Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, but time felt like an awfully flat circle as Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul presented the city’s business leaders with their “New New York” plan on reviving its now underpopulated business districts.
The plan was produced by a panel co-chaired by Dan Doctoroff, Mike Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding whose Olympics scheme for remaking the Far West Side eventually became Hudson Yards and who played a crucial role in remaking downtown after 9/11.
This New New York, not coincidentally, sounded a lot like Bloomberg’s “Luxury Product” vision of NYC as Adams preached to the convocation how he loves “my high income earners” who provide a vastly outsized share of Gotham’s tax revenue, how NYC has been prematurely written off before only to bounce back and is doing it again now (“we were the epicenter of terrorism, we were the epicenter of COVID”), and how the press has unfairly focused on the “scars” of a few terrible crimes while neglecting the “face” of a booming and bustling city (“New York is not coming back. New York is back. We’re back and we have to believe we’re back.”)
The report itself, understandably, is more frank about the challenge ahead: “It’s clear that the old model of everyone commuting daily into a business district is not coming back,” it flatly states.
“When growing numbers of people can work from anywhere, we must answer the question: why should they come here?”
It’s a question nearly as old as big cities themselves, one that the great H.G. Wells posed in his well-ahead-of-its-time 1901 essay, “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities.”
In it, the great journalist, novelist and father of science fiction foresaw urban cores eventually reduced to “an enormous complex of establishments, and hotels, and sterile households, and flats, and all the elaborate furnishing and appliances of a luxurious extinction.”
(There’s “luxury” again, from the Old French luxurios meaning “lustful, lascivious” that’s in turn from the Latin luxuriosus meaning “immoderate, excessive; voluptuous; profuse.”)
As it happened, just after reading Adams’ remarks I ended up for the first time since the pandemic inside the staggeringly imoderate, excessive Oculus, a $4 billion(!) World Trade Center “memorial, but also a monument to life” according to its architect that’s more obviously a shopping mall atop a transit hub.
Wells envisioned the great new cities of his day reduced over time to their malls as a result of the same technological forces, starting with trains, that led to those cities emerging in the first place (including right here, as NYC’s population exploded from 60,000 to 3.5 million over the 19th century), namely that “the velocity at which a man and his belongings may pass about the earth [stands] in an almost fundamental relationship to human society,”
The great new dense cities, Wells wrote, were a result of people’s “centripetal considerations” for schools, doctors, shopping and “love of the crowd” that would, he continued, eventually be undone by centrifugal ones that let them balance those things against a desire for more space, solitude and access to nature without cutting them off from the urban cores.
“With the steady cheapening and the steady increase in efficiency of postal and telephonic facilities, and of good transit, it seems only reasonable to anticipate the need for that expensive office and the irksome daily journey will steadily decline.”
That, Wells predicted — and New York experienced during the pandemic — would mean a “diffusion of a large proportion of the prosperous and relatively free,” leaving behind “those more numerous classes whose general circumstances are practically dictated to them.”
Remarkably, Wells even anticipated — in 1901! — something like Amazon, as “almost all the labor of ordinary shopping can be avoided — goods nowadays can be ordered and sent… to any place within 100 miles… and in one day they can be examined, discussed, and returned — at any rate in theory,” allowing for “one vast indiscriminate shop or ‘store’ full of respectable mediocre goods, as excellent a thing for housekeeping as it is disastrous to taste and individuality.”
With those changes, “the centre will probably still remain the centre,” Wells anticipated, but “it will be essentially a bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, a pedestrian place, its pathways reinforced by lifts and moving platforms, and shielded from the weather, and altogether a very spacious, brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration.”
That’s certainly not New York yet, but it is the Oculus, and half-empty Hudson Yards for that matter.
The New New York Plan may be, fundamentally, a sign of the miserable choice looming between a luxury city and an impoverished one that could end with the worst of both worlds.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.
