The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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William Menking
sports areas, pavilions and ponds that make up the Battery Park City landscape
in lower Manhattan” as a sign of this spatial restructuring. 19 However,
from my Triburban window this suburbanization of the city has gone far beyond
just the packaged malling of the city’s commercial corridors and the
creation of a new suburban community like Battery Park City (Triburbia’s
immediate neighborhood). In fact, the restructuring is affecting, sometimes
overwhelming, every quarter of the old central city.
It is the kind of neighborhood that American cities fantasized
about in the 1960s at the height of the urban crises. But it represents a new
phase in suburban development—one that is not built on open countryside,
but layered over the existing city. The district and its suburban form cannot
be understood without describing the “loft phenomenon.” 20 Lofts are large,
open-floored spaces originally built to accept a variety of different industrial
processes in the late nineteenth century, and Triburbia is composed primarily
of these structures. Their large size (3,000 to 4,000 square feet is common)
allows families to stay in the city and live in a family-centered suburb.
In a culture that increasingly demands that the family, particularly the nuclear
one, be the basic societal unit, this is as perfect a neighborhood as any
suburb. The New York Times trumpets Triburbia as the “kind of neighborhood
where art collectors, bankers, designers, stock brokers and hip upper
middle class parents might consider living in enormous sheet rocked
spaces” even though a “few years ago the building might have been labeled
an eyesore.” 21 Like Sigmund Freud, who, strolling through a small Italian
village, found himself subconsciously looping back through its red light
district, these new Triburbanites seem pleased to find that they live in a suburb
and not a city.
In City of Quartz, Mike Davis describes Los Angeles’ heavy-handed
response to its contemporary urban crises as “an unprecedented tendency to
merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single,
comprehensive security effort.” This “epochal coalescence” comes together
around private gated communities set amid the gridded landscape of the
city. In “defense of luxury lifestyles,” L.A. communities are “gathering behind
walls guarded by gun toting police.” 22 It has to be said that Triburbia
is far more advanced in its urban restructuring. Without being literal, its
walls are just as potent in keeping people out. To enter Triburbia today one
passes historic preservation signposts that for New Yorkers, ever keen to the
distinctions between areas of affluence and poverty, are as clear as walls.
Once in Triburbia one is officially in a landmarked district of unusually (for
New York City) clean streets, carefully tended flower boxes, and highquality
stores and services.