Whose Streets? Our Streets! published in Medium

I’ve long been aware of the difference between the French view of their government, and ours of our own. In the pas de deux of governed to government, the French lead, while we follow. The French government is cowed by the power of the French public, while we Americans are intimidated by our own civil servants.

Maybe it’s foreshortening of history, with the French Revolution seeming like last week (to them) and ours seeming prehistoric. They live amongst monuments of the last millennium while barely a brick from that period exists in our own. Or it might be the French workers’ ability to shut the nation down at the snap of a general strike. Americans don’t see themselves as worthy (or synchronous) to execute, much less voice, that brand of national threat.

Our conspiracy theories, and films, imagine a supremely able deep state capable of any covert response, while the French are essentially variations on The Pink Panther, or Jacques Tati, so it’s not hard to see how that plays out as a cultural trope. They have Les Miserables, and we have Hamilton. So maybe we win on Tony awards.

Whatever the genesis, the mainstream American attitude of deference to (mostly governmental) power taints more than just the citizen/gov touchpoints; the deference defines the relationship of the public to public space. A recent campaign by the Design Trust for Public Space, “Public for All”, sums up the aspiration, but the sad reality is closer to Robert Moses and his obsession with the automobile. It’s time to change that balance, and the pandemic has given us the thin edge of a wedge we can use to prise back some of our urban birthright.

In New York, and most American cities of a certain age, the public realm is the street. There are parks, of course, and the occasional square, but the street is the connective tissue, the common realm; and how appropriate that it’s all about movement (for a nation more comfortable with action than thoughtful repose). And in New York, how perfect that it is a grid.

The 1811 NYC grid came soon after the nation had already been conceptually gridded by Thomas Jefferson, following the Louisiana Purchase. Flying over the US, the mesmerizing sight of an endless square gridiron, seemingly oblivious to natural features, and the perfect circles created by vast crop watering rigs fitting neatly into the squares, is visible from space.

The vast and unexplored continent was gridded as a gesture of ownership; if you could create x and y axes you could measure the land; if you could measure the land you could locate any point, and allocate or distribute land, and therefore conceptually own what you could never hope to fully occupy.

New York’s version was oblong, stretched from river to river, creating a multitude of routes coordinated to the rhythm of docks and piers on the east and west rivers. The maritime measure defined the streets that collected into broad avenues to carry goods; north and out of the city, or south and into the city and onto ships for transportation. When, 14 years later, the Erie Canal opened, NYC was truly the gateway to the rest of the continent and the genius of the grid’s hierarchy came into full view.

I love the grid. I’ve lived and worked in grid-land most of my adult life, and the pure equanimity, the neutrality, the ability to do assimilate nearly anything within a rigid structure, its almost limitless capacity for variation and a million other large and small things reinforce my love every day. For the last several years I’ve lived and worked all the way downtown in the financial district and its colonial era non-grid has been a revelation. Turns out I love that too, so maybe I just love New York streets (I do!).

Streets are our piazzas, our plazas, our squares and our esplanades. We live behind the ‘street wall’ which is the convention (and economic realty reality) that we build up to the very edge of the property line as it kisses the sidewalk. That line of facades constitute the membrane between the public and private realms. Developers, and others, may think that they own the façade of their properties, and technically they do, but the façade is the one communal gesture every building must make. Whether a building contributes to the common good with a façade that respects our common realm, or prefers to believe it is a sovereign nation with only its own needs to satisfy, is a good indication of the urban ethics of the creator. It’s clear that I prefer those who act (at the line of the street) in the common interests, but there is room (see ‘grid’ above) for a fair amount of dissenters without losing the integrity of the urban fabric.

Streets are sacred and not a little bit dysfunctional at the moment. It has been true for decades that movement through the city meant cars. The only people I have ever known that don’t even bother to get a driver’s license grew up in NYC, so engineering a city to efficiently handle a maximum number of cars makes no sense at all, at least not to its inhabitants.

The scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso crosses the street and bangs on the hood of a taxi while yelling “I’m walkin’ here!” was shot on a stolen set (one without permits, without extras and possibly without a script) in real time New York. The scene injected a daily reality that triggered an improvised response by Dustin Hoffman when a taxi tried to jump the light. That encounter pretty much sums up the relationship between pedestrians (i.e. people) and cars in NY. Since laws are made by people (not by cars) you would think we would have the run of the place. But no, street are really rivers of traffic with some people squeezed into the narrow banks. 

Even the Brooklyn Bridge promenade is divided, ridiculously, into bike and pedestrian lanes of the equal width. As a bicycle rider I understand the idea, and safety, of separating differing speeds of travel, and I am a fierce enforcer, when riding, of those lanes (I admit to enjoying administering the occasional shove to a tourist for ignoring our bells and yells). But as there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people crowding the south lane and an occasional bike using the north lane it makes little sense even to me. It’s a microcosm of the city streets, with vehicles prioritized over people in upside down proportions that we have all come to accept as normalcy.

Rewatching Ric Burns “New York: a documentary film” is a revelation, especially in these isolating days. Focusing on the street a few things are startling to the modern eye:
-The streetscape is clean of the mess; no signage, news boxes, striping and painted indications, water testing stations, mounds of black plastic garbage bags and all those unidentifiable constructions that clutter and wall off the street from the sidewalk. The public realm is more unified and contiguous.
-People roam across the entire landscape as though it is all a uniform plane (in spite of the paved sidewalk and the occasionally unpaved streets).
-The pace of vehicles, both horse and people-powered, and even electric trolleys, is just slightly faster than the pedestrians (and btw, ‘pedestrian’ is such a, well, pedestrian way to describe the citizens of a great city. Can’t we come up with a better word? even the Turkish ‘yaya’ is better than our prosaic term).
-The street is a place of business; far exceeding our paltry food carts goods are sold on the street as if it was all one enormous bazaar.
-Sidewalks were much wider one or two centuries ago. It’s not a trick of the lens; sidewalks have shrunk and roadbeds have expanded to prioritize vehicles.
-And of course, in all the massive crowds that once filled the space between buildings, everyone wore a hat!

A century later the street has been zoned into lanes for moving cars, parked cars, occasionally bicycles, and finally, people. A typical NY cross street is 60 feet wide, building face to building face which was once equally divided between cars and people, with two 15’ wide sidewalks and a 30‘ roadbed. But a 30’ roadbed can’t quite accommodate 2 lanes of parked cars and two lanes of traffic (to be able to navigate past the double parked cars and trucks). Today the moving traffic, parked cars and sidewalks each occupy about 1/3 of the street. Stored automobiles are the same priority, to the engineers that dimension these things, as the people who are walking the city streets (as god intended).

Streets comprise about 25% of the total space in Manhattan, even including buildings, a gigantic central park and other parks, and every other variation of land use. To cede 2/3 of that space to vehicles is insane. Let the battle to reclaim the streets begin (and actually, it already has in NY’s bureaucratic, plodding, labored way)!

In the actual battle for the streets, the branding battle of slogans reveals the unspoken power play inherent in who owns the street. Both sides have adopted “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” as their own, and I admit that I may have first heard it when St. Louis police coopted it from protesters during the Ferguson riots in reaction to Michael Brown’s death at the hands of the police.

As a chant from protesters, where it began, it meant one thing; reclaim the public realm, making it safe to inhabit without fear of violence or death at the hands of the police.

As a chant stolen by the police (along the lines of the equally disturbing “Blue Lives Matter”) it is a proclamation of oppression. Police pushing protesters out of the street and onto the sidewalk is happening today, literally today, in cities across the nation. Segregating our streets; keeping power in the roadbed and the powerless on the margins, is the palpable exercise of institutionalized oppression.

Owning the streets is the first step toward restoring citizens’ self-rule.

 “A riot is the language of the unheard” Martin Luther King, Jr.

The demonstrations, resistance and riots happening today are the heartbreaking result the  violent death after needless death after undeserved death of black men (and occasionally black women) at the hands of the police. Catalyzed by months of sheltering in place a national convulsion is happening in the streets, and is being ginned up to provoke a national call for law and order, rather than for a meaningful examination of why this is happening. We seem to think a brawl is the only way protests can be resolved, and our expectations are happily met by the militarized authorities.

In Paris even minor protests fill the boulevards. Intersections are closed suddenly as the marches approach, for a half hour or more, and opened minutes after they leave. The police on motorcycles escort the marchers on behalf of the rest of the population; whether it’s their issue or not, the public believe in protest and believe they all deserve to be protected. Somehow this civilized choreography has completely disappeared in America, especially when the march is a protest, and especially when the protest assails entrenched power. And we need hardly add that the aggression of the powerful toward the powerless is right at the surface during any march about race.

New York is changing in ways we can’t yet predict, at a pace never before imagined. For the wealthiest citizens the race to the exurbs is on, with houses far enough from the density of the city, yet close enough to return in a few hours or less, selling in minutes. Swimming pool orders are surging. And some version of the opposite (converse, inverse or contrapositive; I can never keep them straight) may happen in NYC. The exodus is propelled by the fear that NY will be unsafe and unrecognizable, combined, for the fortunate, with the means to avoid facing the devolution. In short, Density = Fear.

Restaurants rely on several versions of the density proposition; they locate themselves at the busiest spots (density of the public); they settle near each other, in a counterintuitive gesture if one looks only at competition, creating places that attract a larger public (density of businesses); and inside they create a critical mass that, even in intimate quiet spots, assuring that diners feel part of a social public event (density of experience). In the kitchen density is everything with chefs, sous chefs, cooks, dishwashers, waiter and bussers butting up against each other in a highly physical but well lubricated swarm.

Now everything about the impact of those densities has shifted.

Estimates, and not even the worst estimates, predict that 50%-70% of restaurants will not reopen, or will fail because of the new mechanics of safety. With 10% of all jobs in NYC in the restaurant and foodservice industry, the loss is catastrophic. And the conditions under which the small fraction of survivors must operate is not, at the moment, economically viable.

Restaurants are key to a vibrant tourist industry that has also collapsed; tourists come to NYC for museums, Broadway, shopping, while staying in hotels and eating at restaurants. And restaurants serve a resident public in a land with small apartments and even smaller kitchens. Bill Cunningham, the celebrated blue-clad street photographer of fashion and style for the Times, kept his negatives in every appliance in his kitchen. It’s just one end of the tiny kitchen spectrum from Alison Roman to Bill Cunningham, and that’s just in the New York Times!

A friend, when asked what she missed most while sheltering in place, said, sheepishly, “sweetbreads at Frenchette”; remarkable on one level (I mean, really, sweetbreads?) and on another level completely expected. We miss restaurants as a signifier of all that is public, social and communal.

Visiting Paris once, we made reservation at a small restaurant a friend recommended. We called to confirm and the person who answered confirmed, calling us by first name without prompting. Arriving we found the door locked, and opened by the chef himself, then locked behind us. He was the only staff in the restaurant, taking reservations, shopping for food, cooking, serving, selecting the wine, writing up the check and taking the cash, literally alone. And we, for that night, were the only guests while he was our host during the meal. He is a remarkable figure, one who cooked in great restaurants around the world but preferred the intimacy of direct engagement rather than the management of a larger business. The meal was unequalled, and it laid bare the elemental truth of dining out; being served a meal is being cared for, being part of a defined social unit, being treated to a friend’s talent and is among the most basic of human interactions.

Calling it the ‘food industry’ doesn’t quite capture that deeply seated meaning or emotional impact. Restoring that entire world of socializing is more critical than opening places just to get a meal.

Anyone thinking about restaurant solutions for our current disaster comes quickly to the notion that with interiors sparsely populated to maintain safe distances, diners will have to move outside. In order to achieve anywhere near the capacity required to make restaurants tenable economically they will need to become even more public and repopulate the street. But beyond that simplistic realization it’s a void. How, where, weather, heat, cold, rain, lighting, serving, safety and a myriad concerns make this a difficult issue. But it is self-evident, unavoidable and in need of real design (and policy, and economic, and psychological) solutions. Now.

Milan and Berkeley, to note some dissimilar places with similar solutions, are using the pandemic to radically reorder the social hierarchy of streets. Every city, every downtown, even every mall and shopping center should watch them closely. Ownership of streets is (I dearly hope) about to return to the primitive state before traffic engineers gave vehicles the right of way, and before storing a private 2-ton chunk of steel on the public way was considered an inalienable right.

Whose streets? Our streets(!), if we take this moment, unique in world history, to rethink the way we will live from this point on.