master plan for Manhattan that would confine all business andlight industry to a north-south spine in the center of the island.>'?The Goodmans' plan, which would be expanded upon as thekey element of their influential book of 1947, Communitas:Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life,3lJ carried the Corbusier-inspired superblocks favored by the Housing Authority to aneven bolder scale: it proposed the elimination of every othercross street to redevelop the island as parklike residential neigh-borhoods opening up to two rivers, the shores of which wouldbe redeveloped above Twenty-third Street as bathing beachesand boating areas. Tackling one of the city's thorniest new prob-lems, that of airports, the Goodmans offered a "tentative pro-posal" to construct along the Hudson River shore betweenTwenty-third and Forty-second streets an enormous warehouse,the roof of which would provide a landing strip, an idea thatWilliam Zeckendorf would soon adopt as his own (see chapter9). To achieve this sweeping plan, the Goodmans, like ErnestFlagg before them,314called for demapping Central Park in orderto create a massive land reservoir so as to be able to rearrangethe functional components of the city.

In presenting their plan, the Goodmans made what wasperhaps the first strong argument in defense of Manhattan as aspecial and distinct case, different from that of New York as awhole and from typical American cities. Initiating a vision thatwould not be taken up again by architects so forcefully until1978, when the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas would publishDelirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan,3lSthe Goodmans proclaimed "The Idea of Manhattan." Man-hattan, they said, played a "peculiar role not only in the NewYork region but in the world (which is the true region of our cos-mopolis) .... There is no need to defend Manhattan Island; shehas her own rule; there is no need to praise her, though we whoare her sons are often betrayed into doi ng so. She has long beenthe capital not of a region but of a nation."316

In February 1949 Moses was one of five architects andplanners whose predictions for New York in 1999 were pub-lished in the New York Times Magazine.317 For the Times' read-ers, Harvey Wiley Corbett reinvoked his ideas from the 1920s,proposing a multilevel city to handle the traffic. He also envi-sioned superblock-scaled buildings, designed like terraceddomes, in which balconied apartments, "like frosting on a greatcake," would wrap the edges of a structure holding "stores, busi-nesses, theaters, athletic club facilities and many other thingsnot needing outside light." Such an arrangement would coun-teract population dispersion by keeping "the people living onthe outer crust in closer contact with their work as it goes on in-side this great structure," simultaneously solving the problem oftraffic by letting people live nearer to their work318

Moses saw the New York of 1999 as "not so different in itsbroader aspects or vistas, not so changed in its life and spirit."Countering many planners' contention that cities would declineand disperse, Moses believed that the population would growand that housing would improve, with "the worst of the oldslums ... gone, and new forms of obsolescence, neither as ex-tensive or as troublesome," to worry about. "There will be othernew and as yet unimagined problems, but who wants to live inan age without challenges?'?"

Eliel Saarinen, an unrepentant decentralist despite therough treatment meted out to him by Moses five years before,saw Manhattan divided into three principal areas--downtown,midtown and uptown-separated by large areas of greenery.The waterfront would largely be devoted to recreation, withshipping activity relocated to more remote shores. Fewer sky-

124

scrapers would crowd the skyline. Outside Manhattan, "scat-tered along the extended waterfront will be small integrateshipping communities, each with its own particular functionhandling the world trade now concentrated around the shores0Manhattan. Separated by protective zones of green land, thesecommunities will be enclosed in a spacious green-belt sys{tem."320 All in all, the city would be dispersed, and downtownand midtown would be but slightly more important foci than'other communities scattered throughout the region. .

Wallace K. Harrison, who joined Corbett and Moses in es/chewing "neighborhood utopias," reminded readers that the'postwar city was so vulnerable to wartime attack that its future·could be ensured only by peace. Harrison, too, was an unre-:pentant advocate of the urban concentration last heralded in th~1920s, arguing that the city would continue to enlarge and con:'centrate. "I would rather preserve the neighborliness of a quietlittle restaurant in New York, with its sawdust d1'l the floor and.smell of good food, than have fifty neighborhood dining roomsrun by sanitary and efficient food experts." Harrison confessed·himself an island citizen, a man who was "very happy to let thepeople of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, and the outer regionsof Kings and Richmond, live and develop their borough [sic] asthey will." But Harrison's call for more north-south arteries, anew north-south subway, elevated expressways across midtownand across lower Manhattan, and massive housing projects eat"ing "into the cancer of the Lower East Side" was hardly calcu-:lated to foster the small-scale charms he espoused.":

Hugh Ferriss, the fifth of the contributors, chose to submit adrawing, a dramatically rendered vision of a large-scale landscaped enclave of low monumental buildings and tall slabs seatop sunken highways, like an expanded version of the UniteNations, which he was working on at the time. Ferriss include \a caption with his drawing: "Fifty years from now New York will'be a capital city in a united world. A city of several levels, ofglass and light, with building masses set wide apart and sepa-,rated by tree-lined malls. It will, I hope, be run by atomic'power, working for peace, not war."322

As efforts to create a master plan were stymied, the City,Planning Commission's attention turned to zoning, the principaltool at its disposal to shape the city. On June 2, 1941, New Yor~marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day when the'Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions submitted thereport that would give the city the nation's first comprehensivesystem of zoningJ23 Outside the tenement laws, New York had,few use, height or bulk restrictions of any kind until the firstBuilding Zone Resolution was adopted in 1916. This resolutiondivided the city into three classes of districts-business, residen-tial and unrestricted=-each with defined limitations on permit-ted uses, as well as height and bulk of buildings. It was site-spe-cific, relating building heights to street widths, althoughbuildings or parts of buildings that occupied less than 25 percentof a site could rise to unrestricted heights.

Although the 1916 resolution survived significant courtj:tests, its administration by the Board of Estimate and Appor- :;tionment during the 1920s was sloppy and even corrupt. TheSeabury inquiry in 1931-32 inspired the authors of the new city'charter to place zoning under a new entity, the City Planning'Cornmission.F" At the time the new charter was being debated,the obsolescence of the existing zoning ordinance was clearenough that, according to Lawrence Orton, a draft of an "entirelynew type of zoning based upon direct resolution of density" wasincluded in the final report of the Mayor's Committee on CityPlanning (1936). The draft came before the newly established

City Planning Commission in 1938 and it was debated for a yearbefore the conclusion was drawn that the new commission "wasnot in a position to tackle the comprehensive revision implied

. but that it should undertake the most complete revision ofthe existing zoning within its capability."32s This revision wasadopted in 1941, modernizing provisions affecting automobilesand parking, and including some direct density controls.

In May 1944, in a report prepared by John Taylor Boyd, [r.,and Jacob Moscowitz, the Committee on Civic Design andDevelopment of the New York Chapter of the American Instituteof Architects questioned the belief that the "New York ZoningOrdinance satisfactorily controls the physical development ofthe City and the distribution of its population," and called for an"effective master plan and a comprehensive re-zoning of theCity's land uses./326In June 1944 Robert Moses, now ensconcedon the City Planning Commission, in a surprising move, pro-posed sweeping changes to the ordinance, dramatically reduc-ing area coverage in all categories and proportionately reducingbuilding heights in relationship to street width.327 Moses alsoproposed to further restrict the amount of ground area that couldbe covered in retail zones.

Hearings on the zoning plan were held in September.Moses's proposals received the qualified support of architects,but real estate interests angrily battled the new rules, which con-stituted the first substantial change in the controls since 1916.After deliberation, the City Planning Commission released its re-port to the Board of Estimate, which approved it in December1944, despite the objections of four borough presidents and morethan fifty business, real estate and civic orgaruz ations.V"According to the plan, the height and area of new buildings in re-tail business districts would be more restricted than ever before,with buildings allowed to occupy only 65 percent of their lots,except in special situations where parking was included, inwhich case a low base with shops could fill the site to permitgarageentrances in the rear. This feature promised to drasticallyalter and even suburbanize the physical character of midtownstreets,with buildings for the first time set behind the buildingline for most of their lower floors as well as those in the setbackareasabove. According to Lawrence Orton, the "sound and fury"generated by the new rules vastly "exceeded their importance,"but because there was not unanimous approval in the Board ofEstimate, the revised ordinance was taken to the courts byembattled owners of property in the highest-density district. Theopposition was led by Robert Dowling, who in July 1946 suc-ceeded in having the entire amendment defeated in the StateCourt of Appeals after retailers had already gotten the provisionscurtailing ground-floor space overtumed.V"

But the clamor for a new zoning ordinance only seemed togrow, so that in~1948 the Board of Estimate was moved to ap-propriate funds to hire the housing and planning firm ofHarrison, Ballard & Allen to undertake a comprehensive surveyof the city's zoning.P? To knowledgeable observers, most ofwhom were decentralists-either of the low-rise "garden city"persuasion epitomized by Lewis Mumford or of the high-rise,open-city, towers-i n-the-park ph i losophy espoused by LeCorbusier-the existing ordinance, amended 1,440 times be-tween 1916 and 1949, needed more than tinkering, or evenoverhaul: it needed to be reformed.'!' Robert Moses, who hadsupported zoning reform only four years before, objected, fear-ing that the outside consultants were too much in the pocket ofthe City Planning Commission's professional planners, who fa-vored decentralization. In a speech at Dartmouth College, heseemed to reverse himself and take the side of real estate inter-

Diagramsillustrating the concept of floor area ratio (FAR). Harrison,Ballard & Allen, 1950. Eachof the three building masseshasthe sameFAR. NYC

+-v-;»,,0"- 100%COVEQ·AGf.

<,

125

:e,sts;ii'rguing 'in behalf of "the merchants and property owners'wh'e) must pay most of the bills-what is to become of them and,o(,the City's credit while irresponsible greenbelters are declaring

>half the City's real estate worthless for complete rezoning on':~n"e;;YlJlJlkand angle-of-light theories."332'V,; "Harrison, Ballard & Allen's Plan for Rezoning the City of

''''York was released in the fall of 1950,333 It proposed to limit, .. York's population to 12,6 million, as opposed to the 66:ilfibn it estimated could be squeezed in under the prevailing

Given the decreasing birthrate, the planners estimated that,from 1940 to 1970 there could be a 35 percent rise in the num-"ber of families in the city, but only a 15 percent population in-'crease. The plan called for a modest reduction of populationfrom fifty-one people per usable acre in 1940 to forty-five by1970, still a much denser arrangement than in any otherAmerican city. It also foresaw a labor force of four million New

by 1970, 400,000 more than in 1948. For Manhattan,new plan would bring a drastic reduction of manufacturing

districts, particularly on the East Side, with much of the area re-verting to residential use, although manufacturing districts ineast midtown, around the United Nations, would be rezoned for'commercial uses.

If adopted, the plan would also have environmental effectsthat would profoundly alter the city's architecture and urbanism.The plan proposed to determine building bulk not by street

"width and use district, as had been done in the past, but by the.,new principle of floor area ratio, defined as the horizontal area

,.{)f the floors of a building divided by the area of the lot on which"it is placed. The idea of the floor area ratio, though presented al-'most as a technical correction to limitations in the old system,was a revolutionary mechanism devised by architects and plan-hers to transform the traditional city of attached or close-packedbuildings forming continuous blocks bounding streets and inte-rior courtyards. The 1916 zoning had established a fixed physi-cal relationship between street width and building corniceheight, resulting in a street wall of constant height along everystreet. The principle of floor area ratio, however, would set an

. .cverall limit on bulk but give the designer more or less freechoice on how to distribute that bulk and shape the building.The new zoning would result in an "open city" of continuous

.greenery populated by isolated buildings, like the scheme LeCorbusier had most compellingly articulated in his redevelop-ment plans for Paris, which he first proposed in the 1920s.334

That the promulgators of the plan had a specific vision of the fu-ture city in mind was never in doubt, as the report's renderingsof typical build-outs-prepared by Nicholas B. Vassilieve in anevocative, Hugh Ferriss-inspired style-made all too clear.

In an effort to encourage architectural variety, a complicatedformula for determining bulk was devised so that buildingheights controlled by the angle of light obstruction could be av-eraged, permitting a building to rise to a greater height at onepoint of the site if it fell below the setback line at another. Thisprovision would permit freestanding slablike towers to sit on

low, site-covering bases in a manner similar to that of LeverHouse, then being realized on Park Avenue by Skidmore, Owings& Merrill. Richard A. Miller described the evolution of the newformula, arguing for it as the logical third stage in the develop-ment of urban controls: from the oldest technique, height con-trols; to the "recession plane," the principle behind New York's1916 law; to the combination of floor area ratio and the reces-sion plane, which structured the new plan.335 In contrast to the1916 regulations, which categorized the city's buildings by use,

height and bulk, with each category delineated on a separate

Top left: Maximum bulk permitted under proposed residential districtzoning regulations. Harrison, Ballard & Allen, 1950. Rendering byNicholas B. Vassilieve. NYC

Bottom left: Alternative massing permissible under proposed residentialdistrict zoning regulations. Harrison, Ballard & Allen, 1950. Renderingby Nicholas B. Vassilieve. NYC

Above: Illustration of the concept of averaging a building's angles oflight obstruction. Harrison, Ballard & Allen, 1950. NYC

127

B·I}2 4SD.OOO SO H (WITHOUT TOWER)PRE SENT

~,>

WITH PLAZA BONUS' 468,600 SQ FT.PROPOSED

~TANDARD 4S0,oOO 5Q.FT.

PROPOSE 0 ev.w.U.)

PLAZA AND TOWER 504.000 5Q FT.{v."N.lol.1

200' ~ ISO' ~LOCK FRONT

Contrastingeffectsof existing zoning regulationsand thoseproposedby the New YorkChapterof the American Institute of Architects, 1959.Final Report. CU

128

map, the new proposal divided the city into districts, each withits own set of use and bulk restrictions. The information wouldbe presented on a single map.

Aline B. Louchheim, art critic for the New York Times, sawthe proposed law as a way to counter the aesthetic limitations ofearlier zoning: "Our town is becoming a hideous mountainrange of layer cakes, questionably proportioned, insensitivelydetailed, selfishly dominating their entire sites, content to repeatcliches of construction and unimaginative use of materials, andabove all, indifferent to eloquent architectural expression."mFor Henry Churchill, the key benefit of the new ordinance wasthat it would allow for design choices rather than dictating a sin-gle "style," as the fixed rules of 1916 had done: "It was the re-quirements for setbacks ... that produced the 'style' of architec-ture which has been characteristic of New York for the pastthirty-five years. This is a real style, as inevitable under~he con-ditions of the culture which imposed it as any of the great stylesof the past. Regardless of whether the architect chose to dress hisstructure vertically, horizontally, paste pilasters on it, or just topoke holes in it, underneath it is all the same. II The proposedlaw, "instead of confining" architects "in a mathematical straitjacket," would encourage them to pursue "a choice of forms.'?"

Despite such positive critical reception, and despite close toa thousand public meetings that thrashed out issuesand garneredwidespread support, Harrison, Ballard & Allen's zoning planfailed to be adopted for one simple reason: Robert Moses wasagainst it. Given the weakness of the mayor, Vincent Impellitteri,and of the chairman of the City Planning Commission, JohnBennett, who was also a Moses supporter, the plan didn't have achance. But with the election of Robert F. Wagner as mayor in1954, zoning reform got a new lease on life, although it was stillan uphill fight. In 1956, when Mayor Wagner asked James Felt, arespected realtor, to assume the chairmanship of the CityPlanning Commission, public confidence in that body was solow that its very survival was in question. Felt saw zoning reformas the issue with which he could most effectively rally support forthe commission; after all, in previous zoning battles in 1944 and1951, the commission had stood its ground only to be defeatedin the political arena largely because of Robert Moses's contro-versial persona. Given Felt's credentials as a realtor and his closeties to Mayor Wagner, his decision to take on rezoning as "amust" for the city was critical. 338

Instead of fiddling with the Harrison, Ballard & Allen report,Felt decided to start fresh. On August 3D, 1956, the architecturefirm of Voorhees, Walker, Smith & Smith was hired to help for-mulate a new plan, which was released in draft form in August1958 and in its final form on February 16, 1959, as RezoningNew York City339 In addition to Chairman Felt, the commissionthen had as its members Francis Blaustein, a lawyer; RobertMoses; Lawrence Orton; Charles J. Sturla, a Queens real estatebroker and active Democratic politician; Goodhue Livingston,[r.: and Robert G. McCullogh, ex officio member, who was chiefengineer of the Board of Estimate. The new proposal incorporatedmany of the features of Harrison, Ballard & Allen's aborted ef-fort, especially the principle of the floor area ratio, the maximumnumber of square feet of floor space that could be built for each100 square feet of lot area, a figure that would vary from districtto district. In addition to the floor area ratio method, it intro-duced a bonus system, devised to encourage plaza and mallspace inside mapped building lines by rewarding builders withthree additional square feet of leasable space for every squarefoot of open space provided at grade. The plan also reduced thecity's commercial acreage by about 50 percent, and "ribbon" de-

IiI

:'\ielopments that lined block after block of important arteries inresidential neighborhoods were targeted for elimination.

The zoning proposal divided the city's land into forty-seventypesof residence, commercial and manufacturing districts, bal-ancing current use and desirable future use patterns. It also rec-ognized lithe fact and economics of large-scale projects," andprovided for their accommodation. The plan foresaw a resident

..population of only 10,940,000-55,000,000 less than the pop-ulation theoretically obtainable under the 1916 ordinance, and.1,660,000 less than was projected by the Harrison, Ballard &',Allen plan. It accepted lithe existence of the automobile," re-H~uiring off-street parking in residential districts and in all com-:'mercial and manufacturing districts, "except for the most con-gested downtown areas where mandatory off-street parkingwould be uneconomic and impractical."140 According to theNew York Times, the planners explained this "seeming para-

.dox" by arguing that the exception was made lito avoid attract-!.,. ing more automobiles and compounding the present intolerable

traffic congestion" in the worst areas.v"The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Archi-

.tectsquickly endorsed the new plan."? But opposition soon be-ganto build among real estate developers, who believed that byrestricting the bulk of new buildings the plan would make con-J~tructionuneconomical and discourage new projects, therebyYl]d~rmining land values and ultimately adversely affecting the

~,(ity~stax base."" Robert Dowling, who had opposed both the'I:v\Qsesand the Harrison, Ballard & Allen plans, stepped up tosupport the new proposal, forming the Committee for ModernZoning, similar to the group established in 1913-14 to supportthe original ordinance.>" A key issue blocking support was theapsence of a grace period between the code's enactment and itsimplementation, which the Committee for Modern Zoning per-suadedthe City Planning Commission to adopt. The cornrnis-.:. ,n:-conducted a public hearing to discuss the proposed code. April 13, 1959. While most objections came from real estate.interestsconcerned with potential loss of value, one observer,\littor Gruen, faulted the code for its accommodation of the au-·,t~mobile,arguing that "what is not recognized in the new zon-·:in'g.resolution is the fact that a new land use of most destructive

qualities has developed: the automobile as a means of trans-pprt."J45 In the section on "Off-Street Parking Regulations," the~r,aftcodeobserved: "Since 1947 the tidal wave of half a millionmore automobiles owned by residents of the City has swept

+NewYork into the unenviable position of having traffic prob-:1~m5 comparable with Detroit and other 'automobile cities.'''34b:It~also'pointedout that almost one million people drove to work .

. Gruen observed that if New York's projected eleven millionpeoplewere to have one car per family unit, space to store threemillion cars would be needed, requiring about 4.8 billion

,squarefeet of area, or 120,000 acres, more than half of the city's.,19,t<l1 acreage. To stem the tide of the automobile, Gruen op-'P,9sedthe proposed requirement that every new building pro-,vid~off-street parking.·.'ii, By December 1959 the adoption of the new code seemed'fairly certain, with enactment scheduled for the summer of 1960,. yetrevisionswere continually being made.347 In their final report,the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects,

')"~ombining an urge to institutionalize the Modernist open city. with a street-savvy feeling for real estate pragmatics, suggested'. sweeterbonuses than the ones originally proposed for creating.street-level plazas, as well as a bonus for street-level arcades,...concourses,rear yards and interior courts that were connected to'the street,and for side yards that were more than thirty feet wide.

,.

g0:'t

nhit)-.

III'tnIete

e-

la' )0,"00

'~.l'" 1,"01> 'j}."'f) 1.000~

. "~rO"/.L,1oI11 ((O.ITlQl\) '40,000

M,Io,X. FLOOIt AruA.' 540,000 SO ~T

nCOMMENDED , ••.•. )

200' .• 150' BLOCK FRONT

"(TU'" • ~OO. ...l .•.~)I"I". to'Ul tU'IU,."H

'OTO'l

I<!.OOO '1.0(10 11;,000lO."DO 102,000 1''',000

.'CO&."",,,O ~TIOIo.l~ '"lU~l ••• t( p •I u.lCIU.lU .1.1 rl.l.l" .O •••U~.l .o.•v~" '0;0" "IC.DI~ ••.•HI ,,«IH.ft., Y.~"

J "'l'I<OO Of '''\,CUl'''''''o;; 'O"U~; zo·'. LIMIT4 1('1' tHOlU>" .L ••.•• ' •••••• HT'Uk HO\J'.ttJ.(>H~ ON ,VUH,I\

",.,,,,,,,' •• (1) 0" "IJ.llO.,.. SlDI "Ull to •. ,,0 " .••• O •••. "l •. UI .

Zoning recommendations proposedby the New York Chapterof theAmerican Institute of Architects, 1959. Final Report. ell

129

All of these moves were deliberately intended to replace NewYork's traditional street-oriented urbanism with continuous openspace punctuated by freestanding, objectlike buildings. The ar-chitects also called for increased lot coverage for towers, claim-ing that the buildings allowed by the proposed 40 percent cover-age would be too slender to be feasible, and proposed that nooff-street parking be built in crowded areas. As a sop to the grow-ing popular sentiment that development was destroying NewYork's traditional character-which, by the evidence of their re-port, they otherwise clearly applauded-the architects proposedthat the mapping be revised to protect historic areas and the char-acter of certain neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village,Gramercy Park, Hanover Square and the remaining early-nine-teenth-century portions of Washington Square.v'"

The commission scheduled seven public hearings to reviewthe document and Chairman Felt announced his determinationto see the document adopted: "This is the fight of my life," hesaid.349 But the Real Estate Board of New York remained uncon-vinced, claiming that the new zoning would result in higherrents because the size of buildings would be more strictly regu-lated.350 With so much opposition, the City Planning Com-mission decided not to submit the new ordinance to the Boardof Estimate in June but to delay. Between June 1959 and March1960, when hearings on the new law began, the commission,under Felt's direction, relaxed some of the provisions and pro-vided key interest groups such as the Fifth Avenue Associationwith special language describing use districts that conformed toprevailing patterns. Moses raised his voice in protest, attackingthe overall plan as an "alphabet soup" and a "panacea." He fo-cused in particular on the floor area ratio formula, which he hadopposed when it was first advanced by Harrison, Ballard &Allen because it was an abstract concept and not specificallytied to the physical requirements of individual sites, a key pointthat was never adequately debated.J" But eventually Felt andMayor Wagner persuaded him to back off.

Final hearings were held on September 12-14, 1960, andthe proposal was passed on October 18 and forwarded to theBoard of Estimate, which, with only modest opposition at thepublic hearing, approved it on December 15, 1960352 In order"to insure maximum stability in the building and real estate in-dustries during the important transition period," the CityPlanning Commission directed that the new zoning would notbecome effective until one year after its approval by the Board ofEstimate.353As finally approved, the plan incorporated 850 revi-sions to the original proposal, over 500 more than in the previousdocument of December 1959. Among these were dropping therequirement that nonconforming industries in residential districtsmove out within twenty-five years; adding greater incentives forplazas and greater bulk for commercial buildings in the centralbusiness district; and allowing for greater population density, tar-geting the city's ultimate growth at 12,273,000, which was es-sentially what Harrison, Ballard & Allen had initially proposed.

The passage of the new zoning was postwar New York'spivotal architectural event, irrevocably changing the relation-ship between buildings and streets that had prevailed for overthree hundred years. As with the 1916 zoning ordinance, itwould have a profound effect on the design of cities across thel)nited States and, in keeping with New York's new, interna-tional prominence and prestige, on the design of cities world-wide. From the point of view of architecture and urban design,the most notable provision of the new zoning was the plazabonus, a feature pressed for by architects who pointed to theSeagram and Time & Life buildings as models.354 Felt was com-

130

pletely sold on the plaza provision: "We are now saying for thefirst time in New York City that open space is not to be consid-ered as a gouge here and a notch there, depriving builders ofvaluable floor space but as a usable commodity worth morethan the office it replaces."355

In his 1973 essay, "Superville: New York-Aspects of VeryHigh Bulk," Stephen loll argued that by introducing the bonussystem the 1961 zoning reversed the original purpose of zon-ing-"to control its logical bulk"-and encouraged larger proj-ects by rewarding developers for providing public amenities.While the need to use a reward system was probably inevitablegiven that the city had no master plan spelling out desirablepublic benefits in any given area, loll saw the introduction ofincentive zoning as a reflection of the city's sense of helpless-ness in the faco of competition from other cities. HQ GlIIQd suchzoning an "applied cure" that "only intensifies the malady":"Incentive zoning is a reconciliation of the incompatible idea ofbuildings so large as to destroy public amenities and the ideathat such buildings can also be made to provide public ameni-ties .... Incentive zoning regards tall buildings with a mixture ofa planner's horror and a comptroller's glorification.,,356

No sooner was the new zoning adopted than developersrushed to file plans under the old rules, which remained in effectuntil December 31, 1961. As a result, 1961 proved to be NewYork's biggest year ever for building."? Given that the new codereduced the allowable density on many sites, real estate prices atfirst began to drop. But developers were quick to see possibilitiesfor profit. While the city's ultimate theoretical population waslowered from 66 million to 12.3 million, the business cores werenot nearly so severely affected. Large-scale developers of com-mercial office space and apartment houses had no trouble adjust-ing to the code's provisions because they realized that the bonussystem combined with the elimination of setbacks made it possi-ble for them to build bigger and more efficiently engineered build-ings than ever before.P" Though the new code would not havepermitted 666 Fifth Avenue, 300 Park Avenue, 1407 Broadwayand 20 Broad Street, all with a floor area ratio (FAR) of 20, it en-couraged new structures that somewhat resembled Seagram's andits large plaza but were almost twice its size. For example, theSeagram Building, in many ways the yardstick for the new ordi-nance, had an FAR of 11.1; but the new code allowed an FAR of15 for its neighborhood, a figure that could, with the provision ofopen plazas, arcades or terraces, rise to as high as 18.

The new rules had a less positive effect on small-scale en-terprises, resulting in a significant reduction in the amount ofmedium-size, medium-height housing that had traditionally metthe needs of the middle-class market in the outer boroughs andeven in the "soft" areas of Manhattan.3s9 The zoning's impact onapartment house design was a result not only of the emphasis onlarge site assemblages but of the tight density requirements im-posed by the desire to limit the city's population to 12.3 million:a 15,000-square-foot, 1OO-by-150-foot plot on East Sixty-thirdStreet, which would have supported 154 apartments under theold rules, could contain only 115 units under the new; toachieve the old number an additional 5,000 square feet of landwould be needed. Even more dramatically, a similar plot in up-per Manhattan in the new R7-2 zone would result in only forty-two apartments, whereas fifty-six units would have been permit-ted before360 Midblock sites, traditionally the most desirable forapartment houses because of the quiet they afforded, were vir-tually ruled out for development because, in order to achieve areasonable density, they had to be set so far back on the plot asto provide virtually no buildable area.

Despite initial skepticism about the aesthetic impact of thenew code, )61 and the glut that occurred when developers rushedprojects through to take advantage of the old code, the city's realestateappetite was so great that by 1970, less than ten years af-ter the new code went into effect, it had completely transformedthe fabric of Manhattan's two principal business districts as wellaswhole areas of the Upper EastSide. But many observers werenot happy about the changes. While many of New York's bestarchitects had remained enthralled with the 1916 zoning tenyearsafter its passage, and the architecture it mandated had be-come an example to the world at large, in an equal time the1961 ordinance was in severe disrepute at home, though itsprinciples were widely adopted by other cities. Architects andmembers of the city's development community were quick toseeit not only as urbanistically destructive but also as the causeof an increased density of development in the commercial core,rather than the reduction so many had hoped for.

The new zoning also had the result of creating an over-abundance of one particular building type. As the New YorkTimes reported in 1969: "The new code, while limiting buildingbulk, provided incentives for including open space at streetlevel. This had the practical effect of making most profitablefrom the owner's standpoint a sheer tower set well back from thecurb to create a plaza." Edward Sulzberger, a prominent realtor,pointed out that the zoning change did little more than to sub-stitute one design cliche for another. As the Times put it: "Inthe annals of Manhattan's skyscraper architecture, the 1950smight best be described as the era of the wedding cake, and the1960s as the age of the plaza."362 Between 1961 and 1973 some1.1 million square feet of new open space was created in thecity because of the plaza bonus provision. According to asubsequent cost-benefit analysis computed by Jerold S. Kayden,the construction costs of these plazas to the developers cameto $3,820,278, in return for which they were able to build7,640,556 square feet of additional commercial space, yieldingby conservative estimates a bonus value of $186,199,350 tothem; succinctly put, each dollar spent for a plaza yielded forty-eight dollars worth of extra space.363

But the plazas were not all equally useful and almost nonewere comparable to that of Seagram's; some were in fact de-signed to discourage actual use. As a result of the analysis ofWilliam H. Whyte, who organized the Street Life Project, thezoning was amended in May 1975 to set standards for bonusplaza design.J64 Drafted by the City Planning Commission'sUrban Design Croup, under its director, Raquel Ramati, the newlegislation specified types of amenities to be provided on theplazas, such as kiosks and cafes, and prescribed conditions forseating, including the number of chairs per square foot of openspace. In addi~on, to ensure that mandatory tree planting,bench installations and maintenance would be performed, it re-quired the developer to post a performance bond before receiv-ing a certificate of occupany.

As a result of the new zoning, post-1961 buildings were notonly bulkier, they were taller. The typical Manhattan office buildingbuilt in the 1950s was between thirty and forty stories high; in the1960sthe average rose to between forty and fifty stories, making thestreets seem more crowded than ever and even darker in somecases.The buildings were also more expensive: the lower costs ofuninterrupted vertical structures and the towers' smaller founda-tions were more than offset by the costs of increased elevators,which enlarged the percentage of space occupied by the building'score on a typical floor. As a result, cheaper finishes and more dia-grammatic designs and detailing became a commonplace.

The situation had become so bad that even some realtorswere concerned; as Edward Sulzberger told the New YorkTimes, perhaps it was time for a change. Sulzberger suggestedthat new incentives be written into the zoning code to encour-age more variety in skyscraper design: "This could get awayfrom the single-note theme song of the sixties in Manhattanarchitecture."365 In April 1965 the City Planning Commissionvoted a revision to the zoning law that would "take the shacklesoff architects" who had once believed that the 1916 ordinancerestricted their creativity, only to find themselves bound in anew architectural serfdom, cranking out "cheesebox" de-signs.366The 1965 revision was intended to encourage artisticfreedom-that is, to add circular, hexagonal and other nonrecti-linear shapes to the prevailing repertoire of rectangular towers.It further advocated a departure from the constraints of street-hugging architecture by encouraging designs that were not par-allel to the building line and permitting buildings to occupy alimited area within fifty feet of the street line on streets less thanseventy-five feet wide or within forty feet of the line on widerstreets. The first building to take advantage of this change wasone built in 1967 by the New York Telephone Company at 233East Thirty-seventh Street (see chapter 5). A twenty-four-storyhexagonal structure designed by Kahn & Jacobs, who had initi-ated the revision, this prowlike building occupied a midblocksite that extended through to Thirty-eighth Street and featuredplazas facing both streets. But the design of the building wasotherwise banal, and it offered no real direction for a renewal ofarchitectural aesthetics or an improved urbanism

On October 15, 1963, William F. R. Ballard became chair-man of the City Planning Commission, replacing James Felt, whoresigned late in 1962, in part to avoid suggestions of conflict ofinterest because of his brother Irving's role in developing a newMadison Square Carden on the site of the old PennsylvaniaStation.367 Ballard, the first architect ever to hold the job, was amember of the team that had developed the abortive zoning re-form of 1950. As president of the Citizens' Housing and PlanningCouncil, he was a highly respected member of New York's plan-ning world368 With a new zoning amendment in place and anew chairman at the helm, the commission once again turned tothe production of a master plan. This was done for two reasons:because federal agencies were beginning to threaten to cut offfunds to the city until it had a plan, and because the prevailing re-development strategies were beginning to be widely questionedby the public. In particular, the tide of public opinion was begin-ning to turn against the city's dependence on the federal govern-ment's urban renewal program, which was waggishly derided as"urban removal" or-because of the program's unenlightened at-titude toward race-as "Negro removal," a phrase coined by thenovelist James Baldwin369 The Federal Bulldozer, a book writtenby Martin Anderson, a Columbia University finance professor, of-fered a devastating critique of urban renewal as it fanned theflames of community discontent."?

While the generation of New York architects who domi-nated the scene in the 1950s-whether high-style artists such asPhilip Johnson or Gordon Bunshaft, or yeomen such as theRoths---eschewed debates about city planning, a younger gen-eration was now emerging who eagerly took up issues of urban-ism. They began to attack the urban renewal process and thecity's lackluster planning, for which they held their fellow archi-tects in large measure responsible, dismissing the city's profes-sional planners as lacking in vision and hopelessly bureaucratic.In July 1964 some of the younger architects, including RichardB. Snow, Lathrop Douglass, Sheldon Licht, Jeanne M. Davern,

131