Common Law Urbanism

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A Snapshot of the City in 1885

NYC1885-1
I thought this Britannica map of the New York Harbor area in 1885 was pretty interesting. It shows how the West Bronx had been incorporated into the city long before Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, or the East Bronx would be — and why the remaining detached Victorian houses in that area are significant to New York City‘s urban history, as opposed to the separate histories of Brooklyn or Flushing or other towns that were unfolding during the same time period. Mainly because of its shape, the map also gives a good look at where the larger cities in North Jersey were at the same time.

I like the inebriate and lunatic asylums on Ward’s Island. And also the way that the cartographer jumped the gun on the first Hudson Tube (showing a “Tunnel” between Greenwich Village and Jersey City). That’s not entirely wrong — it actually was been being attempted in 1885, and the mapmaker probably didn’t want to leave off an important project. But due to legal, financial, and engineering challenges, it wouldn’t be finished until 22 years later, in 1907.

Update: I found a companion plate that shows the details of Manhattan below Central Park. It includes the names of the ship lines on the Hudson River and East River piers, and Thirteenth Avenue.

LowerManhattan1885

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Late Victorian New Jersey, in 2D

Princeton has a massive archive of Sanborn fire insurance maps of New Jersey, which it has now scanned and placed online. The maps depict the urbanism of the state from the 1880s through the 1920s, showing in fine detail all of the components that made up towns and cities during the heyday of heavy industry and the first great immigration wave.

Here’s an industrial slice of Newark, from 1892:

NewarkNorfolkStreet1892

Here’s Nassau and Witherspoon, in Princeton, from 1885:

PrincetonNassauWitherspoon1885

Here’s Rutgers College and the New Brunswick train station, from 1892:

NewBrunswickSomersetCollege1892

All before zoning. Great materials. One thing that strikes me whenever I look at Sanborn maps is the diversity of uses in Victorian neighborhoods, and how the live-work arrangement was so much more accessible to people with small land holdings in the pre-zoning era. If you look around 1892 Newark, you’ll find bakeries and saddle-makers’ shops mixed in among the unnamed row houses. You’ll also find large industrial sites. Clearly, the possibility of having a glue factory open up right next to one’s house was far from ideal, and the onset of increasingly heavy industries necessitated a more formal way of segregating nuisances from peaceful living and working spaces. But I wonder what role comprehensive zoning ultimately played in squashing what still remained of the home-based workshops tradition from the 19th century. There’s a certain democracy to business and industry when one can venture into productivity without a whole lot of overhead. But regulation has a tendency to create moats around marketplaces that protect those with deep pockets: Requiring prospective businesspersons to invest in properly-zoned real estate rather than resourcefully modifying an existing parcel is certainly one way of creating a formidable moat. And with zoning, all goods must be transported to market, because they can’t be made where the markets exist — another moat.

Given that land use regulation has the potential to create moats around all kinds of economic opportunities for individuals — not to mention its potential to stifle other forms of individualism, community-building, and general resourcefulness — I think the fundamental question of land use law is just how much land use regulation is necessary to achieve the objective of nuisance-avoidance, because (ideally) that point should be its limit. Keeping glue factories out of residential neighborhoods is a reasonable goal. But is keeping apartments out of single-family neighborhoods really the business of government? Or keeping retail space and offices away from housing? (And, if these development filters are important to some, why not let them work out common-law private covenants to achieve the same goals?) To their credit, the New Urbanists have raised some of these questions over the last generation. But their responses, to me, seem flawed: Better zoning! Form-based codes! Going from the mish-mosh of postwar Euclidean suburbia to the ultra-planned paradise (or dystopia) of pseudo-urban neighborhoods whose every inch is legally dictated by someone with graduate planning credentials and (in many cases) distorting political considerations.

Nassau Street, Princeton. Winter 2013.

As a counterpoint, Princeton was built without any of that, and it remains a great town — largely because it hasn’t changed very much. Look at the Sanborn map from 1885, and you’ll find liquor stores, a billiards club, bookstores, a pool hall, and hotels. It’s so well planned! But nobody governmentally authorized those businesses to be there. There was no years-long process of planning-board meetings; no formulaic response by applicants to mind-numbing RFPs; no political sycophancy to become an approved tenant of the borough’s official redeveloper. These businesses were on Nassau Street in 1885 because there was a university across the street; because it was logical for them to set up shop there, and so they did. And looking around the 1885 neighborhood, you’ll also find tenements, “work shops”, a sausage-making plant, watchmakers, a cabinet maker, and a bookbinder. Presumably, the attaching plates all have similar uses — none of which would ever make it past the planning board in such a neighborhood today. But, really, what harm did they do? And what is the cost in terms of the richness of our neighborhoods and the spirit of our culture when we accept the canceling of so many opportunities for people to work from or near home, in their chosen trades?

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Art Imitates Land Use

After the Rain. Paul Cornoyer, c. 1900. (More about the artist, here.)

There’s something captivating about the contrast between nature and human development. Parks, urban waterfronts, skyline views from the countryside: People are drawn to these. I think Paul Cornoyer captured these kinds of contrasts well, and he also depicted other aspects of nature, such as weather, season, and light, as they affected the city.

One of the unique qualities of late-Victorian urbanism, which Cornoyer painted, is that it was the latest and most modern period in which development norms maintained a bright line between human construction and the wildness of nature. This was done by placing parks amid the concrete, and also at the city’s edge. Cast-iron, elevators, and railroads made very high densities possible by the late 19th century. Meanwhile, cars had yet to facilitate market-driven sprawl, and Howard and others had yet to provide the vision of a democratized suburbia.

So, there was still a market- and tradition- and technology-driven compactness to new places. And, at their edges, one would typically find very sharp transitions to much lower densities. Below is a detailed lithograph showing the northern frontier of New York City’s real estate development, as it stood in 1897— approximately when Cornoyer was painting Madison Square. Harlem can be seen at the far left; the foreground is (today) the Bronx; and Washington Heights is in the background, beyond the Harlem River:

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Spotlight: Brick Church, East Orange

Here are some pics from the Brick Church neighborhood, which is situated between the Morris & Essex Line and Springdale Avenue, where Upsala College was once located. The section has a rich stock of large Queen Anne Victorians and early 20th century courtyard-style apartments. There are a lot of potential haunted houses in this neighborhood: Far too many structures have been neglected since the 1970s, when the aftermath of the Newark riots took a heavy toll on much of Essex County. For a while, East Orange had an astronomical crime rate, but it’s calmed down a little bit. And the physical beauty of the neighborhood remains: Its buildings are mostly arranged along wide streets, with parkways, deep setbacks, and hundred-year-old trees. As in other parts of Essex, gas lamps still remain on certain blocks. And, of course, the lack of telephone poles and suspended wires.

Here’s a map of the area’s street plan during its early 20th century heyday, around 1912:

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A Land Use Riddle in Newark

One summer during graduate school, I often walked past the National State Bank Building on my way to an internship in Newark’s City Hall. The building is located at 810 Broad Street, at Edison Place. I wondered: Why did Cass Gilbert, architect of the neoclassical tower that was completed in 1912, design his building to have a completely detailed façade that faced a mid-block lot line?

It’s unusual for a zero-lot-line property to have its lot-facing wall detailed. And this one is elaborate. How did the developers here know– correctly– that more than a century later, their southern exposure would continue to look out on sunlight and green space, rather than find itself pressed flush against a high brick wall?

A first thought was that maybe the bank had owned the yard, but that didn’t seem to check out: Behind the yard is an older, church-related structure which the green space adjoins; across the yard, and closer to the street, is a very old church. These two structures are related: along with the yard, they make up the campus of the Old First Presbyterian Church.

The Old First Church had its origins in the Puritan congregation of Robert Treat. Treat’s was the party that settled Newark under a charter from Governor Carteret in 1666. The church building, itself, was begun in 1787, simultaneous with the Philadelphia Convention. That’s all pretty significant, at least on a local level. Could the history of the church have meant that its property would be preserved by some device that predated formal historic designations?

It sounds plausible that Newark might have had an ad hoc arrangement to preserve its first church, even though widespread historic preservation statutes didn’t arrive until the late 20th century. But even if some arrangement had been made to preserve the historic church, that structure is located far enough from the lot line that the intermediate land, including the yard and the auxiliary building beyond, could presumably have been sold and developed without disturbing what was meaningful to the city’s history.

Another thought was that there might have been a burial ground on the land in question, and that some common-law precept would have therefore prevented its future development in the minds of 1912 architects. I actually thought this was the answer, but it turns out that what had looked (to me) like tombstones once before are actually weathered concrete benches. Here’s the patch of land, and it doesn’t contain any visible tombstones (at least, not in the summer undergrowth):

The gates are usually padlocked, so it’s difficult to get close. But a look at the Sanborn map from 1892 also fails to support the cemetery theory:

In 1892 there was, in fact, a large cemetery near the Old First Church, but it was in back, where the Prudential Arena now stands, reaching east toward Mulberry Street. The land in front was not labeled at all. Meanwhile, the same bank also had a previous building on the site of its 1912 building. So, what’s up here? Are we dealing with a private law device? Some early way of preserving genuinely historic properties, including their grounds, before everything that had grown old was ‘historic’? Was there some sort of a covenant between the bank and the church?

I’m only writing about this because I drove past the site today. There was an empty stretch of curb, and it was a good day for taking a few pictures. It jogged my memory. I’d like to dig some more, but if anyone could shed some light, please do.

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DC to Relax its Height Limits?

The Independent has a piece about recent efforts to revise the DC building height limit of 130 feet (39.6 m). As Washington grows, its century-old height limit becomes a natural experiment in massing regulations and their impact on metropolitan land markets. After providing a brief history of the (aesthetics-driven) massing regulation, the author, Rupert Cornwell, notes:

[T]he price of a European feel is not only to be measured in commuter misery. The ban on tall buildings curbs the supply of space when demand is soaring; the result, naturally, is higher prices, across the board. DC has a chronic hotel shortage, while the cost of office space has hit Manhattan levels, and Washington’s [poor] residents find it ever tougher to make ends meet as . . . gentrification pushes rents remorselessly higher. The city, meanwhile, loses much potential tax revenue.

Washington is an unusually beautiful American city, in the sense that it actually has a classically-proportioned plan. And part of its proportioning lies in the scale of its buildings, which complement the city’s layout. L’Enfant’s 1791 plan predated tall buildings by a century, and in that sense it was silent about building heights. But it was also the blueprint for an airy city of wide boulevards, open spaces, and preeminent public buildings. The 130-foot building limit, imposed in 1899, has been consistent with the original blueprint and its Enlightenment-era political symbolism for America’s capital.

It would be a shame to see L’Enfant’s aesthetic suddenly disrupted; it would also be a loss to market-driven planning innovation to end the city’s role as one of the last American places where old-fashioned land-use efficiency (including the use of courtyards and alleys) is a serious consideration for individual projects. But there are certainly both practical and equitable arguments for relaxing the current height limits. Washington’s recent experience illustrates, starkly (I think), the costs of strictly regulating the massing of buildings in growing real estate markets. Even in cities without such purposive policies, the aggregation of land use regulations is presumably having similar impacts.

L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, DC.

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Mencken v. American Towns

H. L. Mencken has a funny essay in which he reflects on the ugliness of the small towns between Pittsburgh and Greensburgh, Pennsylvania. Sadly, not much has changed since he wrote the piece in 1927. Looking around these blocks on StreetView is a cautionary experience for anyone who would blame Euclidean zoning laws too much for the shortcomings of U.S. development. As a bonus, the same site also has a nice Mencken quote about what drives the antics of certain university professors— also, sadly, unchanged by the progress of a century.

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Funding Sprawl

The Atlantic has an article by Jordan Weissmann entitled, “Why Your Prius Will Bankrupt Our Highways.” It paints an ominous picture of the relationship between gasoline taxes and federal highway funding. I think it’s interesting that proposed public spending on rail infrastructure is reliably controversial in the United States, but not the subsidizing of motor travel through public spending on roads, highways and related infrastructure costs. It would be fair to say that the business model for private railroads would be a lot rosier if the government built and maintained all of the tracks, switches, and stations across the country, without controversy, and the private sector had only to supply the actual engines and rail cars.

Weissmann’s article also, indirectly, makes the case for land use policies that discourage sprawl and facilitate more compact development patterns. I’ve been reading about this topic lately in connection with some work that I’m doing for a research center. Studies have found that, in addition to the staggering highway costs that are generated by car-based land-use patterns, added costs for the development and maintenance of water and sewer infrastructure, private sector utilities, and lost productivity due to traffic congestion also grow in direct correlation with low-density, sprawl-type development.  These externalities ultimately redound to taxpayers, utility customers, and other consumers, where they are shared by town-dwellers and sprawl-dwellers alike. In traditional towns and cities, these costs were borne more directly by those who would benefit– a practice which strongly encouraged efficient land use.

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What’s in a Name?

The Touraine.

The NYT Real Estate section has a nice piece about the renaissance of naming apartment buildings in New York City.  Urban land developers have rediscovered this age-old marketing tactic, and it’s a good tradition.  It has particular resonance in New York City, where the sheer stock of apartment houses can make it a struggle for any one to stand out, no matter how beautiful, luxurious, or well-located.  The article makes a passing mention of the Touraine, a stunning new building with compact, solid, symmetrical features and heavy echoes of the classic pre-war style, located on East 65th Street, at Lexington.