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I, for one, welcome our metal overlords: Part 2, rage against the machine

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By: David A. Smith

 

Yesterday’s post revealed that in the battle for our urban future, many have already joined the machines, including New York State Supreme Court Judge Paul G. Feinman, who as reported in this The New York Times article has interpreted New York’s zoning statutes, which evidently apply to ‘developments,’ have no sway over properties created before the term ‘development’ was introduced into the statute books.  This breach in the legal palisades opens up the likelihood of a wave of auto-invasions as other property owners want to house their cars near them too.

 

transformers_battle_02

This is what comes from reinterpreting precedents!

 

Eldad Gothelf, a senior planning and development specialist at Herrick, Feinstein, a law firm, and an author of the firm’s land-use blog, ZONE, said that when the Gruson decision came down, “The city realized there were thousands and thousands of existing buildings just like this one, whose owners would say, ‘I can go ahead and put in my curb cut in now.’ “

 

headshots_eldad_gothelf

An attorney, not a Tolkien character: Eldad Gothelf

 

In all seriousness, what’s so awful about this?

 

People own personal vehicles.  They want those personal vehicles garaged as close to them as possible.  Everyone wants personal vehicles garaged off the streets, where they clog traffic (both vehicular and pedestrian).  So the available choices are:

 

1. Allow off-street parking either in personal structures (homes) or dedicated structures (large parking garages).  Either way, the structure will consume cubic space, increasing the built environment.

2. Create a city in which people do not want personal vehicles, so their absence is no problem.  That in turn requires creating another form of transport – and taxis are no help, because when unparked, they must endlessly circle in the active traffic lanes.

 

nyc_columbus_circle_taxis

Out of the parking spaces, endlessly circling

 

Option 1 means conceding to the machines and developing a cyborg symbiosis where we and our metal friends share the urban world; Option 2 represents a humanoid attempt to repel the invaders entirely.

 

nyc_chaos

Enemy robots have occupied the city

 

Unfortunately, Option 2 has never worked in human history.  For two thousand years, cities have meant traffic jams., in large part because they have too few places to garage personal vehicles.  Before the internal combustion engine, we had the equine combustion engine, and its outputs were even worse than pollution:

 

Manhattan may seem like a loud and gritty place now, but it is nothing like the city of tenement manufacturing, rumbling elevated trains, and horses and coal dust in the streets that confronted inhabitants in the early 1900s.  

 

The romantic haze of moviemaking (our principal window to the past) has conveniently elided the extraordinary filth and pollution of industrial cities.  A horse produces 30-50 pounds of manure daily (that’s about a cubic foot), and at the turn of the century, Chicago had 82,000 horses producing 600,000 tons of manure annually.  Think about the challenges of moving all that manure out of a city – and where do you put it?  Often in the rivers and lakes. 

 

Industrialized cities were filthy, spectacularly so as recalled by London’s Great Stink of 1858, or Sherlock Holmes’ pea-soup fog (today we’d call it coal smog), or the 1952 smog.  

  

great_stink_1

Faraday giving his card to Father Thames during the year of the Great Stink

 

Yet, from Bob Moses to the present, New Yorkers have wished for a city in which other people’s vehicles would magically disappear.  We all would – car for me but not for thee – but that’s hypocritical.  Nevertheless, some of us try:

 

Within weeks of the construction of the Grusons’ driveway, the city passed a series of changes to the zoning resolution. Amanda Burden, the city planning commissioner, said the changes ensured that sections of the city, from “streets lined with row houses in Bay Ridge to brownstones on the Upper East Side, will remain intact and unmarred by the intrusion of curb cuts that have recently raised red flags.”

 

Now the argument is visual?

 

Below-grade garages and below-grade entrances are visually equivalent, I think.  Consider the offending townhouse’s garage:

 

nyt_yikes_its_a_garage_pregarage_100730

161 East 94th Street, before garage

 

nyt_yikes_its_a_garage_garage_100730

161 East 94th Street, before garage

 

Can you honestly say that the after is worse than the before?  Or that, if you were walking past the street, you’d give the after a second glance?  If anything, you’d be astonished there was space along the curb instead of a vehicle parked in it.

 

Under the amendment, the planning commission can deny permission for a curb cut that it finds to be “inconsistent with the character of the existing streetscape.”

 

Same question: is the After inconsistent with the streetscape? 

 

According to Mr. Lobel, “Now city planning can look at the application and say, ‘There’s a line of lovely old homes; the curb cut isn’t consistent with the surrounding character’ — and there goes your authorization.”

 

Who determines what is ‘consistency’?  Many of these homes had carriages and carriage houses.

 

Consistency is just an excuse for the taste police.

 

emerson_young

Emerson’s great quote is usually butchered:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, 

Adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

 

Under the new rules, he said, “it would have been nearly impossible, or at least extremely difficult” for the Grusons to have built their driveway.

 

The human emotion is easy enough to understand.  You dislike cars on your street (except yours).  You bought your townhouse (for which you paid a fortune) without a garage, and you pay another fortune to garage your car at a location inconvenient to you.  The idea that your arriviste neighbor gains a convenience you reluctantly forwent infuriates you beyond all measure.  If you can’t have one, then by God no one else will have one either.

 

Alarms have also been heard outside Manhattan. In recent years, curb cut disputes have arisen in neighborhoods including Dyker Heights, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill in Brooklyn, and Throgs Neck in the Bronx.

 

dyker_heights_curb_cut

Avert your eyes: curb cut and parking pad in Dyker Heights

 

There, some owners have paved over their front yards for off-street parking.

 

No one objected when they came for the curb cuts, so they came for the parking pads.

 

But so-called ‘parking pads’ enrage neighbors and, according to city planners like Ms. Burden, threaten the residential character of city blocks.

 

‘Threaten the residential character’?  What does that sentence mean?  How can one observe residential character being threatened?  The same vehicle sits, leonine, before the same house of its owner.

 

For what it’s worth, parking pads are ubiquitous in the UK:

 

london_parking_pads

If thine parking pad offend thee, pluck it out?

 

British parking pads serve to keep the streets largely free of vehicular parking, a freedom enforced by no-parking-zones and lovely-rita-meter-maids.

 

london_meter_maid

Nothing can come between us, me and my car that is

 

Cars are mechanical pets – better than pets, really, because they serve a useful purpose.  (And they had best be better, for they are ever so much more expensive.)  People want them near.

 

In one recent case, Gus Englezos said he spent $60,000 on the (successful) fight for a curb cut in front of his house on 70th Street near Eighth Avenue in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

 

“That was the most expensive curb cut in history, I think,” Mr. Englezos told The Times in 2008.

 

The Grusons might disagree. Their lawyer, Mr. Lobel, would not say how much his clients spent on their three-year fight against the city. But given the value of a driveway in Manhattan, Mr. Lobel said, “It was probably a bargain.”

 

nyt_yikes_its_a_garage_twocar_100730

A luxury in a city of cars, a two-car garage.

 

This argument, however, is serious.  Never mind that one single curb cut, a legal reinterpretation of ‘development’ is administratively cataclysmic:

 

The zoning resolution, a 1,523-page document continuously revised over nearly 50 years, contains at least 2,500 uses of the word “development,” according to the Planning Department.  Judge Feinman’s ruling — that “development” did not mean what the city said it meant — compelled the city to examine, and in some cases rewrite, thousands of passages.

 

Municipal administrations tend over time to lapse into Vizzini reasoning, that anything they dislike is ‘inconceivable:’

 

vizzini_inconceivable

‘Inconceivable!”

 

When told they are wrong, they tend to react like Vizzini:

 

 

inconceivable_do_not_think
I do not think it means what you think it means

 

That your administrative governance history has been overturned by a state supreme court judge is not the fault of one curb-cutting homeowner, and to paraphrase my late mother, you should have thought of that before you litigated it to the highest court.

 

 

Given the size of the challenge, the Planning Department, through its zoning division, sought comments from members of the American Institute of Architects, the American Planning Association, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (a nonpartisan research organization), the Real Estate Board of New York, and the City Bar Association. It also briefed community boards.

 

“The city deserves a lot of credit for asking for help,” said Mr. Gothelf, who, along with other members of the other groups, meets with planning officials every two weeks as part of a monumental effort to get a revised zoning resolution ready for public review this fall.

 

The city had little choice; otherwise it would have been overwhelmed by the (successful) applications and lawsuits.

 

If the city succeeds, the cutting of the curb at 161 East 94th Street will be something like the 1963 demolition of old Pennsylvania Station –  

 

old_penn_station
And lead us not into Penn Station 

 

– which gave rise to a preservation movement that has saved countless other buildings.

 

old_penn_station_interior

A garage for iron horses:  

 

Urban space is at a premium, so that for every old Penn Station that disappears, a Madison Square Garden rises in its place:

 

madison_square_garden

Trains below …

 

knicks_madison_square_garden

.. Knicks above

 

Increased density, a consequence of ongoing urbanization, means more efficient use of urban cubic. 

 

The Grusons’ driveway, like the station demolition, will have sounded the alarm.

 

It’s one thing to preserve the historic, visible, and large, and to couple that preservation effort with a hefty tax credit to recoup some of the incremental cost.  It’s quite another to work oneself into a lather over curb cuts and garage doors.

 

The Planning Department has undertaken a revision of the city’s zoning resolution to solve interpretation problems — possibly thousands of them — created by the Gruson case. It hopes to present the revision for public review this fall.

 

mikaela_transformers_04

I suppose it could be worse

 

 

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