The city once took dramatic measures to depopulate privately owned public spaces in lower Manhattan. Now it wants the crowds to come back — not to protest Wall Street, but for music, food and other orderly entertainment.
The City Planning Commission is considering temporary changes to zoning along Water Street to make it easier to hold events like farmers markets, food tastings and concerts on the more than 40 privately owned public spaces in the area, which is still reeling from the havoc Sandy wreaked on businesses there. Though much of lower Manhattan is back to work as usual, storefronts still sit empty in the South Street Seaport neighborhood.
The measure — which is set to go to votes before the Planning Commission and then the City Council next month — would allow new amenities like food trucks as well as live performances, and would extend to a swath of privately owned public spaces along Water Street, in an area bound by Pearl Street, Fulton Street, South Street and State Street.
The public plaza at 125 Broad Street is home to a Vietnam veterans memorial — and soon, most likely, food and entertainment. Photo: Michael Keller
Privately owned public spaces are exactly what they sound like: pieces of private property that are open to the public — some at all hours, others for certain times of day. There are more than 500 in the city, in varying states of habitability. They are the result of a popular incentive, first offered in 1961, that allowed developers more floor area than the city would normally permit under its zoning laws in exchange for providing the open space.
Over the years, the city has developed a strict set of guidelines dictating the types of amenities that must be available in these areas, from the number of trees and types of lighting to the dimensions of the seating. But back in 1961, the primary goal at that time was to bring some light and air to particularly dense areas of the city, focusing more on the aesthetics than user experience, according to a spokesperson for the Department of City Planning.
The majority of the spaces in the Water Street corridor were developed under those initial guidelines and, even before Sandy struck, the city was looking for ways to revitalize them and draw more visitors. Two years ago, it amended its rules to allow tables and chairs on privately owned public spaces in lower Manhattan.
The changes the city is contemplating now would allow for temporary amenities — like chairs, food carts, stages or art installations — to cover up to 60 percent of the public space. The new provision would also allow for public events on the spaces. The city Economic Development Corporation is already advertising in search of anyone interested in hosting and coordinating events across public spaces in the area, though building owners must approve any events held on their property, according to the City Planning spokesperson.
The Alliance for Downtown New York, which manages the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Business Improvement District, has offered its support, noting that though Water Street has the potential to be a “dynamic commercial boulevard,” there is currently little to do there.
“This amendment will allow us to see what life can be breathed into these too frequently dormant spaces,” it said in a statement to the City Planning Commission earlier this month. “With creative programming, we are hopeful that the public will be able to get a glimpse of what a fully reimagined and revitalized Water Street might bring to our civic life.”
If approved, the city is expecting the temporary amendments to go into effect in late June. They would remain in place through the end of the year.
The leading scholar of New York City’s privately owned public spaces gave the plan a thumbs up.
“I think the Water Street proposal is a wonderful pilot project for exploring ways of activating public space in the city,” said Jerold Kayden, an urban planner and professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 2000, he published Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience, an exhaustive analysis of all such spaces in the city. As he explains now: “some are very good and some are very bad.”
Kayden said the idea of temporary, “pop-up” type events of the kind envisioned in the Water Street plan are becoming increasingly popular across the country. He points to an initiative called “PARK(ing) Day,” started by the Rebar studio in San Francisco, to temporarily transform parking spaces into public parks.
Tension arises, Kayden said, if events charging admission are held on the spaces, effectively cutting off public access. And there is debate, he said, over whether any sort of commercial event — even without an admission charge — should be allowed on the spaces, for fear that they could become virtual shopping malls. However, he thinks there are times when commercial events can be appropriate.
In general, he commends the city’s efforts to utilize and revitalize the spaces.
“Openness is not the same thing as publicness,” he said.
