DEVELOPER DREAMS DEFLATED?
THE POINTE, Bay Street at Victory Boulevard, Tompkinsville
THE (USUALLY) EMPTY PROMISE OF HIGH-VISIBILITY PROJECTS
Neighborhoods
are not "brought back" by construction cranes, Walgreens 'Opening
Soon!' posters or the sudden infusion of buckets of leveraged money
masquerading as commitment to the community.
At least in the
outer boroughs, with a very few exceptions, down-at-the-heels
neighborhoods are rescued and revived not by glitzy projects but
building by building, block by block, over years, even decades, by the
people who live in them, love them, and spend huge chunks of their
lives making them desirable again.
THE VIEW, Richmond Terrace at Nicholas Street, St. George
PEOPLE ARE THE VITAL FORCE, NOT LEVERAGED DOLLARS,
THAT TURN STREETS ON A MAP INTO A COMMUNITY
Making neighborhoods desirable again includes lobbying for legal protection from tear-downs as-of-right through historic districts designation. And the creation of institutions that spur community cohesion and confidence, like the St. George Greenmarket and the Every Thing Goes Book Café and Neighborhood Stage in Tompkinsville. These--and not standard-issue apartment blocks--are what bring and keep a community together.
Ironically, these are also the sorts of changes that make neighborhoods attractive to developers, who move in, make big plans with borrowed money and, with their allies, make grandiose claims that they're 'bringing back' the neighborhood.
When the market suffers a downturn, the developers and their minions flee. Community residents, on the other hand, decide to repaint the porch floor or pour another cup of coffee and try to remember where they intended to plant the bulbs that just arrived in the mail. That's what turns the bare bones of a neighborhood on a map into a desirable community: the effort, year after year, to make things a little bit cleaner, prettier, safer, quieter, greener.
Developers don't have that kind of time.
West side of Montgomery Avenue, Tompkinsville. Still waiting for the hipsters to forsake Williamsburg.
THE DEVELOPER SELL
Developers in iffy neighborhoods always sell their projects as broadly transformative. Knock down something deteriorated, replace it with something contemporary and new, and you and the neighborhood live happily ever after.
In the 1970s, St. George was sold that by now rather time-worn bill of goods about the Castleton Park Mitchell-Lama middle-income project --165 and 185 St. Marks Place--a project that, its proponents implied, would halt the flight of middle-class residents and the neighborhood's accelerating physical deterioration. Thus were two achingly banal off-the-shelf residential towers installed on an overlook that is arguably one of the finest waterfront locations on the east coast.
What one can say about Castleton Park is that it is clean, well maintained and not in any sense a problem for any but its most immediate neighbors, who complain about unremitting noise from delivery vans, sanitation trucks and transportation service vehicles that sit, with noisy engines idling, for long periods in the delivery driveway nearest Hamilton Avenue.
What can also be said is that the development provides decent, safe, attractive housing for working people of modest means at rents they can afford. And it has stabilized a location whose once-elegant waterview housing had been derelict for years. But transformative in any more than a site-specific way? No way.
The W.J. Grimshaw postcard image below reveals the very different Castleton Park that once stood on the site, back when the neighborhood was considered part of New Brighton.
