and few new residents moved to the area, the vast majority of the people who had lived there in 2007 were still there as the decade drew to a close. The population remained virtually unchanged. In midsummer 2009, the rental market vacancy rate was 1.98 percent, a full 11 percent lower than at the beginning of the year. Renters were enticed by generous new concessions from landlords, often including free rent for a period of several months, plus subsidies for brokers’ fees and moving costs.
Part of this was the direct result of changes in the Financial District’s employment base. As recently as the 1980s, more than 70 percent of the area’s jobs were in the so-called FIRE industries: finance, insurance, and real estate. In 1999 the number was down to half; now estimates are that it is closer to one-third. Bankers and brokers have been replaced by people who work in design, advertising, software, and the nonprofit sector of the economy. The estimated sixty-five thousand jobs that Manhattan will lose as a result of the financial crisis will take a serious long-term toll on the entire city and have an impact on the residential future of the Financial District. But because so many of these jobs had moved out of the neighborhood in the preceding decade, the impact on Wall Street and its environs will be lessened.
Couples who had moved to lower Manhattan in the boom years not only stayed, they started families amid the chaos of recession. One building on John Street with 147 condo units reported twenty-two new babies born in 2008 alone. For families that had not suffered serious financial losses in the preceding months, the issue of greatest concern seemed to be finding places for their children to go to school. P.S. 234, a K–5 school in the area that consistently records some of the highest test scores of any public school in Manhattan, was operating at 139 percent of capacity in the fall of 2008, and it was difficult even for Wall Street neighborhood kids to find places there. A makeshift overflow kindergarten was established in the old New York County Courthouse at the north end of the district, near City Hall. In addition to the school in the Frank Gehry skyscraper on Spruce Street and one in Battery Park City, a new public high school for girls was being created at 26 Broadway, in the old Standard Oil Building.
It remains true that the residential families of the Financial District are wealthy ones, even in hard economic times. But it is a myth that they all send their children to private schools, or wish to. They are about as eager as other parents in the five New York boroughs to use the public schools, as long as they can find decent ones. In this respect, parents in lower Manhattan differ little from parents in any neighborhood or community across the country.
WALKING THE STREETS of the Financial District today, one can’t help but think that it is, indeed, a throwback to an earlier version of the city’s life. But not to the Wall Street of a century ago: That was an economically segregated one-use neighborhood, with offices and virtually nothing else, no residents, hardly a place to shop, only a handful of restaurants to cater to the financial workforce.
But look back farther than that, and you begin to see a resemblance. In some ways, lower Manhattan in the early twenty-first century has come to resemble lower Manhattan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth: brokers, investors, and insurance agents who live in the neighborhood and walk to work; a social life that does not disappear at quitting time, the way it did twenty years ago; a modest but growing number of families with young children. Ron Chernow offers a picture of this early lower Manhattan in his biography of Alexander Hamilton, who lived there both as a college student and as a young lawyer. “Shaded by poplars and elms,” Chernow writes, “Broadway was the main thoroughfare, flanked by mazes of narrow, winding streets. There were sights galore to enthrall the young [Hamilton]. Fetching ladies promenaded along Broadway, handsome coaches cruised the streets, and graceful church spires etched an incipient skyline. Rich merchants had colonized Wall Street and Hanover Square, and their weekend pleasure gardens extended north along the Hudson shore.”
It would be foolish to extend the analogy too far, but it’s perfectly true to say that conviviality has returned to the Financial District. To notice this, one need do no more than take an evening stroll down Stone Street, one of the shortest and narrowest stretches of pavement in the district, more an alley than a street.
Stone Street is said to have been the first street paved in all of New York, by the Dutch in 1658. It was a gathering spot for British soldiers in the years before the American Revolution, a place for merchants to trade and sell goods of the British West India Company, a place where colonial dissidents argued the pros and cons of independence. Its low-rise redbrick buildings remained a hub of commercial activity through the close of the nineteenth century. To say that it deteriorated in the twentieth would be something of an understatement. It essentially disappeared. One of its two blocks was closed in 1980 and removed from the city map altogether.
But as you turn the corner onto Stone Street now on a summer night, weekday or weekend, you find large numbers of Wall Street workers and neighborhood residents thronging the bars and restaurants that comprise virtually all of its present commercial function. Outside in the middle of the alley are large picnic tables meant for outdoor
eating and drinking. They are family-style tables, built to accommodate six or eight people. It is hard to find seating for one anywhere along the pavement. Stone Street exists for socializing, much in the way that it did two hundred years ago. It is a place where young people who work, live, and look for entertainment in the Financial District come and enjoy the atmosphere and the crowd. Taking in this scene on an atypically comfortable August evening in 2009, one had to remind oneself that a serious recession, much of it launched only a few blocks away, was taking place.
Whatever happens to the residential condo market in the coming years, whatever the financial industry’s job losses may be, Stone Street will continue to serve the social purpose it serves now. The surrounding neighborhood, having reached what would seem to be critical mass with nearly sixty thousand residents, will retain much of the sense of vibrancy it acquired over the past decade. Now that the baby strollers have reached Wall Street, it is unlikely that they will disappear.
This is a neighborhood, then, but is it a community the way Sheffield is, the way communities existed in the great European cities of a century ago? Is it genuine—or is there something artificial about it? That is a question on which reasonable people may disagree. One can argue that the astronomically high average income of the people who bought residences in the Financial District mandates an inequality that will prevent it from becoming a true neighborhood in the sense in which most of us understand that term. The public school population in lower Manhattan does not mirror the public school population in other parts of the city. Or one can look at the growing vibrancy of the streets and decide that the rudiments of genuine neighborhood life are present, regardless of the economic imbalance of those living in the buildings. Street life is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the urban revival of the twenty-first century, and street life is not dependent on demographic equality, much as we might desire it to be.
Jane Jacobs believed the Financial District could never qualify as a community in the sense in which she used the word. She believed this, in fact, long before the efforts to establish one achieved any sort of traction at all.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jacobs devotes several pages to her argument that Wall Street and its environs could never attract enough residents to acquire a diversity of jobs that would keep workers in the neighborhood beyond the end of the conventional workday, or possess the amenities that could bring in a significant core of visitors from outside. She goes out of her way to ridicule a report by the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association that insisted “a residential population would stimulate the development of shopping facilities, restaurants, places of entertainment,” and similar staples of neighborhood life. She warned that the number of residents was unlikely ever to exceed 1 percent of the daytime workforce. One percent at that time would have been just four thousand people.
Jacobs, for all her prescience about so many things, got much of this wrong. The idea of sixty thousand people living south of Chambers Street would have seemed preposterous to her. In other ways, however, her warnings remain relevant. The neighborhoods that Jacobs admired, including the Greenwich Village in which she lived, were suffused with diversity of use: people coming and going at all hours of the day, working at a myriad of different kinds of jobs, seeing and greeting one another regularly, and maintaining the network of casual but reliable relationships that created a genuine sense of community well-being. The Financial District does not have this, and it would seem a stretch to predict that it ever will. People live there, socialize in the Stone Street taverns, and entertain neighbors in their homes, but it would be a considerable exaggeration to say that they create the kind of street life Jacobs was talking about. The twenty-first-century residents of the Financial District do not walk down Wall or Broad or William streets and run into the local storekeeper with whom they can converse casually and comfortably every day. They walk down crowded streets full of strangers, even though the ratio of residents to daytime workers has changed dramatically in half a century, from the one in one hundred that Jacobs imagined to something much closer to one out of five. And, of course, there are no children playing in the streets in the afternoons.
Even if the residents of the Financial District wanted to make a special effort to cultivate local merchants and stop to talk to them, they couldn’t do it, because the merchants themselves are not there. The area has its share of retail facilities, but they are to a large extent boutique retail aimed at affluent tourists. Wall Street has a Tiffany & Co., but it does not have a local jeweler who can fix a watch; it has a Thomas Pink clothing store selling shirts and ties at high prices, but no independent clothing store owner sitting on a folding chair in front of his store, greeting familiar passersby. It has Duane Reade drugstores scattered throughout the area, but these are staffed by employees who come and go every few months, do not live in the neighborhood, and know scarcely anyone who does.
Four new high-end retailers opened stores south of Chambers Street in the spring of 2009: True Religion jeans; Tourbillon watches; La Maison du Chocolat; and Pylones, a French-owned purveyor of luxury household items in unusual colors.
For the ordinary resident, even the affluent one, retail is a serious problem, and it grew worse even during the boom years of the past decade. “I live just about geographic dead center of the Financial District,” longtime resident Ro Sheffe said toward the end of the boom in 2008, “and the three delis we had in 2000 are all gone. One is a high-end cosmetics store, one is high-end condos, one is Gucci couture. After nine o’clock at night [when the drugstores close], if I want a carton of milk, I have to walk nine blocks. In 2000, I could walk down the street.”
Others express serious reservations about the “population explosion” that has brought the baby strollers into the heart of the district. Very little of it has been the result of families moving into the neighborhood; the vast majority of children are born to people who came to the Financial District to live as singles or couples, and then married and started families later. There is nothing wrong with this, but it points up the fact that few married couples who already have children find the district an appealing place to move to. In the view of some critics, this is not the way a “real” community should work.
To say all this is not to deny that what has taken place in the Financial District in recent years is a remarkable transformation, and a significant triumph of modern urbanism. It is merely to accept that it is an imperfect transformation, and that the flaws it exhibits will not be easy to correct anytime soon.
SIX MILES EAST of Wall Street, in a corner of Brooklyn that outsiders seldom visit and some have never heard of, an even more unusual urban transformation was taking place. It was the transformation of large portions of Bushwick, a singularly unattractive industrial territory with aging apartment buildings tucked alongside abandoned factories, into a magnet for artists, a home to increasing numbers of recent college graduates, and a destination even for young Europeans seeking a neighborhood that is edgy, hip, and hypertolerant.
Bushwick is not in the midst of any standard gentrification process. A 2007 census estimate placed the population at 129,000, with nearly 90 percent of it Latino or African American. It is a large, minority-dominated chunk of Brooklyn, one in which more than 30 percent of the population receives some form of public assistance. Bushwick is the seventh-poorest community in New York City.
The young and hip newcomers to Bushwick are not joining with the established residents to create a melting pot. They constitute a white subculture within a relatively stable Latino and black majority culture, for the most part interacting and socializing with one another in lofts and a few cafés and bars, and allowing the majority to go about its business as it did before. Newcomers lament the absence of retail shopping opportunities in Bushwick, but they are misstating the situation. What they are lamenting, whether they know it or not, is the absence of wine-and-cheese shops and high-end stores selling household goods. They are
mildly annoyed at having to procure these items in nearby Williamsburg. But there is plenty of shopping in Bushwick. Anyone who walks down Knickerbocker Avenue almost any day of the week finds vibrancy in the street and on the sidewalks, and endless opportunities to buy shoes, inexpensive costume jewelry, and samples of virtually every Latin American cuisine. A developer who has been building new condos and rental units for the Anglo arrivals lamented one day in 2009 that “Bushwick is starved for retail.” But it is a starvation amidst a kind of plenty, as he admitted a moment afterward. “No one in Bushwick,” the developer said, “could ever want for low-priced tamales or tortas.”
The really remarkable thing about Bushwick—and perhaps a lesson for struggling neighborhoods in other parts of the country—is just how much attention an influx of at most three thousand self-identified artists was able to attract in a community of more than one hundred thousand people. “More than anywhere else in the city they are here,” says Deborah Brown, a painter in her fifties who has maintained a studio in Bushwick for the past decade. “Right now in art schools and colleges, people are hearing, ‘Bushwick is where I want to be.’ Bushwick has this street cred that if you live here, you’re cool.”
In the fall of 2009, sponsors of an art festival in Stavanger, Norway, invited street artists from Bushwick (graffiti taggers, in other words) to come and demonstrate their techniques. Not long before, an issue of the British Airways in-flight magazine had cited the “thriving underground arts scene” that Bushwick had managed to create. “We get a lot of calls from Europe,” says Kevin Lindamood, a local entrepreneur who rents out loft space to artists in what was once a textile factory.
In June 2009, the first Bushwick biennial art fair in the center of the neighborhood provided a glimpse of Bushwick at its edgiest. Some 115 studio artists and more than a dozen public galleries demonstrated their work. One of the participants called it a “huge clusterfuck art happening.” One gallery exhibited a huge sculpture of a very chunky couple copulating on a piece of ground painted in plaid. Another one showed a painting that it called Afterbirth, described by a critic as “a rendering in tasteful salmons, dirty pinks, and peach of bloody female genitalia, a placenta, a gray baby, and a dripping penis.” Still another exhibitor not only presented a lifelike rendering of a sleazy S and M den, but invited passersby to come in and take part.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 8