Demapping Planning

At the recent Brooklyn Borough Atlantic Yards Committee’s meeting, Winston Von Engel from City Planning was asked what the department’s position on demapping streets is. His initial reply: "I don't think there's one policy for demapping or mapping streets". Spectacularly unhelpful. And then, according to Norman Oder in the TimesRatnerReport, Von Engel continued:

"In Downtown Brooklyn, we demapped streets to create more rational building sites, more rational blocks, because the leftover remnants were not lending themselves to be building on. But in other cases, we've mapped streets back and we appreciate the life that streets bring. There is no one set policy."

OK, both happen. But that doesn’t mean that there is no policy. In fact there is a policy, and we know what it is: agree to demap streets only if doing so supports sound urban design principles. City Planning’s public silence in the wake of the planning failure at Atlantic Yards is uncharacteristically deferential to the developer, at the expense of the public realm. Was Von Engel’s statement that the city has supported demapping streets in Downtown Brooklyn a reference to the changes in the Downtown Brooklyn plan in which "several street map changes are proposed to create larger, more viable development sites, to improve traffic flow and to provide landscaped street medians. These actions include closing some low-volume streets and extending and widening some other streets", or the 2003 demapping of portions of Pearl and Adams Streets to expand the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel? There the 1,025 square feet at the end of Pearl was already a dead-end, used only for on-street parking. And the 3,395 square foot sliver of Adams was a non-traffic remnant of a 1940’s street widening. These actions are in no way similar to the proposed demapping of approximately 70,000 square feet of Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt.

Pacific is far from a low-volume street, or a short dead end street. And the blocks on either side are already very large, approximately 200 feet wide and 1000 feet long, certainly not irrational for building sites. Demapping this section of Pacific would form an enormous superblock of perhaps 470,000 sf, over 10 acres. In many ways, the issues here are similar to the issues at the former World Trade Center superblock. The Chair of the City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning, Amanda Burden, recently addressed those streets and blocks in an open letter to the LMDC:

“It is critical to the successful integration of the site with the rest of Lower Manhattan that Dey and Cortland Streets be extended as real streets between Church and Greenwich. These streets must be designed to accommodate both vehicular and pedestrian use. The public realm in New York is primarily composed of streets and sidewalks. As such, Dey and Cortlandt provide key opportunities to expand the amount of open space and accessibility into the site. Furthermore, these streets will ensure that the typical block size along Church Street remains the same as the blocks to the north and south. In New York, with few exceptions, larger block sizes…are provided only for our most significant public buildings such as Grand Central Station” .

But we clearly understood Von Engel’s remarks when he alluded to the support of the project by his boss’s boss. It’s unfortunate that this support is clouding a true discussion of the real urban design issues at stake.