The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: I: Filters
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William Menking
ordered propriety, picturesque repose, and union with nature—all based on
the principle of exclusion. This suburban picturesque fits perfectly into the
new private realm being created in Triburbia. A second park, North River
in Battery Park City, immediately adjacent to Washington Market Park, is
similarly gated and privately patrolled and extends a “greenbelt” parkland
around Triburbia. This greenbelt, originally designed by Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown, will extend a grass- and tree-lined highway along
Triburbia’s western edge.
Triburbanization is dismantling what remains of the modern “reformist”
Olmstedian vision of an open city, in favor of a return to the earlier
mercantile tradition of the city. In the nineteenth century the city government,
controlled by commercial interests, tried to protect those interests by
pushing the working class off the streets and sidewalks. However, during
this period the poor depended on the sidewalks for their living, relying on
everything from peddling to prostitution. 24 This fight and the social unrest
it provoked led to the beginning of a progressive reform tradition in the city.
This movement, in turn, led to the creation of Frederick Law Olmsted’s
New York City parks, including Central Park, which was explicitly intended
to be the living room for all the citizens of the metropolis. The fight
over public space continues in the 1990s in New York City, and defines and
determines in part the city’s current notion of “public interest.” 25 While the
Triburbanization of the city works to defeat all hope for urban reform and
social integration, the city, even with its ethnically and racially defined
neighborhoods, also aspires to be a place of open, nonsegregated streets
and parks.
In detailing this contemporary tale I hope I have made clear that I
am appalled at how the new Triburbia is discreetly sealed off for those so
privileged to live behind real but invisible walls. I have not mentioned my
own role in this suburbanization process. The physical form of Triburbia is
that of low-scale factory buildings, many of them landmark cast-iron structures;
and their charm and Manhattan location attracted a young class of urban
professional artists, writers, and even architectural historians to want to
live in the area. Even the abandoned old dockland that formerly lined the
district’s western edge, before it was torn down for the Venturian “green
highway,” was so picturesque that it became the neighborhood playground.
I and my neighbors used to wander through the rotting and deteriorating
piers and docks as we might walk through the Roman Forum. While I was
initially drawn to the area in part because I could move into a nearly abandoned
building without displacing a family or operating business, I was
quite obviously gentrifying the district. It never occurred to me while I and
other young professionals were helping to make a desirable urban settle-