[[book title 1] FAR WEST NEW YORK: MEGA PROJECTS, ART GALLERY
DISTRICTS, HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND URBAN CHANGE ON
MANHATTAN’S FAR WEST SIDE.
[Book title 2] : URBAN CHANGE ON MANHATTAN’S FAR WEST SIDE:
MEGA PROJECTS, ART GALLERY DISTRICTS, AND HISTORIC
PRESERVATION.
[Book title 3 INTRODUCTION: ART GALLERY DISTRICTS (SOHO to CHELSEA);
HISTORIC PRESERVATION PROJECTS ( THE HIGH LINE, GANSEVOORT
MARKET); AND MEGA PROJECTS THAT OFTEN FAIL OR TAKE DECADES TO
HAPPEN (HUDSON YARDS, PENN/MOYNIHAN STATION): URBAN CHANGE ON
MANHATTAN’S FAR WEST SIDE
The Far West Side of Manhattan saw three crucial kinds of urban and cultural
developments over the last fifteen years, each of which raise a series of critical issues.
First, Chelsea replaced SoHo as the site of the most important commercial art gallery
district in the world for Contemporary Art. Coinciding, as it did, with the rise, and
eventual fall after 2007, of the most effervescent art market ever, this presents a set of
questions about the relation--decidedly complex--between art and money.
The second Far West Side development was a group of attempted mega projects. Three
of these were part of the drive to develop the Hudson Yards, the huge area between 30th
and 43st adjoining the Hudson River, on and around the railyards that served Penn
Station. These three mega projects included an effort to expand the Javits Convention
Center, an attempt to build a Stadium which was also the centerpiece of New York’s
effort to host the 2012 Olympic Games, and a huge rezoning from manufacturing to
commercial in order to encourage office buildings and white collar jobs. A fourth,
related, mega project was an effort to move part of Penn Station, the busiest
transportation facility in the United States, one block East to the magnificent, Beaux
Arts, Farley building, itself located just a few blocks to the East of the Hudson Yards.
This would make amends for the bulldozing in 1963 of the original Penn Station, a
destruction widely seen as a blunder that left New York City as one of the few global
cites with only one imposing train station- Grand Central.
On the whole these mega projects either failed or took decades —the only one that
happened quickly was the massive rezoning of the Hudson Yards. This raises the
question of why it is so hard in New York City to build/pull off mega projects nowadays.
The third Far West Side development was a series of historic preservation projects. One
of these was the High Line conversion of an above ground rail line into a park, which
became a major international tourist attraction after it opened in 2009. Another
preservation project was the creation of the Gansevoort Market historic district, which
quickly became a major night life/club center (popularized as the home of Samantha,
the fictional character in the hit television series “Sex in the City”). These preservation
projects raise the question of how to strike the proper balance between preservation and
development. They also show how hard it is to bottle up history since none turned out as
expected. For example the High Line only succeeded because of a development deal
opening the way for a series of high-rise buildings, mostly condominiums, by
“starchitects” on the cutting-edge of architectural design and, ironically, creating the kind
of buildings that preservationists tend to hate. This was ironic since the High Line was
initiated as a preservation project.
These three types of developments—Chelsea’s commercial gallery neighborhood, mega
projects, and historic preservation--are inter-connected in a variety of interesting and
sometimes unexpected ways, which is why this study considers them together. For one
thing, they are all located in, or on the edge of, the area know as the Far West Side of
Manhattan, and many are physically intermingled. The High Line, for instance, runs
through all the projects (See figure 1.)
Also, by 2004 mayor Bloomberg’s administration saw all three development types as key
parts of its plan for the Far West Side, a plan which the administration considered a
model of the difficult but crucial process of balancing growth and preservation. The
administration’s Department of City Planning, under Amanda Burden, also argued,
plausibly, that its mixed and balanced approach was in line with that of the great urbanist
Jane Jacobs, as expressed in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
This interpretation of Jacob’s book, though accurate, will shock some who have long
portrayed Jacobs as a proponent of vibrant local neighborhood life, which she was, while
also depicting her as an opponent of big projects, tall new buildings, and urban growth,
which she absolutely was not. Like the DCP she favored a balanced approach that aimed
at both, and the attempt to depict her otherwise rests basically on a blatant misreading of
her book that does not get beyond the first few chapters, as we argue later.
The administration’s general perspective here also embodied some of the latest views on
planning. It was, for example, consistent with urban planner Alexander Garvin’s
expansive definition of “planning” that tried to avoid the blunders of past planners.
Many of these blunders resulted from considering a project in a vacuum and failing,
among other defects, to weigh the project’s impact on the surrounding community.
Garvin, one of New York’s most respected planners, defines planning broadly as “ public
action that generates a sustained and widespread private market reaction,’ which
improves the quality of life of the affected community, thereby making it more attractive,
convenient, and environmentally healthy.” i So it makes sense to consider and evaluate
these Far West Side projects together, as intended by the city’s planners. (Garvin was
heavily involved in New York’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.)ii
Further, these developments need to be considere4d together because they affected each
other in various, sometime surprising, ways. For example the High Line’s opening
boosted Chelsea’s art gallery district just when the art market was sagging from the
financial and economic crisis that started in 2007, and also helped attract the Whitney
Museum of American Art to commit in 2010 to a major expansion at the High Line’s
Meat Market entrance, followed in 2011 by a decision to basically move its entire
operation there.. The High Line and the Whitney project also helped Chelsea’s
commercial art gallery district fend off a challenge from the Lower East Side’s growing
gallery district, underlining the often important role of non-profit organizations in
American cultural development, and in planning.
Figure 1. The Far West Side: Chelsea Gallery District, Mega Projects, and Preservation
Projects including High Line and Meat Market.
This book is, therefore, about a series of dynamic and inter-related situations with many
moving parts, which are still in process. Even the mega projects that seemed to have
failed are not unrevivable. For example, the Penn Station/Moynihan Station project rose
from the grave in 2009- 2010 when a new head of Amtrak was appointed who favored
the idea and then when it received $83m of “stimulus money” from the Federal
Government’s emergency economic fund to address the ongoing financial and economic
crisis.
This situation, albeit in flux, offers many important lessons. For example most of the
various reasons why mega projects often fail are likely to continue to apply. Also, fluid
situations are arguably as typical of today’s urban environment, and of many in the past,
as are more static ones. Whilst it is easier to write about projects that have a beginning,
middle and end, presenting the Far West Side of Manhattan in that way would be
unrealistic. Anyway, enlightened definitions of planning that, for example, stress that
only when a project also has a beneficial impact on the surrounding community can it be
considered successful, imply that evaluating projects, especially those in clusters, will
likely be an ongoing process as the project’s effects evolve and change.
Each of the three types of Far West Side development considered here conveys its own
key lessons, which the rest of this chapter summarizes. Together, they illustrate the
intricacies of balancing growth and preservation (of buildings, neighborhoods and
vulnerable populations), the lessons of which the concluding chapter considers.
The Rise of Chelsea’s Commercial Art Gallery District and Contemporary Art
Chelsea became the most important Contemporary Art gallery district in the
world with startling speed. Between 1996 and 2007 the number of commercial
galleries in Chelsea grew from 12 to at least 231, dwarfing other art districts in the United
States and elsewhere and supplanting SoHo, once the most dynamic gallery neighborhood
in New York City. The number of SoHo galleries during this period fell from at least 213
in 1996 to 53 in 2007. (See chapter 1, figures 1- 2[dh maybe fig 1 here]).
One indicator of Chelsea’s pre-dominance is the number of galleries from Chelsea that
exhibit at Art Basel, Switzerland which is the world’s leading annual fair for
Contemporary Art and operates a ferociously competitive admission process for galleries
wishing to exhibit. One gallery owner quipped: “It is easier to get into an Ivy League
college than Art Basle!” Art Basel 2011 included 47 galleries from New York, the
largest number by far from any city in the world. Of these New York galleries by far the
largest number, 23, were Chelsea galleries. The Chelsea total alone equaled the number
from all of Berlin, the city with the next largest number of galleries, followed by London
(19), Paris (18) and Zurich (10). After New York, the only other US cities represented at
Art Basel in 2011 were Los Angeles (4) Chicago (3) and San Francisco (2).iii Marvelling
at the Chelsea phenomenon, the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2004
that “a contemporary art scene on this scale has never happened before, and it's hard to
imagine it ever happening again.” France’s influential newspaper Le Monde, not inclined
to exaggerate American cultural influence, routinely called New York “the world capital
of contemporary art” and Chelsea the city’s “commercial gallery center.”iv
In this context, Chelsea’s mega-gathering of publicly accessible, commercial galleries
present a magnificent, and if Roberta Smith is right, perhaps not to be repeated,
opportunity for systematic research on Contemporary Art--on the art works, their
audience, the galleries and the artists. For example, Chelsea’s galleries offer a fine
chance to survey the audience for the art and to its meaning for the audience. Art works,
of course, have an objective existence, but much of their dynamism derives from the
meaning that the audience assigns to them. Yet throughout the history of art we rarely
know more about this than can be gleaned from the comments of a limited, albeit
important, group—the artists, patrons, purchasers, dealers, or critics. We typically lack
any systematic knowledge of the views of the interested general public. The Chelsea
gallery audience is not, of course, a cross-section of the general public. But it is,
arguably, reasonably representative of the United States public who are interested in
Contemporary Art. We also supplemented the Chelsea audience interviews with a survey
of collectors at New York’s major international art fair, the Armory Show.
Two Stories.About Contemporary Art—Money/Real Estate and the Meaning of the Art
Among the major research issues raised by Chelsea ’s commercial gallery center, we
sketch out three here. First, how far is art about money? As the art market boomed
especially from 2002-2007, public media discussion increasingly focused on the rising
prices of art and its investment potential. The works of Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and
Jeff Koons were prime case studies here. For example in August 2007 Hirst apparently
sold, for $50m, the world’s most expensive work of contemporary art, a platinum cast of
an 18th century human skull encrusted with over 8,000 diamonds, triggering a spate of
media articles. The news, which emerged soon after, that Hirst had actually been part of
the consortium that ”purchased” his work, and then that it had never really been
purchased at all, occasioned another round of articles on art and money, but with ethics
now added as a topic. Even after the art market began deflating in 2008, much writing
still focused on art as money, though now on the question of how far prices would fall.
The strong implication of this discussion was that, for the audience, interest in art is
basically about its investment potential.
In this study and based on our findings we argue that, on the contrary, there are two
stories about Contemporary Art, both of which need to be told. The first story is, indeed,
about money and investment, and changing prices of real estate and commercial rents,
critically salient for the galleries. This story, for example, underpins the move from SoHo
to Chelsea of New York’s dominant commercial gallery center for Contemporary Art.
The second story is about the meaning of the art to those who view and purchase it. This
story, we argue, is typically about the way art resonates with themes in people’s lives,
and it usually has little to do with art as money. Further, it can only be discerned through
interviews with the audience for the works—both people who view the art in galleries but
do not usually purchase it, and also those who do purchase--the collectors. One reason
this second story is seldom told is that the interview data to tell it are rarely collected,
leaving the “art as money story” to dominate. We narrate both these stories in the next
two chapters.
The Definition of Contemporary Art and the Eclipse of Styles
A second issue raised by Chelsea is the whole question of the definition of Contemporary
Art which, as a category, is strikingly and unusually broad and raises the related question
of the decline of art styles which once dominated the art scene.
Chelsea’s rise as a commercial gallery district coincided, roughly, with the establishment
of “Contemporary Art” as the dominant category in the art world for classifying the art of
the time and the associated eclipse of styles. Reflecting this dominance, a plethora of
museums of Contemporary Art were announced and opened during this period in the
United States and around the world especially in cities with aspirations as artistic and
cultural leaders. For example in nine months starting in December 2007 at the height of
the frenzied art market, three major museums of Contemporary Art opened. The first, in
New York City’s Bowery/Lower East Side in December, 2007, was the New Museum of
Contemporary Art, designed by two star Japanese architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue
Nishizawa (chapter 9, photo ). In Los Angeles the Broad Contemporary Art Museum,
part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opened in February 2008, designed by
Renzo Piano. Then Charles Saatchi reopened his Museum of Contemporary Art in a new
London location in the former garrison building of the Duke of York, whose 70,000
square feet of exhibition space made it one of the largest Contemporary Art museums in
the world (chapter 10, photo ). The Whitney Museum of American Art’s plan to
showcase Contemporary (and Modern) Art in a new building next to the High Line’s
entrance, has already been mentioned. (Photo ).
Photo . Whitney Museum of American Art’s new Contemporary and Modern Art
building, designed by Renzo Piano and scheduled to open in 2015 at the entrance to the
High Line in the Meat Market.
Amidst all this activity, but insufficiently noticed and commented on, has been the
distinctive way that Contemporary Art is defined. For example, reflecting the general
usage of the term in the art world, most Chelsea gallery owners defined “Contemporary
Art” broadly and inclusively as, basically, the art produced by all artists still living or
fairly recently dead. Such inclusivity is unusual in the history of art over the last two
hundred years, which has mostly proceeded by foregrounding, in procession, a sub-group
of the styles and artists of their time (e.g Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract
Expressionism, Pop Art etc.) As the philosopher Arthur Danto, one observer who has
stressed Contemporary Art’s inclusivity and the related, modern eclipse of styles, has
said:
Today [in art] everything is permitted. [With the arrival of contemporary art]
Artists were free to make art in whatever way they wished….That is the mark of
contemporary art, and small wonder, in contrast with modernism, there is no such
thing as a contemporary style. v
Still, this leaves unexplained why this inclusivity has occurred. In this study we suggest
an explanation, arguing that Contemporary Art’s embrace of all living artists and their
work is likely related to the fact that its dominance coincided with a dramatically
booming art market. In such a context, when art sells relatively easily, the drive to
highlight, or “brand”, a particular subsection of work and artists (i.e. promote “styles”) is
less urgent. Everything has a chance to sell, and inclusivity-eclecticism reigns. This
explanation carries the prediction that, if the art market remains difficult for an extended
period (i.e. not just a brief recession), styles will re-emerge to dominance and the
category “Contemporary Art” will fade. (Danto, by contrast, believes Contemporary Art
as a dominant category is here to stay.)
Flux in the World of Contemporary Art: Change and Disequilibrium
A third issue raised by Chelsea is that of flux and change in the art world. Chelsea’s
dominance in the commercial art world clearly could not last, and especially after about
2006, a host of challenges to its position emerged. As a result, Chelsea’s art world was
not in equilibrium, reflecting the fact that neither was the Contemporary Art world in
general. So this book also sets Chelsea in the context of these changes, some of which
involve issues of “globalization.”
Some of the challenges to Chelsea were extremely radical, calling into question the whole
commercial gallery/dealer model of displaying and selling art which has dominated in the
twentieth century. This market oriented model, whereby each gallery adopts a limited
roster of artists, displays their works for sale, and receives a cut (often 40-50%) of any
sales, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, in part to compensate for the decline of
church sponsorship and private patronage as a source of artistic commissions, and in part
as a reaction against the perceived stodginess of Government-sponsored institutions for
ranking and selling art, of which the nineteenth century French Academy of Fine Arts
was the most prominent.vi
The most potent challenge to Chelsea and its commercial gallery model is the Internet
which has the potential, by bringing together artist (seller) and collector (purchaser) in
direct transactions, to cut out entirely the traditional middle-role of the commercial
gallery. Charles Saatchi offered one of the strongest, recent such attempts with his free
web site, Saatchi-online which allowed any artist to upload his/her art, and then negotiate
directly on-line with interested sellers, with no commission going to the gallery. At its
peak it contained the work of about 65,000 artists. Still, offering a fascinating case study
of why art is different from books or movies, attempts to sell art over the Internet to new
customers have so far had only modest success, floundering on the fact that, since most
art works are unique, people usually desire to see them in person before making a
purchase. Still, there is no question that efforts will continue to establish the web as the
dominant site for selling art, since the stakes are too high, as is the lure of evolving
technology.
Another radical challenge to the commercial galleries came from the auction houses—
Sotheby’s and Christie’s and the increasingly innovative and aggressive Phillips de Pury .
Galvanized by the huge profits to be made from the sale of new Contemporary Art, this
“duopoly plus one” (as it could be described up to 2008, though no longer since Chinese
auction houses have moved up fast), increasingly pushed beyond their traditional role in
the secondary (resale) market into the primary market for new art, long the sole domain
of commercial galleries.
There were also challenges from the burgeoning world of international art fairs.
Although composed of commercial galleries, these fairs are basically a venue for
individual galleries to operate away from their local roots and at the more exalted level of
an international circuit of global host cities. Whether such fairs will complement, or
undermine, galleries operating at the local level in gallery neighborhoods such as Chelsea
is a key issue.
As well as these radical threats to the basic gallery model, there were a series of more
traditional, pressures on Chelsea from rival art gallery “neighborhoods” such as New
York’s Lower East Side, or neighborhoods in other “global” cities such as Berlin or
Shanghai, vying to supplant Chelsea’s dominance as an art gallery neighborhood. The
pressure from New York’s Lower East Side is analyzed in detail in chapter 9.
.
These various challenges, none of which has yet overrun Chelsea and its commercial
gallery model, constitute the core of the drama of the changing world of Contemporary
Art. They also allow us to see that two changes above all inform the current stage of
“globalization” in the art world, first the rise of the Internet, and second the rise of China.
Mega Projects and Can New York Build Them? The Hudson Yards,
Penn/Moynihan Station, and Others.
The second Far West Side development was a remarkable group of mega projects being
attempted over the last three decades on the Far West Side, around Chelsea’s gallery
district. (See figure 1). These Far West Side mega projects, the ones that basically failed
as well as the few that succeeded or at least finally started after decades of struggle, offer
insight into the central issue of how far New York City is able to build mega projects in
an age that no longer tolerates the ruthless centralization of power associated with Robert
Moses. In particular they pose starkly the question of why it is so hard in New York City
to build/pull off mega projects nowadays?
To Chelsea’s south was the re-building of the World Trade Center, one of the most
scrutinized, contentious and politically driven mega projects in U.S. history, which
proceeded with a much commented-upon slowness.
To Chelsea’s north, the Hudson Yards development, covering 59 city blocks, an
enormous 360 acres (compared to the acres of the World Trade Center ), was called by
Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki in 2004 "probably the single most important
economic project that New York City has undertaken in decades.“ As mentioned, this
Hudson Yards project had three parts, each of which could be considered a mega project
in its own right. One part included a massive rezoning of most of the area, from
manufacturing to commercial (office). The motive was concern that the city was running
out of space for office buildings, and as a result white-collar jobs were migrating from the
city, especially to New Jersey. A second component of the Hudson Yards project was the
expansion of New York City’s existing Javits Convention Center to take it from the 15th
largest (absurdly small for the nation’s largest city) to the third largest in the country. The
third component was a New York Sports and Convention Center, a project that was both
the centerpiece of New York City’s eventually unsuccessful bid to host the 2012 Olympic
games and that would also serve as the New York Jets football team’s home base.
On the whole these mega projects either failed or took decades. The New York Sports
and Convention Center was enormously controversial and its eventual demise, in 2005 at
the hands of State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, was not unexpected. Far less
noticed was that the Javits Center expansion also failed, collapsing into a major fiasco.
Indeed, by 2010 the only part of the Hudson Yards project that was achieved was the
rezoning, and even that basically involved legalizing a blue-print whose results, in terms
of new buildings, were expected to take up thirty years to be fully completed.
Also, in 1992 a plan was suggested to move Penn Station from its dreary and outmoded
facility at Penn Plaza, an urban complex between Seventh and Eighth Avenue and 31st to
33rd streets, to the Farley Post Office building, a building constructed by the same
illustrious architects--McKim Mead and White--and in a similarly magnificent style, as
the originally torn down Penn Station . Although efforts to achieve the move have been
underway ever since 1992, not until late 2010, many years after Moynihan’s death, did
the project’s first phase begin. This slowness also underlines a widespread view that the
United States in general has second rate infrastructure in dire need of upgrading, and lags
tremendously many other advanced societies, especially China. [dh some of para
repeated later]
It remains important to stress that, despite these failures, some projects did occur. For
example a fifth mega project, the Hudson River Park, ran the entire waterfront from
roughly the Word Trade Center site past Chelsea and up to the Hudson Yards. Touted by
some as the “Central Park of the twenty-first century”, by 2008 the Hudson River Park
had enough sections completed to garner a generally enthusiastic reception.vii Further,
even projects that basically failed had some partial successes. For example in 1995
Robert Boyle, Director of the Javits Center, evicted the mob, which had been crippling
the Center’s ability to operate profitably, from the Center.
Yet overall this is not an impressive record. Obviously a central question is why these
mega project so often fail or take so long to happen. The chapters discussing them argue
that the conventional answer, which blames local/neighborhood opposition, especially
NIMBYism, is too simple. There are a series of reasons, not just one, why mega projects
fail. Among the most important are jurisdictional squabbles between various government
agencies, political corruption, destructive competition between different politicians who
are willing to sabotage each other’s projects, incompetent leadership, the presence of a
private sector corporate entity that is both crucial and yet unwilling to co-operate flexibly,
and changes in the economic environment especially the real estate boom-bust cycle.
Neighborhood opposition/NIMBYism can, of course, also be important. Anyway, this is
a forbidding list of forces that can undermine a mega project, which is why it is also
important to notice and celebrate those occasions when a project succeeds, with
consequent lessons as New York and the United States struggle to build and rebuild
infrastructure.
Historic Preservation (Meat Market, High Line)
In addition to Chelsea’s commercial art gallery center and attempted mega projects, the
Far West Side of Manhattan saw major historic preservation efforts. The two most
notable were the High Line, and the creation, or expansion, of a series of Historic
Districts, especially the Gansevoort Market Historic District created in 2003.
The High Line was a long disused freight rail line, raised on stilts and running mostly
along 10th avenue from the Gansevoort Meat Market section all the way to the Javits
Convention Center at 34th Street. In 1999, two young Chelsea residents, Josh David and
Robert Hammond, heard a proposal by CSX, the railroad that owned the structure, to
convert the High Line into an elevated park instead of tearing it down which the Giuliani
administration was on the verge of doing and as had happened to almost all similar
disused elevated rail lines in the city’s past. Hammond and David convinced the
Bloomberg administration to support the conversion idea and by late 2008 the first
section of the new High Line park open, followed by section two in 2011, becoming one
of New York’s major, and most talked about, attractions..
The other major preservation project considered here, the Gansevoort Meat Market
Historic District was, likewise, promoted successfully by two young residents, Jo
Hamilton and Florent Morellet, who together thought of the initial idea.
These preservation projects raise their own set of interesting questions. For example,
how far is it possible or desirable to bottle up history? The example of both the High Line
and the Gansevoort Meat Market Historic District suggest that, even when the
preservation project formally happens, what emerges in a dynamic city like New York is
often a turbulent, and in many ways uncontrollable, brew. This is not a reason to avoid
these projects, but it does raise issues to ponder. For example, a recent (June 2011) show
by the architect Rem Koolhaas of successful “preservation” projects argued,
convincingly, that a constant of those projects that work is “the desire for the
‘preserved’…to not be embalmed, but to continue to stay alive and evolve.” viii
Historic preservation projects also raise the question of how many and how extensive
they should be and who benefits from them? Some critics, for example, complain that
preservationists are anti-growth and would like to turn much of New York into a giant,
embalmed museum-piece. Preservationists often respond that they are protecting the city
from avaricious developers whose only concern is to build whatever maximizes their
profits. Both sides have a point.
A different criticism is that a successful preservation project can make an area so
desirable that if becomes affordable only for the wealthy. For example Adam Sterbergh
in a May, 2007 New York Magazine article just before the real estate and economic crash,
expressed the unease with which many people now viewed the flood of condominium
developments associated with the High Line.
“The High Line…will one day look to us like a monument to the time we live in
now. …A time of essentially unfettered growth. A time when a rusted railbed
could beget a park, and a park could beget a millionaire’s wonderland.” ix.
This too is an important issue.
The Big Picture—Change and Dis-Equilibrium
Overall, these three different kinds of developments—art gallery district, mega projects,
and preservation efforts--raise a host of general issues for those interested in cities and
culture, beyond those already mentioned. There is the question of achieving the proper
balance between growth and protecting older buildings and, more important, vulnerable
populations. There is the question of the interplay between market/commercial forces and
other, quite different, forces over a range of topics from what shapes audience interest in
Contemporary Art to how to achieve Moynihan Station. There are questions about the
proper role of government in the urban planning process, especially given the striking
way in which some of the events that shaped the area in key ways were totally
unpredictable. There are questions about the proper role of neighborhood organizations
(especially the city’s Community Boards) in the process and the whole topic of assessing
the city’s process for reviewing land use projects (ULURP), which look extremely
sensible especially when contrasted with the State’s.
This study also, inevitably, raises important questions of “gentrification” and
“globalization.” These terms are often used very loosely, conflating several issues that
should be considered separately. In this study we carefully define these terms and filet
out some of the various important issues sometimes conflated.
These case studies also make it possible to highlight the major role of “public and private
entrepreneurs” such as Jo Hamilton and Florent in landmarking the Gansevoort District,
Robert Hammond and Josh David in preserving the High Line, Robert Boyle in
evicting the mob from the Javits Center, and entrepreneurs such as Matthew Marks in
first developing Chelsea as a gallery district. All these successful public entrepreneurs
knew how to work creatively, often within the political process, and in doing so make a
major contribution. .
On the research methods level, this is a study of change and attempts to promote and
stop it. Since much of the Far West Side covered here was not in equilibrium during the
period of study, we tried to produce a realistic account which captured the many moving
parts and their interactions. Whenever we thought our study was too broad or complex,
we reminded ourselves of such classic studies as Edmund Leach’s, Political Systems of
Highland Burma which covered change and dis-equilibrium over hundreds of square
miles, not just one section of Manhattan.x
Alexander Garvin, The American City: What Works and What Doesn’t (New York: McGraw Hill, 2002), chapter. 1. [dh ie. High Line definitely a success by these criteria ]
i
ii
This bid relied heavily on the idea of a Far West Side stadium, one of the mega projects
analyzed in chapter six.
Art Basel web site [dh update] Chelsea’s dominance was already established by the
mid-2000s. For example at Art Basel 2007, the 31 galleries from Chelsea were the largest
contingent selected by far, with the next largest contingent, from Berlin, way behind with
22 galleries, followed by London with 18.
iii
Roberta Smith, “Chelsea Enters Its High Baroque Period,” New York Time (November
28, 2004); Le Monde “A New York, Les Galeries Dépriment et Guettent La Reprise,”
(January 1, 2010). A 1996 study of the art market in St Louis, Missouri, stressed, from
that perspective, New York’s dominance of the national, and in many ways the
international art market. “Although Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Sante Fe, and
other centers have large demand areas also, New York is hegemonic on the national and
even the international level, meaning that only elite-gallery exposure in New York
iv
creates art-historical significance.” Stuart Plattner, High Art Downhome: An Economic
Ethnography of a Local Art Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
v
Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), preface and chapter 1
.
vi
For some of this history see Harrison and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers:
Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York: Wiley, 1965) and Vera
Zollberg, “Aesthetic Uncertainty and the New Canon?” in Mark Jacobs and Nancy
Hanrahan, The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005).
vii
The Hudson Park went far more smoothly than its predecessor, Westway, which was
mired in controversy for years before being shot down.
Organized by Rem Koolhaus and Shohei Shigemats and titled “Cronocaos”, it was
first shown at the 2010 architecture biennale in Venice, then at the New Museum in New
York in June, 2011.
viii
Adam Sternbergh, “The High Line: It Brings Good Things to Life.” New York
Magazine (May 7, 2007).
ix
x
Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (1965)