Examining the City

INTRODUCTION: Jay Street runs for approximately 14 blocks north to south from the East River in Dumbo to Fulton Street Mall in Downtown Brooklyn.   Along this stretch of Brooklyn stand a courthouse,  a cathedral,  multiple  college and university buildings, housing, office buildings, a hotel, warehouses, a city park, a high school.  This stretch is also marked by parking lots,  crossings over wide streets  and an underpass below a  bridge with significant noise pollution. Jay  Street’s sidewalks are teaming with life along some blocks, and a no-man’s land along others.    Pedestrians are often confused  and disoriented on this street , not sure it will take them where they need to go. Urban renewal has left this portion of Brooklyn chopped up and left  in a haphazard state , unplanned  and lacking in  many of the fundamental qualities that are found in thriving neighborhoods of New York City. This study is aimed to be a catalyst for change  by establishing a vision that captures the potential of this unique urban precinct and illustrating a potential transformation through  the  design of the urban spaces (streets , squares, and parks)  and architectural proposals for many of the  critical sites  of the precinct. This project responds to a request by the local business organizations that have established a new identity for this part of Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Tech Triangle. The Brooklyn Navy Yard Industrial Park, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, and the Dumbo Improvement District have joined together to foster the continued growth of this precinct through initiatives and a branding effort.  Tucker Reed, the President of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership,       astutely observed that  urban renewal has left Jay Street as the only major corridor linking  downtown  Brooklyn to Dumbo and the Navy Yard. Yet Jay Street as it exists today does not serve well its critical role as a linking corridor. Instead, the conditions along Jay Street as well as in the broader precinct inhibit the natural flow of people and activity that is a critical requirement for the success of the Brooklyn Tech Triangle initiative. This study was initiated in the  Urban Design Studio course (arch 4710) at The  New York City College of Technology (Citytech) lead by Professors  Duddy and Montgomery. The studio comprised of 12 students who worked on analysis and project proposals for new streets and squares, new in fill buildings, and critical changes to existing building fabric and  lots. The students contributing to this project include:

Austin, Aleyda; Batista, Jennifer; Jimenez, Alma; Johnson, Corey; Karimov, Timur; Khan, Mohammed; Melnikova, Evgenia; Shelton, Tony; Sosa , Evgueni; Stelmach, Maciej; Whyte Benitez, Agata; Wilson, Camilla

PUBLISHED DISCUSSION in BROOKLYN TIDES

Shepard, Benjamin Heim, and Noonan, Mark J. Brooklyn Tides : The Fall and Rise of a Global Borough. Urban Studies (Bielefeld, Germany). 2018.

STUDY AREA: The precinct  is a nexus of major transportation infrastructure, most obviously the convergence of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. The  study area is the area considered to be strategically connected to the Jay Street Corridor. The area is not strictly conforming to the extent of the Brooklyn Tech Triangle. The study  area is bounded by the East River to the north, Brooklyn Heights to the west, Atlantic Ave to the south, and Navy Street to the East. Jay Street’s prominence in the study area arises due to its role as the major north south roadway that connects Fulton Street to Dumbo and the East River waterfront.  The study area is the nexus of the high aspirations for Downtown Brooklyn capitalizing on the emergence of the national and international recognition of the Brooklyn “brand.” Real estate pressure is building on the precinct with new residential towers, academic, and commercial buildings rising with increasing frequency. The precinct is a mixed use hub surrounded by predominately residential neighborhoods. The waterfront is in transition, with the development of Brooklyn Bridge Park along the Brooklyn Heights waterfront, continuing west along the Dumbo waterfront. A number of vacant land areas are found in this precinct. Some of these are vestigial areas surrounding the  BQE, Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. A significant number of vacant lots are currently used for surface parking. The Navy Yard stands prominently in the precinct as a commercial zone standing apart from the surrounding neighborhoods. 

HISTORIC CHARACTER: The precinct is architecturally significant, with many significant historic  structures, most  significantly,  the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges have a dramatic impact on  the streets and blocks  where they  merge into the  neighborhood. They also dominate the skyline of the waterfront. The Bridges are a  major gateway into Brooklyn for both city residents and tourists. The arrival in Brooklyn from both bridges is under whelming and confusing, delivering pedestrians into a no mans land without clear direction or accommodation. 

CIVIC MONUMENTS: Downtown Brooklyn is a civic center, with key governmental offices and functions , including Borough Hall, State and Federal Courthouses. Downtown Brooklyn is also   dense with Higher learning  institutions, including Citytech, NYU Polytechnic, and  a new Graduate Center for New York University. A large open space system  from Borough Hall to Old Fulton Street includes two War Memorials. This open space sequence is dubbed the Brooklyn Commons.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT / EVOLUTION: Historic maps illustrate the urban development and evolution of this part of Brooklyn. In the 18th century, organic roadway systems provided routes for commerce and communication from the countryside and small villages into the growing urban center on Manhattan island. The organic roadways responded to topography and  other geographic features. The grid iron of streets and blocks that was firmly established for  Manhattan in the 1811 Commissioners Plan is also implemented in Brooklyn in the early 19th century, with the same disregard for geographic features. Before the bridges were  introduced, the focus of urban develop was Fulton Landing   with a  major  ferry connection to  Manhattan. The earliest major route to Fulton Landing was maintained as the modern Old Fulton and Cadman Plaza West road alignments. The early concentration of density and commerical activity was along the routes to the ferries, especially along Old Fulton Street in the area of Brooklyn Heights. 

STREET NETWORK: There  are  a number of layers to the hierarchy of the street and roadway system in this precinct, including expressways, boulevards with divided lanes, wide streets with 4-7 lanes of traffic plus parking, typical local streets of 2-4 lanes plus parking. A number streets coming into the study area provide regional  connectivity for motorists from Queens, Central and South Brooklyn, and Long Island. This precinct was fundamentally transformed by the bridge connections to Manhattan. The bridges converge of this small land area, resulting in significant demolition of fabric.

EAST-WEST ROUTES: Three major east west streets lead into the study area from the east. Myrtle Ave and Flushing Ave are historical connections to downtown Brooklyn from the distant Eastern neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. Tillary  Street connects to Park Ave as well as the BQE on the east, channeling significant regional traffic in and out of the precinct. The local commercial “main streets” of streets of Brooklyn Heights are Montague and Clark Streets. The historical maps indicate that Myrtle Ave once connected to Montague St providing a powerful connection from inland Brooklyn to the waterfront.

URBAN DISRUPTION: The obvious first observation for this  urban precinct is the disruption  to the urban structure by the multiple regional roadways and bridge infrastructure. The grid iron street network so apparent in the historical maps has been transformed into  an irregular pattern  of widely varying block sizes, cut off streets, and isolated  areas. The disrupted urban structure sits geographically  at   the  center of the Brooklyn Tech Triangle. A primary challenge of the Brooklyn Tech Triangle development strategy is to address this disruption of the urban structure at its core.

URBAN PATTERN: Figure ground diagrams clearly illustrate the disruption  to the urban structure in this precinct. Analysis of both block structure and building footprints show  a normative pattern of streets and blocks in the  neighborhoods to the south and west. The  core of downtown Brooklyn has a different scale of buildings as well as a less regular block structure. The area between Tillary  Street  and Dumbo -Navy Yard is marked by large open unbuilt spaces. Building mass is the first critical element that defines streets and gives them their character. This is the reasoning behind many sections of the zoning text where the text requires or encourages building mass at the property line. Brooklyn Heights reflects this strategy clearly. An overabundance of ill-defined open space in an urban area can result in blight, especially when the open space is under used and not well maintained. 

BLOCK SIZES: The block patterns of this section of Brooklyn are unusually irregular. The predominant block orientation to the south of downtown Brooklyn is with the long dimension in the east to west alignment. Brooklyn heights and Dumbo have an intriguing variety of block patterns and sizes. Typical blocks in the surrounding neighborhoods  are 200’-300’ x 500’. Larger scale blocks permeate the downtown area, with  a number of blocks oriented north-south with lengths  exceeding 1000’.

URBAN BARRIERS: The major roadways through the precinct are wide with significant traffic. For long stretches jersey barriers block any crossings, allowing traffic to move at higher speeds than typical city streets. Where crossing is possible, these streets are intimidating and dangerous for the pedestrian. Large scale blocks by definition limit the urban flow of pedestrian, bike, and vehicular traffic and concentrate it on fewer streets. Parks and green open space are almost always a positive asset in an urban environment. If the parks are under used, however, they can contribute to a dead zone where activity is curtailed. In these cases, the larger the scale of the park, the larger the zone of low activity and vibrancy. This is the case for the open space stretching from Borough Hall to the Brooklyn Bridge. The lack of activity in the Korean War Memorial and the Brooklyn War Memorial results in the parks acting more as barriers between neighborhoods than centers of activity drawing from all surrounding neighborhoods. The  compounded impact of the disrupted urban structure, the wide and forbidding traffic thoroughfares,  and the over scaled north-south blocks is a series of  barriers that divide   the precinct and isolate the areas  flanking Jay Street. 

POPULATION DENSITY: Residential population in Downtown Brooklyn exhibits a common phenomenon: gaps of residential units surrounding the business/civic center. With low residential density in the Downtown area comes less activity, especially outside of business hours. Services in these areas are also limited without a population to serve, including grocery stores and cafes. Spikes in residential density are due to large scale tower  estates including public housing as well as some cooperatives.

ZONES OF JAY STREET: Zooming in on Jay Street,  the students made a key summary observation: Jay Street is divided into three distinct zones  with Tillary and the Manhattan Bridge as the thresholds between the zones. The northern zone has the distinctive character of Dumbo, with a combination of new residential towers  and 19th century warehouses and loft buildings. The central zone is much less active, with  multiple parking lots, a super block on the west side  blocking all circulation to the west for over 1000’. The  southern zone spans from Fulton Street Mall to Tillary Street. This zone will be fully built out with the completion of the new Citytech academic building. This zone is the most active. Each zone is approximately 1/4 mile long north to south (5 minutes walking distance.) But the perceptual distance is much greater with the major thresholds breaking the sense of continuity of the street. 

INTERVENTIONS:

The 1944 Study for Brooklyn’s Civic Center is an important reference for the evaluation of the current conditions of Downtown Brooklyn. Downtown Brooklyn is currently plagued by heavy traffic, dangerous intersections, overly concentrated traffic flow, numerous zones of unoccupied open space, and public buildings that are more intimidating and overbearing than gracious and dignified.

The Civic Center concept is rooted in simple logic: first, group the public agencies so that staff or Brooklyn citizens can conveniently move between them quickly and efficiently; second, use the collection of public buildings to create a place in the city of higher importance and dignity. The mall in Washington DC certainly comes to mind as a composition that achieves these ends: one can enjoy a day at a variety of galleries and museums that endow the open space with a great dignity, setting up the critical crescendos of the composition: the Capital, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument.

Brooklyn was not so fortunate, and the failure of the Brooklyn Civic Center to define a place of dignity or even a place of basic design coherence needs to be studied and understood so that this critical neighborhood of Brooklyn can be re-established as a functional but also vital/active center worthy of the great borough and its proud population.

A survey of early Brooklyn in 1819 reveals a subtle differentiation of the block structure in the burgeoning city, perhaps evidence of rival concepts for the character and design of each development zone. Fulton Street, the historic roadway that links the ferry landing to the heart of Kings County and Long Island beyond, is the natural urban (not quite geographic) center of the land area between the bluffs overlooking the harbor and Wallabout Bay. The land on either side of Fulton was controlled by different families. Joshua and Comfort Sands held a large parcel to the west of Fulton, while other families including the Hick’s and the Pierrepont’s controlled the east. The blocks to the east of Fulton show the standard application of 25′ wide plots to blocks in a simple pattern of nominally oriented north and south lots. Special treatment is given to important streets, in this case Henry and Hicks, with the lots rotated to front onto these streets. The lots back up to each other, with the entire area of the block subdivided into private land.

Across Fulton Street a different pattern is apparent. Between Fulton and Wallabout Bay, a majority of the blocks that are shown subdivided utilize small scale lanes and/or alleys as a secondary and tertiary urban structure of public access. This unusual urban structure for Brooklyn and New York facilitates practical servicing of the lots from the rear, a structure planned or adopted in other American cities, including Philadelphia and Savannah. The system of lanes and alleys also facilitates another unusual feature, mid block lots that are typically slightly wider and longer that run perpendicular to the rest of the block’s lots. These particular blocks stand out in the survey as if they were intended to give a special quality to the neighborhood. To be sure, the application of alleys and lanes would add a texture to the streetscape that the other side of Fulton street did not possess.

The historical record notes that the Sands brothers desired to brand their parcel as a new town called “Olympia”. Perhaps this urban structure was an intentional means of differentiating their development. It could also be motivated by the anticipation of commercial and industrial activity along the waterfront, providing the servicing of blocks in a more discrete manner.

This unique structure was wiped out as Brooklyn developed, most significantly with industrialization of the waterfront area that demanded larger lots, and finished off by the urban renewal projects of the mid 20th century. Harrison Alley in Vinegar Hill near the boarder of the Navy Yard is likely the only remnant of this intriguing urban vision.