The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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William Menking
vention. In 1981 the mayor of the city, Edward Koch, began an unprecedented
spatial restructuring of the city based not on the historic row house
or apartment building patterns of New York, but on the suburbs. His ideas
about the future of the city seemed to be grounded not in the needs of the
current population of the five boroughs, but in his childhood memories of
the city before the Second World War, when it had a large, white middle
class. Koch wanted these middle-class residents back in the city and he was
not shy about promoting his vision. In 1984 he declared, “We’re not catering
to the poor anymore . . . there are four other boroughs they can live in.
They don’t have to live in Manhattan.” 12
Koch would have the poor move to once-thriving but now largely
abandoned districts, such as the South Bronx and Brownsville. These decrepit
areas would be rebuilt once again, along the lines of suburban communities
of single-family houses with yards. In order to accomplish this
Koch proposed his “Ten-Year Plan” to rebuild or renovate 252,000 units of
affordable housing. 13 The mayor planned to use federal housing programs,
initially intended for lower-scale suburbs, for the first time in a highdensity
urban setting. For example, he utilized a federal “affordable housing
program” to build blocks of suburban-like single-family homes on
Coney Island. He also encouraged a series of six different housing programs
in New York City’s poor neighborhoods, including Charlotte Gardens. This
project created low-density ranch-style single-family houses in the South
Bronx in the shadow of abandoned tenement buildings, many of which had
decals affixed to their bricked-up windows to make them look like pleasant
apartments. And thousands of low-cost houses, part of the governmentsupported,
private, for-profit Nehemiah Housing Movement, began sprouting
all over Brooklyn and the Bronx. The architectural iconography of
Nehemiah’s medieval half-timbered houses in this largely Hispanic and
African American community could not be clearer. Despite an enviable
record of creating truly affordable houses for people making between
$20,000 and $53,000 a year, the movement promotes a social agenda that
asks the poor to believe they are actually middle class. 14 It forces them to buy
into a privatized world of home repair, gardening, and bank credit. One
must also question the extremely cheap, flimsy quality of these houses,
which may have only a twenty-year life expectancy (though they probably
were bought with a thirty-year mortgage). Finally, their low density ensures
that the thousands of people who need housing in New York will never receive
it in these neighborhoods.
But let us return to Triburbia in lower Manhattan, the privileged
half of this new urban/suburban model. Those used to identifying suburbs
simply as places of freestanding houses and green grass will find at first that