Published in Ciutat real, ciutat ideal. Significat i funció a l'espai urbà modern [Real city, ideal city. Signification and function in modern space]. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1998 (Urbanitats; 7).
Bryant ParkThis nine-acre park sits behind the main building of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, close to Times Square, in a central commercial district of office towers and stores. For most of the 20th century, the park has been difficult to control. During the Great Depression, unemployed people tried to sleep in the park, and during World War II, soldiers and visitors to the city used the park for illicit trysts and meetings. In the 1970s, drug dealers used the park, even during the day, making others, especially women, afraid to enter. The impression of the park as a sinister place was aided by its design, planned by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in the late 19th century. Tall stone walls and trees isolated the park from the view of passers-by. The feeling of nature Olmsted had desired was used, instead, to isolate the interior from the streets and led to the park's abandonment. Toward the end of the 1970s, the New York City Parks Department yielded to the request of a private association of owners of office buildings and their corporate tenants around the park, and turned over the park's management to them. This BID (Business Improvement District) raised funds for a study, under the guidance of William H. Whyte, of how and why people used this and other small parks in the center of Manhattan. The BID paid for new design plans and landscaping evocative of the Jardins du Luxembourg, new park furniture imported from Paris, and new kiosks ―designed on the Beaux Arts model of the Public Library― to sell fancy sandwiches and coffees. They aimed to use the design of the park to attract a critical density of "normal", law-abiding users. The aesthetic program, one could say, was to make the park more "civilized". I would call it "domestication by cappuccino".
Significantly, under private management, the public space of the park is protected by a large number of public police officers and private security guards. The BID has posted rules for using the park at each entrance: no one may be in the park after sunset except at a cultural event organized by the BID, no one may pick things from the garbage except for homeless people associated with one church near the park, no one may drink alcohol except in one area of the park. Some rules are the same as in all public parks, but Bryant Park was, I believe, the first park to post rules on signs in the park and to employ security guards to enforce them.
The revitalization of 42nd Street as a Disney colonyLike Bryant Park, Times Square ―especially the historic and symbolic core of Times Square on 42nd Street― has been a hard area to control. From the time of the Great Depression, the number of "legitimate" commercial theaters steadily declined and the number of "low-brow" burlesque, pornographic shops, and movie theaters steadily rose. Buildings became dilapidated and were not modernized; illegal sex and drug businesses took over the street. 42nd Street bothered all municipal administrations for many years because the public authorities could not control it. Its degradation repelled private investors, corporate offices, and real estate developers from that whole area of the West Side of midtown Manhattan. No redevelopment strategy attracted much interest until the 1980s, when the expansion of the stock market and financial and legal services persuaded the city and state governments that the time was ripe to redevelop Times Square as a commercial center like Wall Street or Park Avenue north of Grand Central Terminal. The city and state governments offered big financial incentives, and used the power of the state, to tear down old buildings, evict low-class and illegal uses, and transform 42nd Street into a financial district.
Nike Town: store or art museum?Nike Town is a flagship store for the Nike Company, which has designed it as both a shrine to sneakers and a tourist attraction. New Yorkers generally go to cheaper sporting goods stores or sneakers stores to buy athletic shoes. When I stood at the entrance to Nike Town one spring morning, almost everyone who walked in was already wearing Nike shoes, and many carried shopping bags from the nearby Disney or Warner Brothers store. The exterior of Nike Town suggests both a public school, where many teenagers play sports, and a monument; the entry looks like a place of transit for a mobile shopping public, with turnstiles, "gates", and signs flipping, letter by letter, to announce different attractions. Giant video screens dominate the tall atrium. Every 15 or 20 minutes, when videos promote different Nike products, customers stand still in the atrium, gazing up at the video screens. Each floor specializes in Nike products for a different sport. Nike caps and baseball bats are displayed in glass showcases, along with Jackie Robinson's autobiography. Athletic shoes and soccer uniforms, all bearing the Nike "Swoosh" logo, are artfully arrayed.
In contrast to heroic, historical models, and everyday, vernacular models, the contemporary American model of public space derives meaning from such symbolic commodities as Nike shoes and Mickey Mouse. The immanent meaning of society in the vernacular, and the transcendant meaning of society in the monument, are obliterated by the unmediated consumption of the shopping space. These spaces have lost a connection with the collective events that have shaped the course of cities. "In a few moments, the topography of Barcelona had changed", Abel Paz recalls in his memoir of The Spanish Civil War. "...Everywhere, barricades of paving stones were beginning to rise... There were battles on Plaça d´Espanya and on the Paral·lel... Their advance was halted on Plaça de Catalunya..." Remaking this topography by building an Imax movie theater or a Hard Rock Cafe poses the most difficult challenge for the future of public spaces.
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29 June 2004