It was the winter of 2007. I got a letter in the mail.
It was from an oil and gas company. But not one that I had ever heard of.
It said that there was a large reservoir of natural gas under the 1875 farmhouse plus 7 acres of land that my wife and I bought in 2000 in the little town of Cochecton. The property was what remained of a once 120-acre farm that — during the 1920s to 1940s — delivered milk to a store on 4th Avenue near 11th Street … eerily, a mere 5 blocks from the loft that we had been living in on Cooper Square for decades.
Would we like to lease our land so that the gas could be extracted in exchange for a share of the revenue?
The farmhouse, which had sat on the market for over three years before we came along, was in sad shape. It had become known to the local children as “The Dare House,” as in “I dare you to go up to a window and look inside!”
We were environmentally conscious, though not nearly as much as we thought, as you are about to see. So when we restored the farmhouse, we went to great lengths – or so we thought – to do it to what we thought was a high energy efficiency standard.
Being more suspicious of oil and gas companies than I am of haunted houses (and this house was haunted in very specific, very creepy ways that almost make a believer out of me, but I digress), I went online to learn more. The internet by then already being very much a place that siloed and pushed profitable information to the top of searches, my initial learning was that natural gas was the “cleaner carbon fuel”, … so, … we were good, … and we were rich!
A month later, we were still reveling in our good fortune. We were having dinner at Matthews on Main in Callicoon, basically the only restaurant within a 15-mile radius of our farmhouse that city folk felt safe to eat at. It was owned and run by a lovely couple, who, like my wife and I, were checkerboard: he, a burly chef with a sardonic Jewish sense of humor not unlike that of Al Franken; she, an African American Wall Street investing consultant. She was way too close for comfort the day of 9/11: they sold everything, moved here and started their restaurant. Thank the Good Lord for that: I don’t know what we would have done up there when we were too tired from renovating to cook at home.
Anyway, there were eight people at two adjacent tables having a fierce argument over natural gas leases. Being the nosy person that I am, I leaned in and introduced myself: “Hey, I got one of those letters. What’s the fuss about?”
I learned that the reason that I hadn’t heard of the oil and gas company was because the letter never came from one. It came from a landman. I had never heard of a landman. Tell me more …
Barbara Arindell, a stained glass artist who taught at Columbia University, explained: “He’s a businessman who serves as the go-between energy companies and property owners. They negotiate with landowners like yourself to secure rights to explore and drill for oil, gas, or minerals beneath your land. Before any drilling can begin, they handle the legal groundwork that makes development possible. This includes title research — combing through public and private courthouse records to verify who legally owns both the surface and underground mineral rights. They perform title curative work, resolve legal defects, and handle unitizing: where smaller individual tracts are combined into one large operating unit.”
“But their main job is to reduce risk and make money … for the gas companies. They do not work for you. They work for them. They are not your friend. And no, you will not get rich. Quite the opposite. The technology is dirty, gas will get into your well water, they will destroy your property and its value. Permanently.”
Ouch. And oops.
The Delaware Valley in that area – besides being home to Yasgur’s farm, the home of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, which was one of the things that drew me to this beautiful area – was a mix of what were colloquially known as highlanders (wealthy landowners with large farms), lowlanders (not so wealthy landowners, or people who owned no land at all, most of whom lived in the villages), and flatlanders (people from the city living the town and country lifestyle, people like … me). The fight at the dining tables was between highlanders — who supported hydraulic fracking (what I learned was what this relatively new process of drilling was called) – and flatlanders, who opposed it.
Barbara was a flatlander. I could tell that she was not someone to be trifled with. She was a founder of something called Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (DCS). We exchanged contact information.
…
The highlanders and the lowlanders were my neighbors. Most of them felt that “You can’t fight the gas companies”.
That wasn’t my style. I joined DCS.
And so began my 6-year journey into the rabbit hole to keep fracking out of NY State.
In a few months, the first meeting of about two dozen statewide grassroots groups and national environmental NGOs was held at our farmhouse. Later, I was – rather pointedly – introduced to a Stan Scobie, PhD, Associate Professor Emeritus, Psychology at Binghamton. He was looking for someone to partner with on research.
After a few months of his hair-on-fire work pace, I suggested that we enlarge our “group.”
“NO! Absolutely not! We will never get anything done! It is just you and me!”
OK, Stan, but I am also organizing 24 families in Dimock PA and coordinating their PR for their lawsuit against Cabot Oil & Gas. Maybe one assistant …
“NO!”
Could we at least give our group a name?
“Oh, OK.”
And so, that is how we got to become known as “New Yorkers for Sustainable Energy Solutions Statewide” — NYSESS for short, which came out sounding like “nicest”. We were not un-nice, most of the time. A very important-sounding name that made our group sound big, and therefore important, as we carried on with our endless testimonies before State Assembly and Senate and NYC committees, based on research that continued at our hair-on-fire work pace. Instead of leading with the environment, we often led with public health — the better way to reach families with children, with a simple message: hold the gas industry at the very least to the same standard as big pharma – first do no harm. We even got into the governor’s mansion: this is where I first met Sean Patrick Maloney, husband of a friend, Randy Florke, who introduced me to him as a way of getting the ear of then Governor Paterson, whom Sean worked for at the time. Sean eventually went on to become a congressperson.
Eventually, the group of 25 organizations that met in our farmhouse grew to a group of 250,000 individuals who could not be ignored. A theatre director and writer named Josh Fox, who ran International WOW Company, did a Godardian guerrilla style documentary called Gasland that took home the Special Jury Prize at Sundance.
“Gasland” by Josh Fox.
Then Yoko Ono — who still had the farm in Delaware County that she and John purchased back in the 1970s — decided to get into the act. Her PR firm, Fenton Communications (a firm I used on a project 25 years earlier), reached out to me to help them get creatives at Ogilvy – where I was freelancing as a creative director – to enter an anti-fracking ad contest. I told Fenton that these people have multi-million dollar accounts, they are very busy, a contest would not likely go over very well with them, even if it is Yoko, that they should instead reach out to the Ad Council: it is specifically set up to do work like that pro bono.
They ignored me.
Yet sure enough, four weeks later, I get a call from Yoko. She tells me that I “won the contest!” … with an ad that I had already written, directed and produced for Delaware Riverkeeper. I wrote it so that I could swap out the last 7 seconds of the Riverkeeper credit and put in the name of another org: in this case, Artists Against Fracking. The ad ran statewide the week that Governor Cuomo (governor, in part thanks to the Working Families Party endorsement, who as a consequence threw Zephyr Teachout under the bus during the primary, where she nevertheless carried almost all of upstate in part due to her anti-fracking stance) made his decision to declare that “Until the gas companies can guarantee that the totality of their operations will not harm public health” (language lifted almost verbatim from what Leslie Lewis – lead counsel on the Dimock suit – and Stan and I had crafted), hydraulic fracking will not be permitted.
AAF: “Protect Our Water”: the ad I made at the request of Yoko Ono, which was modified from the original version I made for Delaware Riverkeeper. I shamelessly borrowed the visual from Nirvana’s “Nevermind” LP, and mimicked some of the audio from Grace Slick’s “Eskimo Blue Day” from the Jefferson Airplane LP “Volunteers”.
Technically, it was a moratorium: in reality, it was a de-facto ban, since we all knew, thanks to Dr. Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell, PhD in rock fracture mechanics (yes, that is A Thing), that most gas wells eventually fail.
The highlanders and the lowlanders said “You can’t fight the gas companies.”
250,000 of us fought. We won. And that was that.
…
But that is not what I am here to talk to you about.
This essay is not called “Something Weird and Awful Almost Happened to Us When All We Wanted to Do Was Fix Up a Farmhouse”. It is called “The Leyland Proposal”.
MEANWHILE.
Our farmhouse was in Cochecton, both on and at the end of something called The Newburgh-Cochecton Turnpike. The turnpike was chartered in 1801. It was conceived in the 1790s as a “drovers’ road”: a route for driving livestock on foot to market or from one pasture to another. As it went east, towards the Hudson, it was made wider and wider. By the time it got to the other end, in Newburgh, it was “8 rods wide.” A rod being 16.5 feet, it was 132 feet wide by the time it dipped to the Hudson shoreline.
At the other end of that turnpike, unbeknownst to me, at the very exact moments that the anti-fracking fight was raging hair-on-fire, a more constructive drama was unfolding.
…
The Leyland Alliance had brought the town planner Andrés Duany to Newburgh to design a new district on the waterfront, on the cleared and scarred urban renewal site. He organized a robust charrette: days-long public workshops, citizens in the room, drawings going up on the walls as fast as they were made. It produced a plan. A real plan, with real public participation, with thousands of people: so I have been told – I wasn’t there, I was fighting fracking – by several people whom I hope to talk with on NIA soon. I have read the transcript (reproduced below) more times than is normal, but I am not normal so I guess that works. I have viewed the video (in two parts, posted below).
Yes. Thousands of people. The final presentation held at the NFA auditorium, so many they had trouble fitting them all in. Enthusiastic support: a sweet, older lesbian couple told me that “It was better than sex!” (They also told me NEVER to repeat that. Oh, well: it is too good a line to waste on just me.) Not the fistful of a dozen or so letters from a dozen or so businesspeople that today’s city planning department waves in the air at meetings in support of this or that PILOT-supported project that passes for “overwhelming public support.”
Duany is, by some distance, the most famous town planner in America. With his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk he more or less invented New Urbanism. It was my Cooper Union classmate, friend, and fellow avid cyclist Peter Katz, of the class of 1976, who gave the movement its name and its bible, the 1994 book The New Urbanism : Towards An Architecture of Community https://www.amazon.com/New-Urbanism-Toward-Architecture-Community/dp/0070338892 . Duany built its showpiece at Seaside, Florida, the town you have seen even if you have never been there, because they filmed The Truman Show in it. He came to Newburgh and stood up, on the night of February 6, 2007, and talked for two and a half hours. And almost nobody left the room.
He began by setting relationship terms: he was the expert on the future, the people in the room were the experts on the present. He praised the citizens as the most well-informed that he had ever worked with, praised Leyland for keeping the design team on a long leash, noted that four local firms had worked under his own. It sounded like it was a uniquely exciting time: I often wish I was there instead of at the other end of the Newburgh Cochecton Turnpike.
The demolition of the East End four decades earlier he called, flatly, a cultural tragedy. Then he said something that might have made the room lean forward. The low point of the demolitions, he observed, had coincided with the low point of American architecture, so any replacement plans drawn at the time would have been monstrous, and the fact that they were never built was a blessing. The empty ground was not only a wound. It was a second chance almost no city ever gets.
Then he got to the money.
He gave them numbers. The average Newburgh dwelling, he said, was assessed at $199,000. To be “tax-positive” – to put more into the city’s coffers than it drew back out in services – a unit had to be assessed at $341,000. Everything below that line was quietly eating the tax base alive. And from that arithmetic he drew this sentence: the last thing this city needs is more affordable housing. Newburgh, he said, already shouldered a wildly disproportionate share of the county’s subsidized housing, and the answer was to spread it across the towns that took none – not to pile more onto the one place that had never learned how to say no. What the cleared ground needed was housing that paid its own way: market rate, roughly a thousand units, about six percent of the city’s population, tilted toward the childless young and the retired, who use the fewest city services. An economic generator, he called it, like landing a Japanese car factory, except this one would arrive without the tax breaks.
He was right about the disproportion. I have said so elsewhere, and I will say it again. But notice what the plan did with a true thing: it decided the ground should be made to pay. The people who had been cleared off that ground, by bulldozer, four decades before, were – like the people in Cochecton – being shortchanged and written off by arithmetic. Hold that thought. We will come back to it later.
He was frank enough to admit that it worked at all only because of where Newburgh sits. The whole scheme ran on proximity to Manhattan; he contrasted it with a plan his firm had drawn for Syracuse that went nowhere, because Syracuse was not growing and no amount of beautiful drawing makes a place grow. So he wanted the trains back, and a ferry, and a rapid-transit bus running up Broadway to Stewart — which, he told them, they should have the nerve to rename Newburgh Airport. Underneath all of it was a single idea, the pedestrian shed: an American will walk five minutes to get somewhere and ten minutes to reach transit, and you build the entire town around those two circles or you do not bother.
The plan fell out of that logic. Broadway, he said, was much too wide — he called it a wagon street, the kind they have out in Utah — and he wanted to tame it with a planted median and a chain of public squares, to lift the value of what fronted it and to squeeze down an oversupply of storefronts no small city could ever fill. (He was not wrong about the width. He simply did not know, I think, where the width came from.) Martin Luther King Boulevard, by then a highway wearing a street’s name, he would hand back to the people as a parked, civil boulevard. He would dig the diagonal of Colden Street back out of the grid and bring Clinton Square back from the dead. The waterfront he refused to flatten into a single jogging trail; he wanted a concatenation of experiences, and he wanted real public open space down there — a Painter’s Park — so that an ordinary person was not, as he put it, forever having to spend money just to stand at the edge of the river. The buildings would be C- and U-shaped courtyards, turned to share the view and break the wind off the water, with the parking tucked out of sight behind the rail embankment.
And then he came to the foot of Washington Street. Where there was then a tangle of stored docks and overhead wire, he saw a beautiful square and the start of a waterfront drive, lined with low buildings, a fish market – low buildings, he said, not tall ones. He was explicit about it. Remember that too.
He was a militant for density and made the green case for it without blinking: lowering density does not spare nature, it eats it, by smearing the same number of people across more land. The environmentalists in the room, he told them, ought to be demanding more density, not less. Become rabid urbanists. He defended putting five stories on the old Iron Works and the EPA site to catch the view and draw a real hotel and real office tenants (Bonura/Kaplan: please take note, there may be the seeds of a compromise here). And he came at last to the one thing he knew would set them off: a pair of slim, tapering flat-iron towers, stepping down seven or eight stories, set to frame the long view down Broadway onto a civic, public park on the site of the Erie rail yards, and to hide the orange bulk of the college building from the river. He tried to disarm it before they could swing – there is already an eight-story building right there, he reminded them – and mostly, that night, it seemed to work.
He finished on how it should look and how it should last. He walked them through the available styles — the traditional, the industrial warehouse, the self-consciously hip — and came down on brick warehouse, because brick warehouse lets in the most light. He floated green building as the thing that might give a whole district one visual key. He insisted on hiring several architects rather than one, so the variety would be real instead of staged. He called live/work units the future.
And then he gave them the single most important instruction of the night, and it had nothing to do with towers or brick. Put the plan into a code, he said. A form-based code. Write it into law. He told them about a plan his firm had made for Trenton that died the moment its two champions in city hall packed up and left for Houston — and he drew the lesson in a phrase that has stuck with me: urbanism is larger than your lifetime. A plan that survives only on the goodwill of whoever currently holds office is not a plan at all. It is a rumor. Only a plan written into the city’s own law outlives the people who dreamed it.
Then the numbers, and the benediction: something near a thousand units, two hundred thousand square feet each of office and retail, nearly twenty-five hundred parking spaces, most of them hidden — and the reminder, twice, that none of this was really for the people sitting in that auditorium. It was for the future. The public process, he said, was only just beginning.
Then the financial markets fell out from under Leyland in 2008, and the city made a number of decisions that I have covered elsewhere and that I will be returning to. Leyland withered, and it was gone.
I spent those years a hundred miles up the turnpike in a fight over land — over the value of land, the value of what is underneath it, how the two are severed and extracted. A fight over public health, and the health of the planet. I learned that you can fight and win. That you can fight THE GAS COMPANY and win.
Duany stood in a room in Newburgh on those same winter nights, in a fight over different land with a different history. Land with ghosts underneath it — not the kind that rattle a farmhouse window, but the kind a city makes when it plows nine streets under and paves over the people who walked them. The real Colden Street still runs down to the river under there. Clinton Square is still down there, where the statue stood. The grid the East End was built on is still in the ground, erased from the map but not from the earth, and every plan for that waterfront since has had to decide whether to remember it or to erase it for good.
That fight is not over. As the current city leadership appears to suffer an amnesia about what public, civic engagement looks like, how to engender it, and inclines toward the developers in spite of its progressive rhetoric, the fight may be harder.
But.
I am old enough to remember John Kennedy promising to land a man on the moon within a decade. By 1969, we did it. After WWII, Europe rebuilt entire cities within decades. Are we to be satisfied that in 2026, we still cannot rebuild a hillside and waterfront in an equivalent amount of time? There are developers who have built similar projects, to scale and larger, that respect history and embrace environmental and social justice. We will talk about them another day.
CODA:
How, you might be asking by now, did my wife and I end up in Newburgh?
As a consequence of the fracking fight, we learned that the town and country lifestyle was, among other things, one of the most environmentally unintelligent things we could be doing.
We both moved to New York City in the mid 60s and early 70s. “The City” by 2015, had become a different place: the edgy, arty Downtown Scene was rapidly vanishing. Most artists had in fact left. What was once a place where people created was now a place where people acquired.
One late autumn afternoon, on our way back from leaf peeping during a wedding anniversary trip, we were driving down the thruway from Woodstock. My wife for years had been saying that we should check out Newburgh. The Newburgh exit was coming up. We had some time. I made an abrupt turn.
We drove up and down the streets.
And I got it, immediately: Newburgh reminded her of Santo Domingo during the 1965 revolution.
For me, it took me back to The East Village of the 1970s/1980s: edgy, mixed, affordable, a place where creative people can do their work, make friends, make mistakes and still afford to pay the bills. I could get on my bicycle and within 5 minutes, be in the countryside. It was a place where we thought we could fit in.
It has not been lost on us that we bought a farmhouse on what was once a dairy farm that sold milk a few blocks from our loft on Cooper Square, a farmhouse that was also at the other end of a turnpike partly named after both the small town that the farmhouse was in and the small city that has now become our new home. Don’t ask me what that means because I don’t know.
A man named Richard Ocejo wrote a book about people ostensibly like us, people who came up from the city, arguably to “fix Newburgh”. The book is inaptly named “60 Miles Upriver” – inaptly, because to be sent “up river” is, in old New York, to be sent to prison: convicts were shipped from New York City up the Hudson to Sing Sing. Richard did interview us: for better or worse (I could argue the later; I would argue the former), he did not include us in its pages. By moving to Newburgh, we certainly did not think that we were shipping ourselves to prison.
In Closing
For the fullest view of what robust civic engagement and excitement once looked like in the City of Newburgh, see, and enjoy, the videos and the transcript of the Leyland charrette, below, and imagine what might have been, and what might still be.
© May 30, 2026 Newburgh Is America
Notes
I am a one-man band here — writer, editor, copy editor, fact-checker, legal consultant, publisher and moderator wrapped into one, publishing within a time line that is compressed from the weeks or even months of what is normally allowed for long-form investigative writing into sometimes as little as a few days. Errors and omissions are inevitable in work produced under these conditions. I rely on an informed public to identify them, and where they are identified, the record is corrected. This piece reflects my best understanding at the time of publication and is subject to revision as additional information becomes available.
The Leyland Charrette, Part 1
The Leyland Charrette, Part 1
TRANSCRIPT:
The Newburgh Waterfront Charrette
Closing Presentation
February 6, 2007
Leyland Alliance, LLC · City of Newburgh · Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company
Speakers: Mayor Nick Valentine · Steve Maun (President, Leyland Alliance) · Andrés Duany (DPZ)
Nick Valentine, Mayor: Welcome to the closing presentation for the Newburgh downtown development charrette. We have been calling this “the Newburgh waterfront charrette;” however, the project actually focuses on the redevelopment of the City’s downtown.
These plans will propel the development of the entire city of Newburgh, not just the waterfront. Many of the charrette meetings have focused on the connection between the waterfront area and the City. Although the parcel of land offers a water view, and a portion of the site is located directly on the waterfront, the plans really will transform the development of the downtown and the city of Newburgh as a whole.
With that, I have the opportunity to introduce Steve Maun, the President of Leyland Alliance. Steve, thank you so much for all the work you’ve done so far and for the continuing work that we’ll be doing together.
Steve Maun: Thank you very much, Mayor Valentine. It is really a pleasure for me to be here tonight, and to continue this process and, of course, to introduce Andrés Duany and the entire DPZ Team. We’ve had a very interesting week, and this charrette has begun a process which we think will continue to be an interactive one.
When we were first introduced to the city, we offered to keep the development process open, and to design the project in the public realm, in order to incorporate the public’s ideas into the plan. We felt the plan was not simply about buildings. Rather, it involved the building of the entire city. Through the plan, we would be connecting the waterfront, and using the designated site as a bridge to the city proper— connecting the plateau of Broadway and all of the surrounding neighborhoods—to the Hudson River. We think we have gotten off to a very good start in making that a reality.
Throughout the charrette we had many, many meetings with different groups, including lenders, investors and participants interested in the neighborhoods and areas around the subject site. There was a lot of conversation about the shops and stores on Broadway and neighborhoods both to the south and to the north of Broadway that might be adjoining this site. We really want to kindle a spirit of renovation and restoration in these areas to bring more homeowners into Newburgh to continue the revival. We have had discussions with the Board of Education about locating an additional elementary school in one of the neighborhoods. This is a very, very positive idea. I know it’s been discussed for a while, but it is exactly the sort of thing that is very central to place making and to city building. We just need to knit the pieces of the project together to make Newburgh once again a great place and something that we can all be very, very proud of.
I believe that Newburgh can be the front door to the region. It is definitely more than just a city. Newburgh can relate in many positive ways to the county, of course, and beyond the county to the region as a whole. It has such extraordinary physical assets and an incredible landscape.
I also have to just quote Andrés from one meeting with a group of civic leaders and citizens. He said, “You know, this is one of the brightest, most active and most engaged publics that I have ever worked with.” And, he did not say that lightly. He meant exactly what he said. He felt it very strongly and felt it from the heart that Newburgh should be commended for the quality of the citizenry and the citizenship that we have here in this city. I have worked in many places as well, and I have to echo that comment. I think what is possible is very much related to the leadership and the interaction of the citizens. We feel very good about the leadership that is in place right now in Newburgh. We look forward to a long and close relationship to make things happen in the future. We also look forward to meeting more and more people in the city of Newburgh to get that engagement that we talked about throughout this process.
The Leyland Alliance is really just down the road. We are here. It’s the beginning. We are not going anywhere. Leyland is here to stay. We think this is one of the most exciting projects certainly in the state of New York and beyond. Without further adieu on that, I will introduce Andrés Duany. (applause)
Andrés Duany: Thank you, Steve. Everybody is thanking each other. By the way, I meant what I said about the citizens that I met in this charrette. You are not just smart and civic-minded. You are also nice. That is a very rare quality in American public discourse. People can be very spikey in this country and it takes a great deal of patience to put up with them at times. You have been so wonderful. By the way, there is not enough praise for the developers who are really excellent. Leyland Alliance is one of these developers. For those of you interested, one of the most beautiful communities built in the last seventy years in the United States is East Beach in Virginia. It’s a Leyland Alliance project and is well worth visiting. At Newburgh, Steve and his crew have been absolutely supportive and have not constrained the design team at all. They’re willing to support whatever density fits…whatever is best. They have enabled the design team to have an almost completely creative experience.
Although DPZ is getting principal credit for the project design, there are four local design firms who have also been involved. Kim Matthews is a marvelous architect from New York and is involved in some of the best and most human-friendly, as well as ecological, park designs in this region. Then there is Alex Gorlin, a New York architect; Alex Latham from Long Island; and Donald Powers from Rhode Island.
I selected only about half of the drawings that were available for this presentation tonight. Among the ones that I cut were mostly the architectural ones. So, as this project moves forward and a report is published, you will see much more of their work than I can show you tonight.
The first challenge for the design team involved the site. It’s a tight, sloped site and virtually all evidence of prior infrastructure—the streets that were there and so forth— have all been altered. Yet, this was once a very charming place. Old photographs make East Newburgh look like one of the most beautiful places in the northeast—the equivalent of places that have become famous for their wonderful, tight, picturesque streets. The fact that it was demolished some forty years ago is a cultural tragedy. Since I last spoke to you, I read much more of the history of the demolition and how it happened and what it felt like. I must say that I was quite surprised to read about it. I am just amazed that there was virtually no cynicism during this planning process. I, myself, would be much more suspicious of this process than you have been, considering your city’s past history and how roughly it has been treated. So, I thank you for that.
When I first arrived here, I knew very little about you. Now, I know a lot. I could actually amaze you tonight by how much I have learned but that is not my role. You are always the experts on the present. As you have heard me say, I am really the expert on the future. I do not want this to be a test as to how much I understand about the city; I want to move on from the present of which you know very, very well, and show you a vision of the future, which unlike most of our projects, is in relatively short order. The cycle for permitting and building this project is something like five to seven years, which is amazingly fast for a project in America at the moment. Of these seven years, we are allocating about two years to permitting. This is essentially a waste of time, because the permitting system in the state of New York has grown as a response to bad development. There has been so much bad development that an anti-body has grown, which has been making development virtually impossible. They are going to try very hard to design a process that makes this faster. But, the fact is that we are allocating about two years to this problem. Two of the seven years is going to be essentially wasted. Anyway, that is beyond our control at this point.
This is the third presentation I have done of this kind in which I show you slides. But, we have had over a dozen meetings, which were much more interactive than this. So, for those of you who were not there, you should know that this is not the way it has always been. This is the third meeting of this kind. The others had a lot of give-and-take.
These images were put together quickly. It is a little bit out of order, but a few of them are important to remember. They remind us that once this city was really, as they say today, “hot.” This was a beautiful city. People that had a lot of choice came here…not the least of which were, George Washington, Downing, and Vaux. These are people who could have lived anywhere. And, they chose this place.
We must remember that when this city was built, things were even more difficult. There were no bulldozers. Whatever they did over that hill, it was done by hand. There was no telephone. There were no faxes. There was basically a poorly functioning banking system. This beautiful city was built during two wars and the depression. There were people who lived here without sewers and without water, and yet they built a very beautiful city, because they held the built environment to very high standard. We must remember that the context of the beautiful American cities we inherited in the 1920’s was built against difficulty greater than we have now. By the way, these were your ancestors with the same genetic material as you. So if they could do it, why not you? Let’s remember that this greatness was done against great difficulty.
(Next Slide) You can see that, when Newburgh is at its best, it is as good as any place. It has a wonderful kind of austerity and elegance. As you know, this is now a poor city. These were also poor people. These were immigrants. Virtually all of them started with nothing. So, although this City is still experiencing poverty, it is not unlike the experience of those who built these first buildings. They really made it. There was an ability to do great things. That has always been very American.
(Next) However, some terrible mistakes were made. Every city molts. Many, many buildings in this city have been demolished and rebuilt. This was not the first building that occurred on that site. There was probably something like a shanty followed by a house and then a small commercial building. All of them were demolished. This looks like it may be the fourth generation of building that occurred on that site. It is not unusual to demolish. The problem is that the great demolitions that occurred here in Newburgh coincided with a very low point in the history of architecture.
(Next) When that building went, you got this. That is the problem. The problem is that in the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s when it was your turn to molt—to become great— you coincided with a very low period in architecture. All cities that actually were subject to redevelopment in the 1960’s and 1970’s were harmed quite a bit. Fortunately for architecture, the low period is over, and there are a great number of very good architects and planners of different types who know what they are doing. They do everything they are asked to do relatively well—whether they are traditionalists or modernists or on the vanguard. Architecture is going through a very good period, and Leyland Alliance knows the difference between the various sorts of architecture and planning. These are sophisticated people about architects. I am not going to mention architecture very much here. I am speaking mainly about planning and social issues, but you are likely to get an East End of very high quality. So that is something to look forward to. You will not be getting junk anymore.
(Next) The plan that was supposed to replace the many, many demolished blocks was so horrible that you are very lucky it was not built. Let’s think positively about this thing. Every one of the prior developers and prior plans that you did not build, which perhaps made you feel like a failure, was actually a blessing. I have seen them and they were horrible. The very little that was built has generally nothing to do with the history of your city. So the low period in this city was a very good time to be asleep.
(Next) These are some of the things that were built during the low period. Sometimes they were low-budget, and sometimes they were high-budget. It does not matter. They are both bad. (laughter/applause) By the way, this is quite independent of what goes on in the building. These may be marvelous people and that may be a really marvelous college. By the way, do you know what is happening here? The college is coming to your town. College towns are the way to go. They have a fantastically high reputation, particularly with retired people. Retired people love to go to college towns. It’s not just for young people anymore. When the baby-boomers retire, among the things they like to do, is work themselves up to a second career, or perhaps teach, or complete careers they never finished. Having a college where people can take courses and so forth is the Number One asset to them. This rates much higher than golf courses. Even in Florida, we realize that the golf course, which is all that developers ever think about, rates much less highly than a college of this kind. And, you are getting a college downtown. This is wonderful. The new buildings for the campus, by the way, are much better than the existing ones. We have seen their Master Plan.
(Next) Then, there is the blight. We need to discuss this not so much in detail, but how we are going to get past this because obviously the site we were given is all on the waterfront. What happens to the rest of the city to the west? There is obviously going to be a lot of good influence physically. The streets connect. The people who live here will go there. The people who live there will go here. There is going to be a great deal of interaction. There is no question that the existing retail is going to get better. But the big change (and I do not like to be so crude) will be financial. I did study the financial situation of this city. There are many ways to explain what is going on in the city financially, but the single-most important fact that you should remember is whether the buildings, as they pay taxes are fiscally-positive or fiscally-negative. As you pay your taxes and as you use city services, are you contributing to the city or draining the city? The average dwelling in this city is rated at $199,000. To be tax-positive, the dwelling has to be rated at $341,000. In other words, any dwelling, under $341,000, is actually eating up tax base. And, only dwellings over $341,000 are contributing to the tax base. Frankly, one of the things that we want to do in this project is to create a market that is tax-positive. We are trying to build hundreds of units here that will contribute to the tax base. Quite a few of you have brought up the issue of affordable housing and we need to confront that. Of course, there is a need for affordable housing. There is an infinite need for affordable housing. LeylandAlliance is going to build market rate here, and they are going to build affordable housing on other sites here. Affordable housing is absolutely necessary, but it actually drains the tax base. One of the things one can say, and we will say this brutally, “The last thing that this city needs is more affordable housing,” because of what it does to the tax base. (applause) I mean, you have done your job. An enormous amount of the affordable housing in this county is in this city. It should be spread out. (applause) Streets like this with houses of great potential needing to be fixed and sidewalks needing to be redeveloped and policemen on the streets and garbage not properly picked up can be resolved with a good tax base. We need to increase that. This play is about increasing the tax base of this city. This city has 28,000 residents. I do not know the number of units exactly. The entire site, not just the Leyland site, accommodates about 1,000 units. Most of those units will be inhabited by two people. By the way, the market consists generally of people so young that they do not have children or they are retired so they consume fewer services. There is nothing more expensive than a child consuming services, because of the education required by that child. So you must imagine that this project, when you see it ten years from now, will constitute about 6% of the population of this city. These 1000 units will be 6% of the population of the city. However, because of the substantial commercial component and the relatively costly housing that will be built, it will have a tremendously positive effect. It is going to be one of the main helps to the city.
So, let’s get over that sordid economic discussion and get on to describe how this may actually be something that tremendously increases your quality of life. For instance, what kind of places are we making?
By the way, good job, Mr. Newspaper Editor! Did you all read this eight-page inset about the miserable place Newburgh was and how fundamentally hopeless it was? I don’t know how you pay for such good advertising. (laughter)
(Next) This is the slide that is going to help me actually describe what taxes will do. This city, I believe, is in the midst of a master planning process that needs to address many smaller issues: how do we smooth the permitting process so that people can get permits more quickly to renovate their houses? (applause) That kind of thing definitely needs to be addressed. I’m not making light of it. It’s just that tonight we have to speak about other things.
(Next) I hope some of the Hispanic population is here tonight. I went to church on Sunday to address the Hispanic population and to ask them to come. The Hispanic immigrants are really good builders. Intrinsically, they are builders because they come from countries that don’t have a development industry. Everybody builds for themselves. These are people who, once they attain the carpentry skills, can renovate anything. Everywhere I have been where there is Hispanic immigration they are stymied by the inability to get permits. They know how to build, and they know how to do this. However, they needed some training because they come from masonry countries and this is a wood country. But, with a little training, they could be expert renovators if it were not so incredibly hard to get over the permitting hurdle. Here, because it is a Historic District, the hurdle is particularly difficult, because it is not just a matter of being licensed to do the work, it has to look good. One of the things that we discussed is that not every building in Newburgh is first-rate…even in the Historic District. Perhaps, if we had standards of “good, better, best” things would move quicker. The “best” buildings, like the Downing ones, have to be beautifully renovated. The “good” buildings can be done more simply. So, why not have a triple standard system? Well, lo and behold, somebody figured out that you had exactly that system in 1966. This was a system of “good, better, best.” It was also applied to the historic buildings of Newburgh. Somebody had this idea, and goodness knows how you lost it, but it is something that can be dusted off and redone relatively easily. It is a good idea, and it’s time has come again. Maybe in the past it was not the right time, or everyone was wealthy, or everyone had a contractor, or permitting was easy, but for some reason, you lost this. Now, the time has come to revive it.
By the way, one of the nice things about this charrette is not that when I thought I needed something or anybody on our team needed something, it’s almost like we spoke the word “run” and somebody brought it in. It was wonderful. It’s like…may I please have the tax ratables? And, I’d do…like this and, somebody would hand it to me… like that. (laughter) Or, I’d ask how many units are in the city? It’s been a wonderful cooperative. It wasn’t just talk. A couple of dozen of you have taken it upon yourselves to really advise us well…in between meetings or whenever…and giving us the materials we needed.
(Next) This is the city as a whole. The area that we’re working with is the entire eastern end (we both east to the south in all these drawings) down here…probably 1/15 of the area of the city…but a uniquely important 15th because this is where the city started.
(Next) You should understand that, although there is a great deal of land down there, only certain parcels and they are certainly disconnected, the ones in “yellow” are the ones that are owned by the city and are part of the public/private partnership. We went ahead and designed not only the areas that we were chartered or asked to design…but we designed every other parcel that was there under other people’s ownership. What usually happens when we do this…somebody comes in and starts screaming at us, “How dare you design this?” …as if you had sort of flipped into bed with him or something. I mean…the fury! “How can your pencil touch my site?” (laughter) But, everybody has been completely cooperative. They were so pleased to have their site looked at. They were so cooperative by coming in and saying, “Do your best”; “We trust you”; and so forth. I think there is an understanding that all these multiple landowners know that we’re working on it together. We spent no energy convincing people. It was just a given that this was good for everybody. Again, I’ll be separating the statistics that have to do with the sites that Leyland and the city own.
(Next) Here are the sites on the larger context. You can see it’s a very tiny amount of the city. It’s only about 30 acres. It’s a tiny amount; but the economic potential of these thirty acres is like getting a Japanese car factory. It may not create as many jobs. Then, again, it may create as many jobs. It certainly will result in more taxes than a Japanese car factory. A Japanese car factory gets tax breaks. You know that Leyland and these people will not. So, really think about this as an economic generator not unlike getting a really important factory. Think about it that way. (Next) That’s the site that we’ve been asked to design.
(Next) This is where we worked. At the high point of the consultants, there were 52 people present working on this doing different things: marketing consultants; residential consultants; retail consultants and so forth. When I was putting these slides together, I wanted to have one slide just to make all the consultants feel good. I would have the engineering slide and so forth; but there were so many consultants that I couldn’t even do that so I don’t even have token slides for many of the people who were contributing to this. This is the workplace when there was almost no one there. Usually, this was so crowded, it was almost dangerous.
(Next) Some of the meetings that were most interactive with people are shown here. Everyone’s been very wellbehaved. (laughter)
(Next) We did many plans. I’m going to show you a few of them. Then, I’m going to go straight to the one we think is best. But, here are a few. We were fascinated by the termination of Broadway and that location should probably be the park with a wonderful plaza with this great view. One of our earlier ideas was to bypass that because the land to the south was essentially owned by the city and the college has a kind of public road down the middle and you can’t go straight down with vehicles anyway so we said, “Why don’t we build to either side and take the last block of Broadway and actually make it a plaza…a four-court to the view?” Then, we found out that the college had a very advanced plan and we couldn’t do this. We had another idea. Once you stand on that river, you realize that the view is nice across the way but you really want to turn to the south. That’s the famous view. But, then, rivers are always nicer with a slight angle because there’s more water where it’s longer. So, we said, “What would happen if all the walkways and streets that we made were actually angled so that you had a longer view of the river?” And, this is the kind of idea that we explored and we drew up and we tried to figure out why it worked or why it didn’t work. I want you to know that many different ideas were explored…and some good ones were lost. The reason may have been, for example, that the parking of cars is too inefficient in this one…or, as I said, the college already had its Master Plan. So, we lost some ideas but we always recovered. I would say that, at the end, the ideas that we have are all more subtle than these. These are some big deal ideas; but I’m going to take some care to describe the complexity or the subtlety of the ideas that were actually implemented. They’re not one-liners. Both of these were one-liners. You can go home and tell your kids real fast what it was all about. You’re going to have difficulty explaining unless you have a lot of time everything that’s built into this project. So, it’s more subtle. (Next) As we worked, we worked at all different scales. We worked at the scale of the site. Simultaneously, we worked at the scale of the building. Do you see this? This area here is that area.
(Next) We worked at the scale of the open space. We took out very important pieces of open space such as Vaux Park at the end of Broadway and then what we call “Site 10” which is the Consolidated Iron which is now a brownfield site being cleaned up by the EPA. This is a large piece of ground and since it does have potential for an open space, we spent an enormous amount of time with the public open space…particularly Kim Matthews in her office…because we realized that the first-rate public open space is one of the great assets that the people who live behind could use to the river. If we just privatized the open space or didn’t pay attention to it, there wouldn’t be as much to do for the people who didn’t live there. Also, there is going to be a lot of commercial here. You already have a restaurant. We don’t want people constantly having to spend money just to be on the waterfront. (applause) Typically, in the suburbs, where do the kids go? What is the public space in the suburbs? It’s the shopping mall. That is the public space in the suburbs…relentlessly, commercial space. Like any kid who is out in public…which is the shopping mall… he’s continually under pressure to spend money. We don’t want this waterfront to be like that. We want it to have a great variety of terrific open spaces…for just being there. “This is my favorite park”. “This is my favorite plaza”. “This is my favorite street”. “This is my favorite sunny corner”. It’s going to feel just fine just to be there…just to hang out.
(Next) We went into great levels of detail with the buildings. Here’s the difficulty that we had. The buildings had to be small…although you might think $340,000 is a great deal of money…depending on who you are. If you’re from Manhattan, you might not think of it as very much money. It is, in fact, a great deal of money. But, it is so expensive to build these days by the time you handle the automobiles and everything that you can’t give people really big units. You have to give people really clever and really cool and really well-designed units. For those of you who know how to read plans and know how to scrutinize them, you will see that some very small units are actually terrific to live in. They’re filled with very nice spaces…won’t have double-height or two bathrooms in a master bedroom…none of these luxuries…but they will have very cool designs. That’s because these designers are good. It’s not about size. It’s about quality. That’s the smallest scale that we worked.
(Next) What you saw there was furnishings. There were people working and I said, “Where’s the living room?” “Where’s the dining room?” “Does the table fit 6 or 8?” At the same time we were looking at the regional picture. And, this is one of the drawings we inherited which is, of course, the New York State Bike Route proposed by groups for proposed walking trails, etc. I can tell you categorically that everything that enters this site is picked up and connected. Don’t worry about it. That 70-mile bike route that’s being created…maybe it’s called “nature trail”…whatever…we’re all connecting them. This will be a great stopping point. This isn’t going to be just a trail. There is going to be a great deal of activity here… and we’ll support it. Even hikers…like every once in a while…sit down and take time for a cappuccino. It isn’t all about thermos coffee.
(Next) This is the plan that we did in some detail. This is going to recur here. I’m going to show you this plan. This is the plan that we spent a little time on. There are no big moves in this plan so I need to explain it to you to show you what’s happening and then gradually show you more detail.
This is Broadway. Broadway is much too wide. It’s one of the widest streets I’ve ever seen. It looks like the streets in Utah…which is not to flatter it. If you’ve been to Utah, you know that the streets were designed for wagons and so forth. It is the presentation of your city and it gives an extremely bad impression of your city. In fact, if all people ever see is Broadway, it’s not a very good impression on them. But, the minute they turn into the neighborhood, they find it is nice…nice to amazingly nice. Broadway is a very bad front door. It can become much better. Among the things it needs is not only managerial advice for the shops which I already spoke about… but something needs to be done to reduce the width of the pavement…generally a median in the middle to transform it into an incredibly elegant avenue. You can go from this wide piece of asphalt to one of these great avenues with a median in the middle similar to Park Avenue in New York. Well, you might say, “We tried that”. And, it’s obvious that there’s a little residual median left in the last block, as you know. Because I’m like a doctor who looks at a patient and says, “How are your eyes?” “How is this?” “How is that?” “Your skin doesn’t look all that healthy?” and so forth…so I went to see that median. Of course, it had been demolished by incompetent snow-plow operators. Anyway, you just need to have a properly well-designed median with some elements that actually rise above the snow. Then, you need to get snow-plow operators who know what they’re doing. Medians are all over the world. I don’t know why the entire look of your city needs to be calibrated to incompetence. (applause) The kind of public discourse that says, “We can’t do that because the snow-plow operators will break it up” has to be off the table. You don’t think that way anymore. You say, “Well, get better snowplow operators”. I know there is a little more to it than that…but that’s the basis. It’s an attitude. It’s just not good enough, is it? We need to do something about that presentation of Main Street.
The last block is a great improvement. Right now, it’s three disconnected events. It’s the last block that anybody goes to. There’s this so-called Vaux Park of which I could show you some very cruel photographs…which is this seedy little park at the end. The best thing about it is the name. Then, there is the railway…and Martin Luther King Boulevard which is a highway…and then some kind of parking lot for summer docks. Nothing is tied together. Our task was to tie the last block and all the way down to the river which is a fantastic opportunity into a sequence of places that brings the city down literally into the Hudson. It’s a wonderful view. Nature has done its job. The topography falls. It couldn’t be better. Any Italian garden designer would love…love…to have that site. It just has to be conceived as a work of art and useful to people from beginning to end. We really spent a lot of time on it. I’m going to do some details about that.
You also need a gateway and a symbol that shows the center of the town. If not, the town has a kind of oatmeal quality because it kind of dribbles…like this…except for that “orange” monster in the middle. So, one of the things we want to do is to have the town built up to the center… to have a central piece like all good towns…the ones that are in posters that look so good because they have a center piece. We also need to mask that “red” building from the Hudson because there is a lot of Hudson tourism. Unlike most cities, you have a presentation to make to the people boating by. Most cities in America don’t have to look good from a distance…but this city does.
Then, we have the waterfront that has so spectacularly taken off. Front Street has taken off because the restaurants are good. It’s mostly gapped by parking lots. We need the ferry…which I’m going to get back to in detail…because it is incredibly important. However, the ferry has a problem. As this succeeds, it is going to require a lot of parking. Everything we do here is going to need a lot of parking. And, how do we absorb that parking without turning it into a Wal-Mart parking lot? So, we spent an enormous amount of time doing that and we’re counting on the success of the ferry.
There is the one nice plump site which is the Iron Works…now the EPA site. We certainly didn’t want to waste it. Other than the cliff up here on which you have a park that has one of the most spectacular views of the Hudson…the second best view is right here at the edge of the park. I’ll show you what we do with that. When you stand there and you see the great gorge coming down, it is fantastic. We wanted to celebrate that, as you will see. We also wanted to restore those sites all over that have to be meaningfully developed without ruining the views of those who have grown accustomed views of the Hudson. When the demolitions took place, many people received three views of the Hudson. They didn’t pay for them. They were a result of the demolitions but they’ve grown accustomed to those views and someone has to respect them. I’ll show you some drawings. We might actually improve those views. I’ll show you some drawings about how that gets affected.
Lastly, there is something that has been completely erased; and it was only brought up by Mary McCammey* time and time again…and that is Colden Street… the one which goes down. So, it is Colden Street and then Clinton Square. There are wonderful articles written by your city historian that make me realize that you are so lucky to have that lady who can really write. Otherwise, I wouldn’t read them. (applause) You cannot pay me to read badly written stuff. I read all these articles and I loved them. What happens is that this Colden Street is absolutely fundamental to your memories. First of all, it was the most charming street you had. It was the street that took you down. It was one of the original streets. And, once to learn to read the photographs, you see that the majority of the really cool places where people are gathering, you begin to see that it is actually Colden Street. So, at great expense and technical risk, as LeylandAlliance said, it is not easy to restore a diagonal street down the middle and try to put buildings on them. We restored that street. We have our fingers crossed that we can afford to do that. Anyway, I will show you quite a lot of that.
Then, there is the new Martin Luther King Boulevard which was woefully over-wide was actually done as a gift to you so you can put a lot of parking on it. It’s going to become a great street again because it is exactly the right width to become a boulevard. I’ll show you how we transformed it. Right now, it’s a highway that is cutting everything off; but we can transform it.
That’s a summary of what I’m going to show you…just lightly…I can’t get too much into it, but I will get into it.
(Next) Let me tell you about transportation and walkability. The reason people live in cities is not to have a big yard. It is not to have convenient parking. The reason people willingly give up the American dream yard and the American dream garage is because of street life. If you do not achieve street life, then basically why would you live in an apartment? The majority of the units here will be apartments; condominiums; or they will be townhouse or live/work units. In order to make this attractive, we need to make this place walkable. We know very well how to do that. You need to have meaningful destinations. You need to have pedestrian sheds. Americans will walk five minutes to a destination. They will walk ten minutes to transit. It’s just known. It’s been proven.
The site that we were given which is essentially this area here is a five-minute pedestrian shed. It takes five minutes from edge to center. Look at the number of people that are within a five-minute walk on this principal square that we are making. The second square…which is the existing one…look at the number of people that can actually walk to it…if there is a walkable experience…not just this miserable crossing…the Martin Luther King Boulevard kind of thing. Look at the number of people in the large ten-minute walk that would walk to a transit stop, including the ferry. This is a really good transit-oriented development. It is the walkability from the pedestrian shed that everything flows. Do you remember that streetcar you had? People didn’t take the car to get to the streetcar. Isn’t that right? You didn’t drive and do a “kissand-ride”. The reason public transit works so well in Manhattan is that people can walk to it. The reason it works so badly in the suburbs is that people will not willingly get in their cars and drive to the transit. Yes, sometimes they’ll do it if there’s a very strong destination…like Manhattan…but mostly they won’t. What’s great about this is that the pedestrian shed works perfectly. Pedestrianism doesn’t start with light rail. It doesn’t start with the train. It starts with how many people can walk to transit because that’s where you get the catchment…the pedestrian catchment. This is a future model community for transit because it’s so pedestrian.
(Next) Transit is the key to this project. I’ve had the chance to be very explicit about the impossibility of this development occurring if Manhattan were not near by. We did a plan for Syracuse, New York, some years ago. And, it was perfectly good. They were wonderful people. Nothing happened. Why? It’s because the place isn’t growing because it doesn’t have any industry. The plan is like a mold. You need to put something through it. What is going to put energy into this plan and build it in very short order is the proximity of Manhattan. Manhattan has this fantastic energy. It’s one of the half dozen cities in this world that are winners. Everybody wants to be there. Everybody wants to be near there. Anywhere within an hour and a half of Manhattan and you can get things done that you can’t dream of getting done anywhere. There are very few “winner” cities. Newburgh is very lucky to be within that range. What happens is that you have a train system that is not only absolutely decent. It’s spectacular. You have a new ferry system that brings people there. The people on your east side are going to be literally able to walk to the two Broadways. Do you realize that? Without getting in a car, they’ll go to your Broadway and also to the Manhattan Broadway because they’re within the pedestrian catchment of the ferry and then the train.
Then, you have this airport which is very impressive. I flew in directly from Ft. Lauderdale which is near where I live into Stewart Airport in Newburgh and I just couldn’t believe it. By the way, you should insist that it be called “Newburgh Airport”. (applause) It was extraordinary.
Just having coffee today at 4 o’clock, we were discussing new codes and how the city needs a new code. We were discussing how the city has a totally dysfunctional code. We said that there was a new generation of codes that really creates urbanity. And, we were asked how to find out more about it. “How do we train ourselves to learn about this new code?” And, I said, “Well, you have to go to a seminar. There are essentially two seminars that I am leading. One is taking place in Austin in six weeks. The other one is scheduled in London in ten days and I’m leading that one too.” And he said, “Oh, you can fly to London from this airport for $200.” Well, what about that? Isn’t that unbelievable? It’s absolutely extraordinary. By the way, that should be in your advertising…that you’re near this airport. So, this airport is of enormous importance and it should be connected. Right now, there are consultants that are trying to trip over themselves to figure out incredibly expensive and complicated ways to get rail into the airport from Manhattan. I would suggest that, instead of spending billions of dollars doing it some other weird way, that you just take the sequence in which you take the existing rail…take the ferry…and then take bus-rapid transit or streetcar straight to the airport. Look at the beautiful logic of this. (applause) And, this will revive your city. Just remember this. This is the force of this diagram. No one is going to arrive with this immediately because it’s too simple and you can’t get paid to come up with simple ideas…but the compelling simplicity of this diagram compared to any other diagram is what’s going to make it happen. Just don’t forget this… because you can either get your city bypassed which is what everybody is thinking or you can have all that energy come straight down Broadway. It’s very important that you fight hard for this. Hopefully, it will not take generations of officials. Hopefully, it can happen very quickly. Just look at this beautiful diagram of the airport from Manhattan.
(Next) This is Broadway…looking a little better… although there is an awful lot of horse manure on the ground. You know, things were tough. They’ve always been. This is the streetcar. There were trees. (Next) This is the kind of thing we’re talking about. There is a new generation of vehicles that is not necessarily a streetcar. It’s called “bus-rapid transit”. This is in a city in Oregon. It’s a vehicle that can actually be on a dedicated transit way…which most of Broadway can be because you have the width to do it…but once you leave the city, for about half a mile it gets too narrow. Rather than disrupt it and make it impossible and have to spend millions of dollars, this kind of bus-rapid transit can just get in a regular lane for that short distance and then when it gets wide again because there’s a short bottle-neck… just zoom up to the airport. You gather the speed in the dedicated lane. It is handicapped accessible. It doesn’t have all the disadvantages of a bus…the roar of the bus…the stink of the bus…the ridiculous uncomfortable seats of the bus and so forth. This is all about really dignified travel and we should find out more about it because you have the streetcar infrastructure already. By the way, if it doesn’t work, sell it. Just try it. It’s not like the commitment to rail. Then, maybe it’s too early and maybe you can bring it back two years later and try it again for a year or so. If it then loses money, then sell it again. But, it’s not this kind of agony that you have with rail and whether to spend the millions or not. It’s just the matter of spending some money for bus-rapid transit.
(Next) This is the plan in a little more detail. I believe this is one that I am going to show again and again and again. This is the area. What you see in “yellow” here masks away this parking. There’s a large amount of parking masked by buildings between the river and the railway tracks. You don’t see the parking. I love that railway embankment because if it weren’t for the railway embankment hiding our parking, it would show to the city. It makes a nice little back board that we have. So, what you see in “black” are the buildings. Mostly, they’re “U-shaped” buildings. The buildings are like courtyards facing the road. Almost every building we’ve designed is like a “C-shape”…like this…to the river. They have several advantages. Everybody in that courtyard has a view. If you make a bar, only the ones on one side have the view. The second thing is that it impinges on the river lightly. So, instead of being a bar, only the tips hit the river. Also, because it’s a windy old place…let’s not forget that there are some rough days…you can actually find sunny courts. Particularly in the first floor, you can protect yourself from the river winds…because of the courtyards. You can see that there is a repetition of “Cshaped” buildings…principally in the properties not owned by the city…but in the other properties. We kept every building of historic importance. We kept every building that’s active commercially. We kept the park. Don’t worry. We’re not into demolishing stuff.
(Next) Here are the buildings that are being proposed. They’re interspersed, insofar as possible, into the city. There is a gap. This is the college here. They’re adding a very nice building that fills the gap on the north. It is important that there be buildings of equal quality on the south to close the gap. And, there’s a chance that there could be dormitories which the college wants. It would be very nice if that central green that we’re going to be proposing for Broadway for that block actually becomes the college green because the college is too tight to have its own green. The campus inside doesn’t have a proper green. This could be its green…like the University of Virginia. Most colleges have a common center. This could be shared by the city and the college could maintain it, by the way, because I suggested it be maintained to a higher level than the rest of the greenway on Broadway. The college could contribute to that. And, the students would love it. It would be a great image for the college. The private owners of the other side could very easily create the dormitories for the students…instead of just having more condos. So, you would have students living there full-time…which is always terrific. Notice how the fabric is relatively small…no mega buildings anywhere. (Next) This is your thoroughfare system. Wherever possible, we connected and re-connected in every one of the walkways and vistas that come down. Sometimes there’s nothing but the view going down. We preserved it.
(Back to Previous Slide) This constant slicing that you see is the preservation of the view corridors and people in back.
Now, there are corridors and there are elevations also. Remember, it isn’t just looking out. It’s looking down to the water. We’ve done some diagrams to explain how that works.
(Next) This is a thoroughfare.
(Next) This is Martin Luther King Boulevard. Look at how it was reamed out from being this to being essentially a highway. Fortunately for you, that street belongs to the city. The Traffic Engineer, Norman Garrick, whom some of you met, is completely convinced that adjusting the intersections for either side…putting parking on it just for the price of paint…and re-calibrating or re-timing the lights on Rt. 9 would allow a great deal of the traffic to stay in Rt. 9 unless they want to come downtown. Right now, the lights work so badly that people tend to actually go out of their way to go east on Martin King Boulevard which is turning it into a highway. (applause) By the way, it’s not a highway. It’s got “Stop Signs” on it. It’s a little old local road that is so wide that people speed on it. It’s a little old local road with “Stop Signs” on it. I couldn’t believe it. Anyway, we’re going to use that for parking. I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back to this but this is the general principle. (Next) Look at this. Isn’t it amazing? And, all that paint means is that it’s too wide. But, all that paint redone means that we can park on it. This is the existing Martin Luther King Boulevard. Look at what fits on the existing pavement. Not only can you fit two rows of parked cars but a tree-lined median will actually fit on it. It could be a really beautiful street. For those of you who are worried that this is going to hamper traffic or somehow reduce capacity, you should know that traffic is at the highest capacity at 27 miles an hour. When cars speed up, the spacing between them gets further and further apart. Therefore, fewer cars can get through. So, by reducing the speed which is what you do when you stripe it down…which is called “traffic-calming”…the cars move more slowly plus you’re at 30 miles an hour…the spacing reduces and you put through more cars so you’re not harming anybody by actually saying, “Drive at 30 mph”. By the way, posting it doesn’t work. You know that. The only thing that slows down cars is parallel parking. That’s the way it is. Look at the existing street and what it could become…which is really beautiful…worthy of the name. Most Martin Luther King Boulevards that I’ve seen are hideous. This could be a beautiful one.
(Next) This is Water Street which was the one way that you could get down from Broadway down to the waterfront. Because it was also sloped and angled and it had Clinton Square at the other side, it was very, very picturesque. It was one of the really great streets in the northeast. (Next) These are the public buildings and open spaces that we’re proposing. The campus is here. As I said, we would like to give it the green in front of it. Then, there is an upper square and a lower green that brings you down (which I’m going to show you) to the water. So, there is a square; a sloped green; and then a great waterfront park over here that has the monument.
Then, on this side, is a series of places in the private sectors’ backyard…hopefully, restaurants. It will remain public. The one thing that does occur in the Master Plan is that all of this will be public. You can actually stay in the waterfront, but it will be a variety of experiences. (applause) It isn’t just the same dull old trail. What we’ve done is we’ve concatenated a series of different experiences. By the way, nature is elsewhere…so you’ve got 70 miles of that. You come in from nature. You have that experience. Then, you have a proper waterfront park. Then, you have a waterfront drive. Then, you have a trail…a walkway…a square. In other words, it’s a concatenation of experiences. It isn’t just the same section all the way through. It’s very rich to actually enter Newburgh and experience all these various things.
There was a call for a covered inflatable structure for sports fields. It was very nicely asked for. It was. Who can deny that courts and playing fields would be a good thing to have down here? We tried very hard to fit it; and the only place we could fit it was down here in the only flat site we have which is the Iron Works site. Then, somebody pointed out to us that, although it fit, it is incredibly ugly. It’s a utilitarian structure. It’s white. And it’s like a big white blister. We can’t have it there just down hill from the George Washington site. He wouldn’t have liked it. What we did is we reserved a site for openair field so in good weather…if you want to play soccer…if you want to play tennis…if you want to play handball, it would be perfect. That looks great…so the site is reserved here…not in the waterfront, but behind the waterfront. The waterfront has better uses. Then, we found a site further down further to the south where it is less visible from the historic structure. So, basically, you end up with more sports fields and you now have good weather and bad weather sports fields. That is what we’re proposing. Remove the Rowing Club from way down here somewhere that, unless they have secret rituals…which they may…and, therefore, they prefer to be on the other side of the sewage plant…we think that the Rowing Club provides a lot of great activity. It us fun to watch them take the boats out…take the boats in…and so forth. It’s a great recruiting tool when you can actually see people doing it. Also, it’s the kind of activity that brings people in so that the waterfront doesn’t seem so private or so alien. They can remain where they are but we also found a marvelous site for them right over here as part of the park…a really good site where they can participate more. The boat-launching ramp is maintained where it is. But, the parking lot for trailers which is immediately behind it which is a disgrace has to be considered. Why should empty boat trailers have some of the best real estate in Newburgh? So, we moved them back and hid them behind some really decent buildings…in the back. There are these floating docks that are out there. We redesigned them so they form part of the park so that they make more sense with this open space that we’re bringing down, etc.
By the way, there’s still another site for the Boating Club down here…if they so wish. Then, we did a little bit of a good job here with the existing park. The name is Newburg Landing.
We found that the location for the ferry isn’t bad at all where it is now, particularly since we want people to walk about one block…from the parking to the ferry. In that way, they can do some shopping and activate some stores…not the destination stores i.e. the restaurants and the entertainment places…but the utility stores where they can stop for donuts and coffee in the morning…pick up a newspaper or some prepared food. There might also be a gymnasium kind of activity. We’re referring to places having ordinary daily things that wouldn’t normally exist here unless you tapped into the economic energy of those commuters. You will see how we orchestrated that. Basically, that is happening between the parking garage that we hid behind this building and the ferry over here. That will happen later.
(Next) I guess it’s here. Let me show you. This is the bubble…the sports dome. These are the playing fields. These are the masked parking garages. You actually don’t see them unless you’re on the train. Then, there are valuable buildings including condominiums; the Boating Club; a hotel; office buildings…all hiding the unused trailers. This is Broadway coming down as a sequence of spaces, including an outdoor auditorium. The slope gives an outdoor auditorium.
This is where you park. If you’re taking the ferry, you come out here…you park…walk a block and take the ferry. That’s where the shops are. This street remains in use basically for entertainment…all the way down… more restaurants for that kind of activity. The parking on the other side of the railway gets double-decked for efficiency and then is masked by decent buildings. These are the two 8-story buildings that I will explain later.
This is Colden Street coming down. This is the restoration of Clinton Square, etc.
These are row houses at the lower end on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Don’t worry. They’re way down from the existing houses on Montgomery Street and other sites that were developed.
(Next) These are some of what I call “political drawings”. “What’s it like?” “What happens?” This is an accurately-drawn section. This is Montgomery Street. These are the houses to the east of Montgomery Street and then the slope falls down. This is Martin Luther King. This is the Regal Bag Company. This is the shore; and that’s the surface of the Hudson.
The townhouses that we are proposing on Martin Luther King down here are such that when there is a six-footer standing there in the garden, they do not block the view beyond what is already blocked by Regal Bag. These are 3-story buildings with one exception. At one of the meetings, people on top said, “Fine. That’s all right. But give us a green roof.” I said, “Fine, but when you have a green roof…you have to get on the green roof to enjoy it and maintain it.” So, on that green roof there is a room that pops up to get you out to the roof.
What you are seeing here are the existing houses on Montgomery that slope down. The garages that are also green-roofed are put into the hill as a retaining element. These are the townhouses. What you are seeing here is in sections…the Regal building; the townhouses; the existing houses…and you can see that the existing view is not trammeled* and that actually that central one which is not harmed at all is what hits the center of the Hudson. Basically, the buildings are way down.
The historical circumstance was totally different. Those buildings on Montgomery had their views blocked…not by one row of buildings but by two rows of buildings. There once was a street there. This is done as gently as we can provide and still develop that very valuable site.
(Next) This is George Washington’s headquarters. This is an existing warehouse. Some of you inquired about an elementary school. This could be the coolest elementary school. Imagine going to school in a converted warehouse that was once George Washington’s headquarters…especially since most current schools look like strip-shopping centers. This could be great.
These are the buildings that we have been proposing for the site on the Iron Works down here. They can be 5story buildings and not block the view. Now, why would you do 5-story buildings? You would do 5-story buildings there because you can attract a first-rate hotel with tons of stars if all the rooms have that wonderful view. You’re not going to get a multiple-star hotel anywhere in Newburgh unless you have that amenity; and it’s perfectly ridiculous not to use an amenity. Why would you want to erase wealth? Here you have wealth. Think of it as industry. Think of it as a tax base. Think of it as jobs. Why, for some arbitrary reasons, would you say, “Well, I only want it to be two stories or three stories when it’s one of the great sites of the world?” You can also attract an office building that wouldn’t dream of coming here unless you offer them that view. The whole idea here is not to say, “How little can we do?” “How few humans can we put on this site?” It’s the opposite. It is “How well can we build in a place that will actually create wealth for the city behind it?” It always astounds me how people who are against things say, “What does it cost for what you’re asking?” Like, “How many millions of dollars of future wealth are you erasing by taking two stories of that hotel?” If that hotel were to last thirty-five years as a 3-Star or 4-Star or 5-Star hotel…what does that represent in tax revenues that you are just arbitrarily erasing? I’m going to make a plea. The knee-jerk reaction is “Don’t build on that site”. “Don’t get anywhere near the Hudson”. But, those that love the Hudson have to realize that it is not always nature that fronts the Hudson. But, when there are natural areas…yes, then by all means…I believe that anybody who builds should be behind the tree line…should be behind the down slope, etc. I understand that. But, when you are in a historic city like this, you should have as many people as possible there so that they don’t spread horizontally. One of the problems with environmentalism in this country is that you always try to lower density. Well, if you lower densities, you spread out. Once you spread out you consume more nature. If anything, environmentalists should be asking for more density…“Can we please get more people to live here?” It always astounds me how they don’t. They’re always trying to have more green space. (applause)
Tomorrow afternoon I am lecturing in Los Angeles at a huge Green Building Conference for 3½ hours. That’s what I’m going to talk about. You people have to become rabid urbanists…rabid urbanists…because it’s not just that people leave the cities because cities aren’t good enough. And, if you push down the density, they consume nature. It is then environmentalism…picture environmentalists to become great city designers so that people love cities. Anyway, that’s how I’m going to get into trouble with what I’m doing tomorrow.
That’s my strong plea for really developing this site. By the way, the parking is behind…between the train and the building. Notice that Washington Street comes down. Now, if I showed you a photograph, you would see that it’s a disgrace. Washington Street ends in a parking lot for trailers…wires…and stuff. This would end, as I’ll show you, in a beautiful square and part of a waterfront drive with a park there. (Next) That is how Broadway used to end. This is 1903. That park, which is called “Vaux Park”…and now I need to walk up Vaux Park. Vaux Park which has a history is nevertheless a really mediocre place. That’s all it is. It never was properly funded. It wasn’t brilliantly designed, etc. Just because it was built at a certain time doesn’t mean that it can’t be done better. I totally respect parks designed by Vaux, but that’s not one of them. That’s by the kid. And the kid is not otherwise known as anybody but the son of the father. Even if you were a good designer, that’s not a good one. One of the things we need to do is we need to restore the park…which we did. We did a Vaux Park restoration. That’s because we had been backed into…for fear of offending…“Let’s just get Vaux Park cleaned up and properly designed.” Then, one of your artist citizens came in by the name of Greg Wyatt* with a drawing today at 3:00 o’clock. He came in with a whole new rendering. I want to tell you something about how receptive and flexible we are. At 4:00 o’clock today, we changed the design. I would like to tell you that his design was better than ours. It’s a more authentic Vaux Park than our Vaux Park. (applause) So, let’s look at that when that comes up. So…that’s the old hill.
(Next) This is the wonderful, wonderful intersection between Water and Colden. This is Clinton Square. We’re going to revive this. (applause) By the way, the traffic engineers don’t like this. They say that all this is going to cause death…destruction…accidents. That’s going to have to be a private street. We don’t want to get any traffic engineers upset. We’ll just label it a “driveway” and then, suddenly, all rules are suspended and you can do what you want. So, this is going to be in our Master Plan…one of these internal streets…so as not to upset the engineers because these intersections, as you know, are all really dangerous.
(Next) This is the oldest map we found…1850…this Sidney map of Orange County. It was very little. This is Broadway. By the way, I think it is fundamental that this street be restored. Notice that Colden was already there. It’s really a huge part of the character of the city.
(Next) This is our rendering of it. This is Martin Luther King. I hope you still have the statue. This is the way that we wind up. By the way, notice the solar collectors… those of you who like that kind of thing. We would like to see this kind of architecture…which is like the old architecture…but with much bigger windows. One of the things that changed from the traditional architecture is that people now like more light. If you’ve ever been to an old house, you know that if you do it in an absolutely straight-forward way…an actual traditional house without any modifications…the lights have to be on during the day. Our predecessors loved the darkness, as well. It was part of the cocoon. They even put curtains over the windows. But, we like more light. And, as we were wrestling with what the architecture was like…and we want it to be traditional because we want to key in…we don’t want it to be different from the housing behind it…as we tried to key in, we said “What is the architecture that is both traditional and has more light?” Of course, the answer is, “The brick warehouse”. The brick warehouse has more light because they have deeper sections; and that is, of course, the traditional architecture of an industrial waterfront. Here you are seeing buildings which are perfectly recognizable American buildings…very simple…but with a lot of light.
(Next) This is what you are looking at. I don’t know if you can see this from a distance. This is Clinton Square. This is Colden Street. Notice how it wiggles. It’s not straight. First, it goes this way. Then, it goes that way. Then, it goes this way. Then, it goes that way. That kind of famous street made by cows*…as they climbed up… that is exactly what it is. It’s going to have a great character.
This is Martin Luther King with all of its new trees. This is that beautiful green now which is in front of the college. Then there was our design for Vaux Park. We kept the design of the “wiggly” thing and we just extended it so that it reached all the way down. Then, we bridged across both the railway and Martin Luther King. We kept going down all the way to the water with a slope which is the green. These are the liner buildings on the side which hide the parking.
By the way, those of you who know how to read plans know that these are courtyards and alleys and cool little places all behind. It isn’t just about fronts and bad backs. There are really good backs. There isn’t just one show here. It isn’t just Colden. All of this is pretty nice.
I also want to speak about these two triangular buildings. When we first said that the buildings were all below, there was a kind of disappointed crowd who said, “Can’t we have some tall buildings?” They wanted a symbol for the city. At no time do we ever discard any ideas. We always draw them up. As we began drawing them up, I began to realize that the prospect of that taller building was quite important in order to frame the view at the end of Broadway and also to mask the college…the hideous orange building…from the river. Both of these buildings, in this very peculiar shape, are designed to be incredibly slim from the city…almost like a gateway from the city. Have you ever seen the tip of the Flat Iron Building and saw how cool that is? When you look at it from Broadway, they look like the “tip” of the Flat Iron Building. And, these are two flat-iron buildings. That’s what you see from the city. Then, from the other side, they get wider and they perfectly mask this building which is, by the way, seven to eight stories. (applause)
(Next) We were just showing you the center of the Master Plan…to give you a scale.
(Next) This is before the park. Look at that fantastic view. There used to be a fantastic view. This was a problem then and it is still a problem now. This is the pavement.
(Next) By the way, this is something I spoke about earlier. This is Washington Street…your famous marvelous Washington Street. Look at how it ends. What a mess. Here you store docks. There you store whatever. It’s just a mess. That will be cleaned out…opened thoroughly… masked by decent buildings, but not tall buildings. They are going to be inexpensive fish markets and so forth. Then, all the industrial stuff will be hidden. This will be an actual access to the water…not just notional. Right now, there’s a notion that it goes to the water. It will actually be so.
(Next) This is the site which is at the end of Washington Street. It consists of a very complex pattern of pollution…looking like a Jackson Pollock. It took tens of thousands of hours to study it; and it’s going to be dug out anyway and made healthy.
This is Washington. And, this is the parking lot on that beautiful site.
(Next) The first thing we did was this. We put a square at the end that somebody had asked for and then we put these “E-shaped” buildings on the Hudson. Then, someone from either Scenic Hudson or Riverkeeper…one of the many organizations that love and take care of the Hudson…said, “We don’t want the buildings so close. It’s too tight”. This, in fact, is not too tight throughout. It does get tight in certain areas. She said, “You necked it off there. That’s necked off. I want to have a continuous walk through.” So, we responded to that. (Next) The plan that we propose is this one. What happens is that Washington Street is open. It ends in a square and a paved plaza. That paved plaza is there because some people prefer pavement. I could show you a lot of photographs from the 1920’s wherein people are not in parks…but on pavement on benches and so forth. We always design green areas and also paved areas. By the way, Hispanics in particular prefer plazas rather than parks. In Europe, the open spaces are plazas. Since you have 38% Hispanic population, I am concerned that we make paved places and not just green ones. Anyway, the park looks like this. I’m going to show you the scale.
This is the Boating Club. It’s only one story. They launch here, giving activity to the open space. This square here is a drop-off for the hotel which is a “U-shaped” building with a pool with a beautiful view. The parking is in the back.
This is an office building on the Iron site. This is another office building on the other site. They both are approximately 100,000 sq. ft. It would be incredible if you could get them. You haven’t got the least chance of getting them unless you have that view that you’re selling. And, once you get them, then the residential part is balanced by the commercial part; and it’s not the kind of residential place that dies at noon. Remember, when you have a purely residential place and nobody walks there, the restaurants die. They have to make all their money…and the shop owners have to make all their money…from the evening trade. By having a truly mixed-use community, it never shuts down. There’s always light. There are always people in the street. Commerce works better. These are the sites which we selected because there is so much parking capacity on this big site. This is the parking that we selected to feed these two.
As I said, the boat launching is here. The empty boat trailers are back here. Then, there is more parking here for the ferry. In order to keep this mixed-use, this is office. This is hotel, which I think can be first-rate. And, these are condominiums. This is a square. This, over here, is the sewage treatment plant which I’m told sometimes smells; and in order to prevent it from smelling, we propose the office building for Public Works right next to it. (laughter/applause) This is a beautiful site. This is one of the few offices of Public Works with a Hudson River view. So…they’re okay. They just need to take care of the plant. They help mask it. The plant is right over here.
The park is quite nice. By the way, this axial condition here…this diagonal…is the perfect view for looking down the Hudson. It’s the famous view of the Hudson. Greg Wyatt…a wonderful sculptor…is responsible for many of the sculptors in the National Cathedral in Washington. He has been commissioned to design a monument to the Hudson River painters…the painters who were first amazed by the Hudson River and made it famous. He wants it to be here so we located it here. For those of you who care about public art, this is a really meaningful tribute. It is all about this place. This park is all about that. It isn’t just an empty thing. As I said, lots of people are there.
This sequence…the square; the waterfront drive; the hidden square; the waterfront drive again; the plaza; the other hidden square…all this stuff is the variety I’m talking about. If you were to walk the mile and a half of this waterfront, it is a continual set of different experiences. It isn’t just one thing.
What else can I tell you? This is the playing field for good weather sports. There is plenty of ground here. I think it can be leased. This ground here is owned by the railway. They don’t use it. You can ensure that it’s okay to use it if you put the fence in. It’s not permanent like a structure would be so that needs to be negotiated. That would be a wonderful place for kids to play. They can make lots of noise and so forth. They shouldn’t be any worse than the railway.
(Next) These are some of the structures that our retail consultants came up with. These are the renderings. I chose this from the set of renderings of our retail consultants. They want to have these inexpensive single-story buildings. Do you see this image here? This is their version of the office building. This is the inexpensive fish and waterfront-oriented restaurant.
(Previous Slide) I’m talking about these buildings here. These are single-story buildings that look like that. Remember, retail needs inexpensive quarters. You don’t make that much selling bait and fish and so forth. In fact, these buildings perhaps need not require heating or insulation. They’re just industrial buildings. That’s what you are seeing here. It’s all about fishing and the port. By the way, the Boating Club doesn’t like motors so we separated them. They came in and told us that.
(Next) This is some kind of ferry terminal that’s there and maybe it has to do with tourism. I don’t know. But, we were asked to leave it there.
(Next) Some of you may think this park is not particularly large or perhaps not large enough. Here it is. We call it “Painter’s Park” in Newburgh, New York. It not only has a nice cross-section but a continuous one…like this. This is by way of comparison…Harold Stern, New York; Battery Park City, the large park in Battery Park City; and then this is the green at Seaside. This is just the green area. If you count the road that feeds it, it’s even bigger. But, I think this park is just right.
(Next) This is the sculpture. This is the arch which is very impressionistic and I think it catches the light really well. This is the arch that Greg Wyatt brought. That’s just the first sketch. I actually like it very much.
(Next) This is the bubble that we don’t want. I mean it’s very nice and inexpensive and you should have it but we want to move it toward the south.
(Next) That’s a detail of the same thing again.
(Next) This is just to give you a hint that something needs to be done. This is one of two analyses we did of retail on Broadway. It’s in dismal condition. You need some real professional help to get it going at the same time. By the way, if somebody says that your retail will kill that retail. I don’t think so. I think it’s dying on its own. In fact, what’s going to kill it is the development of the suburban retail as the airport takes off because there’s going to be a great pressure to build the Wal-Mart; the Target; the strip-shopping centers. It’s already happening out to the west and that’s what does in the Main Street. It’s not going to be our retail. To compete, you have to have really good competent retailing. But, you have an additional problem. There simply is too much of it. You have miles of retail. This is an old phenomenon. What we need to do is compress it in certain sections of Broadway. So, the question is, “If we compress it, what do we do with the rest of it?” What we need to figure out is how to make Broadway good for other things such as residential use. At the moment, no one who could avoid it wants to live on Broadway because it looks like a commercial street. We do have an idea that I think should be developed.
(Next) I believe it is this one. This is what Broadway looks like. It Is incredibly wide. By the way, the sidewalks are great, but it is incredibly wide. This is the width of it…right there. We measured it and drew it. Look at the little cars. It is so wide.
(Next) You can do two things with it. Without any loss of capacity, you can put a 24-ft. median in the middle that would fit the dedicated transit system, whether it be bus or rail. When you get to the base…to the last block past Montgomery Street…at that point, I would get rid of the diagonal parking and just go parallel and get a really wide carpet which is the 4-court of the great view of the Hudson. Later, I will show you a picture that shows you how that asphalt interferes with that beautiful view and how important it is to actually bring the park not only up the hill but into the city.
(Next) This is that last block I just showed you. That’s the college. This is your enormous street. Notice that whenever we could, we found an opportunity…whether it be a kind of gas station or some kind of demolished building or whatever…we put the median down the middle continuously and wherever we could, we widened it into a square. Do you see that? We just widened it into a square. These are just three that we found…very evidently. When you put a square in, you slow down the traffic and you put a green 4-court that suddenly makes it really valuable for residential. Instead of just being the losers that have to live on the street…you live on a square…like in Savannah…or the West End in London. Americans love living on squares. This requires a study. This is just speculative now. By introducing squares on Broadway, I think you can make it more valuable for residential and then compress the retail so that it actually works. It could be a very uniquely elegant street as it reaches the Hudson with a series of different squares because every square would be designed differently… depending on the circumstance. Anyway, I think this idea is one of those transcendental ideas. It is so much better than just “bricking the sidewalks” or “changing the lighting”. It’s just a big idea. (applause)
In planning, it’s actually quite interesting because it’s been well known for a long time that the big ideas are easier to implement than the little ideas. The little ideas get picked to death. The big ones are bigger than anybody so they happen. This could actually be a great transformation. (Next) This is one of the squares. This is your Broadway. This is the new median which is everywhere now. This is your rail line. At certain points, it actually just widens into a square. The real estate becomes valuable, as I said. By the way, “What happens to the traffic?” Guess what? It has to slow down. Instead of it zooming all the way down as on a highway, it deviates and it goes in and out…and so traffic slows down. But, nobody that has to drive around a square ever minds it. They just think, “Boy, isn’t this great? I’m so glad that I’m in this place.” Sometimes, it feels like the center of the world.
(Next) This is a rendering of what it might be like. And, it might not take that long because these three at least are where the land is hardly being used at all. It’s empty.
(Next) In your mind, Broadway ends in a really fantastic view. Now, somebody like me who is a skeptic, comes here…stands there…and says “Yeah…but…50% of what’s in my field of vision is horrible” because everything from here up is unbelievably good…but everything from here down is a parking lot. It’s a huge…still maintained…parking lot. For the last two blocks which is the one place where you really see the Hudson, this really should be re-designated as a park and, as I said, it would be good if it became the green for the college. (Next) The college has done a terrific job. This is what they did. This is what they brought us. That’s the famous lousy building. This is one of your typically good buildings. And, this is a really good building they’re building. This is the new one. They’re going to seal off that opening with a very nice building. What we suggest is that the building on the other side be done with the same kind of architecture so that the walls of the green are also harmonious…and the college bridges across. Even though the dorms on the other side would be owned and operated privately, they form part of the college.
(Next) This is what that looks like. Now, I’m going to show you probably the single-most controversial thing we’re proposing which is the tall buildings here in which everybody responds immediately “Oh, no, high-rises”. I just want to remind you that this building that’s there already is eight stories. It’s a matter of saying that you have it already. If you ever had a phobia about eight stories looking awful, well…now, you need more buildings to hide that one.
Do you see this park that goes down? These are ramps and these are stairs on the side. These two buildings are very unusually-shaped and are designed to form pylons. I’ll show you some very rough drawings. This is the green at the bottom…just to remind you. This is Waterfront Drive. This is the green which forms an auditorium. Remember, this is dropping drastically.
(Next) That’s the view. This is the famous Vaux Park. I just want to know what this piece of pasture is doing there. (laughter) I’d like to know what the hell that is. I know what that is. And, what is this tube? The place is absolutely pathetic. So, could we please do it right? Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good. (applause)
(Next) Here you have Garin Baker who showed up at 3:00 o’clock or 4:00 o’clock today and says, “Oh, by the way, I prepared those drawings (laughter) of Vaux Park”. He didn’t actually say this but “It’s not only much better than your idea. It’s actually a Vaux Park design. Like, if Vaux had had a budget, this is what he would have done”. Now, notice what he did. This up here is the end of Broadway…two stairways down the side; a flat area in the middle; a really glorious fountain; another flat area; and beautiful, beautiful steps down to Martin Luther King. It just brings you down gloriously. This would be a fantastic thing to do. The structure of this could be built on the parking garage that connects the two tall buildings…so the under-cross is there. All you have to pay for is the stone and the fountain. That may sound like a lot but it’s really the least amount. I think this is a marvelous idea and I think you should do it this way. (applause) (Next) After you cross Martin Luther King, you still have a huge drop which should be handled this way. This is that green that we spoke about. This green can be used a million ways. Part of it could be for dogs. Part of it could be used for Frisbee-activity and so forth. Can you just imagine a concert with people relaxing on that slope… looking down? (applause) This could be the landing pad for commuters with hydrogen rocket belts…from Manhattan. (laughter) And, who says that won’t happen? If it does…you’re ready. We were there first. It’s not just open space. It is open space with people on the side… open windows…making it safe…and so forth. What’s been well known for a while is that spaces are only used depending on the buildings on their edges…the buildings that give space its activities…so we’re always making buildings. By the way, this is the new building we’re proposing…which is the masking building for the other. It’s an early version.
(Next) Notice what people did at that precise place… what your ancestors did. This is very interesting. Normally, we’re trying to recover to some kind of ideal past. Like…can we ever be that good? This whole system of parks and stairways and squares coming down is much better than it ever was. This is the one thing we’ve done that actually makes Newburgh better than it ever was. It’s like your chance to outdo everyone. And, this is just your ancestors. I don’t think there’s anything else on the Hudson…perhaps in Manhattan, but I don’t know of it…that is quite this marvelous as this sequence of parks. This could really put Newburgh on the map…you know: “Must see…must stop”. It could be a complete repositioning of Newburgh and the perception of the region as not being the tail end where people just end up…but literally the most elegant and coolest place. Don’t forget that it isn’t just enough to be well run and clean and so forth. You really have to be beautiful also. Cities have to be beautiful. We could get this to really work economically. But, this is what’s going to make it beautiful…this square that’s coming down.
(Next) This is one of our drawings. We made this drawing exclusively because I kind of had a tiff with somebody who kept saying “You shouldn’t have cars on the waterfront”. And we said, “We won’t have cars all over the waterfront but there are certain places that work better when there are cars on the waterfront”. Cars give activities. Cafés work better or at least certain types of cafés. The older cafés that are all about fish and picnic tables that work better without that. But, then, there are other more urbane cafés that are on Waterfront Drive. So, this is the harbor and we would like to redesign that harbor so that it isn’t an American-style parking lot for boats…but more like a European harbor which is to say people come with their boats and they stern-in and they socialize…off the fan tail the way they do in Europe… except they will come from New York. Some of the restaurants can actually serve food to people on the boats because who wants to cook on a boat anyway? Then, as they do in European waterfronts, the cafés face the boats and they activate both sides; and for that, you need a street. That street is what you have in Nice. That’s what you have in San Tropez. That’s what you have in almost every Italian waterfront resort. That’s the way you do it. I’m not saying you should do this all over the Hudson… but why couldn’t we do it for 500 ft.? Let’s just try this for a change…so we did this rendering. This might be repulsive to some people, but it is wonderfully appealing to others….the café…on the drive…on the waterfront. (Next) This is what we’re talking about…here…and here. That’s where it would happen. Replace this with the new park.
(Next) The shape of these two buildings was specifically designed not by internal floor planning. We don’t care what goes on inside. These buildings were designed to perform two functions. One is to frame the view of the Hudson from Broadway. And, from the Hudson itself from the other direction, try to give a kind of crown to the city…to have it build up. It is very vertical from Broadway. Then from the other side, they step down and they erode and they look a little bit like a hill town.
(Next) This is the way they were designed. From precisely this spot…which is a selected spot on Montgomery…they’re designed perceptually to look perfectly like the pylon of the Flat Iron Building from its absolutely perfect vantage point. Remember that famous photograph? Well, it’s just like that…vertically.
(Next) This is a very crude drawing…I grant you. It hasn’t been rendered yet. It’s just a masking. We’re studying it. This is the college. This is the future building. This is the green. And, those are the two pylons. Do you see how slim they are?
(Next) Then when you move forward, they open out… like this. It’s an unforgettable framing of the view.
(Next) This is what they look like as it all steps down. We’re talking about this building which is exactly the same height as the college and then it all steps down. By the way, this is Vaux Park. This is the bridge across the railway on Martin Luther King. This is the great green that slopes to the Hudson. Underneath these are the parking lots.
(Next) This is the building we’re masking. Actually, part of the problem is that if you look at it long enough, you kind of begin to like it. (laughter)
(Next) This is the view from the Hudson. This is, I think, an acceptable model in which the buildings are all below…relatively harmonious…but what you’re seeing against the sky is trees and churches. It’s really very beautiful. Think about that…just the green and churches. That’s lost because you have the big buildings in back. So now we have to do the next thing. We can’t recover this. We’re just beginning to do this. But, many of your buildings have been drawn properly. Do you see this back there? That building is the other lower building of the college. These are the new buildings that are being proposed. See how they generally build up? These are the two “wedge-shaped” buildings and look how they mask the “orange” building there. Basically, once this is a finished rendering, you will see that Newburgh mounts to this area and then comes down again…not mechanically…but there’s a general tendency to do a crescendo and then come down again. That’s what these buildings do.
(Next) As you go by on the steamboat, do you see how these two buildings step down? There’s that sudden slot lining right up…right up Broadway. Broadway now is not a place. It’s just one more gap. This makes it a specific slot. You go by and you say “Wow!”
There are many buildings missing here. This computer rendering isn’t finished and, of course, we’ll draw it up.
(Next) This is what you’re looking at. You’re looking up that slot.
(Next) This is looking at our architecture a little bit. This is Martin Luther King. This is the end of Montgomery. What we’re trying to do is create places where basically the cars are hidden. This is one way.
(Next) This is another way. This is the preferred way. This is Martin Luther King. This is Colden above. There is a lane in here that gives access to townhouses on one side…with hidden cars…and then parking courts on the other. We didn’t want to put everything in large parking garages. The increment of investment is too large. They’re crude. We couldn’t avoid it in two or three places; but, generally speaking, we wanted the parking to be part of the structure. The increment of construction would be from twelve apartments and some ten townhouses…like this. You build one. Then, you build the other.
By the way, these are all pedestrian walkways…down. This urban fabric continually filters through. You don’t have to wait to the street to get down to the water. Between every building is a walkway that takes you down. Now…it’s not a street. It’s more like really great streets in San Francisco or Italy. You actually take steps down. I’ll show you a rendering of what these two would be like.
(Next) This is what I just showed you. That is the court. That’s the 4-court of the upper building. Down here are the super-imposed townhouses with parking in here. This Martin Luther King…we succeed in creating a really pedestrian-friendly environment there because of the parked cars. They can be live/work units. Remember, live/work units are the future. The computer has liberated us so we are now able to work at home. Thirty million Americans work at home. You can incubate your own business. It doesn’t have to be in Manhattan. Perhaps, you can even schedule your appointments in Manhattan and have your production back in Newburgh…which would be terrific for your tax base. Instead of just bringing the big office buildings, we have actually dozens of these live/work units occupying potentially the first floor of all the buildings on Martin Luther King. That’s what this section would look like. Imagine Martin Luther King. And that’s a potential commercial space. The parking is off the alley above.
(Next) This is the cut that alternates from that. The alternate cuts are these pretty incredible pedestrian stairs coming down between the buildings. As I said, between every courtyard building is a pedestrian walkway down. (Next) They look like this. They’re great…with platforms…townhouses on the side. They are like some of the most charming places anywhere. Incidentally, these were quickly done. We intend to use many architects. This is not going to be repetitive. It’s not about “Oh… we’ve got a design. Let’s just keep using it”. One would be by one architect. Another would be done by another architect and so forth. You get that diversity which is authentic to urbanism. This is one of my favorites. You can easily imagine being in one of these places.
(Next) We’ve also had some interesting aesthetic discussions. We take a floor plan like this one and we have an architect develop it this way which is in the tradition of Downing. This guys studied Downing somewhat. (Next) This is the exactly the same floor plan with an industrial look. How do we do it? What do we do? Well, first of all, it’s an open issue. Although the group as a whole is tending to go toward the industrial look, there’s a counter-argument that, to the north…the Montgomery Street area…which becomes progressively residential… that towards that area, we should be more residential in look (applause) and then towards the center, more industrial. We need to argue that out. The disadvantage of the traditional look, frankly, is that it creates the pitched roof that the people on Montgomery asked us not to have because they wanted us to have a green roof. So, I would say that this is a slam-dunk decision except for the problem that the pitched roof blocks more view than the green roof. It’s difficult. It’s a quandary. What do we do?
(Next) No one on our team is an enamored of this. You can also go a Vanguard…the latest and coolest. We can make the argument that maybe you should have a little of this. If you track it in the “New York Times”, New York is beginning to get, finally, some buildings as hip as Los Angeles. One of the more interesting discussions we can have is how hip does Newburgh want to be. Maybe you don’t want to be hip…because hip looks ridiculous ten years later. (laughter) Maybe not because maybe the building is good enough that you hit the jackpot and it becomes a masterpiece and you get your next Downing. So, we leave this as open discussion for you; but this is yet another way to do it.
(Next) This is by one of the architects that was here. He actually did this. This is an illustration. I can’t believe it took so little time. He must have worked forty-eight hours a day. This is what the industrial look, in a nonhistoric way, might look like. This is what the townhouses or the apartments might look like.
(Next) I have a specific thing that I asked him to do. I said “As a source of unity, I would like you all to develop an image which is based on an explicit green architecture”. Remember that green architecture doesn’t have to show. You can hide your solar collectors. You can hide your green roof. You can use the right paints and the right materials; and unless you read the label, you don’t know. But, I think it would be exciting. I think it remains to be done to do an architecture whose aesthetic is derived from expressing that it is green building. It’s still exploratory. It’s still being done. We’re still working it out. But I believe that if all the architects who worked here had as a discipline not some stylistic preference like “I’m a classicist” or “I love Downing” or whatever it is…but actually said “How do we confront the fact that the sun is to the south and we have solar collectors; the fact that east is more benevolent with the sun than west; with east, we could have big glass; with west, we have to shield it; with South, it requires horizontal rather than vertical shielding and so forth. And, if every architect paid attention to responding to the climatic and environmental issues…that that in itself would become a form of harmony…self-administered…instead of an aesthetic overlay. If we did that, that would be truly pioneering because that’s not the discipline that architects are accustomed to. We’re thinking about that. (applause)
See how these buildings face south a little bit…how the bay windows are A-symmetrical? The little glass is to the south. The bay windows have the same glass to the south and to the north. That bay window is A-symmetrical. It has a little glass to the south and a big glass to the southeast and a big glass to the northeast. Do you see how it works? Then, of course, the solar collectors and so forth…it can be solar on one side and skylights to the north.
(Next) Then, here is someone else working the same style.
I spoke earlier about how important it is to institutionalize this plan. One of our failures took place about fifteen years ago when we did the plan for Trenton. Our plan for Trenton was imbedded in two individuals. They really believed they were going to push it forward. It worked very well until they were both hired by Houston. In fact, because the plan of Trenton was so good, they got hired by Houston. And, there was no one in Trenton to fulfill the plan. Since that time, I’ve come to realize that, once the Master Plan is approved, one of the most important things to do is to imbed it in a code which is a law that will survive all the individuals here…whether it be the Mayor; whether it be the developer; or whether it be myself. But, somehow it would go into the time frame of urbanism and not be dependent upon me or Steve or the Mayor. Urbanism is larger than your lifetime. That’s what codes are for…so we will write a code. We have some very advanced codes. We practically invented Form-Based Codes…our firm…with Seaside twenty five years ago. They are very specific codes where… what you see is really what happens. We’re going to code for this site in such a way that it would be a code so formatted that if you decided to use it for the rest of the city, it would work. As I’m told, this city really needs a code because the current one doesn’t work. (applause) One of the nice things is that you get the code for free. Otherwise, it would be expensive. It still needs to be calibrated. You still need to map it. You still need to calibrate it. You still need to convince everybody. The politics is so complex. But, at least the development order that imbeds our plan predictably into the future in this contract that the city writes for the developer that says, “This is what you will do”…will be embodied in a form-based code like this which will also imbed hopefully in your citywide code. As I said, if you want to start sending your planning department head or other people to these training sessions about the SmartCode, you can get going with it…because right now your code doesn’t work.
There are also regulating plans which we’re beginning to work on. It’s not only a code…but a regulating plan.
(Next) This is the phasing for those of you who are interested…what goes first; what goes second; what goes third…it’s preliminary. It won’t happen all at once. As I said, it’s a sever-year project. It’s not so big. In terms of statistics, we have about 570 units in the city-owned land and about 430 on the private land. It’s around 1,000 units. There are a few more. There are about 200,000 sq. ft. of office building. There are about 200,000 sq. ft. of retail. That’s what the site gives you. Nobody told us to come up with those numbers. We designed it as it should be. Then, we counted. In fact, we didn’t count…and I swear to you…until this afternoon. We just did what the site told us and then counted. They ended up being beautifully round numbers, including about 2,470 parking spaces. Almost all of them are hidden or parallel on the streets and this looks nice anyway. You have a huge parking capacity which, again, means you can build quite a lot here.
I should say this. It occurred to someone who remembered that all these kids here will be adults and at a buying age by the time this is finished. So, those grouchy older folk here who hate change…I always remind them to please bear in mind that urbanism is in a time frame that is about the next generation. Just don’t hold this back. In some ways, it’s sad to say that this is fundamentally not for us. It’s for the future. Don’t worry. They’ll remember you. I’ve seen it happen so often…that the people in place are an impediment. I don’t have any evidence that anybody I’ve met here is going to be an impediment. It just hasn’t happened. But, it often is. It’s not about us and this generation. It’s really not. It’s about the Newburgh of the future. A completely positive attitude is necessary. This is going to happen. There is a great deal of agreement here. The question is whether it’s going to take longer or shorter. I suggest that everybody here be an early adopter and we will get going with this as quickly as possible.
Thank you very much. (much applause) By the way, as the Mayor said, this is really not the time for questions. We will be having dinner; but there is so much time for commentary because the public process now begins. I just want to tell you that several times now, I have been careful to say how flexible we are. Anybody who comes in with a good idea…we’re still open for that. And, if we’ve made any mistakes, please alert us as quickly as possible. The process begins tonight. Thank you.
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