Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  “And we decided it was time to build a very pleasant workplace, and make it as personalized as possible. A lot of small buildings—that in practice are all connected, underground. A little more square footage than usual per person. But emphasize the outside. Eat outside, set up tables. There’s two ball fields. Obviously you have tennis courts. We have a cafeteria here, we have a gymnasium, we have a company store if people need a new razor and wrapping paper or something. We have a barber shop. We have a gas station.

  “As a result we’ve been able to recruit, even at lower salaries, against—certainly against anybody in New York unless you get a dedicated New Yorkerphile—but against most people even out here. And trying to make quality of life an issue does reduce turnover. Any personnel people will tell you the longer you can keep an able person, the better you are.”

  The result is over a thousand people working at a corporate headquarters that not only would never have been seen outside an old downtown until recently, but is now located in a part of New Jersey in which the deer are a nuisance and Canada geese on corporate lawns a cliché. The night before I talked to Caspersen, I ended up chatting with a man from Beneficial’s Utah offices.

  “I like this,” he said. “I like this a lot.” He couldn’t get over the verdant country lanes and all the trees. He knew it was unspeakably craven for a Westerner even to think what he was thinking, but what the hell. He stuck his chin out. “This is enough for me to re-examine my prejudices about the East.”

  Caspersen, nonetheless, is already looking to move farther out. The corporate goal of having 80 percent of the employees able to live within twenty miles of the office is already a bust. He thinks the number is now no more than 60 percent. The area had so many advantages that even in a sagging Northeast real estate market half a million dollars per house was not unusual. And automobile traffic is a concern. “That may be a fatal defect—the roads. Though what’s the alternative? There are the same problems with center city. You have to get there. Mass transit is not a very pleasant circumstance. People don’t like it. It’s no more pleasant than driving. Things work if there’s transportation. They don’t if there isn’t,” says Caspersen, echoing the sentiment of city builders throughout the millennia.

  But then he starts talking about Beneficial’s computers in a way that reveals how Edge Cities are the creation of a new way of handling ancient transportation concerns. Beneficial’s computers allow Caspersen to uncouple the pieces of his corporation and move them around in ways that ground transportation never could.

  “Let me explain to you one of our projects,” he says. It is called Rapid Refund. “It’s a joint venture with H & R Block. For an extra $25, H & R Block will offer to send your tax return into the IRS electronically. You say, ‘Why should I do that?’ Well, you’ll probably get your refund quicker. Then they say, ‘By the way, we’ve got another program. For an extra thirty-five bucks we’ll get you your money tomorrow.’ ”

  Here’s how it works. The distant office of H & R Block, where the taxpayer is, zaps the return to the H & R Block central computer in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus computer then zaps the return to an IRS computer in Ogden, Utah; Cincinnati, Ohio; or Andover, Massachusetts; depending on the region in which it originated. If the IRS computer decides it looks like a good return—no liens against the taxpayer, for example—it relays the message back to Columbus. That computer then sends information from the return up to Beneficial’s computer at 287 and 78, which decides if it meets their standards for a quickie loan. If so, the Peapack computer instructs the Columbus computer to tell the branch office computer to cut a check. (At the same time, the Peapack computer is taking care of bookkeeping with the Beneficial computer in Wilmington, Delaware, where Beneficial’s bank is located.) The taxpayer comes back the next day to the H & R Block office in West Nowhere, Idaho, and picks up his check. “All happens in twenty-four hours. Yes. Just like that,” says Caspersen. “And you can do it anywhere. Sure you can. It’s all their computers, our computers, and the IRS’s computers.”

  That is why Caspersen is thinking of moving his programmers out of 287 and 78. Theirs, he says, is a highly skilled business. “We’re talking average salary, $45,000. They are college educated and have skills that you and I don’t. And these are highly transferrable skills, so you really want to keep them happy. If they have a long commute that they don’t like, find a place with a comparative advantage.”

  He thinks the answer may be to locate them nearer the more affordable housing in the Edge City emerging down I-78, across the Delaware River in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania’s Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area. Or, for that matter, in Dallas, Texas. Lot of cheap housing and office space there. “You can set up your programmers really anyplace,” he said.

  If that’s true, I ask him, why bother to have any agglomerations at all? Why bother to have a headquarters? Why build a city of any kind, even an Edge City?

  “You know, that’s the question of the future. Why don’t people all stay at home and work? We’ve got over a thousand people here and at least 10 percent of them work through our systems at home. Particularly women when they’re on maternity leave will do much of their work at home and use their terminals for that. But there’s a line beyond which it really doesn’t work. It’s different for different people. But you lose that team spirit, the ability to work together, if you don’t get the touchy-feely, the face-to-face. You can use it part time, you can use it at night, and you can use it on the weekend. But they still have to come in or you lose that synergy between people, you lose the corporate culture. And the corporate culture is very important.”

  This turns out to be big news. For all of its attenuation, the bulletin is this: Edge City means density is back. “Maybe the wonder,” said the urbanologist Jane Jacobs in an interview, “is how thin things got.”

  Humans still put an overwhelming premium on face-to-face contact. Telephones, fax machines, electronic mail, and video conferencing share a problem: they do not produce intense human relationships. They do not create interactions that end with either a fistfight or an embrace. “Trust” is tough to build over a wire. Edge Cities prove that a market thrives for bringing people together physically. Humans are still gregarious animals.

  Edge City is not really a rejection of the nineteenth-century city of Dickens. Nor does it reject the nineteenth-century vision of nature of Thoreau. Instead, perhaps, it strives for a new equipoise, a new but stable urban energy level. Forget our alleged isolation in “automotive cocoons” and “sterile subdivisions.” The final value of Edge Cities is—social.

  That is why there are more than twenty Edge Cities emerging in the New York area. There are that many huge markets out beyond the old core for this new balance. Ten are in northern New Jersey, two in central New Jersey, one on the border in Pennsylvania, and nine more in nearby New York State and Connecticut. Each of them is or will soon be bigger than Memphis.

  Edge Cities are most frequently located where beltway-like bypasses around an old downtown are crossed at right angles by freeways that lead out from the old center like spokes on a wheel. New Jersey can be thought of as having three such beltways that circumvent Manhattan. One is Interstate 95, the East Coast’s main drag. In this part of the world, it is called the New Jersey Turnpike, and it shunts traffic headed south toward Washington or north toward Boston around Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. The second bypass, which is popular for through traffic because of the congestion of I-95 near Manhattan, is the Garden State Parkway. The third, Interstate 287, the northern leg of which is scheduled to be completed in the early 1990s, is the most obviously beltway-like because it broadly loops halfway around the state, never getting much within an hour of Manhattan.

  There are three spokes on the wheel heading west from Manhattan across the Hudson—one bridge and two tunnels. At the New Jersey end of each of these, an Edge City is growing. The northernmost is where Interstate 95 lifts off toward Harlem and the Bro
nx. That is the high-palisades, high-rise Fort Lee area of Yaohan Plaza fame. The next, opposite midtown via the Lincoln Tunnel, is the Meadowlands, the center of which is the intersection of Route 3 and Interstate 95 at the home of the “New York” Giants and “New York” Jets, as well as the Jersey Nets and Devils. Office plazas are rising all up and down Route 3. Hoboken, which is that part of the Meadowlands Edge City that has the best view of Manhattan because it is right on the Hudson, actually became trendy in the 1980s.

  The Edge City opposite Wall Street via the Holland Tunnel is the Newark International Airport area, strategically located at the intersections of Interstates 95 and 78. The civic boosters of the Hudson shore areas of Jersey City are now pleased to call that the Gold Coast. What it really is, is that portion of the Newark International Airport Edge City that has the nicest view of Wall Street, as well as direct PATH train connections to the World Trade Center. That’s why some very high-rent residential development, featuring high security and water taxis, was built on the grim industrial waterfront facing Wall Street during its go-go merger-and-acquisition years. When that boom ended in the late 1980s, of course, so did a lot of Wall Street salaries, and it was hello Chapter 11. But, oh well. This place still has a lot of advantages. I bought a sweatshirt there that read “Proud to Be an American. Statue of Liberty State Park. It’s in New Jersey.”

  On the second bypass road, the Garden State Parkway, there are three more Edge Cities. From south to north, the first is the Woodbridge Mall area. This is the place just above New Bruns wick where you turn off the cruise control and shut up the kids. That is where all the major north-south highways on the East Coast merge, scramble, and peel off. Menlo Park is here, where Thomas Edison invented the twentieth century. Even the New York Times has figured out this place enough to stake a turnpike claim on a massive building.

  The second Edge City on the Garden State is just north at a curious place called Metropark. This has been described as the first Edge City in the world to grow from a parking lot. That may be true, but this parking lot had a lot of advantages. Metropark is still one of the fastest, safest, and cheapest places to change modes of ground transportation in the Northeast. Leave your car there at Iselin and pick up either good short-haul train connections into Manhattan or Amtrak long-haul. To as distant a destination as Washington, the high-speed Metroliner competes successfully with shuttle jets.

  There is another city north of this, which goes by the venerable old name of Newark. Newark has enough office space to be considered moderate-sized by Edge City standards. It even has a new twenty-two-story office tower, anchored by the Seton Hall University School of Law. But it has been around for so long and its growth is so conditional that it should not really be counted as Edge.

  Therefore, the third Garden State Parkway Edge City comes after you pass through all those blue-collar neighborhoods on the parkway that look like the opening credits of All in the Family. Fifteen miles north, this is the Paramus-Montvale area of Bergen County. It is a relatively mature part of New Jersey, but was originally suburbanized by people looking for sylvan environs who were used to Manhattan-level salaries. It was then urbanized when they brought their jobs with them. Richard Milhous Nixon lives and writes his books in these parts.

  Of the Interstate 287 Edge Cities, we’ve already mentioned one—the Woodbridge area way to the south where 287 is crossed by all those north-south arteries. Then, following around clockwise, there is 287 and 78, the Edge City we’ve been examining, centered on Bridgewater. That intersection is important because of where Interstate 78 goes. East, it leads right into the international flights at Newark Airport and the Edge City there, and then on into Wall Street via the Holland Tunnel. West, just over the Delaware River, it dumps into the emerging Edge City of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.

  Out of date are the impressions of this area shaped by the 1982 Billy Joel song that goes “Well we’re living here in Allentown / And they’re closing all the factories down; / Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time / Filling out forms, standing in line.” Today, the Lehigh Valley is booming—its unemployment rate fell from 11 percent to 4 right after Joel’s song came out. Because of its abundant skilled labor, pleasant environment, and bargain housing opportunities compared with New Jersey, an Edge City of an Edge City is rising there. It is not in the orbit of New York. It is in the orbit of 287 and 78. That is why Beneficial is thinking about setting up its backshop of computer programmers there.

  North of 287 and 78, there is old Morristown. Its freeway approach is memorable: GEORGE WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS, EXIT, ONE MILE. And people say Edge Cities have no history. Red Coats—right lane only?

  The Morristown area has an arts community, two universities nearby—Drew and Fairleigh Dickinson—and a thriving downtown. It has not yet hit critical mass as a job center, and probably won’t until Route 24 is extended, so it does not qualify as an Edge City; it is headed in that direction. Now, though, it is still serving a residential community; many of the members work in 287 and 78 and in 287 and 80, the next Edge City north around Parsippany-Troy Hills.

  That latter Edge City, 287 and 80, which includes the I-280 spur, is already formidable, and is expected to gain more advantage during this decade with the completion—through environmentally fragile wetlands, after enormous controversy—of Interstate 287 all the way to the New York State border. For that matter, the area near Mahwah at Route 17—the “Quickway” to the Catskills—at the other end of 287’s so-called missing link should also profit. If it grows, it will spill over into New York State’s Rockland County.

  Those are the Edge Cities of northern New Jersey, but the 287 beltway’s influence does not end there. The Tappen Zee Bridge is the next river crossing up from Harlem, where it takes 287 into Westchester County, New York. There, three more Edge Cities arise. The biggest is in the center of the county, at White Plains, where the region’s Edge City phenomenon got an early boost in 1954 when General Foods moved its headquarters there from Manhattan. The one emerging to the west is in the Tarrytown area. The one to the east is in Purchase-Rye, the headquarters of Pepsico—one of the world’s largest consumer-goods providers. It is located where 287 finally picks up Interstate 95 again as it heads north toward Connecticut—and New England.

  There are two more Interstate 95 Edge Cities in southwestern Connecticut’s Fairfield County. One is the Stamford area, relatively near Manhattan. The other is the Westport and Fairfield area farther out on 95, in which is the headquarters of General Electric, the corporation that in the 1990s began to challenge IBM as the largest corporation in America.

  Long Island was the first place in America to be declared urban by the U.S. Census without having a single significant nineteenth-century-style city. It was also the first such territory to spawn a national-quality newspaper—Newsday—which is now challenging the downtown papers on their own turf with a New York City edition. Long Island is even more prototypically Edge City than New Jersey. Suffolk County is that half of the island most distant from the mainland. (It is, in fact, a very long island.) As long ago as the 1980 Census, only 14 percent of the people in Suffolk County commuted to New York. For that matter, only 16 percent of them commuted to neighboring, more built-up Nassau County, to the west. Fully two-thirds worked right there on the eastern end of Long Island. Even in Nassau County, which, like Suffolk, is comparable to Manhattan in population and is separated from it only by Queens, 62 percent never leave the island to go to work.

  From west to east, the Long Island Edge Cities are the Great Neck-Lake Success area and the Mitchell Field-Garden City area in Nassau County. In Suffolk, there is Route 110-Melville, just east of the county line, and Hauppauge, ten miles farther east on the Long Island Expressway.

  There are yet two more Edge Cities in the region. They are so far into central New Jersey that it is debatable whether they are in the orbit of New York, Philadelphia, north Jersey, or are freestanding. One is the Princeton-Route 1 corridor, which in the 1980s w
as the fastest growing in New Jersey and among the most traffic-choked. The other is Cherry Hill, the home of the first Rouse-Corporation mall, right there between Camden and the James Fenimore Cooper Rest Area.

  If the ultimate value of Edge Cities is social—if their whole point is a balance between individualism and face-to-face contact—then the uniting of diverse people into federations, that is, politics or governance, remains a historic city shaper. In few places is that made more clear than in 287 and 78. It was the first place in America whose inhabitants were so hungry for a center to their Edge City that they waged a grass-roots struggle for two decades to get it.

  The people of Bridgewater Township, at the heart of 287 and 78, decided in the late 1960s that what they wanted was a kind of twentieth-century village green. They envisioned a place that teenagers would instantly recognize as a fine location to promenade before the opposite sex, akin to the Mexican village square. They hoped that the old would come there to exercise early in the morning, as in a Chinese city park. What they wanted was a market meeting place reminiscent of the Greek agora. They could see a place that was warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and festooned with plants in every season. It would provide for every earthly need, exactly like “the heart of Constantinople, its ‘bazestan’ [bazaar], with its four gates, its great brick arches, its everyday foods and its precious merchandise,” as Braudel described that ancient realm. Around it, the people of Bridgewater figured, they would cluster all their public sites—from their courts of law to their courts of basketball. It would be a city center as described by the urban theorist and architect Louis Kahn: “the place of the assembled institutions.”

  So that is exactly what they got. After a fashion. Their plans collided with the Law of Unintended Consequences: No matter what you think you’re up to, the outcome will always be a surprise. And they came to recognize the truth of that ancient wisdom: Be careful what you pray for; you just might get it. Nonetheless, a bronze historical marker may someday be affixed to their answer. For their village square is thriving. Their center finally opened in 1988 after half a generation of struggle, and it is known far and wide as Bridgewater Commons.